Culture and Society
PUBLISHED
Despite its bleakly short winter days and a well-documented fondness for alcohol, Finland consistently grabs the top spot as the world's happiest country. To better understand the “secret sauce” behind this consistent contentment, part of its government is launching a new century-long research project that will track the lives of thousands of kids born in Finland.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Dubbed Future Finland, the initiative is led by the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, an independent state-owned research institute that's part of the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. The study will follow up to 200,000 children born in Finland between 2026 and 2029, as well as their families, creating one of the most comprehensive longitudinal datasets in history, and certainly the country’s history.
Through questionnaires and the collection of biological samples, the project will attempt to gather large amounts of data on the Finnish population to examine how health, living conditions, family environments, and societal shifts can shape human happiness over a lifetime.
Finland’s apparent wellbeing is often pinned to a few crucial factors frequently linked to happier societies: strong social trust, a robust welfare state, access to high-quality universal healthcare, relatively low inequality, and a deep connection to nature. Regular saunas probably help the Nordic nation too.
One part of this latest study is to move beyond these general theories and provide scientific answers on what truly sustains a high quality of life.
However, this project isn't just about identifying success. The information could also be used to inform how the country tackles the challenges faced by all 21st-century societies, including mental health, health inequalities, and lifestyle-related diseases.
“We believe that the trajectory of human well-being can be changed within a single generation,” Mika Salminen, Director General of the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, said in a statement. “But we cannot solve problems whose roots we do not understand. Long-term research helps identify the causes of well-being, as well as the most effective ways to strengthen it.”
Finland is not alone in this effort. The UK has a lengthy tradition of this kind of longitudinal research, with birth cohort studies that have followed people born in 1946, 1958, and 1970, each quietly reshaping national policy on education, health, and welfare. The most recent of these, the Millennium Cohort Study, revealed in data collected between 2015 and 2016 that nearly one in four girls reported symptoms of depression at age 14, prompting new government strategies to address the issue. Similar projects have sprung up in the US, New Zealand, and elsewhere.
Could Future Finland crack the code of what makes a nation happy? Let's hope so; they've only got a century to find out.
“Long-term research like this is part of the responsibility of an educated and forward-looking society,” said Sauli Niinistö, former President of Finland and patron of the project. “A century-long perspective may provide answers to questions we do not yet even know how to ask. The knowledge created through this research can benefit future generations in Finland and, potentially, around the world.”
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