The Geography of Bliss

by Eric Weiner

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”

Swiss humorlessness, like most aspects of life here, is self-policing.

In Switzerland, it’s illegal to flush your toilet past 10:00 p.m. or mow your lawn on Sunday, but it’s perfectly legal to kill yourself.

Choice translates into happiness only when choice is about something that matters. Voting matters. Ice cream matters, too, but fifty flavors of it do not.

Perhaps love and attention are really the same thing. One can’t exist without the other. The British scholar Avner Offer calls attention “the universal currency of well-being.” Attentive people, in other words, are happy people.

When the last tree is cut, When the last river is emptied, When the last fish is caught, Only then will Man realize that he can not eat money.

Thimphu is the world’s only capital city without a single traffic light.

Bhutan is the world’s first non-smoking nation; the sale of tobacco is banned. There are more monks than soldiers. The army, such as it is, produces most of Bhutan’s liquor, including Red Panda beer and my favorite, Dragon Rum. Imagine if all of the world’s armies got into the alcohol business. “Make booze not war” could become the rallying cry for a whole new generation of peaceniks.

A country's GDP might be very high but the question what does this country make? Weapons or things that make our planet happier?

The word “travel” stems from the same root as “travail” does. There’s a reason for this. For centuries, traveling was equated with suffering. Only pilgrims, nomads, soldiers, and fools traveled.

I don’t think so. Consider this finding: People who say they agree with the statement “God is important in my life” report being significantly happier than people who disagree with that statement, irrespective of their participation in organized religion. A happiness bonus—to put it in earthly financial terms—equivalent to a doubling of their salary. I can hear the howls of protests from atheists. If belief in a delusional, dogmatic religion makes you happy, then it is not a happiness I want any part of, thank you very much. The atheists might be on to something. For one thing, the happyologists fail to take into account the moral underpinnings of happiness. A pedophile who reports high levels of happiness—say, a nine out of ten— counts exactly the same as a social worker who also reports being a nine on the happiness scale. Likewise, a suicide bomber, firm in his belief in Allah, might very well score higher than either the pedophile or the social worker. He might be a ten, just before blowing himself up and taking a few dozen innocents with him. Aristotle would clear up this moral confusion in an Athenian minute. Happiness, he believed, meant not only feeling good but doing good. Thus, the pedophile and the suicide bomber only thought they were happy. In fact, they were not happy at all. Perhaps it is not the belief in God that makes us happier but belief in something, anything. How else to explain the fact that the happiest countries in the world—Denmark, Iceland, Switz...

What was going on? Brickman surmised that, in the case of the lottery winners, they now derived significantly less pleasure from ordinary events like buying clothes or talking to a friend. What was once enjoyable was no longer so. Psychologists call this the “hedonic treadmill.”

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but interdependence is the mother of affection.

“He who tastes, knows,” goes the old Sufi saying.

every culture has many more words to describe negative emotional states than positive ones. This partly explains why I’ve found it so difficult to get people to talk to me about happiness.

“I think America is one of the most stressed countries in the world. You think you need money to buy happiness. You hire people to do everything, even to mow your lawn. Here, even wealthy people do that themselves. We think it’s fun.”

it is because of fate, the gods, or some negative karma accumulated in a previous lifetime. In other words, they are not to blame. If an American is poor, it is seen as a personal failure, a flawed character.

How personal failure is seen in India versus the superpower nation the US?