If you’re in Finland, you’re probably feeling happy; in Afghanistan the opposite is likely true. Those two countries mark the top and bottom of the 147 states ranked in the World Happiness Report 2026. Egypt ranks 139th, with Lebanon and Yemen ranking even lower.
Released on March 19, the 14th annual report, produced by Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, focuses on the links between happiness, wellbeing and social media use. Given global and local concerns about social media’s impact on wellbeing and mental health, especially among children and adolescents, its headline conclusion is significant: young people who use social media for less than one hour a day report the highest levels of happiness globally.
But the regional picture is more complicated than a simple warning against screens. Chapter 9, devoted to the Middle East and North Africa, finds that social media use in the region is among the highest in the world, yet youth wellbeing there has not fallen in the same way it has in the English-speaking world and Western Europe. That does not mean the region is immune. The report says heavy use is still associated with higher levels of stress and depression, especially when it becomes passive, visual and influencer-driven.
The variation within MENA is also stark. Israel, a state at war for the past three years, and widely regarded as having committed genocide against the population of Gaza, ranks eighth globally, placing it among the world’s happiest countries. The Palestinians, recognized in the report as the State of Palestine, rank 109th.
The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia also perform strongly, ranking 21st and 22nd, while Egypt sits near the bottom at 139th. That spread underlines a basic point often lost in regional discussion: there is no single MENA happiness story, only very different national experiences shaped by income, conflict, state capacity, social support and political conditions.
The rankings themselves are based on a three-year average of how people assess the quality of their own lives. Researchers then use factors such as GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, freedom, generosity and perceptions of corruption to help explain differences across countries and over time. In other words, the rankings are built from people’s own answers, while the familiar economic and social indicators are used to understand why those answers vary.
That matters for how the report’s social media findings should be read in Egypt. In the Gulf, social media use exceeds 80%, while in several North African countries, including Egypt, it is below 60%. The report also notes that social media is gradually overtaking television as a main source of news across the region, but in Egypt and Jordan that shift has been slower and appears to have stagnated. Egypt’s low ranking, in other words, cannot be explained by digital habits alone.
Looking at the numbers, Egypt’s rankings in terms of GPD per capita (67th), inequality (80th) and freedom (101st) are all significantly better than people’s self-reported perceptions of how happy they are. Perhaps a reality of high inflation, a poverty-level minimum wage, and a poor human rights record are also taking their toll.
For most users in MENA, the report finds, spending up to five hours a day on social media has only a negligible association with stress, depressive symptoms and whether people feel they are doing better than their parents. It is beyond that threshold, in what the report classifies as heavy use, that the pattern becomes more consistently negative. Heavy users are more likely to report stress, depression and a sense that they are worse off than the previous generation.
The type of use matters as much as the amount. Messaging and active communication do not appear to carry the same risks as endless scrolling through image-heavy, comparison-driven platforms. The report repeatedly points to passive consumption and influencer culture as the most problematic forms, because they encourage social comparison while offering little real connection in return.
The gender findings are also more nuanced than much of the Western debate suggests. Women in MENA are less likely than men to use social media, which the report links to region-specific pressures including harassment, family surveillance and reputational concerns. Yet the report does not find that heavy use affects one gender far more than the other in the region. That differs from the English-speaking world, where the decline in youth wellbeing has been sharper and the harms are often found to be greater for girls.
The broader lesson is not that MENA defies global trends, but that it may reflect them in a different register. Low use appears safest. Heavy use carries clearer risks. And social media neither uniformly harms nor benefits wellbeing. For Egypt, that is probably the most useful takeaway: social media may deepen existing pressures, but it is only one part of a much larger story about why people feel their lives are getting better, or not.
