If you're happy and you know it...

One wishes, in vain, one could resist the anti-intellectual temptations of this kind of statistics-porn.

But you can see why the index's temptations are so strong. The index imposes a kind of faux tidiness and orderliness on the usually riotously untidy world of the emotions.

We are all vitally interested in happiness and unhappiness but seldom (until the index comes out) find these elusive entities measurable. Then, for peoples and nations (like Australians and Australia) who are works in progress still with no developed sense of who and what they are, it is strangely comforting to have the index doing some helpful defining and labelling of us. So Australians then are officially, statistically, HAPPY, (phew! thank goodness!) even though we may sometimes mistakenly imagine we are instead Anxious, Confused, Despairing or even, thinking of our nation's moral failures, Ashamed.

Then, too, to find we are far more gladsome than the Indonesians (80th), the Bangladeshis (99th) the languishing Yemenis (138th) and dispirited Haitians (140th) gives some of the same shallow and temporary buzzes the worst of us get from those Olympic Medal Tables that show us trouncing athletically lesser nations like Tajikistan, Mozambique and Botswana (respectively 76, 113 and 143 on the Happiness Index and so as inferior to us in the emotions as they are in the pole vault, water polo and rhythmic gymnastics).

And the World Happiness Index is always of extra interest to me because Finland always does so well (Happiest in the World four years in a row now) and I am a Finnophile. My Finnophilia has taken me to Finland and keeps me continuously interested in that intriguing, legend-rich country of 5.5 million folk and 188,000 lakes, the 75 per cent of its surface upholstered with thick forests infested with uniquely Finnish species of gods and goddesses, trolls, elves, water spirits (all those forest lakes), goblins and sprites.

Why are the Finns so happy, and is there anything Australia and Australians can do to be more Finnish? Perhaps the Finns (outwardly and with their facial expressions and body languages one of the most morose, inhibited and unhappy-looking of peoples) are not so much happy as contented.

In a thoughtful piece titled The Wealth of Having Enough, triggered by this latest World Happiness Index, Elena Attfield diagnoses that "While Finland is by no means a utopia, one could propose a few lessons to take from its self-assessed happiness. These include the importance of human proximity to nature, the benefits of small homogenous populations .... and, by no means least, the superiority of gratitude to the insatiable pursuit of an ill-defined happiness."

She continues, "We have known for millennia that nature is integral to mental and spiritual health. Although the vast majority of its 5.5 million population lives in or nearby cities, the cities themselves all boast easy access to sea, lake, forest and shore."

"Finally," Ms Attfield concludes after a substantial and wistfully envious analysis of Finnishness, "Finland possesses a culture which does not encourage ambition for the accumulation of 'ever-more'. This could be assumed not just by the behaviour of an average Finn but also more widely by the historical absence of any of its own imperial pursuits."

"Rather than fantasising about self-advancement and world dominion, Finns have enjoyed what they are given."

Are Australians gratefully good at enjoying what we are given? Perhaps it is treasonable of me but I am afraid we are a rather materialistic, ever-accumulating, self-advancing, ladder-climbing people. Then, unlike Finland with its famous and self-esteem-nurturing neutrality (it has even given us the word 'Finlandisation' to describe this happy national state of things) we are, demeaningly, a fawning, poodle-like ally of a badly flawed superpower.

Perhaps, on a well-researched World Discontentment Index (where Finland might come about 150th) Australia might be right up there towards the top of the unhappy pops.