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

by Eric Weiner

Thais accept what has happened, which is not to say they like what happened or want it to happen again. Of course not. But they take the long view: eternity. If things don’t work out in this life, there is always the next one, and the next one, and so on. Periods of good fortune naturally alternate with periods of adversity, just as sunny days are interspersed with rainy ones.

The BBC retained six “happiness experts” and set them loose on Slough, hoping to “change the psychological climate” of the place. When I first heard that phrase, I was instantly intrigued. It dawned on me that I had overlooked an important component in the happiness equation: change.

“Suspicion of happiness is in our blood,” said English travel writer E. V. Lucas. Or, as one Brit told me, in colloquial American so I could understand, “We don’t do happiness.”

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.

“In America,” says Nancy, “every conversation is held as if it might be your last on Earth. Nothing is held back. I always want to say, ‘I’m sorry, but I just met you. I don’t know you. I really don’t need to hear about your hysterectomy.’ ”

For Bentham, happiness was a mathematical proposition, and he spent years fine-tuning his “felicific calculus,” a wonderfully disarming term. I, for one, never associated calculus with felicity. It’s simple math, though. Add up the pleasurable aspects of your life, then subtract the unpleasant ones. The result is your overall happiness. The same calculations, Bentham believed, could apply to an entire nation. Every action a government took, every law it passed, should be viewed through the “greatest happiness” prism. Bentham, for instance, reasoned that giving ten dollars to a poor man counted more than giving ten dollars to a wealthy man, since the poor man derived more pleasure from it.

Bentham’s theory is intriguing but flawed. For instance, he didn’t distinguish, qualitatively, one pleasure from another. The pleasure accrued by helping a little old woman across the street was for him on par with the pleasure a sadist derived by beating that same old woman senseless. For Bentham, pleasure was pleasure. Another pitfall: Utilitarianism is interested only in making the majority of people happy. It is concerned with the happiness of the many, not the misery of the few, which is fine if you are lucky enough to be among the happy many, but not so fine if you find yourself among the miserable few.

let’s not forget that government is already in the happiness business. Every time it offers tax incentives for married couples or mandates the wearing of seat belts or strives to increase gross domestic product, it’s sticking its nose in our happiness. Besides, what is the role of government if not to make the citizenry happier?

The British don’t do therapy, philosophical or any other kind, for the same reason they don’t buy self-help books. It’s seen as weakness. Tim tells me an apocryphal story. He went to his local library in search of an American self-help book called Changing for Good. The nearest he could find, though, was Changing for Dinner, a book about English etiquette. “That kind of sums it up right there,” says Tim, staring forlornly into his beer.

Tim also teaches a course in positive psychology, but he is not a true believer. Sometimes, he tells me, people choose not to be happy, and that’s okay. 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.

Tim also finds positive psychology’s emphasis on optimism troubling. Optimism is sometimes a wonderful thing, but not always. Tim gives me an example. Let’s say you’re on a flight, and there is a problem, an engine has caught fire. Would you want an optimistic pilot at the controls? Perhaps, but what you really want, Tim says, is a wise pilot. Wisdom born from years of experience. “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.”

Slough, like much of Britain, is multicultural. On the one hand, this is welcome news. The immigrants have spiced up bland British cuisine, as well as the bland British personality. On the other hand, this influx of immigrants has brought problems. Most notably, Islamic terrorists. This is where political correctness and happiness research part ways. Diversity, that much heralded attribute, does not necessarily make for a happy place. The world’s happiest nations—Iceland, for instance—tend to be ethnically homogenous.

What Samuel Johnson observed more than two hundred years ago holds true today: “When two Englishmen meet their first talk is of the weather.” Not just any talk but reassuring, comforting talk. “You must never contradict anyone when discussing the weather,” warns George Mikes, a Hungarian humorist.

Richard tells me that the graveyard therapy was a highlight for him. He wandered around the cemetery, as instructed, and found a tombstone for a boy who was four years old. “And I got to thinking, it’s tragic for the people left behind, but that boy had no sense of his own mortality, so, providing he didn’t suffer, he had a wonderful life, I’m sure.”

how, I wonder, would we go about really making Slough—or any place else—happier? Is it simply a matter of eliminating problems? Reduce crime, get rid of those ugly housing projects, clean up air pollution, and happiness will flow like warm beer from the tap? George Orwell was skeptical of this approach: “Nearly all creators of utopia have resembled the man who has a toothache and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having a toothache.”

So, instead of actively trying to make places, or people, happier, perhaps we’d be better off heeding the advice of Canadian author Robertson Davies: “If you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.”

For me, that place is India. I hate it. I love it. Not alternately but simultaneously. For if there is anything this seductive, exasperating country teaches us it is this: It’s possible to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time and, crucially, to do so without your head exploding. Indians do it all the time.

The Taj Mahal is today considered the quintessential Indian icon, yet it was built by a seventeenth-century Mughal emperor who at the time wasn’t Indian at all. He is now. Likewise, McDonald’s caved to the Indian palate and, for the first time, dropped Big Macs and all hamburgers from its menu, since Hindus don’t eat beef. Instead, it serves McAloo Tikki and the McVeggie and a culinary hybrid, the Paneer Salsa Wrap. McDonald’s didn’t change India, as some feared. India changed McDonald’s.

I pass a few people. They seem calm, alarmingly so. I say hello. They respond with “Jai Guru Dev.” A strange greeting, I think. Later, I learned it means “Victory to the Big Mind.”

At the same time, some of Guru-ji’s words, channeled through Ami, ring true: “We keep postponing happiness. We can only experience happiness now. The present moment is inevitable.” I like that last bit a lot. It’s much better than that old dharma refrain, “Be here now,” which always struck me as too much of an imperative, an order. “I said, ‘Be here now, God damn it!’ ” But if the present moment is inevitable, then, well, I might as well embrace it.

Fawning over someone else is just as counterproductive, and annoying, as fawning over yourself. Narcissism turned inside out is still narcissism.

Then, we’re instructed to make the “om” sound. The word is Sanskrit, the language of the ancient Hindu texts. It is a language based on vibrations. In Sanskrit, you don’t merely hear words, you feel them. Hearing and feeling about one thousand people saying “om” at the same time is something to behold. The whole room feels as if it is vibrating. I like this, I think, yes, I like this, and it dawns on me how much I associate India with sounds—the singsong call of a street hawker, the bleating horn of an auto-rickshaw, the chanting of a Hindu priest. Every sound, not just the holy ones, is a vibration. And a vibration is, of course, motion. Air pressing against air. Nothing more. Yet this simple act of physics can result in Mozart’s piano concerto or a freeway at rush hour or a lover’s whisper or the pop-pop of a semiautomatic weapon.

“How can I know my fate?” “Life is a combination of freedom and destiny, and the beauty is you don’t know which is which.”

“When will India be corruption free?” “When you stand up and fight against corruption.” I like that answer. It was real, and it required action of the asker. Hinduism is a religion of action more than belief. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Lord Krishna tells Arjun that his actions, not his beliefs, will set him free.

“I keep the good and discard the bad,” she said to me over lunch one day. In other words, Indians don’t expect perfection, or even consistency, from their gurus. The guru is wise. The guru is a fraud. Two contradictory thoughts that, for Manju, coexist comfortably in her Indian head.

Someone once told me that if you want to know India, just stand on a street corner, any street corner, and spin around 360 degrees. You will see it all. The best and worst of humanity. The ridiculous and the sublime. The profane and the profound.

This is not happy India. This is the country where, as Mark Twain observed, every life is sacred, except human life.

Indians may care deeply about their families and circle of friends, but they don’t even notice anyone outside that circle. That’s why Indian homes are spotless, while just a few feet outside the front door the trash is piled high. It’s outside the circle.

I’ve arranged to meet a professor named Sundar Sarukkai. He wrote an article about happiness that caught my eye. In one short paragraph he managed to capture a paradox that has been nagging me for some time: “Desire is the root cause of sorrow but desire is also the root cause of action. How do we counter the paralysis of action when there is no desire to motivate us?”

I’m eager to talk about ambition, the one noun that, more than anything else, has sabotaged my search for happiness. It is the source of my success and my misery. A contradiction that, I figure, only an Indian can wrap his mind around.

Miami had tropical weather, corruption, and political turmoil. All of these things I had grown used to overseas.

at the dawn of the twenty-first century, American happiness isn’t left to the gods or to fortune, as was the case for most of human history. No, happiness is there for the taking. All we need is enough willpower to summon it, enough gumption to try it in the first place, and of course enough cash to afford a convertible VW Beetle with optional satellite radio and leather interior.

America’s current fixation with finding happiness coincides with an era of unprecedented material prosperity. Many commentators have suggested this is not a coincidence. 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.

Americans, like everyone, are notoriously bad at predicting what will make us happy and what will not. This quirk of the human psyche is especially frustrating for Americans because we, more than any other nation, have the means at our disposal to pursue happiness so vigorously. A Bangladeshi farmer might believe that a Mercedes S-Class will make him happy, but he will probably die having never test-driven that belief. Not so with us Americans. We are able to acquire many of the things that we think will make us happy and therefore suffer the confusion and disappointment when they do not.

Historian Will Durant has said, “History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The [real] history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.”

No other nation’s founding document so prominently celebrates happiness. Of course, the Declaration of Independence only enshrines the right to pursue happiness. It’s up to us, as Benjamin Franklin once quipped, to catch it.

One way Americans pursue happiness is by physically moving. Indeed, ours is a nation founded on restlessness. What were the pilgrims if not hedonic refugees, searching for happiness someplace else? And what is our much-heralded “frontier spirit” if not a yearning for a happier place? “In America, getting on in the world means getting out of the world we have known before,” wrote the editor and teacher Ellery Sedgwick in his autobiography, The Happy Profession.

Where is the happiest place in the United States? Here the science of happiness fails me. I could not find one definitive report that answers that question. Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan told me that people get happier the farther west they move. His theory, though, contradicts the findings of David Schkade of the University of California at San Diego. He and his colleagues surveyed people in California and Michigan and found that they were equally happy (or unhappy, depending on your perspective). The people in Michigan thought they would be happier if they moved to California, a belief that Schkade calls a “focusing illusion.”

I like Laurey instantly, in a way I haven’t felt since I met Karma Ura in Bhutan. So when Laurey tells me that both her parents died, a few months apart, when she was twelve and that she is a two-time cancer survivor, it makes sense. What doesn’t kill you not only makes you stronger but also more honest.

Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

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. Exasperated, I call one of the leading happiness researchers, John Helliwell. Perhaps he has some answers. “It’s simple,” he says. “There’s more than one path to happiness.” Of course. How could I have missed it? Tolstoy turned on his head. All miserable countries are alike; happy ones are happy in their own ways.

Carbon is the basis of all life, happy and otherwise. Carbon is also a chameleon atom. Assemble it one way—in tight, interlocking rows—and you have a diamond. Assemble it another way—a disorganized jumble—and you have a handful of soot. The arranging makes all the difference. Places are the same. It’s not the elements that matter so much as how they’re arranged and in which proportions. Arrange them one way, and you have Switzerland. Arrange them another way, and you have Moldova. Getting the balance right is important. Qatar has too much money and not enough culture. It has no way of absorbing all that cash. And then there is Iceland: a country that has no right to be happy yet is. Iceland gets the balance right. A small country but a cosmopolitan one. Dark and light. Efficient and laid-back. American gumption married to European social responsibility. A perfect, happy arrangement. The glue that holds the entire enterprise together is culture. It makes all the difference.

Yes, we want to be happy but for the right reasons, and, ultimately, most of us would choose a rich and meaningful life over an empty, happy one, if such a thing is even possible.

“Misery serves a purpose,” says psychologist David Myers. He’s right. Misery alerts us to dangers. It’s what spurs our imagination.

“The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth,” observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.

The word “utopia” has two meanings. It means both “good place” and “nowhere.” That’s the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise.

“A lifetime of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on Earth,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman.

I found the Thai words mai pen lai on my lips. Never mind. Let it go.

Of all the places I visited, of all the people I met, one keeps coming back to me again and again: Karma Ura, the Bhutanese scholar and cancer survivor. “There is no such thing as personal happiness,” he told me. “Happiness is one hundred percent relational.” At the time, I didn’t take him literally. I thought he was exaggerating to make his point: that our relationships with other people are more important than we think. But now I realize Karma meant exactly what he said. Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors and the woman you hardly notice who cleans your office. Happiness is not a noun or verb. It’s a conjunction. Connective tissue.