The Geography of Bliss

by Eric Weiner

“Maybe happiness is this: not feeling like you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else. Maybe the current conditions in Switzerland … make it simply easier to ‘be’ and therefore ‘be happy.’”

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.

But what exactly is Gross National Happiness? What does it look like? The best explanation I heard came from a potbellied Bhutanese hotel owner named Sanjay Penjor. GNH, Penjor told me, “means knowing your limitations; knowing how much is enough.”

With Gross National Happiness the official policy of the government of Bhutan, every decision, every ruling, is supposedly viewed through this prism. Will this action we’re about to take increase or decrease the overall happiness of the people?

Former French president Jacques Chirac, in his farewell speech, declared: “A nation is a family.” Chirac was speaking figuratively, but Iceland really is a family. Geneticists have found that everyone in the country is related to everyone else, going back seven or eight generations. Icelanders can go to a website and find out how closely they are related to a colleague, a friend—or that cutie they slept with last night. One woman told me how unnerving this can be. “You’ve slept with this guy you’ve just met and then the next day you’re at a family reunion, and there he is in the corner eating smoked fish. You’re like—‘Oh, my God, I just slept with my second cousin.’”

“Happiness,” Kant once said, “is an ideal not of reason but of imagination.” In other words, we create our happiness, and the first step in creating anything is to imagine it.

The formal Icelandic greeting is “komdu sœll,” which translates literally as “come happy.” When Icelanders part, they say “vertu sœll,” “go happy.”

The Thais have a different way, the way of mai pen lai. It means “never mind.” Not the “never mind” that we in the west often use angrily, as in “Oh, never mind, I’ll do it myself” but a real, just-drop-it-and-get-on-with-life “never mind.” Foreigners living in Thailand either adopt the mai pen lai attitude or go insane.