“They’re a glass full kinda guy,” said Chidi Pea.
Photo by Destiney Friday
After years of substandard rankings, the United States was ranked as the world’s happiest country in the 2024 World Happiness Report released this past week. Produced by Gallup and the United Nations, the report seeks to calculate the happiness index of the world’s nations with a 95% confidence level. However, researchers involved with this year’s report noted that the US’s ranking might have been affected by one American who exhibited “exceedingly high levels of happiness.”
The exceptional American, whose name was anonymized in the report as “Outlier A,” was noted to have responded to the report’s questions with “strangely positive” answers. Outlier A claimed to have smiled for 70,046 hours over the past two weeks, and they have reportedly achieved 16,375 Ph. D.s. The report further stated that Outlier A claimed to regularly donate billions of dollars to charities, and that they believed there was virtually zero corruption present in American businesses or governments. In response to a question asking how happy they were on a scale from one to ten, Outlier A said “125,” which was also their answer to how many years they expected to live.
Researchers of the report emphasized that the other 1,499 American participants had drastically lower well-being scores compared to Outlier A’s. “Outlier A’s responses brought up the class average, so to speak,” said Lead Researcher Chidi Pea. “We know this might skew the data and create unreliable statistics, which is why we recommend that the other participants try a little harder to be happy.”
President Joe Biden commended the report’s ranking at a press briefing a few days after its release. “Folks, I just want to give a shoutout to Outlier A for showing everyone what it means to be a good, hard-working American,” Biden said. “If you ever reveal yourself, I’d be honored to maybe pay off some of your student debt, which I assume is probably in the billions. No promises though, Jack.” After the briefing, several “zoomers” and millennials claimed to be Outlier A, both in person at the press briefing room and virtually on social media. In response, experts affiliated with the report quickly claimed that it was “statistically unlikely” for any of them to be a match for Outlier A due to the fact that “Outlier A was happy.”
The search for Outlier A continues. Federal officials are on the lookout for someone who “wreaks happiness on their surroundings and leaves behind a trail of collateral joy.” Though no one matching this description has been found yet, investigators are “positive” they will find Outlier A in their “pursuit of happiness.”
Despite the President’s positive remarks, not everyone was happy with the report’s outcome. Finland, which had been ranked as the happiest country for seven years in a row, released a statement from the Finnish Embassy in Washington, DC: “You can’t take this away from us. That ranking was the only thing keeping us going. Without it, we’re just some country with universal healthcare, a top ranked education system, and the birthplace of Linux. You will pay for this.” The statement also disclosed that Finland will increase tariffs on US goods until they “reclaim their rightful rank,” and that the once-mutually beneficial relationship with the US “is now Finnished.”
With or without Finland as an ally, the US announced that once they find Outlier A, they will make them a motivational speaker at future UN meetings in hopes of showing the other countries “how
it’s done.”
