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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Eric Weiner
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December 27, 2016 - January 4, 2017
Europeans love conferences. Get three Europeans together, and chances are quite high a conference will break out. All that’s needed are those little name tags and many, many gallons of Perrier.
The American way is: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. The Swiss way is: If you’ve got it, hide it. One Swiss person told me, “You don’t dress or act like you’re rich. Of course, you might have a four-thousand-dollar espresso machine in your apartment.”
Trusting your neighbors is especially important. Simply knowing them can make a real difference in your quality of life. One study found that, of all the factors that affect the crime rate for a given area, the one that made the biggest difference was not the number of police patrols or anything like that but, rather, how many people you know within a fifteen-minute walk of your house.
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell thought so. “A certain amount of boredom is . . . essential to a happy life,” he wrote.
Russell had something to say about this: “A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.”
British academic Avner Offer wrote that “affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines well being.” He’s right. You don’t see many impatient poor people.
“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.’ ”
The British scholar Avner Offer calls attention “the universal currency of well-being.” Attentive people, in other words, are happy people.
For Some Time will not arrive until it does. Unless it doesn’t.
Bhutan bucks the trend in most developing countries, where money is poured into appearances—a glitzy airport terminal surrounded by slums, hotels with extravagant lobbies but shabby rooms. In Bhutan, what’s on the inside is often more impressive than what’s on the outside.
“Karma, are you happy?” “Looking back at my life, I find that the answer is yes. I have achieved happiness because I don’t have unrealistic expectations.”
Then there it is again: death. A subject that, oddly, comes up an awful lot in my search for happiness. Maybe we can’t really be happy without first coming to terms with our mortality.
GDP is simply the sum of all goods and services a nation produces over a given time. The sale of an assault rifle and the sale of an antibiotic both contribute equally to the national tally (assuming the sales price is the same). It’s as if we tracked our caloric intake but cared not one whit what kind of calories we consumed. Whole grains or lard—or rat poison, for that matter. Calories are calories.
GDP doesn’t register, as Robert Kennedy put it, “the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, or the intelligence of our public debate.” GDP measures everything, Kennedy concluded, “except that which makes life worthwhile.”
As Schumacher said, “The richer the society, the more difficult it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate payoff.”
American politicians were probably like this, long ago, before the consultants and the focus groups drained the sincerity from their veins. Before we confused form and substance.
In the west and in the United States especially, we try to eliminate the need for compromise. Cars have “personal climate controls” so that driver and passenger need not negotiate a mutually agreeable temperature. That same pair, let’s say they’re husband and wife, need not agree on the ideal firmness of their mattress, either. Each can set their own “personal comfort level.” We embrace these technologies. Why shouldn’t everyone enjoy their own personal comfort level, be it in a car or in a bed? I wonder, though, what we lose through such conveniences. If we no longer must compromise on the
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Trust not only of your government, of institutions, but trust of your neighbors. Several studies, in fact, have found that trust—more than income or even health—is the biggest factor in determining our happiness.
You can tell a lot about a country by the way people drive. Getting someone behind the wheel of a car is like putting them into deep hypnosis; their true self comes out.
Home need not be one place or any place at all, but every home has two essential elements: a sense of community and, even more important, a history.
So the greatest source of happiness is other people—and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house and, if we’re really wealthy, to an estate. We think we’re moving up, but really we’re walling off ourselves.
Back then, life was too harsh for culture. Today, it is too comfortable for culture.
While it’s true that money talks, it talks only in the future tense. Money is 100 percent potential. You can build a future with money but not a past.
“you can crave for something very much but take little or no pleasure in it once you had it.”
In fact, researchers have found that people who are too busy are happier than those who are not busy enough. In other words, the playwright Noël Coward got it right when he observed that interesting work is “more fun than fun.”
“All this wealth. Does it make people happy?” “No, not really. You need enough money to have your dignity. Beyond that, it won’t make you happy.”
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but interdependence is the mother of affection.
The sun is like most things in life. You don’t miss it until it’s gone.
As any poet (or blogger) knows, misery expressed is misery reduced.
Having multiple identities (though not multiple personalities) is, he believes, conducive to happiness. This runs counter to the prevailing belief in the United States and other western nations, where specialization is considered the highest good. Academics, doctors, and other professionals spend lifetimes learning more and more about less and less. In Iceland, people learn more and more about more and more.
“envy tends to diminish all in whom it takes possession.”
For if you are free to fail, you are free to try.
Martin Seligman, founder of the positive-psychology movement, discovered that happy people remembered more good events in their lives than actually occurred. Depressed people remembered the past accurately. “Know thyself” may not be the best advice after all. A pinch of self-delusion, it turns out, is an important ingredient in the happiness recipe.
There’s no one on the island telling them they’re not good enough, so they just go ahead and sing and paint and write. One result of this freewheeling attitude is that Icelandic artists produce a lot of crap. They’re the first to admit it. But crap plays an important role in the art world. In fact, it plays exactly the same role as it does in the farming world. It’s fertilizer. The crap allows the good stuff to grow. You can’t have one without the other.
The measure of a society, he said, is how well it transforms pain and suffering into something worthwhile. Not how a society avoids pain and suffering—for
Hotels are wonderful inventions, but they are not the ideal window to the soul of a nation.
Neuroscientists, meanwhile, believe they have located the part of the brain linked with altruism. To their surprise, it turns out to be a more primitive part of the brain than initially suspected—the same part associated with our cravings for food and sex. That suggests that we are hardwired for altruism and not just faking it.
Joseph Epstein, in his book on envy, described the entire advertising industry as “a vast and intricate envy-producing machine.”
“Not my problem” is not a philosophy. It’s a mental illness. Right up there with pessimism. Other people’s problems are our problems. If your neighbor is laid off, you may feel as if you’ve dodged the bullet, but you haven’t. The bullet hit you as well. You just don’t feel the pain yet. Or as Ruut Veenhoven told me: “The quality of a society is more important than your place in that society.” In other words, better to be a small fish in a clean pond than a big fish in a polluted lake.
I’ve spent most of my life trying to think my way to happiness, and my failure to achieve that goal only proves, in my mind, that I am not a good enough thinker. It never occurred to me that the source of my unhappiness is not flawed thinking but thinking itself.
Thinking about happiness makes us less happy.
Yet happiness, as Tim sees it, is more than simply an uninterrupted series of pleasurable moments, and that’s a point he feels the positive-psychology movement misses.
“Part of positive psychology is about being positive, but sometimes laughter and clowns are not appropriate. Some people don’t want to be happy, and that’s okay. They want meaningful lives, and those are not always the same as happy lives.”
perhaps we’d be better off heeding the advice of Canadian author Robertson Davies: “If you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.”
People stand to leave. Everyone seems pleased with the evening’s performance. I leave feeling like I’ve just had the spiritual equivalent of popcorn: tasty, easy to swallow, and certainly of some nutritional value, but not particularly filling.
We may be fairly happy now, but there’s always tomorrow and the prospect of a happier place, a happier life. So all options are left on the table. We never fully commit. That is, I think, a dangerous thing. We can’t love a place, or a person, if we always have one foot out the door.
What doesn’t kill you not only makes you stronger but also more honest.
Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.
All miserable countries are alike; happy ones are happy in their own ways.
“The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth,” observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.
