Happiness is something that every person strives to achieve; it makes peoples lives easier and meaningful. It is said, that being happy means being a healthy person. Everyone understands happiness in its own way, for some people it is money, for others it is being famous, having friends or a person to love, for some – being recognized as a specialist or a professional in something they are doing. Dutch sociologist Ruut Veenhoven by his researcher found out, that average happiness of people differs from country to country.

Sadly, Lithuania, my home country, is at the very bottom of Ruut Veenhoven’s list of happiness, at 85^th place from a total of 95. That is a sad score, but I can not say that I am surprised by the results. I haven’t travelled anywhere from my country, but when I ask my friends who travels a lot, what is the main different between life in Lithuania and abroad, I usually get the same answer – people “there” are happier. So I became interested, why people in Lithuania can’t find their happiness?

As I said, happiness can be understood in many different ways and that depends on a person, so I am just going to talk about happiness in general. In my opinion, all those things that makes us happy – money, friends, love, career, fame, etc. – are based on a feeling of being secure – socially, financially and in any other possible way. And I think that the main problem in our society (in Lithuania) is that people can’t feel safe. The corruption levels are sky-high, taxes are growing almost every day, and salaries are just going down. Crime levels are also high, so people can’t feel safe even in their homes. And finally, I think that our country is still recovering from a long period of occupation, so people are still not really ready to start trusting each other.

To sum up, I should say that there are still lots of things to change on order to see Lithuania somewhere near the top of Ruut Venhoven’s list, but I believe that those changes will be made with time, and I will have an opportunity to write another composition, considering not why Lithuanian people are sad, but why they are so happy. J

References:

http://worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl/hap_nat/nat_fp.php

http://206.47.170.43/channels/images/happy-face-istock-456.jpg