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By: Karnvir Mundrey
For most of human history, happiness was treated as a philosophical question. Today, it has become an industry.
There are happiness apps, happiness retreats, happiness coaches, gratitude journals, dopamine detoxes, wellness resorts and thousands of books promising to reveal the formula for a good life.
Yet many people remain anxious, lonely and dissatisfied. Perhaps the problem is not that we know too little about happiness. Perhaps it is that we keep looking for it in the wrong place.
We imagine happiness as an emotional jackpot: a perfect marriage, a successful company, financial freedom, a beautiful house, a healthy body or a life without major problems.
But Finland, which repeatedly ranks at the top of global happiness surveys, is not a country without problems. It has dark winters, alcohol abuse, social isolation, geopolitical anxiety and serious mental-health challenges.
What Finland appears to possess is not permanent cheerfulness. It possesses something deeper: a society in which people generally believe that life is manageable. That may be the real foundation of happiness.
Happiness is not the same as feeling happy
The World Happiness Report does not ask people whether they laughed yesterday or woke up in a good mood. It asks them to imagine a ladder from zero to ten, where zero represents the worst possible life and ten represents the best possible life, and then place themselves on it.
The report therefore measures life evaluation more than momentary emotion. This distinction is crucial. You can have a terrible day and still believe you have a good life. You can experience grief and still feel supported. You can struggle professionally and still feel that your life has meaning. You can also experience frequent pleasure while feeling that your life is empty.
A person may eat in the best restaurants, travel constantly and receive endless social attention, yet still feel fundamentally dissatisfied. Another person may live modestly, face ordinary difficulties and still feel grounded because life has coherence, relationships and purpose.
Happiness, in this deeper sense, is not an uninterrupted festival. It is a durable belief that your life is worth living.
The documentary also notes that the World Happiness Report is considered reliable because the same questions are asked repeatedly across many countries using recognised social-science methods, and the findings broadly align with other national surveys. Its purpose is not merely to declare that Finns are happier than Germans. It is to identify the social conditions under which human beings are more likely to live satisfying lives.
Finland’s secret is not pleasure. It is trust.
Finland succeeds in three forms of trust:
Trust in other people. Trust in institutions. Trust in society itself.
This sounds abstract until we consider what distrust does to the human mind. In a low-trust society, ordinary life becomes psychologically expensive.
You worry that a contract will not be honoured. You assume that rules may be selectively applied. You expect public systems to fail. You fear that influence matters more than merit. You prepare for betrayal even before cooperation begins.
Every interaction requires extra verification, follow-up, documentation, negotiation and emotional energy. Trust, therefore, is not merely a moral virtue. It is a form of public infrastructure. Reliable institutions reduce what might be called the background anxiety of citizenship.
When schools work, childcare is available, public spaces feel safe and government systems function predictably, people retain more mental energy for family, creativity, friendship and work.
A government cannot command citizens to be happy. But it can stop making them unnecessarily miserable. It can reduce humiliation. It can reduce fear. It can reduce the number of hours people spend fighting systems that should serve them.
This is especially relevant to countries like India, where many people must privately arrange what functioning societies provide collectively: water purification, private security, generators, private schooling, private transport, private healthcare and personal networks for navigating bureaucracy.
We often measure the price of these failures in money. We rarely measure their cost in attention, time and emotional exhaustion.
Equality creates psychological freedom
Finnish families when interviewed repeatedly return to one idea: freedom. Not abstract political freedom, but the practical freedom to shape one’s life regardless of the family into which one is born.
This is where equality connects with happiness. A society does not need to make everyone equally wealthy. But it can ensure that poverty does not completely destroy a person’s ability to choose.
In Finland, even someone with limited money can access education, childcare and social support. Children are not immediately separated into sharply unequal educational tracks. They study under a common system designed to give them comparable opportunities.
The underlying message is powerful: People are happier when their future does not feel permanently decided by their birth.
The Bhagavad Gita speaks repeatedly about action, capacity and duty. It does not say that all people will receive identical results. But its moral structure assumes that human beings should have the opportunity to act according to their nature and dharma.
A deeply unequal society violates this possibility. It tells one child, “You may dream.” It tells another, “Your circumstances have already decided.” Equality of opportunity is therefore not merely an economic objective. It is a psychological one. It allows people to experience the belief that their decisions can meaningfully influence their lives.
Without that, ambition turns into frustration. With it, even hardship can feel purposeful.
Schools should not only produce workers
Children in Finnish schools attend a common comprehensive school system for nine years. They follow a broadly shared curriculum. They receive free school meals. Teachers work alongside special-education professionals and psychologists. Students who struggle academically or emotionally receive additional support.
Most importantly, support is not treated as a mark of failure. In Finland it is considered normal for almost every student to require help at some stage. There is less stigma attached to receiving assistance.
This changes the moral meaning of difficulty. In many educational systems, a child who struggles is labelled weak, lazy, unintelligent or problematic. In the Finnish model, difficulty is treated as part of development.
The question is not: “What is wrong with this child?”
It is: “What support does this child need at this moment?”
This principle extends far beyond schools. Adults also need support at different stages of life. A founder may need help during business failure. A parent may need support during divorce. An elderly person may need companionship after retirement. A successful executive may need psychological help despite appearing powerful. A healthy society does not wait until people collapse before allowing them to ask for help.
Contrast this with Germany for instance, where the ratio of school psychologists to students is far less favourable than in some Scandinavian countries. It asks whether the purpose of education should be limited to academic achievement-or whether schools should also be responsible for human well-being.
India should ask the same question. Our schools can produce rank-holders who are frightened of failure. They can produce engineers who do not know how to regulate emotion. They can produce children who have memorised formulas but have never learned how to ask for help. An education system cannot be called successful merely because it produces employable adults.
It must also produce adults capable of living.
Childcare is not a “women’s issue.” It is social architecture.
Finland has an accessible childcare system. Parents are generally able to find daycare from a young age, and new parents receive practical support, including the well-known starter package for babies.
At first glance, these may appear to be welfare details. In reality, they shape adult freedom. Reliable childcare allows parents-especially women-to return to work, maintain professional identities, reduce stress and make decisions without feeling that parenthood has permanently closed other parts of life.
This demonstrates an important truth: Happiness is often created through unglamorous administrative competence. A society may speak poetically about family values while making parenthood unnecessarily exhausting. It may celebrate motherhood while providing little childcare. It may praise children as the future while underfunding schools and mental-health support.
Finland’s lesson is that values become real only when institutions support them.
Nature is not decoration. It is medicine for attention.
Forests, lakes, parks and cottages are critical to happiness.
Finland has vast natural space, widespread public access and a culture in which people spend time outdoors not as an occasional luxury but as part of ordinary life. Regular exposure to nature is attributed to better mental health and lower risks of depression, high blood pressure and some respiratory illnesses. An overwhelming majority of Finns say that nature contributes to their happiness.
But nature’s value is not only medical. It changes the scale of our problems. An angry email feels enormous when it occupies the whole screen and the whole mind. It feels smaller when you walk under trees that were alive before your career began and may remain after your ambitions are forgotten.
Nature interrupts the illusion that the human ego is the centre of existence. Indian philosophy understood this deeply. The forests in the Ramayana and Mahabharata are not merely locations. They are places of transformation.
Rama’s exile takes him away from the palace and into a more demanding moral world. The Pandavas’ years in the forest strip away status and force reflection. The Upanishadic tradition itself emerges partly from seekers withdrawing from noise, power and possession to examine consciousness.
The forest represents a space in which social identity becomes quieter and deeper identity becomes audible. Modern people rarely enter forests to hear themselves.
We enter social media to avoid hearing ourselves.
Rituals create islands of presence
The Finnish sauna is not simply as a tourist symbol.
One happiness researcher describes rituals as regular moments in which people temporarily escape external demands and become fully present. For Finns, that ritual may be the sauna.
For someone else, it may be morning prayer, tea on a balcony, an evening walk, gardening, meditation, singing, swimming or reading before sleep. A ritual differs from a habit because it carries meaning.
Drinking tea while answering emails is consumption. Drinking tea slowly with someone you love can become a ritual. Walking while taking business calls is movement. Walking without a phone can become restoration.
In Indian households, many traditional rituals once performed this function. Lighting a diya at dusk created a pause between work and evening. Reciting a prayer before food created gratitude. Visiting a place of worship established rhythm. Eating together created belonging.
Modern life has removed many rituals but has not replaced their psychological purpose. We are constantly occupied, yet rarely present.
Happiness may depend not only on what we do, but on whether we are mentally there while doing it.
Even self-deprecating humour matters
The documentary introduces two Finnish ideas.
The first is sisu – perseverance, resilience and the determination to continue through difficult conditions.
The second is the humorous term kalsarikännit, roughly referring to drinking at home in one’s underwear without intending to go out.
Finns so not present alcohol abuse as healthy. Instead, it uses the phrase to illustrate Finnish self-deprecating humour. This matters more than it appears. The capacity to laugh at oneself protects the ego from becoming too rigid. People who must constantly appear impressive become prisoners of their image.
They cannot admit failure. They cannot ask for help. They cannot laugh at their own contradictions. Humour creates psychological distance. It says, “This situation is difficult, but it is not the entirety of who I am.”
Indian mythology is full of serious philosophy, but it is also filled with playfulness. Krishna is not portrayed only as a lecturer of metaphysics. He is also mischievous, musical, affectionate and playful. The divine, in this vision, is not permanently solemn. A life without play may be disciplined, productive and respectable.
But it may not be joyful.
Sisu and the Gita: happiness is not the absence of winter
Finland’s concept of sisu closely resembles one of the central teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna tells Arjuna that heat and cold, pleasure and pain arise through contact with the world and are temporary. They come and go.
The spiritually mature person is not someone who never experiences discomfort. It is someone who is not completely ruled by it. This is not emotional suppression. It is emotional proportion. A failed deal is painful, but it is not the end of one’s worth. A broken relationship is devastating, but it is not proof that life has no future. Illness is frightening, but fear need not become the whole personality. The Finnish response to winter is practical: wear the right clothes and continue living.
The Gita’s response to life is similar: recognise difficulty, prepare yourself and perform the action that is yours to perform. Happiness is not the absence of winter.
It is the ability to live meaningfully during winter.
Young people are losing the happiness advantage
Traditional happiness research often described life satisfaction as U-shaped.
People were believed to begin adulthood relatively optimistic, experience a decline during midlife and become more satisfied again in later years. This pattern is changing.
Young people globally report rising distress like school pressure, parental conflict, bullying, discrimination and anxiety. It also says that diagnosed depression among adolescents has increased substantially over recent years. The disturbing implication is that young people may no longer begin life with the psychological optimism earlier generations enjoyed.
They are entering adulthood already exhausted. Why? Part of the answer may be that comparison has become constant. Previous generations compared themselves with classmates, neighbours and relatives.
Today’s teenager compares their body with models, their lifestyle with influencers, their intelligence with prodigies and their ordinary life with the edited highlights of millions of strangers.
There is no natural finishing line. Whatever you achieve, the screen can immediately show you someone younger, richer, fitter, more beautiful or more successful. More than three hours of social-media use is shown to increase depressive symptoms among adolescents, including lower motivation and disturbed sleep.
The key issue is not simply screen time. It is what the screen replaces. Sleep. Movement. Face-to-face friendship. Boredom. Imagination. Unstructured play. Silence.
The adolescent brain does not merely need stimulation. It needs recovery.
Young people need spaces without judgement
In a German classroom students participate in a mental-health workshop. They discuss what made them happy during the week and what is causing distress.
The workshop leaders do not grade them. They do not report everything to teachers. This creates a space where students can speak about bullying, discrimination, anxiety, self-harm and suicide.
The deeper lesson is that people speak honestly only when honesty is safe. Many families claim to encourage openness but respond to uncomfortable truth with judgement, panic, punishment or immediate advice.
A child says, “I am anxious.” The parent replies, “What do you have to be anxious about?” A teenager says, “I feel like a failure.” The adult replies, “At your age, we had real problems.”
The conversation ends.
Listening is not waiting for your turn to correct someone. Listening is allowing another person’s experience to exist without immediately replacing it with your own.
This may be one of the most valuable forms of social support.
Happiness is biological-but not reducible to chemicals
Science now explores serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins. Scientists have also uses an EEG experiment to show changes in brain-wave patterns when a person recalls a deeply positive memory.
The message is that repeated mental states can influence the brain. Positive memories, gratitude, connection and attention are not merely poetic ideas. They correspond with real biological processes. However, happiness should not be reduced to a simplistic “chemical cocktail.” Dopamine is not happiness itself. Serotonin is not a liquid form of peace. Oxytocin does not automatically create moral love.
Human well-being emerges from the interaction of the brain, body, relationships, environment, meaning and behaviour. Still, the practical lesson remains encouraging:
The mind is not completely fixed.
What we repeatedly practise becomes easier to experience. A mind repeatedly trained in resentment becomes skilled at finding insults. A mind repeatedly trained in comparison becomes skilled at finding inadequacy. A mind repeatedly trained in gratitude becomes better at noticing what is still good.
This is close to the yogic understanding of samskara: repeated thoughts and actions leave impressions that shape future behaviour.
We become, in part, what we repeatedly rehearse.
Flow may be more valuable than pleasure
Flow has been identified as an important contributor to happiness.
Flow is the state in which a person becomes deeply absorbed in an activity. Time recedes. Self-consciousness decreases. Attention and action merge. A musician may experience it while performing. A surgeon may experience it during a demanding procedure. A writer may experience it while working on an idea. A runner may experience it when effort and movement become seamless.
Flow is different from passive pleasure.
Watching short videos may be pleasant, but it often fragments attention. Flow requires concentration, skill and challenge. It usually leaves the person more satisfied than before. This helps explain why meaningful work can make people happy even when it is difficult.
Human beings do not merely want comfort. They want to use their capacities. Arjuna’s crisis in the Gita is partly a crisis of action. Krishna does not advise him to withdraw into permanent comfort. He directs him back toward disciplined engagement.
A life without difficulty may sound attractive. But a life without challenge can become empty. The aim is not to eliminate effort.
It is to find effort worthy of us.
Community does what money cannot
Happiness also appears to come from a combination of strong community ties, local clubs, volunteering, family life, nature, short commutes, educational access and a sense of belonging. This is not incidental.
Community gives people a role. It allows them to be needed. Modern urban life offers privacy and freedom, but it can also make people invisible. You can live in an apartment building for ten years without knowing the person across the corridor. You can work with colleagues daily without knowing whom they call when they are frightened. Community is not merely having people nearby. It is having relationships in which your presence matters.
This is one reason volunteering improves well-being. It shifts attention from “What am I receiving?” to “Where am I useful?” The ego asks, “Am I important?”
Service answers, “You are needed here.”
Karaoke is more profound than it looks
Finns are often emotionally reserved, yet karaoke is extremely popular. Singing allows people to express feeling without having to explain it directly.
This reveals something important about happiness: people need forms of emotional release. Not everyone can discuss sadness in clinical language. Some people pray. Some sing. Some dance. Some write poetry. Some cook for others. Some sit silently beside a friend.
Cultures create indirect ways to express what individuals cannot say plainly. The Bhakti tradition in India understood this brilliantly.
Mirabai did not write a psychological case history of longing. She sang. Kabir did not produce a self-help manual. He created verses that people could carry into ordinary life. Guru Nanak’s teachings were sung as shabad.
Music makes difficult truths emotionally bearable. A society that loses communal singing, storytelling, prayer and shared celebration may become psychologically poorer even as it becomes materially richer.
Money matters-more than spiritual clichés admit
It may not be true that money stops contributing to happiness after a modest income level. Researchers have found that life satisfaction can continue increasing even at high levels of income.
This should not surprise us. Money provides more than objects.
It provides choice. It can reduce commuting time. It can improve healthcare. It can allow someone to leave an abusive workplace. It can buy privacy, education, safety and rest. It can protect a family from the terror of one unexpected expense.
The spiritual mistake is not earning money. It is believing that money is sufficient. Wealth can provide the “have” in the formula have, love, be. It cannot automatically provide love. It cannot guarantee belonging. It cannot create meaningful work. It cannot teach self-forgiveness. It cannot ensure that a person likes who they have become.
The wise position is neither “money is everything” nor “money means nothing.”
Money is powerful-but specialised. It solves certain problems extremely well and others not at all.
Have, love and be
One of the most useful frameworks emerging in modern research comes from sociological thinking about three dimensions of well-being:
Have
Material necessities and security: food, housing, money, health and safety.
Love
Relationships and belonging: family, friendship, affection, community and trust.
Be
Meaning and participation: fulfilling work, hobbies, growth, self-respect and the ability to contribute.
Many unhappy lives are unbalanced across these dimensions. A person may have abundance but no love. Another may have love but no security. A third may have security and relationships but no sense of purpose.
Happiness is rarely destroyed by the absence of one luxury. It is often weakened by the prolonged absence of one of these fundamental needs.
Genes matter, but destiny is not genetic
Genetic differences may explain a significant portion of the variation in happiness between people.
Some people appear naturally optimistic. Others are more sensitive to threat, rejection or uncertainty. This is no different from differences in athletic ability, sociability or stress response. But predisposition is not destiny.
A person with a naturally anxious temperament can still build a meaningful, connected and satisfying life. A naturally cheerful person can still destroy their well-being through isolation, addiction or reckless decisions. The important point is: happiness training must be personalised.
Exercise may transform one person. Friendship may matter most to another. Meditation may help someone else. For another person, meaningful work or service may be the turning point.
There is no single universal routine because human beings do not suffer in identical ways.
The Yaksha’s question
In the Mahabharata, the Yaksha asks Yudhishthira a series of profound questions.
One concerns happiness.
Yudhishthira repeatedly associates the good life with contentment, freedom from crushing debt, modest needs and inner steadiness. This does not mean that ambition is wrong. It means that endless appetite is a form of poverty. A person with $10 million who requires $20 million to feel adequate is psychologically poorer than someone whose needs are modest and whose relationships are rich.
Contentment is not the end of aspiration. It is the end of self-contempt. You can build a larger company without despising the company you currently have. You can improve your body without hating it. You can seek a better home without treating your present home as an embarrassment. You can want more while remaining grateful for what is already present.
That balance is rare.
Ashoka won the war and lost the argument with himself
History offers a dramatic example of the difference between achievement and peace.
After conquering Kalinga, Emperor Ashoka possessed the victory a ruler was expected to desire. But the scale of death and suffering transformed him. His remorse revealed that external triumph can produce internal defeat.
The lesson remains relevant. A person can win the court case and destroy the family. A founder can build a billion-dollar company and lose all capacity for friendship. A politician can win power and become permanently frightened of losing it. A nation can grow richer while citizens become lonelier and more distrustful.
Success answers the question: “Did you get what you wanted?”
Happiness asks a different question: “What did getting it do to you?”
The state and the individual both have responsibilities
Science of happiness refuses two simplistic positions.
The first is that happiness is entirely personal. This view allows dysfunctional societies to blame citizens for being distressed. It tells people living with insecurity, inequality and broken institutions to think positively.
The second is that happiness is entirely structural. This view assumes that once governments provide sufficient money and services, inner peace will automatically follow.
Both are incomplete. Society must provide safety, dignity, education, healthcare, opportunity and support. Individuals must cultivate relationships, gratitude, resilience, attention and purpose.
The state can provide a park. It cannot make you walk in it. A school can provide a psychologist. A family must still make it safe for a child to speak. A society can reduce corruption. An individual must still decide whether to live honestly.
A government can create opportunity. A person must still act.
A deeper formula for happiness
The science of happiness does not ultimately provide a single formula. It provides an architecture.
A sustainable life appears to require:
Security, so survival does not consume all attention. Agency, so people believe their choices matter. Equality of opportunity, so birth does not completely determine destiny. Trust, so every relationship does not begin with suspicion. Belonging, so people are not emotionally abandoned. Support, so weakness does not become shame. Nature, so the nervous system can recover. Ritual, so life contains pauses and meaning. Flow, so human abilities are used deeply. Service, so people feel useful beyond themselves. Humour, so the ego becomes lighter. Resilience, so suffering does not become identity. Contentment, so ambition does not become permanent inadequacy.
This may be the most honest formula: Happiness is the experience of having enough security to breathe, enough freedom to act, enough connection to belong and enough inner steadiness to endure what cannot be controlled.
Finland’s lesson is not that happiness comes from saunas, forests or welfare benefits alone. The Bhagavad Gita’s lesson is not that we should detach ourselves from life. Modern psychology’s lesson is not that happiness can be reduced to neurotransmitters or positive thoughts.
Together, they offer something more powerful. Build institutions that people can trust. Build communities in which people are needed. Build schools in which asking for help is normal. Build lives that include nature, ritual, work, friendship and service. And build a mind that can experience difficulty without declaring life a failure.
Happiness is not the absence of darkness.
It is the confidence that you have enough light, warmth, companionship and courage to move through it.
Karnvir Mundrey is the Editor of TheFutureOfPR.com. Reach out at tfofpr@gmail.com or at +918296303806.
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