Finland is known to be the happiest country in the world. It topped the chart in the 2025 World Happiness Report. I was therefore surprised to read this recent article that seemed to suggest that the level of cheerfulness in Finland is perhaps not as high as advertised. According to the article, the Finns often ask, “If we are the happiest, how badly must everyone else be doing?”

The reality is probably somewhere in the middle. No matter how wealthy and powerful people are, they still have insecurities. Finnish society is certainly rich and tranquil, but beneath the surface, there are bound to be a few worries. Sharing a long border with a large, belligerent country such as Russia is by itself enough to cause insomnia. However, by questioning their top ranking on the happiness index, the Finns perhaps underestimate how good they have it. If they looked a bit more closely, they would find that it is indeed really bad out there in much of the rest of the world.

I understand where the Finns are coming from though. I have always had questions about the opinions people express about places that they themselves don’t inhabit. For years, some of the rosy pictures that Western media painted about socio-economic conditions in Ghana, my country of birth, were unfathomable to me. Although Ghana hasn’t been my place of residence for a long time, I am intimately familiar with what goes on in the country because of the close contact that I maintain with my siblings and their families who live there. I visit them periodically.

Over the last couple of decades or so, there has been a highly visible construction boom in Accra, Ghana’s capital city, and a handful of the country’s major cities. Fancy high-rise office buildings, swanky shopping malls and condominium complexes and ritzy hotels dot Accra’s landscape. There are luxury vehicles everywhere on the city’s streets. To untrained eyes, all that signifies prosperity. The Western journalists who used to write glowing reports about the state of the national economy, and life in the country generally, could not have fully appreciated the widespread discontent that existed outside of the bubble inside which they were trapped in Accra.

Much of that extravagance on display in Accra and a handful of places in the country is the product of rampant corruption and reckless government borrowing. As is often the case in underdeveloped countries, the elite, constituting a tiny minority of the population, has been the primary beneficiary of that “prosperity.” Life for the overwhelming majority of average Ghanaians who live in villages and small towns has worsened. The fundamentals of the macro economy are extremely weak. Education, healthcare, electricity and water delivery systems and other public services have deteriorated to the point where most people seek private solutions to basic problems that ordinarily, the state should be responsible for. Today, Ghana is one of the most heavily indebted countries on the planet, with all the attendant negative consequences for the ordinary citizen.

Because of my extensive travels and the multiple educational institutions I have attended in different countries, I have friends from all corners of the globe. Whenever I want to get the true picture of what life is really like in a particular country, I make an effort to reach out to people who have intimate knowledge of the place. I often find that their views are quite a bit different from what I have read in some foreign newspaper or heard on television here in America.