JNS
How did Israel place eighth in the 2025 World Happiness Report?
Israelis shouldn’t be happy.
They are in the midst of a grueling war with Hamas that has stretched on for a year and a half. They live with grief and anxiety over hostages still held by the terrorist group and IDF soldiers battling Israel's enemies on multiple fronts.
Their economy—particularly the tourism and tech sectors—has taken a hit. They face global diplomatic isolation beneath the shadow of an existential threat.
By any reasonable measure, one might assume that Israelis have little to be happy about.
And yet, they are.
Once again, Israel has ranked among the happiest countries in the world. According to the newly released 2025 World Happiness Report, Israel placed eighth globally—just behind Sweden and ahead of Luxembourg, Australia and the United States.
The rankings are based on a range of metrics, but the primary measure is the Cantril Ladder: respondents rate their current life on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the best possible life.
It marks a slight drop from the previous year, when Israel placed fifth, but continues a remarkable streak: the country has held a top 10 spot for three consecutive years, having ranked fourth in 2023 and ninth in 2022—the first year it broke into that elite group.
At first glance, Israel’s inclusion looks like a statistical anomaly. The top of the list is once again dominated by the Nordic nations—Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden—countries more readily associated with social harmony, fresh air, functional bureaucracy, and cradle-to-grave welfare systems.
So what, exactly, makes Israelis almost as happy as the Finns, who cite clean air and long walks in the forest as the source of their national contentment? What is it about a country under near-constant threat, riven by internal divides, and often misrepresented on the global stage, that produces such consistently high levels of subjective well-being?
The answer may lie, at least in part, in a homegrown theory of happiness.
In 2017, Israel became the birthplace of the world’s first Happiness Studies Academy, an online educational initiative co-founded by Yuval Kutz and Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, whose course on positive psychology became the most popular class in Harvard’s history.
The Academy trains educators, therapists and business leaders around a five-part model of well-being, known as SPIRE—Spiritual, Physical, Intellectual, Relational and Emotional well-being. It’s less a formula for instant joy than a framework for long-term resilience.
Take the spiritual dimension—not strictly religious but tied to the sense that life has direction and meaning. This is something Israelis tend to cultivate instinctively. Whether through family, community, national service or simply the belief that their presence in the region matters, there is often a strong sense that individual actions are woven into something larger. In Israel, a sense of purpose is not a luxury, but one of necessity.
The other SPIRE components echo this orientation. Intellectual well-being is embedded in Israel’s culture of debate and innovation. Physical well-being is reinforced not just by military training, but by the broader emphasis on readiness and self-reliance.
Emotional well-being, often overlooked, is central to the SPIRE philosophy: not the pursuit of constant joy, but the capacity to move through pain without being consumed by it. As the Academy puts it, happiness sometimes means simply “permission to be human.”
Still, none of this fully explains why Israel consistently outranks far more stable countries.
For that, the World Happiness Report itself points to what may be the decisive factor: social connection.
Loneliness is a growing problem globally, particularly among young people whose lives are increasingly lived online. Against this anesthetized backdrop—where digital connection often masks a lack of real-world support—Israel stands out. According to the 2025 report, young Israelis rate the quality of their social support higher than any other country in the world.
In short, Israelis have people to turn to.
And that, says Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky, a leading expert on happiness at the University of California, Riverside, makes all the difference. “Happy people have stronger relationships,” she tells JNS. “And that’s a really critical asset or resource for coping with adversity.”
Her decades of research show that happiness doesn’t shield people from pain—it helps them recover faster. “They might be very unhappy during trauma,” she explains, “but they bounce back sooner.”
She also points to another important trait: how people compare themselves to others. We all do it, but happier people, she says, “don’t anchor their identity in those comparisons.” Instead, they tend to use internal standards—measuring themselves against their own values, not someone else’s Instagram feed.
In a country that often feels like a global pariah, this internal orientation may be more necessity than virtue. Israelis are used to being misunderstood, maligned or outright demonized. It may be that the national psyche, hardened by experience, simply stopped looking outward for approval and learned instead to derive meaning from within.
Lyubomirsky sees a wider social mechanism at play, too. “External threats and collective challenges can bond people together,” she notes. A classic psychology study she references found that strangers waiting to receive electric shocks bonded in the waiting room—united by anticipation and anxiety.
“You suffer together,” she says, “and you grow together.”
It’s a grim analogy, perhaps. But one that tracks disturbingly well for Israel. The trauma of Oct. 7, 2023—when Hamas carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—deepened the country's collective sense of threat. But it also intensified the Israeli people’s sense of purpose and unity, at least for a time.
Of course, Israel is no stranger to division. The past two years have seen mass protests over judicial reform, bitter political polarization, and rising tensions between religious and secular communities. And yet, through it all, the center holds. The country argues vociferously—but it argues in the same language, often at the same table, and rarely without humor.
This capacity for cohesion, even amid chaos, may well be the secret to Israel’s happiness. As Lyubomirsky puts it, "There’s a 'we feeling' that emerges from collective challenge." Israelis, it seems, know how to hold together without pretending to agree.
It is a theory shared by Natalie Buchwald, a psychotherapist and founder of Manhattan Mental Health. “Happiness is more than just wealth or security,” she tells JNS. “It comes from meaning, connection, and how we frame our world.”
She sees Israel’s high ranking not as an outlier, but as a challenge to conventional assumptions. “Countries facing economic or security challenges, like Israel or Mexico, often rank high in happiness due to strong cultural narratives of purpose and resilience,” she says. “Meaning-making acts as a buffer against adversity.”
She also highlights one of the report’s more surprising insights: that expecting kindness from others is a better predictor of happiness than GDP or personal safety: “This suggests that cultural norms, trust in communities, and even media portrayals shape psychological expectations—ultimately influencing how individuals experience daily life.”
For Buchwald, the takeaway is clear. “Fostering happiness on a societal level means prioritizing connection, storytelling and community trust. The data is clear: happiness isn’t just about what happens to us, but how we interpret it.”
That idea—the interpretation of adversity—is deeply embedded in the Israeli experience. A nation born from catastrophe, shaped by waves of immigration, and continually forced to defend its legitimacy, Israel has become fluent in the language of reframing. Its people are not naïve. But they are, almost by necessity, focused on continuity, survival, and purpose.
And perhaps that is the uniquely Israeli psychological trick: to argue, to mourn, to rage—and still to remain tethered to each other. To hold together even when everything threatens to break apart.
Maybe that’s not happiness as the Nordics define it. But it’s happiness that endures.
