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

by Eric Weiner

Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, concludes his book 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.” That’s an awfully transcendental statement for a self-declared atheist.

Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, said when asked what the main aim of his life had been: “To be a good ancestor.” A comment like that can only come from a man profoundly aware of his place in the universe.

He is the kind of person, I know from experience, who holds the key to understanding a place. He is a cultural interpreter.

We are shaped not only by our current geography but by our ancestral one as well. Americans, for instance, retain a frontier spirit even though the only frontier that remains is that vast open space between SUV and strip mall. We are our past.

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.

I can’t help but wonder: What if everyone had their own personal museum, actual buildings devoted to telling our stories?

Yes, I concede, she is right. Qataris have no culture. Frankly, I can’t blame them. If you spent a few thousand years scraping by in the desert, fending off the solid heat, not to mention various invading tribes, you wouldn’t have time for culture, either. Back then, life was too harsh for culture. Today, it is too comfortable for culture. “Creative cities, creative urban milieux, are places of great social and intellectual turbulence, not comfortable places at all,” observes British historian Peter Hall.

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.

I can imagine the billboards: “Your Cultural Heritage. Coming Soon!”

Reminds me of UIC - inventing traditions - used to drive Sam crazy

In one experiment, the participants actively chose a good cause to donate their money to. When they did, two of the more primitive parts of the brain—the caudate nucleus and the nucleus accumbens—lit up. The truly surprising finding, though, is that even when the participants were forced to give up their money (to a good cause, they were told) the parts of the brain associated with altruism still fired. Not as much as when the choice was made voluntarily, but most economists would not have predicted any brain activity at all, at least not of the positive variety, when someone was forced to cough up money involuntarily—in other words, pay taxes.

In the real world, taxes aren’t always seen as fair, and how they’re spent is sometimes questionable. But clearly paying taxes is good. Mind you, I’m not saying that high taxes are good. I’m just saying that the concept of taxation is good, is necessary, for a healthy democracy. “Tax” is another word for vote. If a public worker is goofing off on the job, Qataris can’t chastise him with that old standby, “Hey, I pay your salary, buddy.” No, you don’t. Qataris have neither taxation nor representation, and that’s not a happy thing.

Sami introduces me to his friends, all wearing white dishdashas, the long, flowing robes worn by Persian Gulf Arabs, with the standard accessories: cuff links, expensive watches, and Mont Blanc pens tucked into their breast pockets. Since the dishdashas are generic clothing, these accessories are the only way that Qatari men can flash their wealth. Their procurement is a vital part of life here.

That question—are you happy?—the question we Americans chew on every day, every hour, is not entirely appropriate in a Muslim country like Qatar. I’ve noticed that people cringe slightly when I ask and politely try to change the subject. That’s because happiness, bliss, is in the hands of Allah, not man. If we are happy, it is God’s will and, likewise, if we are miserable it is also God’s will.

“If you want to know true happiness, you should become a Muslim,” says a fourth. “You should believe and know that everything is in the hands of God. You will get what Allah has written for you. Yes, you should become a Muslim if you want to know happiness.”

People who attend religious services report being happier than those who do not. Why? Is it because of some transcendental experience, the religious part of the religious service? Or is it the service part, the gathering of like-minded souls, that explains this phenomenon? In other words, could these happy churchgoers receive the same hedonic boost if they belonged to a bowling league or, for that matter, the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan?

Consider this finding: People who say they agree with the statement “God is important in my life” report being significantly happier than people who disagree with that statement, irrespective of their participation in organized religion. A happiness bonus—to put it in earthly financial terms—-equivalent to a doubling of their salary.

I can hear the howls of protests from atheists. If belief in a delusional, dogmatic religion makes you happy, then it is not a happiness I want any part of, thank you very much. The atheists might be on to something. For one thing, the happyologists fail to take into account the moral underpinnings of happiness. A pedophile who reports high levels of happiness—say, a nine out of ten—counts exactly the same as a social worker who also reports being a nine on the happiness scale. Likewise, a suicide bomber, firm in his belief in Allah, might very well score higher than either the pedophile or the social worker. He might be a ten, just before blowing himself up and taking a few dozen innocents with him. Aristotle would clear up this moral confusion in an...

Perhaps it is not the belief in God that makes us happier but belief in something, anything. How else to explain the fact that the happiest countries in the world—Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands—are hardly religious at all? The citizens of these countries, though, clearly believe in something. They believe in six weeks of vacation, in human rights, in democracy, in lazy afternoons spent sitting in cafés, in wearing socks and sandals at the same time. Bel...

“You need to make effort, but it is effort that matters, not result,” says one man. Islam, like other religions, maintains that if you want to be happy, put great effort into living a virtuous life and expect nothing, absolutely nothing. Divorce your actions from their results, and happiness will flow like oil.

A major turning point in human history occurred in the Dutch region of Flanders in the year 1445, though you won’t read about it in most history books. Flanders is where the first lottery took place. The prize wasn’t much—a goat’s head and a date with a comely lass of virtue true, I presume—but the event marked a major shift, what I might call a paradigm shift if I were the kind of person who used terms like “paradigm shift.” For the first time in history, a member of the unwashed masses could become instantly rich and without lifting a finger. Just like the landed gentry. Legalized prostitution and now this. The Dutch, once again, were on to something.

What was once enjoyable was no longer so. Psychologists call this the “hedonic treadmill.”

Aristotle was right when he said, “Little pieces of good luck (and likewise of the opposite kind) clearly do not disturb the tenor of our life.”

Lotteries are not really about money. They’re about the intersection of luck and happiness. It’s a busy intersection, prone to accidents.

The ancient Greeks believed that happiness required a measure of good luck. Even Aristotle, who preached the need to lead a virtuous life, also believed in the necessity of luck: “For a man is scarcely happy if he is very ugly to look at, or of low birth, or solitary and childless, and presumably less so if he has children or friends who are quite worthless, or if he had good ones who are now dead.”

In every Indo-European language, the word for happiness is tied to the word for luck. The English word “happiness” comes from the old Norse word “hap,” or luck. When we have a mishap, we’ve had a spell of bad luck. In modern German, the word “glück” means both “happiness” and “luck.”

Neuroscientists have discovered that the parts of the brain that control wanting and the parts that control liking are separate; they operate independently of one another and involve different chemicals. Neuroscientists know this the way they know everything else about how our brains work: by doing strange and often sadistic things to rats.

Wanting things we don’t like. If true, it pretty much demolishes the entire field of economics. Economists base their studies on the premise that rational human beings pursue things that will increase their “utility,” economist-speak for happiness.

So much of human misery can be explained by this crazy way we’re wired. We assume that our intense feelings of wanting something—a new car, winning the lottery—means that, once obtained, these things will make us happy. But that is a connection that, neurologically speaking, does not exist. We are disappointed but don’t learn from our disappointment because our software is flawed. It’s not faulty data but faulty programming that is holding us back, and that is much harder to rectify.

Human beings will go to great lengths to avoid nothingness. We will conquer foreign lands, fly to the moon, watch cable TV alone in hotel rooms, shoot thirty-two people dead, compose beautiful music.

In Qatar, the question isn’t: What is the rule? But rather: Who’s enforcing it?

As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has shown, there’s an inverse relationship between the price of oil and democracy. As the price of oil rises, moves toward democracy decline. The leaders of these oil-rich nations feel no compunction to relax their grip on power. Why should they? Everybody is comfortable, and therefore happy.

In the nineteenth century, one hundred years before a country called Qatar existed, Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, wrote of “anomic suicide.” It’s what happens when a society’s moral underpinnings are shaken. And they can be shaken, Durkheim believed, both by great disaster and by great fortune.

Several studies have found that unemployed people in Europe are significantly less happy than people with jobs, even though the laid-off workers still receive the equivalent of a full salary, thanks to the generous welfare system.

researchers have found that people who are too busy are happier than those who are not busy enough.

Noël Coward got it right when he observed that interesting work is...

I note his use of the word “dignity.” Not enough money to buy your comfort or your security but your dignity or, to extrapolate slightly, your honor: the driving force in the Arab world.

My Arabic barely exists, but my ears perk up when I hear the word “mushkala”: problem. “Mushkala” is a very popular word in the Middle East. Usually, it’s used during, say, a tense moment at a checkpoint. “Ayn mushkala,” no problem, your driver will assure you. Translation: big problem. Very big problem.

I had misread reality, once again failing to realize that, 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.

Then, suddenly, His name pops into my mind and His is not a name I expected. Ambition. Yes, that is my God. 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 tired, entombed in the corner office, that the realization hits like a Biblical thunderclap. The God Ambition is a false God and always has been.

Of all the substances known to man, the least stable is something called francium. It’s never lasted longer than twenty-two minutes. At any given time there is only one ounce of francium in the earth’s crust. “Vanishingly rare” is how it’s often described. There are places like that, too.

Our language, too, reflects the palm-tree bias. Happy people have a sunny disposition and always look on the bright side of life. Unhappy people possess dark souls and black bile.

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.

Icelanders practice bracketed indulgence. Everything in moderation, they believe, including moderation.

Icelanders joke that one day they will erect a statue in the center of Reykjavík to honor the one Icelander who never wrote a poem. They’re still waiting for that person to be born.

“Better to go barefoot than without a book,” the Icelandic saying goes.

Icelanders, for obvious reasons, have several words for ice. The particular kind underneath my feet at the moment is called “hálka”: flying ice. The ice doesn’t fly, you do. I slip and slide, almost falling on several occasions, before getting a handle on the flying ice.

In the United States, there is an unspoken understanding that an unemployment rate of 5 or 6 percent is acceptable, yet inflation must stay very low—no more than 1 or 2 percent. In Iceland, the reverse is true. If the unemployment rate reaches 5 percent, it’s considered a national scandal. Presidents are booted from office. Yet Icelanders will tolerate a relatively high inflation rate. Why the different approaches? The answer lies in how countries feel about pain, economic pain. High inflation is shared pain; everyone feels the pinch of higher prices when they go to the grocery store or the gas station. Everyone suffers a little; no one suffers a lot. Unemployment is selective pain. A relatively few people suffer greatly, yet most of us don’t suffer at all.

“He who tastes, knows,” goes the old Sufi saying. France’s most famous epicure, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, believed that food is the mirror to our souls: “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.”

Unlike New York or Shanghai, Reykjavík has no delusions of grandeur. It’s a city that knows its place in the cosmos, knows it’s an insignificant place, and is comfortable with that. Icelanders thrive on this provisional nature of life. It keeps them on their toes, fires their imaginations. Most of all, it reminds them of the fragility of life. Big cities feign immortality, deluded that somehow their sheer size, their conquest over nature, will forestall death. In Iceland, a land where nature always gets the last word, immortality is so obviously a joke that no one takes it seriously.

“Happiness,” Kant once said, “is an ideal not of reason but of imagination.”