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Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Geography of Bliss

A year ago I was standing in line to buy Eric Weiner’s new book, The Geography of Bliss. I was fascinated by his personal yearning for happiness. I wondered if his quest to find the worlds ‘happiest places’ and understand why the people living there were happy would help him understand what happiness is, and find some for himself. I wanted to wish him good luck, I wanted to protect him, and I wanted to know what he found and if it helped.

He seemed like the perfect man for the mission: A little bit of a Don Quixote, “The story of Don Quixote's deeds includes the stories of those he meets on his journey.” A little bit of every modern man missing a link to the bliss we’ve all been told is out there, and an experienced investigative reporter on a personal journey.

I had a few little concerns: Was “One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World” going to be a success I’d appreciate, or an epic tale like the Illiad, with 15,693 lines of verse that would haunt me forever? Was ‘Geography’ a metaphor for a person, place or thing that didn’t really exist? Was the answer going to be a repeat of Glinda the Good Witch’s speech to Dorothy in Oz, where Eric Weiner would learn that “happiness is right there in your own backyard?” And finally, what would my family say if I finished this book and tried to convince them we should move to where the Bliss was?

Although he was a stranger, I soon felt a great kinship with Eric. He describes himself as a grouch, and I’ve been called worse before coffee in the morning. He is “a longtime foreign correspondent for National Public Radio,” and I am a longtime listener. “He has covered a multitude of catastrophes and maladies from more than thirty countries,” while I have always had a deep desire to avoid catastrophes, maladies, and other peoples’ drama firsthand whenever possible.

We also shared a lack of appreciation for the “grinning yellow happy face” emoticon

and the belief that happiness is either hard-wired into your personality, or, like Elvis, it has left the building. I worried that he would search for an adopted country, home, or family, where a “new way of seeing things,” would convince him to settle for step-happiness, and never complete his own longing.

I’m a cynic, but my happiness is permanently rooted, like one of those giant exercise balls, or a gyroscope, deep inside me. I thought this made me the perfect candidate for appreciating “his decision to tell the other side of the story, and search for the “Geography of Bliss.”

His explorations begin in the Netherlands, where “a Dutch professor named Ruut Veenhoven runs the World Database of Happiness.” Happiness is now an ‘official’ field of study, but the “contemplation of happiness is not new.” Philosophers, religions, neuroscientists and psychologists have questioned, measured, and recorded definitions of happiness since cavemen drew on walls. Computers at the World Database store all of “humanity’s accumulated knowledge of happiness.” The facts defining life for happy people weren’t much of a surprise, so Eric decides to expand his search, realizing what he “really wants to know is not who is happy but where they are happy, and why.”

His travels continue to 8 more countries; Switzerland, Bhutan, Iceland, Qatar, Thailand, Great Britain, Moldova, and India, exploring how extremes of weather, income, government rule, neighborly compassion, personal and cultural philosophy, humor, and cleanliness affect the happiness of citizens. He finds that the condition called happiness has just a few basic requirements. Happiness has to be shared. It doesn’t thrive in solitude. Happiness needs some balance, or contrast, to be appreciated. Happiness requires first the understanding, then the ability to let go of the things we can’t control. “Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors. Happiness is not a noun or verb. It’s a conjunction. Connective tissue.”

Fellow hunters searching for happiness in a climate of upside down smiley faces