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

by Eric Weiner

The British academic Richard Schoch, in his book The Secrets of Happiness, put it this way: “Your imagination must, to some extent, be found in a realm beyond reason because it begins with imagining a future reality: the self that you might become.”

If it is possible for language, mere words, to nurture happiness, to tickle the creative soul of an entire people, then surely that language is Icelandic. Icelanders love their language. Love it even more than they love their country, which is saying something. For Icelanders, language is the tabernacle of the culture. That’s what one person here told me. In any other country, I’d dismiss such a statement as nationalistic hyperbole. I might even laugh. Not in Iceland.

Icelanders insist on inventing purely Icelandic words for these modern devices. Icelandic linguists do this by drawing upon the language of the Vikings. Of course, the Vikings didn’t have a word for lightbulb, let alone broadband, so the linguists have to get creative. The Icelandic word for television—sjónvarp—for instance, means, literally, “sight caster.” The intercontinental ballistic missile presented a real challenge. Ultimately, the linguists came up with a word that means “long distance fiery flying thing.” Not bad. My favorite, though, is the word for computer: tolva, or “prophet of numbers.” I like the way it makes my PC sound like something magical and vaguely ominous. Which, actually, it is.

The highest compliment any foreigner ever paid Iceland came when, in the nineteenth century, a Dane named Rasmus Christian Rask claimed he had learned Icelandic “in order to be able to think.” When I heard that, it made me think—about the connection between language and happiness. Can language make us happy? Do words alone have the power not only to describe our moods but to create them?

All languages share one trait, and it is not a happy one. As I discovered in Switzerland, every culture has many more words to describe negative emotional states than positive ones. This partly explains why I’ve found it so difficult to get people to talk to me about happiness. They literally don’t have the words to express it. It also makes me wonder: Are we hardwired for misery? Are we a species of whiners? Perhaps. Or maybe happiness is so sublime, so self-evident, that it doesn’t require many words to describe it.

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.”

There are, on average, twenty earthquakes a day in Iceland. Not cataclysmic ones, of course, but all of that seismic activity must shake things up.

“History shows that golden urban ages are rare and special windows of light, that briefly illuminate the world, both within them and outside them, and then again are shuttered,” writes British historian Peter Hall in his marvelous book Cities in Civilization.

Having multiple identities (though not multiple personalities) is, he believes, conducive to happiness. This runs counter to the prevailing belief in the United States and other western nations, where specialization is considered the highest good. Academics, doctors, and other professionals spend lifetimes learning more and more about less and less. In Iceland, people learn more and more about more and more.

This relative lack of envy is one sure sign of a Golden Age, says Peter Hall. Here he is describing turn-of-the-century Paris but could just as easily be describing twenty-first-century Reykjavík: “They lived and worked in each other’s pockets. Any innovation, any new trend, was immediately known, and could be freely incorporated into the work of any of the others.” In other words, the Parisian artists of 1900 believed in open-source software. So, too, do Icelanders. Sure, they compete, but in the way the word was originally intended. The roots of the word “compete” are the Latin competure, which means to “seek with.”

The psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihalyi wrote in his book Flow, “It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have” (emphasis added). When I first encountered that sentence, I reread it four or five times, convinced that it must be a misprint, or perhaps Csíkszentmihalyi was strung out on consonants. He seems to be advocating a delusional outlook on life. If I think I’m a violin virtuoso but in fact I’m tone-deaf, aren’t I fooling myself? Yes, but it doesn’t matter, Csíkszentmihalyi argues. Either way, we experience flow, a state of mind where we are so engaged in an activity that our worries evaporate and we lose track of time.

Likewise, Martin Seligman, founder of the positive-psychology movement, discovered that happy people remembered more good events in their lives than actually occurred. Depressed people remembered the past accurately. “Know thyself” may not be the best advice after all. A pinch of self-delusion, it turns out, is an important ingredient in the happiness recipe.

We Americans also pride ourselves on being a can-do nation, where anything is possible. That’s true, but the system is set up to discourage people from taking such leaps of faith. Leaving your job in America means giving up health insurance, working without a net. In Iceland, though, one person told me, “You never have to worry about falling into a black hole, because there is no black hole to fall into.”

“I don’t know if I believe in them, but other people do, and my life is richer for it.”

I didn’t know what to expect, so I decided to do what journalists call reporting, academics call research, and normal people call reading.

They attend church if someone is born or wed or dies, but otherwise they are, as one Icelander put it, “atheists with good intentions.”

I ask Hilmar how he feels when he’s composing music. “I lose track of time when composing. It is a blissful activity. You are doing something you couldn’t imagine doing. It is bigger than yourself. You are enlarging yourself.” These are the classic signs of flow, as defined by Mihály Csíkszentmihalyi. The line between the actor and the act blurs and, in some cases, disappears entirely. There is no dancer. There is only dancing. Flow is not the same as happiness. In fact, when we interrupt flow to take stock of our happiness, we lose both.

It’s not what we believe that makes us happy but the act of believing. In anything.

Social scientists have been investigating this phenomenon. They call it “cultural fit,” and it explains a lot about happiness. Like people, each culture has its own personality. Some cultures, for instance, are collectivist; others are individualistic. Collectivist cultures, like Japan and other Confucian nations, value social harmony more than any one person’s happiness. Individualistic cultures, like the United States, value personal satisfaction more than communal harmony. That’s why the Japanese have a well-known expression: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” In America, the nail that sticks out gets a promotion or a shot at American Idol. We are a nation of protruding nails.

I remember what Hilmar had said when I asked him if he was happy. “Yes, but I cherish my melancholia.” Magnus, the sunburned penguin, said something very similar. “You nurture your little melancholia, and it’s like a buzz that makes you feel alive. You snap yourself a little bit, and you feel this relief of how fragile life is and how tremendously fragile you are.” “So you can have this melancholia and still be happy?” “Absolutely!”

The psychologist Norman Bradburn, in his book The Structure of Psychological Well Being, describes how happiness and unhappiness are not opposites, as we often think. They are not two sides of the same coin. They are different coins. It is possible, in other words, for a happy person to also suffer from bouts of unhappiness, and for unhappy people to experience great moments of joy. And here in Iceland, it seems, it is even possible to be happy and sad at the same time.

Usually, Nietzsche gives me a headache. But one thing he said keeps bubbling up to my consciousness, like a geothermal spring. The measure of a society, he said, is how well it transforms pain and suffering into something worthwhile. Not how a society avoids pain and suffering—for Nietzsche, a deeply troubled man himself (he went insane in his latter years), knew that was impossible—but how it transforms it.

Note “transformation” here

When I tell people about my project, everyone asks the same two questions: How can you measure happiness? How can you even define it? “I’m not sure,” I reply. “How do you define it?” Sara thinks for a moment then says, “Happiness is your state of mind and the way you pursue that state of mind.” Aristotle said more or less the same thing, though he didn’t say it in a smoky Icelandic bar frequented by androgynous women. How we pursue the goal of happiness matters at least as much, perhaps more, than the goal itself. They are, in fact, one and the same, means and ends. A virtuous life necessarily leads to a happy life.

When the talk of genetics and communal bonds and relative income is stripped away, happiness is a choice. Not an easy choice, not always a desirable one, but a choice nonetheless.

As the German philosopher and fellow malcontent Schopenhauer once said, “Because they feel unhappy, men cannot bear the sight of someone they think is happy.”

That old saw about the glass being half full or half empty is dead wrong. What really matters is whether water is flowing into or out of the glass.

today the former Soviet republics are, overall, the least happy places on the planet. What is going on? That old causality bugaboo, political scientist Ron Inglehart concluded: It’s not that democracy makes people happy but rather that happy people are much more likely to establish a democracy.

Neuroscientists, meanwhile, believe they have located the part of the brain linked with altruism. To their surprise, it turns out to be a more primitive part of the brain than initially suspected—the same part associated with our cravings for food and sex. That suggests that we are hardwired for altruism and not just faking it.

Benjamin Franklin, America’s first self-help author, once wrote that happiness “is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.”

Joseph Epstein, in his book on envy, described the entire advertising industry as “a vast and intricate envy-producing machine.”

The official mission of the U.S. Peace Corps is “helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women” and “helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.” Really, though, the mission is to spread a bit of American happiness around the world. We can’t very well call it the U.S. Bliss Corps, but that’s what it is: an attempt to remake the world in our own happy image.

Charles Dickens once said, “One always begins to forget a place as soon as it’s left behind.” God, I hope he’s right.

Or as the ancient Indian text the Mahabharata says: “Hope is the sheet anchor of every man. When hope is destroyed, great grief follows, which is almost equal to death itself.”

Canadian author Mont Redmond put it best when he wrote that, in Thailand, “Anything too big to be swept under the carpet is automatically counted as furniture.”

A number of years ago, Thai Airways ran a clever advertisement. The ad showed two photos of flight attendants smiling: one from Thai Airways, the other from the competition. The photos seemed identical. The copy read: “Can you spot the genuine smile?” Indeed, there was a difference, one that any Thai person could spot instantly but not most foreigners. What the Thais know instinctively is that a smile, a real smile, is not located in the lips or any other part of the mouth. A real smile is in the eyes. To be precise, the orbicularis oculi muscles that surround each eye. We cannot fool these tiny muscles. They spring to life only for a genuine smile.

The Thai smiles means more—and less—than the western smile. It is a mask or, more accurately, many masks. The Thai smile can signify happiness but also anger, doubt, anxiety, and even grief. Thais will smile at a funeral, something that foreigners find disconcerting.

Just as the Inuit are said to have many words for snow, the Thais have many words for smile. There is yim cheun chom, the I-admire-you smile, and yim thak thaan, the I-disagree-with-you-but-go-ahead-propose-your-bad-idea smile. There is yim sao, the sad smile. And my favorite: yim mai awk, the I’m-trying-to-smile-but-can’t smile.

I also find the Thais’ variety pack of smiles disconcerting. It has undermined my belief that a smile, at its core, signifies happiness, contentment. I don’t trust the Thai smile anymore. I don’t trust any smile. I see deceit and misdirection everywhere and find myself staring at people’s orbicularis oculi for signs of activity. Maybe I’m right to be paranoid, but then again maybe not. Sometimes, as Freud would say, a smile is just a smile.

Thai culture, while rare in its distrust of thinking, is not unique. The Inuit frown upon thinking. It indicates someone is either crazy or fiercely stubborn, neither of which is desirable. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes one Inuit woman who was overheard to say in a righteous tone, “I never think.” Another woman complained to a friend about a third woman because she was trying to make her think and thus shorten her life. “Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living,” concludes Tuan.

The inevitable conclusion: Thinking about happiness makes us less happy. The philosopher Alan Watts, were he alive today, would nod knowingly when told of that experiment. Watts once said, “Only bad music has any meaning.” Meaning necessarily entails words, symbols. They point to something other than themselves. Good music doesn’t point anywhere. It just is. Likewise, only unhappiness has meaning. That’s why we feel compelled to talk about it and have so many words to draw upon. Happiness doesn’t require words.

When you get down to it, there are basically three, and only three, ways to make yourself happier. You can increase the amount of positive affect (good feelings). You can decrease the amount of negative affect (bad feelings). Or you can change the subject.

The Thais have a different way, the way of mai pen lai. It means “never mind.” Not the “never mind” that we in the west often use angrily, as in “Oh, never mind, I’ll do it myself” but a real, just-drop-it-and-get-on-with-life “never mind.” Foreigners living in Thailand either adopt the mai pen lai attitude or go insane.

the concept of jai yen, cool heart. The worst thing one can do in Thailand is to lose one’s jai yen. This is why Thais have no patience for uppity foreigners, which is pretty much all foreigners.

We have a proverb about this: ‘Keep the dirty water inside; show the clear water outside.’ ”

People like to say that Bangkok isn’t the “real Thailand,” just as they say that New York is not the real America and Paris is not the real France. I think this is wrong. These cities did not materialize out of nothingness. They grew organically in the soil in which they were planted. They are not the exception to the rule but, rather, the rule on steroids. New York is America, only more so. The same is true of Bangkok.

In developing countries, such as Thailand, people living in cities are happier than those in rural areas. Why? Is it simply that cities provide economic opportunities lacking back in the village? That is part of the story, I think, but not the whole story. The truth is that when Thai villagers move to the big city, they are not really moving at all. They take the village with them and end up reaping the best of both worlds.

And what about sanuk, fun? Thais consider it very important, yes? With this, his eyes light up, and he bolts upright in a sudden burst of sobriety. “Ahh, sanuk. If it’s not sanuk, it’s not worth doing. People will resign from a good-paying job because it’s not fun.” “But everyone likes to have fun. We Americans practically invented fun.” “Yes, but you Americans take your fun very seriously. We Thais do not. We don’t believe in this work-hard, play-hard mentality. Our fun is interspersed throughout the day.” “What do you mean?” “It could be a smile or a laugh during the workday. It’s not as uptight as in America. Also, our patterns of holidays are different. We don’t take the entire month of August off, like Europeans. We take a day off here, a week off there. Everything is interspersed.”

Some think of cities as godless places. Yet one of the original intents of cities was to provide places to consort with the gods, and it is in cities, not rural areas, where Christianity first took root. In Bangkok, the sacred and the profane exist side by side, like a divorced couple who, for financial reasons, decide to continue living together. Not the perfect arrangement, but not as contentious as it sounds, either.

Asian cities are tough nuts to crack. So much remains invisible in plain sight. Somerset Maugham observed this when he traveled the region in the 1920s. “They are hard and glittering . . . and give you nothing. But when you leave them it is with a feeling that you have missed something, and you cannot help thinking that they have some secret that they have kept from you.”

In front of each shop, each home, is a spirit house. These look like elaborate, beautiful birdhouses. The idea is that by giving evil spirits a place to inhabit, a room of their own, they will stay away from your actual home. It’s not unlike the in-law cottages that sit in the yards of many Miami homes. Same principle.