More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Eric Weiner
Read between
January 1 - January 23, 2017
Bhutan was the last country in the world to get television,
Bhutan’s low crime rate—murder is almost unheard of—contributes to the overall happiness here. Not surprisingly, places with high crime rates rank low on the happiness scale.
Life expectancy has increased from forty-two to sixty-four years (though it is still well short of the 250 years in Shangri-La). The government now provides free health care and education for all of its citizens. Bhutan is the world’s first nonsmoking 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
“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.”
Happiness is low expectations? How do I reconcile that with my driving ambition, which has served me so well in life? Or has it? And what he said about compassion being the ultimate ambition.
“It’s a good thing. The mountains, the isolation slow everyone down. The attitude is ‘What to do, la.’ ” Bhutan is the land of la. The monosyllabic word serves as all-purpose affirmation, honorific, and verbal tic. Mostly, it is a softener, appended to almost everything. La means “sir” but also “ya know.”
In America, few people are happy, but everyone talks about happiness constantly. In Bhutan, most people are happy, but no one talks about it.
Trust is a prerequisite for happiness. 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.
Qataris, like all nouveau riche, possess a strange mix of arrogance and insecurity. What they crave, most of all, is validation. Qatar is using money to accomplish this goal. Doha resembles one giant construction site. They are building forty-one hotels, 108 skyscrapers, and fourteen stadiums. And that is just in the next couple of years. No wonder the country suffers from a cement shortage.
Khaldoun believed that the great curse of civilization is not war or famine but humidity: “When the moisture, with its evil vapors ascends to the brain, the mind and body and the ability to think are dulled. The result is stupidity, carelessness and a general intemperance.” An accurate description, too, of the inhabitants of New York City during the dog days of August.
Either way, an important ingredient in the good life, the happy life, is connecting to something larger than ourselves, recognizing that we are not mere blips on the cosmic radar screen but part of something much bigger.
The Conquest of Happiness by describing a happy person thus: “Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joy that it affords, untroubled by the thoughts of death because he feels himself not really separated from those who will come after him. It is in such a profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.”
Social scientists estimate that about 70 percent of our happiness stems from our relationships, both quantity and quality, with friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. During life’s difficult patches, camaraderie blunts our misery; during the good times, it boosts our happiness.
That’s hard to say, but there is no denying that, for Icelanders at least, language is an immense source of joy. Everything wise and wonderful about this quirky little nation flows from its language. The formal Icelandic greeting is “komdu sæll,” which translates literally as “come happy.” When Icelanders part, they say “vertu sæll,” “go happy.” I like that one a lot. It’s so much better than “take care” or “catch you later.”
It’s never a good sign when a country’s people are thin and its police fat.
mindful that food is the mirror of a nation’s soul.
Trust—or, to be more precise, a lack of trust—is why Moldova is such an unhappy land,
Moldovans don’t trust the products they buy at the supermarket. (They might be mislabeled.) They don’t trust their neighbors. (They might be corrupt.) They don’t even trust their family members. (They might be conniving.)
Another reason for Moldovan misery? “People in Moldova are neither Russian nor Moldovan. We have been abused and abandoned by everyone. We have no pride in anything. Not even our language. There are ministers in the Moldovan government who don’t speak Moldovan. They speak only Russian. I hate to say it, but it’s true: There is no Moldovan culture.”
It’s not that democracy makes people happy but rather that happy people are much more likely to establish a democracy. The soil must be rich, culturally speaking, before democracy can take root. The institutions are less important than the culture. And what are the cultural ingredients needed for democracy to take root? Trust and tolerance. Not only trust of those inside your group—family, for instance—but external trust. Trust of strangers. Trust of your opponents, your enemies, even. That way you feel you can gamble on other people—and what is democracy but one giant crapshoot?
That golden rule of positive psychology, hedonic adaptation, states that no matter what tragedy or good fortune befalls us, we adapt. We return to our “set point” or close enough anyway.
We have a proverb about this: ‘Keep the dirty water inside; show the clear water outside.’ ”
“Thai people are not serious about anything. We don’t take anything seriously. Whatever it is, we can accept it.”
“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.”
You come home because this is where you live. It
It’s people, not money, that make you happy. Dogs, too.”
He’s right. Surely, happiness is not merely “the absence of suffering,” as that über-pessimist Schopenhauer believed, but the presence of something. But what?
McDonald’s caved to the Indian palate and, for the first time, dropped Big Macs and all hamburgers from its menu, since Hindus don’t eat beef. Instead, it serves McAloo Tikki and the McVeggie and a culinary hybrid, the Paneer Salsa Wrap. McDonald’s didn’t change India, as some feared. India changed McDonald’s.
McIndia
We in the west think of unpredictability as a menace, something to be avoided at all costs. We want our careers, our family lives, our roads, our weather to be utterly predictable. We love nothing more than a sure thing. Shuffling the songs on our iPod is about as much randomness as we can handle. But here is a group of rational software engineers telling me that they like unpredictability, crave it, can’t live without it. I get an inkling, not for the first time, that India lies at a spiritual latitude beyond the reach of the science of happiness.
embracing unpredictability
“What do you love so much about India?” I ask. “I love the sound of horns tooting, the rickshaws, the women balancing pots on their head, the peanut wallah calling out, the bells at the temples. I love the Indian accent. It’s endless, really. I love everything. ” I can’t help but notice that most of the things she listed are aural. India is a feast for the ears. Maybe that will change, as India grows richer because, to be honest, there is nothing more deadly dull than the sound of prosperity. The dull hum of an air conditioner or the muffled clicks on a keyboard simply can’t compete with the
...more
Someone once told me that if you want to know India, just stand on a street corner, any street corner, and spin around 360 degrees. You will see it all. The best and worst of humanity. The ridiculous and the sublime. The profane and the profound.
