[bendtb]

There is also a religious element to suicide that cannot be overlooked.

Also, I Spain your view of Spain is tainted. I think very few people would choose an average city in Spain over e.g. Copenhagen where 20% of the Danish population live.

[GoatOfAplomb]

All the Spanish cities I've visited have looked "perfect", but there's a lot I don't see as a tourist, e.g. that Spain has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe (10.5%).

[PLMUV9A4UP27D]

Finland is now close to Spain when it comes to unemployment rate! Let's see how that affects Finland's ranking.

[alephnerd]

The perception of Spain is much more positive in the Anglophone world - it's viewed as a country where cost of living is low, you can nap in the middle of the day, the women/men are hot and easy, the wine is great and cheap, and you can party late at night.

In reality the average Spaniard isn't experience the majority of that, as those are perceptions that arose from the rose-tinted glasses of tourists. Most tourists don't know about the Eurozone crisis, the regional disparity, and the consolidation of Spain's economic growth engines to 1-2 cities.

Spain is a good developed country with a decent QoL as is reflected by it's HDI and developmental indicators (and the fact that it has outpaced historically richer and more developed Italy is a testament to that), but tourists almost always take a rose-tinted view whereas locals almost always take a negative view.

And I think this is the crux of the issue with how the "World Happiness Index" is used in American discourse - in the US almost no one vists Europe or other parts of the World for extended periods of time and most Americans lack familial or social ties in Europe. As such, idealized images of Europe ("a socialist paradise" or "white Christendom under siege") have taken hold in popular discourse and are used as proxies for the American culture war.

[vjk800]

> The perception of Spain is much more positive in the Anglophone world - it's viewed as a country where cost of living is low, you can nap in the middle of the day, the women/men are hot and easy, the wine is great and cheap, and you can party late at night.

If you're a tourist, you get to experience only those parts. If you live there, you have to experience the other 99% of the life also and it's not so great.

[phony-account]

These measures are bullshit and often just come down to a prevalent societal ‘temperament’ that’s inculcated from birth. I live and have family in Sweden and the rest of my family is in Spain. The Swedes have immense pride in their country and pretty much only talk about the positives. When the winters are dark, cold, rain has been pouring for fourteen days straight and the last time you saw sun was 4 weeks ago, they say “there’s no bad weather just bad clothes”. One day I sat with my cousin and some other relatives in the olive grove of his country place in Spain - sun was shining and we’d been eating delicious locally produced food for hours and drinking wine from his vineyard while he yapped on about how everything in Spain is ‘shit’ (una mierda). And this is why places like Finland are reportedly the ‘happiest’ in the world.

[euroderf]

> There is also a religious element to suicide that cannot be overlooked.

Also a genetic component.

[nephihaha]

Dark winters are a bigger component here. Most Nordic countries get little sun in winter and it gets worse the further north you are.

[socalgal2]

Have you eaten everyday food (not gourmet) in Copenhagen?

[simonask]

Copenhageners eat the same plastic-wrapped salads, organic grass-fed whatever, and whatever the latest green smoothie trend is, as in Southern California.

If this is a dig at the largely pork/cabbage/potato-based diet of Northern Europe, you will be relieved to hear they don’t follow it.

Source: Am one.