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For most of human history, I would have been considered normal. Happiness, in this life, on this earth, was a prize reserved for the gods and the fortunate few. Today, though, not only is happiness considered possible for anyone to attain, it is expected. Thus I, and millions of others, suffer from the uniquely modern malady that historian Darrin McMahon calls “the unhappiness of not being happy.” It is no fun at all.
Here is what a Polish citizen living in the United States told the writer Laura Klos Sokol about Americans: “When Americans say it was great, I know it was good. When they say it was good, I know it was okay. When they say it was okay, I know it was bad.”
Most of the world is happy. Why does this come as such a surprise? Two types of people, I think, are to blame: journalists and philosophers. The media, of which I am a culpable member, report, as a rule, only bad news: wars, famine, the latest Hollywood couple’s implosion. I don’t mean to belittle the troubles in the world, and God knows I have made a good living reporting them, but we journalists do paint a distorted picture.
No, he explains, the Swiss are happy because they go to great lengths not to provoke envy in others. The Swiss know instinctively that envy is the great enemy of happiness, and they will do anything to squash it. “Our attitude,” says Dieter, taking a sip of beer, “is don’t shine the spotlight too brightly on yourself or you might get shot.”
we find natural settings so peaceful. It’s in our genes. That’s why, each year, more people visit zoos than attend all sporting events combined.
“Patients with the natural window view had shorter post-operative hospital stays, had fewer negative comments in nurses’ notes . . . and tended to have lower scores for minor post-surgical complications such as persistent headache or nausea requiring medication. Moreover, the wall-view patients required many more injections of potent painkillers.”
The things that prevent us from killing ourselves are different from those that make us happy. Roman Catholic countries, for instance, tend to have very low suicide rates because of the Catholic prohibition on suicide. Yet that doesn’t mean these countries are happy. Good government, meaningful work, strong family ties—these are all major contributors to happiness, yet if you are unhappy, truly despondent, none of them will prevent you from committing suicide.
“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.”
that is this generation summed up exactl. sad but true
The Bhutanese were never colonized, never conquered, so their hospitality is served straight up, devoid of the gratuitous deference and outright ass-kissing so common in this part of the world.
“You need to think about death for five minutes every day. It will cure you, sanitize you.” “How?” “It is this thing, this fear of death, this fear of dying before we have accomplished what we want or seen our children grow. This is what is troubling you.” “But it sounds so depressing, thinking about death every day. Why would I want to do that?” “Rich people in the west, they have not touched dead bodies, fresh wounds, rotten things. This is a problem. This is the human condition. We have to be ready for the moment we cease to exist.”
In America, few people are happy, but everyone talks about happiness constantly. In Bhutan, most people are happy, but no one talks about it.
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.”
Recent research into happiness, or subjective well-being, reveals that money does indeed buy happiness. Up to a point. That point, though, is surprisingly low: about fifteen thousand dollars a year. After that, the link between economic growth and happiness evaporates. Americans are on average three times wealthier than we were half a century ago, yet we are no happier. The same is true of Japan and many other industrialized nations.
But wealth can also stymie the human spirit, and this is something that very few economists seem to recognize. As Schumacher said, “The richer the society, the more difficult it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate payoff.”
In a wealthy, industrialized society, one where we are supposedly enjoying a bountiful harvest of leisure time, we are discouraged from doing anything that isn’t productive—either monetarily or in terms of immediate pleasure.
I’m sitting on the terrace, overlooking a fast-moving river. It’s a beautiful setting, and instinctively I reach for my notebook and camera. But I stop myself. The words of the Rinpoche echo in my head. Experience. You need to experience. He’s right. Recording life is a poor substitute for living it.
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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very true
as the Hindus say, all is maya, illusion. Things are not as they seem. We humans do not know a damn thing. About anything. A scary thought but also, in a way, a liberating one. Our highs, our accomplishments, are not real. But neither are our setbacks, our mushkala. They are not real either.
dunya dunya dunya
When Ambition is your God, the office is your temple, the employee handbook your holy book. The sacred drink, coffee, is imbibed five times a day. When you worship Ambition, there is no Sabbath, no day of rest. Every day, you rise early and kneel before the God Ambition, facing in the direction of your PC. You pray alone, always alone, even though others may be present. Ambition is a vengeful God. He will smite those who fail to worship faithfully, but that is nothing compared to what He has in store for the faithful. They suffer the worst fate of all. For it is only when they are old and
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subhanAllah
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but interdependence is the mother of affection. We humans need one another, so we cooperate—for purely selfish reasons at first. At some point, though, the needing fades and all that remains is the cooperation. We help other people because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we’re counting on some future payback. There is a word for this: love.
Thus, democracy makes the Swiss happier but not the Moldovans. For the Swiss, democracy is the icing on their prosperous cake. Moldovans can’t enjoy the icing because they have no cake.
Moldovans derive more pleasure from their neighbor’s failure than their own success. I can’t imagine anything less happy.
I try to wrap my mind around that. We in the west usually put problem solving ahead of relationships. In our search for answers, for the truth, we will gladly jettison friends and even family overboard.
In Britain, the happy are few and suspect. If you are English and, through no fault of your own, find yourself inexplicably joyful, do not panic. Remain calm and heed the advice of English humorist Jerome K. Jerome: “Don’t show [your happiness] but grumble along with the rest.” For the British, happiness is a transatlantic import. And by “transatlantic” they mean American. And by “American” they mean silly, infantile drivel. Confectionary.
Freud was dying of cancer, not far from this pub actually, yet he refused morphine. He wanted to continue to work and didn’t want to have his mind clouded. If you believe that pleasure, or at least the absence of pain, is man’s highest ideal, then Freud’s decision made no sense. 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.”
India does not disappoint. It captivates, infuriates, and, occasionally, contaminates. It never disappoints.
Why do so many presumably sane westerners leave their wealthy, functional nations behind and travel to a poor and dysfunctional nation in search of bliss? Are they romanticizing the east, falling for charlatans with flowing beards? Or did the nineteenth-century scholar Max Mueller get it right when he said that, by going to India, we are returning to our “old home,” full of memories, if only we can read them?
Guru-ji doesn’t hesitate. “Yes, there is something higher than happiness. Love is higher than happiness.” The audience applauds. Guru-ji waits for them to settle down then elaborates: “Not only does love trump happiness, but in a competition between truth and love, love wins. We must strive for a love that does not bring distortions.”
Calcutta’s destitute, it turns out, are significantly happier than those in California, even though the Californian homeless had better access to food, shelter, and health services. Biswas-Diener attributed the surprising result to the fact that Calcutta’s street people may have little in the way of material wealth, but they do have strong social ties. Family. Friends. I would go a step further and say that no one is really homeless in India. Houseless perhaps, but not homeless.
As early as the 1840s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that America was populated by “so many lucky men, restless in the midst of their abundance.” Or, as Kevin Rushby writes in his recent history of paradise, “All talk of paradise only starts when something has been lost.” What have we lost? I wonder.
The self-help industrial complex hasn’t helped. By telling us that happiness lives inside us, it’s turned us inward just when we should be looking outward. Not to money but to other people, to community and to the kind of human bonds that so clearly are the sources of our happiness.
On the road, I encountered bushels of inconsistencies. The Swiss are uptight and happy. The Thais are laid-back and happy. Icelanders find joy in their binge drinking, Moldovans only misery. Maybe an Indian mind can digest these contradictions, but mine can’t.
A headline on the BBC’s website caught my eye the other day. It read: “Dirt Exposure Boosts Happiness.” Researchers at Bristol University in Britain treated lung-cancer patients with “friendly” bacteria found in soil, otherwise known as dirt. The patients reported feeling happier and had an improved quality of life. The research, while far from conclusive, points to an essential truth: We thrive on messiness. “The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth,” observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.
