The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

by Eric Weiner

Scientists have isolated the chemical in chocolate that makes us feel good. Actually, there are several chemicals involved. Tryptophan is what the brain uses to make the neurotransmitter serotonin. High levels of serotonin can produce feelings of elation, even ecstasy. Then there is something called anandamide. It’s a neurotransmitter that targets the same regions of the brain as THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

We have far more words to describe unpleasant emotional states than pleasant ones. (And this is the case with all languages, not just English.) If we’re not happy, we have a smorgasbord of words to choose from. We can say we’re feeling down, blue, miserable, sullen, gloomy, dejected, morose, despondent, in the dumps, out of sorts, long in the face. But if we’re happy that smorgasbord is reduced to the salad bar at Pizza Hut. We might say we’re elated or content or blissful. These words, though, don’t capture the shades of happiness.

There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything. — James Hilton, Lost Horizon

For me, a place unvisited is like an unrequited love. A dull ache that—try as you might to think it away, to convince yourself that she really wasn’t the right country for you—just won’t leave you in peace.

No billboards or neon signs; there is hardly any advertising in Bhutan, and neon signs were banned until a few years ago. However, I do spot this hand-painted sign, propped up by two pieces of wood on the side of the road. 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.

Every trivia buff who visits the city loves to point out that it is the world’s only capital city without a single traffic light, so I will do so here. Thimphu is the world’s only capital city without a single traffic light.

This is how Ringzin Dorji, quoted in Barbara Crossette’s book on the Buddhist Himalayan kingdoms, describes this phenomenon: “Today my mother may be human. But when I die I may be reborn as a dog and then my mother may be a bitch. So, therefore, you have to think that all living things are my parents. My parents are infinite. Let my parents not suffer.” When I first read that passage, it made a big impression on me. Not just the dubious proposition that “my mother may be a bitch,” but the more profound notion that our parents are infinite. That we are all related.

“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.” This strikes me as an odd explanation. In America, high expectations are the engines that drive us, the gas in our tanks, the force behind our dreams and, by extension, our pursuit of happiness. “My way of thinking is completely different,” he says. “I have no such mountains to scale; basically, I find that living itself is a struggle, and if I’m satisfied, if I have just done that, lived well, in the evening I sigh and say, ‘It was okay.’ ” “Do you have bad days?” “Yes, but it’s important to put them in the perspective of insignificance. Even if you have achieved great things, it is a sort of theater playing in your mind. You think it so important, but actually you have not made such a difference to anyone’s life.”

Karma pauses one of his pauses and then answers with a suggestion, a prescription. “You need to think about death for five minutes every day. It will cure you, sanitize you.”

“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.”

“There has been so much rain lately,” I say, making conversation. “Yes, sir, that is because of Blessed Rainy Day. It’s a festival we have every year to mark the end of the rainy season. After Blessed Rainy Day, there will be no more rain.” She says this with utter certainty, as if she were explaining to a dullard that the sun always rises in the east. The next day, the rain stopped.

I ask him how he knows all this to be true, since there is no proof of these things. “You see this light?” he asks, gesturing toward a lamp overhead. “Yes, I see it.” “But you cannot prove it. If you were born blind, you cannot see it. If you want proof, you will never be enlightened.”

In America, few people are happy, but everyone talks about happiness constantly. In Bhutan, most people are happy, but no one talks about it.

Maybe Plato was wrong. Maybe it is the examined life that is not worth living. Or, to put it another way, and to quote another dead white man: “Ask yourself if you are happy and you cease to be so.” That was John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century British philosopher who believed that happiness should be approached sideways, “like a crab.”

They suffer from an excess of sincerity, a trait anathema to good marketing.

The Bhutanese take the idea of Gross National Happiness seriously, but by “happiness” they mean something very different from the fizzy, smiley-face version practiced in the United States. For the Bhutanese, happiness is a collective endeavor. The phrase “personal happiness” makes no sense to them or, as Karma Ura told me, “We don’t believe in this Robinson Crusoe happiness. All happiness is relational.”

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. Think about it as Richard Layard, a professor at the London School of Economics, has: “They have become richer, they work much less, they have longer holidays, they travel more, they live longer, and they are healthier. But they are no happier.”

Free-market economics has brought much good to the world, but it goes mute when the concept of “enough” is raised.

As the renegade economist E. F. Schumacher put it: “There are poor societies which have too little. But where is the rich society that says ‘Halt! We have enough!’ There is none.” Wealth is liberating, no doubt. It frees us from manual labor, working in the fields under a merciless midday sun or flipping burgers, the modern-day equivalent. 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.”

Albert Einstein once said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

Doesn’t adopting a policy of national happiness place a burden on his small nation, a presumption of felicitousness that might be hard to live up to? I ask. “Bhutan has never said we are a happy people,” he parries. “What we are saying is we are committed to this process of Gross National Happiness. It is a goal.”

“But many people in Bhutan, those in the villages, haven’t even heard of Gross National Happiness,” I counter. “No, but they are living it.” Good answer. Maybe only clever, maybe more than that.

The word “travel” stems from the same root as “travail” does. There’s a reason for this. For centuries, traveling was equated with suffering. Only pilgrims, nomads, soldiers, and fools traveled.

In Bhutan, the roads don’t subdue nature but are subdued by it, bend to its whims, curving and snaking around the mountains in a series of endless switchbacks. I find this meditative. For about ten minutes. Then, I find it nauseating. Now I know how a pair of socks feels on tumble dry. No wonder they abscond.

Recording life is a poor substitute for living it.

Every now and then we pass a hand-painted sign that says, simply, “Thanks.” Thanks for what? The sign doesn’t say, but I appreciate the thought nonetheless.

The road is only wide enough for one car at a time. Passing is negotiated through a series of elaborate, poetic hand gestures, and I’m reminded of what one Bhutanese told me back in Thimphu: “There is no room in Bhutan for cocky assholes.”

I wonder, though, what we lose through such conveniences. If we no longer must compromise on the easy stuff, like mattresses, then what about the truly important issues? Compromise is a skill, and like all skills it atrophies from lack of use.

On the wall, a row of clocks shows the time in Tokyo, New Delhi, New York, and Bangkok. I am amused. No one in Trongsa cares what time it is in Trongsa, let alone in New York.

“Money sometimes buys happiness. You have to break it down, though. Money is a means to an end. The problem is when you think it is an end in itself.

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.

All of the moments in my life, everyone I have met, every trip I have taken, every success I have enjoyed, every blunder I have made, every loss I have endured has been just right. I’m not saying they were all good or that they happened for a reason—I don’t buy that brand of pap fatalism—but they have been right. They have been . . . okay.

I immediately run smack into a wall of heat. Heat has velocity. Anyone who managed to stay awake during high school physics knows that heated molecules move more quickly than cooler ones. But Qatari heat also has mass. It is a solid, a thing, that presses down on you. Much like gravity, only not as pleasant.

We equate happiness with comfort, but is there really any connection? Is there a point where excess comfort actually dilutes our contentment? More prosaically, is it possible for a hotel to be too nice?

The big question, though, is: What happens to a person’s soul when he or she indulges in excessive, obscene—truly obscene—amounts of craven luxury?

Qatar is roughly the size of Connecticut. Unlike Connecticut, though, there is no old money in Qatar. Only shiny new money. Fifty years ago, Qataris eked out livings diving for pearls and herding sheep. Today, the only pearls they encounter are the million-dollar ones wrapped around their necks, and the only sheep they come across are the sheepskin seat covers on their new Mercedeses. Rarely before in history has one nation grown so wealthy so quickly.

She works for a major American university that has set up a Doha campus, part of something called Education City. It is based on a simple and logically irrefutable premise: Why send Qataris to American universities when you can send the American universities to Qatar?

Life in Qatar is a continuous series of air-conditioned moments, briefly interrupted by unair-conditioned intervals.

Travel, at its best, transforms us in ways that aren’t always apparent until we’re back home.

The entire nation of Qatar is like a good airport terminal: pleasantly air-conditioned, with lots of shopping, a wide selection of food, and people from around the world.

In transit. If two sweeter words exist in the English language, I have yet to hear them.

Humans, even nomadic ones, need a sense of home. 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.

I had asked a Swiss man what the glue was that held his country together, given the linguistic, if not ethnic, diversity. Without hesitation he answered: history. Can history really do that? Is it that powerful?

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As Rebecca Solnit observes in her lovely, lyrical book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, “Perhaps it’s true that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scene of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fateful decision; the places ...

He always enjoys his visits to the region’s ancient cities—Cairo, Damascus, Beirut. But the oil-rich nations of the Persian Gulf leave him feeling empty.

It’s about a temple I visited in Japan. It was a very old and beautiful temple. More than one thousand years old, my guide told me. How remarkable, I thought. I’d never seen such an old structure so perfectly preserved. The wood had hardly any splinters, and not a log was out of place. I read a plaque mounted on a small stand in front of the temple and, sure enough, the temple was built in the 700s. But then, I noticed a few more words, in smaller print. “Temple rebuilt in 1971.” What was going on? Were the Japanese trying to pull a fast one on unsuspecting tourists, pretending the temple was 1,200 years old when in fact it was fewer than forty years old? Not exactly. In many Asian cultures, what matters is not the age of the physical structure but the spirit of the place. Temples in Japan are routinely destroyed and rebuilt, yet people still consider them as old as the day they were first built. This is not a semantic sleight of hand. It says a lot about how a culture relates to its past.

And while the Chinese may not venerate their old temples and houses, they do honor their dead. Ancestor worship is the Chinese way of staying connected to the past. Who are we to say that worshipping dead people is any better or worse than worshipping dead buildings?

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.