Bask in the Sun and be Happy

Well, isn't that how it works, after all? We yearn to feel the warming, healing rays of the sun on our winter-weary bodies. We suffer through long months of winter hardship, coping with the cold, the arctic winds, the never-ending episodes of snowfall, of freezing rain and completely inclement days. And when by the calendar winter is assumed to have left our environs, what happens? Fooled you, didn't I? We're still coping with the effects of winter.

Not merely putting up with the melting snowpack and the resulting areas mired in muck from a landscape so completely saturated that each new rain and snow event simply adds to the misery, but wondering where, this year of 2007 and Global Warming, did spring go? More than halfway through April and we've still got snow on the ground. Little wonder, since this geographic jurisdiction took in 17 cm of very wet but very real snow only yesterday. Followed by rain and lots of it.

Which of course turns peoples' winter-weary minds to thoughts of warmer climes, temperate or tropical, and what it must be like to live in such places, sans the kind of winter we experience. Bliss. Surely it must be at the very least, complacently wonderful to live in warm-weather climates where the sun is wont to shine continually. How could it be otherwise, and wouldn't we be thrilled?

Oops, maybe not. A recent European Union poll would seem to indicate otherwise. Is that counter-intuitive, or what? In the EU-funded survey roughly twenty thousand people are asked every two years to rate overall happiness and long-term sense of fulfilment. The resulting scores are then checked against a larger survey designed by psychologists.

Mediterranean countries' respondents indicate they're the most miserable, despite all that sunshine, while Scandinavians are at the top of the heap in contentment and happiness, despite their cooler climes and relative lack of sunlight. "The idea that people are happiest along the sunny banks of the Mediterranean does not appear to be true," said Luisa Corrado, who led the research.

"Italy, Portugal and Greece are consistently among the lowest-scoring countries in the survey, while the highest scores were registered in the chillier surrounds of Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands, and among the highest-scoring Danes." Who would've thunk it. On the other hand, without having the weather top and foremost to complain about what would people communicate to one another about?

Rated on a scale of one to ten, Denmark came out on top at 8.3. They have a high GDP and low unemployment; they love their royal family and it's claimed that the region's happiness owes much to its balance between work and family life; city and countryside. "We are a small country and there is not a great difference between the top and bottom economically," claimed head of the Wonderful Copenhagen tourist board.

Sun or lack of it aside, it appears the countries that scored highest also reported the highest levels of trust in their governments, laws and one another. Happier people tended to have a lot of friends and acquaintances (unsurprising in itself, since people prefer to gravitate toward happy, not grumpy individuals), at least one close friend or a partner. No kidding.

I'm happy.