Per the World Happiness Report 2025 (WHR), supposedly, the 4 happiest countries on Earth are Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden.

All Nordic countries.

As I discuss in the Robbed in Finland episode of my Fascinating with Sasha Tobago podcast, I have visited two of those four countries.

Iceland is gorgeous, but I definitely never felt a high level of happiness from the locals to justify its ranking as the 3rd happiest country on Earth.

Meanwhile, in Finland, I was robbed at the Helsinki airport upon arrival; and when the Romanian criminals returned to the airport a week later to fly out with my valuable items, the national airport police force went out of their way to protect the criminals and help them flee.

The same airport, mind you, where I saw multiple homeless people digging in trash cans — inside the airport! Something I have never seen at any other airport, anywhere else in the world, in all my years of travel, in dozens of countries spanning six continents.

Suffice it to say, there is a huge disconnect between the Truth of what it is like to visit these Nordic countries in person; versus the lies and misinformation that is perpetuated year… after year… after year in a World Happiness Report that is not only sinister in its mission; but its researchers also have no clue how to actually measure True Happiness.

In this revised excerpt from my Robbed in Finland episode, I explain the #1 reason why Finland and other Nordic societies aren’t even qualified to be in the running for “World’s Happiest Countries.”

The Truth of the matter is that highly individualistic societies can never qualify for the “World’s Happiest Country” because, one of the reasons people value their family, or their mother, or their loved ones over money is because of how that person makes them feel.

At the end of the day, feeling, emotions, connection, community… trump money.

They trump money.

That’s why you have to measure True Happiness on how people make other people feel. Not on a country’s GDP — which is based on a narcissistic, capitalistic system of modern feudalism that is man-made.

The reality is, in these Nordic countries, the way they view their role in society is:

The government takes care of other people. I only worry about myself and my family.

That is how they view things. The idea of me helping out someone else:

I don’t need to help out someone else because that’s the government’s responsibility.

That’s their viewpoint, and I’ve gotten this from talking to actual people from these Nordic countries.

It is a very cold concept.

But one thing they gloss over in the World Happiness Report is the fact that many of these cold and individualistic societies have high suicide rates.

Now, they have a high suicide rate for a number of reasons. One, those countries are dark for half of the year. They’re cold half of the year.

But also the fact that, even when it is warm, the locals don’t really interact with one another unless they are family members, or they have known each other as friends since they were children.

“I was explaining to my friend how I went to school in Sweden, and I really don’t have that many Swedish friends. Why? Because Swedish people are womb-mates.”

So says Marni, a social media vlogger(@ ohmarni), who studied abroad in Sweden:

“I make this joke, and I say they’re womb-mates. Because they make friendships when they are very young, and then it sort of stays that way until adulthood… They don’t really have the urge to make new friends.”

They don’t really make new friends. They don’t really say, “Hi,” to each other on the street.

They’re not much of a communal society at all.

When you live in a society wherein everyone thinks:

It’s not my responsibility to care about my fellow human being, that is the government’s responsibility.

I mean, how cold is that? That is so freaking cold.

And you wonder why these societies have a high suicide rate —

Which, suspiciously enough, is NOT included as a metric in the World Happiness Report’s main ranking calculations…