There are plenty of reasons to feel cynical about the world around us, especially following almost 15 years of austerity in the UK and fascism being on the rise in Europe and the US.
As understandable as cynicism is in this moment, the latest World Happiness Report highlights that there is still a lot of good, kind people in the world and even when it feels as dark as it does at the moment, there is still hope to be found.
In fact, you can even find hope in strangers.
Strangers are twice as kind as people think
To measure trust in strangers and people we don’t know, the researchers behind the World Happiness Report deliberately lost their wallets to see how many would be returned and compared that with how many people thought would be handed back in.
What they found was that the number of wallets returned was almost twice as high as people around the world had predicted.
Notably, the study also found that belief in the kindness of others was more closely tied to overall happiness than previously thought.
In the study, the researchers said: “Our findings in this chapter expose the need for the kind of caring and sharing that delivers peace, forgiveness and reconciliation.
“Building a broader international network of caring connections seems to us a first necessary step, using such efforts to supplant the force of arms.”
Sharing meals is essential to community building
The 2025 World Happiness Report also found that sharing meals with others was strongly linked with wellbeing across the globe.
The report urges: “Sharing meals proves to be an exceptionally strong indicator of subjective wellbeing – on par with income and unemployment.
“Those who share more meals with others report significantly higher levels of life satisfaction and positive affect, and lower levels of negative affect. This is true across ages, genders, countries, cultures, and regions.”
Speaking to the BBC, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, added: “In this era of social isolation and political polarisation we need to find ways to bring people around the table again - doing so is critical for our individual and collective wellbeing.”
You can read the full report here.