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Thus I, and millions of others, suffer from the uniquely modern malady that historian Darrin McMahon calls “the unhappiness of not being happy.”
The late British-born philosopher Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on eastern philosophy, used this analogy: “If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball. Very few people will say I’ve drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together—you cannot have what is ‘in here’ unless you have what is ‘out there.’ ”
as Henry Miller said, “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
As the author Eric Hoffer put it, “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
I once heard of a café in Tel Aviv that dispensed with food and drink altogether; it served customers empty plates and cups yet charged real money.
Dutch sounds exactly like English spoken backward.
I am engaged in what the French call la chasse au bonheur, the hunt for happiness.
Instead of judging a society by its system, he thought, why not judge it by its results? Were its citizens happy?
Veenhoven’s hero wasn’t Che Guevara but a socially inept nineteenth-century British barrister named Jeremy Bentham. Bentham famously espoused the utilitarian principle, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”
Newscasters know instinctively that the best way to get people’s ears to perk up is with these five words: “A new study has found.”
But first, it needed a vocabulary, a serious jargon. The word “happiness” wouldn’t do. It sounded too frivolous, too easily understood. This was a problem. So the social scientists came up with a doozy: “subjective well-being.” Perfect. Not only was it multisyllabic and virtually impenetrable to laypeople, it also could be condensed into an even more obscure acronym: SWB.
Next came other pieces of the jargon puzzle. “Positive affect” is when something feels good; “negative affect” is—you guessed it—when something feels bad.
Happy feelings, in other words, register in the regions of the brain that have evolved most recently. It raises an intriguing question: Are we, in evolutionary if not personal terms, slouching toward happiness?
Researchers have toyed with other ways of measuring happiness: stress hormones, cardiac activity, and something called “facial coding”—counting how many times we smile, for instance. All of these techniques are promising, and, indeed, one day scientists may be able to “take your happiness” the way a doctor today takes your temperature.
My favorite definition of happiness sprang from the mind of an unhappy man named Noah Webster. When he penned the first American dictionary, in 1825, he defined happiness as “the agreeable sensations which spring from the enjoyment of good.”
In one study, people who found a dime on the pavement a few minutes before being queried on the happiness question reported higher levels of satisfaction with their overall lives than those who did not find a dime.
All cultures have a word for happiness, and some have many words. But does the English word “happiness” mean the same as the French bonheur or the Spanish felicidad or the Arabic sahaada? In other words, does happiness translate? There’s some evidence that the answer is yes. The Swiss report equal levels of happiness, whether they take the surveys in French, German, or Italian, the country’s three main languages.
With each click of the mouse, I encounter mysteries and apparent contradictions. Like this: Many of the world’s happiest countries also have high suicide rates. Or this one: People who attend religious services report being happier than those who do not, but the world’s happiest nations are secular. And, oh, the United States, the richest, most powerful country in the world, is no happiness superpower. Many other nations are happier than we are.
Which countries are the least happy? Not surprisingly, many African nations fall into this category. Tanzania, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe are near the very bottom of the happiness well. A few African countries, such as Ghana, manage to achieve middling levels of happiness, but that’s about it. The reasons seem obvious. Extreme poverty is not conducive to happiness. The myth of the happy, noble savage is just that: a myth. If our basic needs are not met, we’re not likely to be happy.
I find another batch of nations stuck at the bottom of the happiness spectrum: the former Soviet republics—Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and a dozen others. Are democracies happier than dictatorships? Not necessarily. Many of those former Soviet republics are quasi-democracies; certainly they are freer now than in Soviet times, yet their happiness levels have decreased since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ron Inglehart, a professor at the University of Michigan, has spent most of his career studying the relationship between democracy and happiness. He believes that the causality flows the other way; democracies don’t promote happi...
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Fiji, Tahiti, the Bahamas—they all fall into the middle latitudes of happiness. Happy countries tend to be those in temperate climates, and some of the happiest—Iceland, for instance—are downright cold.
Virtually every country in the world scores somewhere between five and eight on a ten-point scale. There are a few exceptions: The sullen Moldovans consistently score about 4.5, and for a brief period in 1962 the citizens of the Dominican Republic could muster only a 1.6, the lowest level of happiness ever recorded on the planet. But, as I said, these are rare exceptions. Most of the world is happy.
The philosopher Robert Nozick
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did think long and hard about the relationship between hedonism and happiness. He once devised a thought experiment called the Experience Machine. Imagine that “superduper neuropsychologists” have figured out a way to stimulate a person’s brain in order to induce pleasurable experiences. It’s perfectly safe, no chance of a malfunction, and not harmful to your health. You would experience constant pleasure for the rest of your life. Would you do it? Would you plug into the Experience Machine? If not, argued Nozick, then you’ve just proved that there is more to life than pleasure.
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In their world, happiness is reduced to yet another statistic, data to be sliced, diced, parsed, run through the computer, and, ultimately, inevitably, reduced to spreadsheets. And I can’t think of anything less happy than a spreadsheet.
Our driver was a Tanzanian named Good Luck. We thought this was fortuitous. Only later did we learn that his name represented a wish and not a point of fact.
only the Swiss could make the Germans look sloppy.
Susan is a writer from New York. She is a woman who speaks her mind, in English and French. Her candor is constantly bumping up against the Swiss reserve. Susan complains that the Swiss are “culturally constipated” and “stingy with information.” Even if that information is vital, such as “your train is leaving now” or “your clothing is on fire,” the Swiss will say nothing. To speak out would be considered insulting, since it assumes ignorance on the part of the other person.
The Swiss consider Geneva boring, and if the Swiss consider someplace boring, you know it is very boring indeed.
Geneva, like most European cities, is built on a human scale, and that makes it intrinsically interesting.
So appealing is the image of Switzerland as an affluent, clean, and well-run society that other countries fancy themselves the Switzerland of their particular region. Singapore is the Switzerland of Asia, Costa Rica the Switzerland of Central America. But here I am in what can rightfully be called the Switzerland of Europe. The real deal.
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.”
Swiss humorlessness has a long and serious history. One academic tells me that in the seventeenth century in Basel, there was actually a prohibition on public laughter. There is no longer such a law, of course. That’s because there is no need for it. Swiss humorlessness, like most aspects of life here, is self-policing.
Everything is regimented in Switzerland, even anarchy. Once a year, on the May Day holiday, the anarchists break a few shop windows, but it’s always exactly at the same time. As one Swiss person quipped, in a rare display of humor, “Yes, we have anarchy. It’s in the afternoon.”
The nineteenth-century Italian painter Giovanni Segantini once said that people of the mountains see the sun rise and set as a golden fireball, full of life and energy, while flatlanders know only a tired and drunk sun.
A sense of calm sneaks up on me, a feeling so unusual that, at first, I am startled by it. I don’t recognize it. But there’s no denying its presence. I am at peace. The naturalist E. O. Wilson gave a name to this warm, fuzzy feeling I’m experiencing: biophilia. He defined it as “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.”
The biophilia hypothesis is not your run-of-the-mill Berkeley/Al Gore/Eat Your Spinach environmentalism. It does not appeal directly to our sense of stewardship or responsibility. It appeals to a much more base, and common, human proclivity: selfishness. It says, in effect, protect the environment because it will make you happy. For a country like the United States, with the word “happiness” in its founding document, you’d think environmentalists would have latched on to biophilia a long time ago.
(including death, the ultimate symptom),
Switzerland has one of the world’s most liberal euthanasia laws. People travel from all over Europe to die here. The strangeness of it all sinks in. 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.
When I told friends I was going to Switzerland as part of my research into happiness, some people replied, “Don’t they have a high suicide rate?” Yes, they do, one of the highest in the world. This seems to make absolutely no sense. How can a happy country have a high suicide rate? In fact, it’s easily explained. First of all, the number of suicides is still statistically low, so it doesn’t affect the happiness surveys very much, since the odds of the researchers interviewing a suicidal person are quite low. But there’s another reason. The things that prevent us from killing ourselves are
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Every country has its cocktail-party question. A simple one-sentence query, the answer to which unlocks a motherlode of information about the person you’ve just met. In the United States that question is, What do you do? In Britain it is, What school did you attend? In Switzerland it is, Where are you from? That is all you need to know about someone.
It’s said that the Swiss only become Swiss upon leaving the country. Until then, they are Genevans or Zurichers, or otherwise defined by wherever they happen to come from.
No wonder it was the Swiss who invented the modern concept of homesickness; they were the first to put a word, “heimweh,” to that nagging feeling of dislocation, that feeling of loss we experience when uprooted from the place we call home.
Or consider this statement: “In general, people can be trusted.” Studies have found that people who agree with this are happier than those who do not. Trusting your neighbors is especially important.
In other words, is there something to be said for boredom? The British philosopher Bertrand Russell thought so. “A certain amount of boredom is . . . essential to a happy life,” he wrote.
Patience and boredom are closely related. Boredom, a certain kind of boredom, is really impatience. You don’t like the way things are, they aren’t interesting enough for you, so you decide—and boredom is a decision—that you are bored.
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.”
With the help of a friend, I had set up a blog to solicit comments from the Swiss about happiness. One in particular caught my eye, and I’m reminded of it now. “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.’ ”
