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The video tries to explain what makes people happy.

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Gatsby was one was of the wealthiest people in New York, he could have anything he wanted, and threw massive parties that anyone could attend. Yet he remained unhappy. Why? Because he didn't have the things that most happy people do. In all of my research, the happiest people are the ones that have a good support base to fall back to. Community, friends, and family all have an important role. Being comfortable with yourself is a big part of someone's level of being content. People in today's society feel so at of place and have no self-confidence which is a big reason why depression is growing. Gatsby had no real friends, he left his family when he was young, and Daisy was out of reach. Many characters in the book felt the same way. Nick was the only one that had them all but in the end, when he lost it, he became extremely depressed. This is why nobody in the Great Gatsby was actually happy, they did not have the key things that most people, even without money, have and they are truly content in the way they live.

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Finland according to CNN has the happiest people in the world. This is because they pay high taxes, which is strange to think, but this gives them free healthcare and college. They trust their government, which many in the USA say that they cannot. Most of all, according to the article, people respect, trust, and care for each other. I find it interesting because most people in the US do not feel this environment of support. I think this reflects back to The Great Gatsby because everyone was out for themselves and didn't really care for anybody. An example is nobody shows up for Gatsby's funeral. Nobody cared that Gatsby threw massive parties for free and nobody even wanted to pay respects towards

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(CNN) - Finland has a lot to celebrate.

It's followed by Denmark, Norway, Iceland and The Netherlands.

The World Happiness Report was released by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations on March 20, the date that the United Nations has declared to be the International Day of Happiness.

The report ranks countries on six key variables that support well-being: income, freedom, trust, healthy life expectancy, social support and generosity.

"The top 10 countries tend to rank high in all six variables, as well as emotional measures of well-being," says report co-editor John Helliwell, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of British Columbia.

And that's not just about the native-born residents of those countries.

"It's true that last year all Finns were happier than rest of the countries' residents, but their immigrants were also happiest immigrants in the world," says Helliwell. "It's not about Finnish DNA. It's the way life is lived in those countries."

They pay high taxes for a social safety net, they trust their government, they live in freedom and they are generous with each other. "They do care about each other," he says. "That's the kind of place people want to live."

Differences among the top eight countries are small enough that jostling among the top five is expected every year.

Switzerland came in sixth place, followed by Sweden, New Zealand, Canada (the only country in the Americas) and Austria.

The 2019 list only changed a little, with Austria nudging Australia out of the top 10 list. Australia dropped one spot to 11th place.

Ranking high in happiness doesn't protect a country's people from violence or trauma, as the recent attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand show. But the response of New Zealand's people to the attacks does.

New Zealand came in eighth place this year, as it did last year.

"What stands out about the happiest and most well connected societies is their resilience and ability to deal with bad things," says Helliwell. "After the 2011 earthquake and now the terrorist attack in Christchurch -- with high social capital, where people are connected -- people rally and help each other and (after the earthquake) rebuild immediately."

The United States came in 19th place, dropping one spot since last year and a total of five spots since 2017.

Except for its 10th place ranking for income, the US doesn't rank in the top 10 on measures that make up a happy country in the UN report. They include 12th place for generosity, 37th place for social support, 61st place for freedom and 42nd place for corruption.

Addiction is partly to blame, says report co-author Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, who wrote a chapter focused on the US epidemic of addictions and unhappiness in America, a rich country where happiness has been declining.

This year's report provides sobering evidence of how addictions are causing considerable unhappiness and depression in the US," says Sachs, in a press release. "Addictions come in many forms, from substance abuse to gambling to digital media. The compulsive pursuit of substance abuse and addictive behaviors is causing severe unhappiness."

Social connections are weakening in the US as social media usage is raising anxiety, especially among adolescents, says Helliwell.

No other super powers made it into the top 10 rankings, either. The United Kingdom came in 15th place, up from 18th place, while Germany came in 17th place, down from 15th. Japan came in 58th place (down from 54th), Russia came in 68th place (down from 59th) and China came in 93rd place (down from 86th).

People in South Sudan are the most unhappy with their lives, according to the survey of 156 countries, followed by Central African Republic (155), Afghanistan (154), Tanzania (153) and Rwanda (152).

Bolstered by population growth, overall world happiness has fallen over the past few years, which has mostly been fueled by a sustained drop in India, which came in 140th place this year (versus 133rd place in 2018). There has also been an increase of negative emotions, which were also measured and include worry, sadness and anger.

The prime minister of the tiny country of Bhutan proposed a World Happiness Day to the United Nations in 2011, which brought international attention to happiness as a metric. Bhutan came in 95th place (up two spots from last year) in this year's report.

In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly declared March 20 as World Happiness Day, recognizing "the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in the lives of human beings around the world and the importance of their recognition in public policy objectives."

This report is the seventh to come out since 2012. The rankings of the world's happiest countries came from an analysis of data from surveys in 156 countries, including the Gallup World Poll starting in 2005-2006.

2. Central African Republic

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world's happiest country for 2019 revealed - cnn

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World's happiest country for 2019 revealed

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(CNN) - Finland has a lot to celebrate. It's followed by Denmark, Norway, Iceland and The Netherlands. The World Happiness Report was released by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations on March 20, the date that the United Nations has declared to be the International Day of Happiness.

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I posted a survey with the question of what non-materialistic make them happy. 20 people responded and had many different things to say. Some said that their friends and family made them the most happy. Others said sports of any physical activity help them relieve stress. Overall I learned that people have many different ways of making themselves happy. There is not singular way people are happy.

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Google Forms - create and analyze surveys, for free.

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Create a new survey on your own or with others at the same time. Choose from a variety of survey types and analyze results in Google Forms. Free from Google.

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The articles I wrote about this subject gave a different take on this subject. Some thought that money was negative, while others thought that it was much more beneficial and that people below the poverty line were indeed less happy. I think that money can fix problems that make you unhappy and allow you to do things you enjoy like traveling. But money makes people do things that hurt others.

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The pursuit of something that you want is a major motivator. People want to work towards a goal. When that goal is accomplished, people loss sense of their purpose. This is a big reason why millionaires and billionaires aren't happy. They don't get the thrills of buying or accomplishing anything because everything is easy for them now. I think to be able to do the things that you love and be with people who care about you is what most people who are happy have.

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It's human nature to want to be happy, but people know relatively little about the science behind the emotion.

Scientists are only just beginning to grasp how the human brain processes emotion - the chemical processes and how they affect our thoughts and behaviors. What does it mean to be happy? And what's actually happening in people's brains when they are?

These are the questions neuroscientist Dean Burnett set out to explore in his new book, "Happy Brain: Where Happiness Comes From and Why," an attempt to understand one of humanity's most potent emotions. He recently spoke with U.S. News about what he discovered. Excerpts:

It's clear the brain's process of forming emotions is incredibly complicated. Do you have a unified theory of what makes us happy?
The process itself is incredibly complicated, a reward pathway deep in the middle of the brain. We share it with lots of other species. It's a small circuit, but it's incredibly important and it allows us to experience pleasure. The brain recognizes that as a good thing, saying, 'You should do that again, here's some pleasure.'

And it can be anything. For instance, it happens when we experience something bad, where we experience fear or something scary, but then it goes away. People want to know why horror is so appealing. You were scared a minute ago and but now you're not. Every experience can be traced back to that process, so many things that can determine how powerful it is and to what degree it's triggered, like if something is familiar or not.

Novelty is a big part of that. Humans need money so we can purchase what we need to survive. And you'd think the more money we have the happier it tends to make us, but it's not that straightforward. If you have $500 that goes into your account every two weeks in your paycheck, that's nice but that doesn't really excite you, whereas if you find $20 in the pocket of your jeans, that's brilliant. It's a lot more rewarding. But familiarity can makes us happy, too. There are a lot of things in the environment that lead to stress and fear and terror and anxiety, and the brain is primed for threat detection, but in our homes we're surrounded by things that calm us down. We're more content, we know what goes where. The brain goes, 'I've been here before and at no point have I died.'
The 'pursuit of happiness' is in the Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right alongside life and liberty. Why is happiness such a powerful motivator?

The evidence that has accumulated is that happiness is a reward, the brain telling us that something has gone right or we've done something which is beneficial. The reward part of our brain identifies sources of pleasure in our lives. You want to do things that make you happy, and the quest for happiness is a big part of who we are, and it's a way for our brain to tell us when things have gone right, what things are beneficial.

It all comes down to the fact that it's a positive sensation. We have a lot of other emotions - embarrassment, fear, guilt - but they're unpleasant, they're meant to discourage us. At the most basic level, emotions are the shortcut the brain uses rather than having to think through a scenario every single time, weighing the pros and cons. The brain can think rationally and logically. Emotions are the shortcut we have to that. I tried something, but it made me feel guilty. Or there's something we enjoy, we like, we want to feel good.

But happiness isn't necessarily the most powerful emotion. Fear, for example, is about survival - we don't want to be happy for a few minutes but then end up dead.

As for the pursuit of happiness, the pursuing itself is a good thing. In modern culture, we think happiness should be the default state, otherwise something is amiss. But that's not how the brain works. The brain adapts to anything: You could have a favorite meal that makes you happy, but if you have it all day, every day, you'll be fed up with it in literally every sense.

Your brain stops paying attention, it doesn't idle well. So while you don't have to do anything to make yourself happy, it loses all its potency. The pursuit is a good thing. It's all about motivation. People who are born into wealth, great privilege and power, they don't seem particularly happy because they don't have to strive for anything.

If you're constantly happy, you're avoiding all sorts of experiences. The more emotions you experience, the more you develop emotional competence. Something bad will happen to you eventually. If you've always been happy, you don't know how to deal with it and your brain gets really confused. It's the same as if you were to only exercise one muscle - you might end up with a really strong leg, but you'd have trouble getting around. It's not great.
A lot of our brain is set up for the purposes of survival. Most of us no longer constantly face mortal threats. How has that changed how our brains process happiness?
Modern life, counterintuitively, can actually cause more of a problem. Since survival isn't necessarily a big deal anymore - we don't really have life-or-death situations, no predators, no readily immediate fatal dangers - there's so much more opportunity to indulge ourselves, our basic hedonistic instinct.

All of this stems from the fact that the human brain evolved very rapidly. The cortex was half the size it is now 3 million years ago. That is phenomenally fast for evolution. But the underlying parts of the brain - the reptile brain - is the same as it's always been. It keeps us alive. The incredibly complex, highly advanced part of the brain and the more primitive part of the brain don't always work together easily. It's like trying to install Windows 10 on a 5-year old laptop - you can do it, but neither side really enjoys it.

As a result, there are lots of different parts of the brain that rival other parts of the brain. The basic instinct to seek out basic pleasures competes with the survival instinct - conflicts like that are often coming to a head inside the brain. The instinct to binge eat comes from the need for survival in the wild. When you came across a plentiful, nutritious food source when food was otherwise scarce, the instinct is to eat as much as you can beyond your fill. The pursuit of happiness can make us blind to more long-term advantages.
Why is so much of our happiness contingent on our relationships with others?
We are such a social species, perhaps the most social species of all, and that's part of what drove our evolution. We don't tend to kill each other. That's a really strong selling point of the human race. In New York, there are 8 million people and relatively few murders. If you put 8 million chimps in New York, in a few days you'd have 4 million chimps, and then 2 million. They're an aggressive species in that regard, whereas we can happily live side by side.

Other people are such a big part of how we experience emotions. Guilt and embarrassment only exist in the context of other people. So if your bathrobe falls off when you get out of the shower, no big deal. But if it happens in a hotel lobby, it's terribly embarrassing because there are other people around to see and judge you. Rejection is such a huge part of our make-up.

We're a pair-bonding species, and we seek out partners. Not everyone's the same, of course, but it's the human norm, as it were. When we find the one person who we want to settle down with, it causes all manner of reactions in the brain. We've evolved to encourage us to maintain a link with one person. It means that when you first fall in love, you spend a lot of time not aware of that person's tics and flaws. Your hazard-detection system is shut down. That can be harmful, such as when people cannot recognize that their partner is awful. It can be really quite disturbing, when people are maintaining relationships they shouldn't. The part of your brain that can recognize that is suppressed, and the longer you stay with someone the harder it is to leave. It's a form of self-sabotage.

On the other hand, we're able to form that kind of connection with more than one person. We've detached it from pure mating instinct. We can have friends now, a strong emotional bond with someone we'll never mate with. Friends make us happy because we can form that strong connection.
You write about how the chemical oxytocin, for example, is important to creating meaningful bonds between people - mothers and babies, lovers, friends. How does it sometimes backfire?
There's an impression that these things are straightforward, but the brain is so incredibly diverse that these chemicals can sometimes have radically different effects. We're evolved to make friends but not necessarily with all other people. There's an ingroup and an outgroup. The outgroup, who aren't part of us, can be perceived as a threat.

We're a tribal species. To a degree, the only thing that's really a threat to a human is another human. Oxytocin enhances emotional bonds, romantic bonds, friendship bonds, familial bonds. But not every bond is helpful. It can make us more negatively predisposed to people in the outgroup, even racist.

We have a strong sense of status. We want to be top dog, respected, looked up to as much as possible. We have a strong instinct, rooted in the amygdala, which regulates emotions like fear, that anything that boosts our state, we seize upon it. If you have a goal, say, to be the world's best sprinter, that's fine as a goal. But it means nobody else can have it. It's a zero-sum thing. A lot of what makes us happy is dependent on making other people less happy. We are a hierarchical species. For us to go up, someone else must go down.
Presumably, you get asked a lot for advice on how to be happy. What do you tell people?
There are two things I try to emphasize.

First, happiness isn't the default - expecting it isn't realistic. Happiness should be a goal rather than a permanent state. The brain has to work hard to be happy - to be happy all the time would be exhausting. High energy, extroverted people can be pretty tiring to be around. It's nice to try to aim for happiness, but it's not something we can ever get to permanently. The closer you get, the harder it is. Sure, there should be more times that you're happy than you're not, but you shouldn't be happy all the time.

And, second, because it's not easy to be happy, the theories about a secret to happiness aren't realistic - or at least they're a huge oversimplification. Anyone offering a quick-fix solution - and there are plenty of self-help books that do - should be taken with a massive grain of salt. For every person they help, there's at least one for whom it won't work, because the brain is the most variable thing in the world. There never will be any simple answer.

And one other thing: The cultural notion that you can find happily ever after, that when you find the one person you should be with, that's it. That's an ironically romanticized version of love, and it doesn't really work that way. It sets you up to fail. It's unhealthy, and it sets an ideal that isn't going to happen. When you buy a car you've always wanted, you don't just park it in the driveway and look at it, you drive it and put fuel in it and service it. The same is true in a relationship - it should be used and appreciated.

All these ideas of constant happiness, they're culturally induced rather than biological. There's no guarantee that you should be happy constantly.

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It's human nature to want to be happy, but people know relatively little about the science behind the emotion. Scientists are only just beginning to grasp how the human brain processes emotion - the chemical processes and how they affect our thoughts and behaviors. What does it mean to be happy?

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This article talks about the main reasons more people then every are not satisfied with their lives. One of the points I thought was the most interesting was that our expectations are too high because we are always told that you can do anything you want in life. This really isn't true even when we don't want to admit it.

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Everywhere you look today, people are stressed out. Many reach a breaking point and sink into depression - a mental health issue few of our grandparents or great-grandparents experienced.

Or is it?

Perhaps people 50 or 75 years ago just didn't talk about depression, and didn't seek treatment for it. After all, effective treatments weren't exactly available back then. Maybe people today are more willing to admit to depression, and that's why it looks like everyone is so stressed and depressed. That's one reason why many researchers are skeptical of the claim that mental health issues have become more common.

One way to get around this problem is to look at anonymous surveys that ask about anxiety and depression. Even better, ask about symptoms of anxiety and depression - that way, people aren't saying they are depressed outright. Instead, they are reporting how they actually feel.

That was my goal in a study just published in the journal Social Indicators Research. It looked across three samples totaling 7 million people, two of them nationally representative. I found that teens in the 2010s, as compared to the mid-1980s, were 38 percent more likely to have trouble remembering, 74 percent more likely to have trouble sleeping, and twice as likely to have seen a professional for mental health issues. College students were 50 percent more likely to say they felt overwhelmed, and adults were more likely to say their sleep was restless, that they had poor appetite, and that everything was an effort - all classic psychosomatic symptoms of depression.

But when people were asked directly if they "felt depressed," that didn't change much between the 1980s and the 2010s.

How can that be? Most people don't realize that having trouble sleeping and remembering are symptoms of depression. Many people admit to being stressed or overwhelmed but don't consider themselves depressed. The problem is that stress (psychologists usually call it anxiety) is a risk factor for depression, and depression doesn't always appear as extreme lethargy and sadness; it often shows up in bodily symptoms.

This also means that the rise in mental-health concerns isn't caused by people being more willing to admit to being depressed. It actually looks like fewer are admitting to being depressed, because more say they have the psychosomatic symptoms. It seems to be a true increase in problems, and not just a decline in stigma.

The tougher question is why people seem to be suffering more. I have three theories. (I explore these in greater depth in the new edition of my book, Generation Me.)

1. Our relationships and community ties are weaker.

2. We're more focused on goals such as money, fame, and image, which Tim Kasser 's work has shown is correlated with anxiety and depression.

3. Our expectations are too high, probably because of the emphasis on "you can be anything you want to be" and highly positive self-views. This was a big theme in the first edition of Generation Me, which came out in 2006, and other observers-I believe independently-came to similar conclusion, such as Tim Urban (" Why GenY Yuppies are Unhappy") and Bret Easton Ellis (" Generation Wuss").

There are probably other reasons. I doubt technology is the major one, as tempting as it seems; these increases were in place long before cell phones and Facebook. Ditto for the recession. Instead, something else in our culture seems to be making people unhappy.

What do you think it is? And can we do anything about it?

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Why So Many People Are Stressed and Depressed

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Generation Me doesn't admit to depression more; they're actually feeling it.