The Geography of Bliss

I’ve been trying to so hard to get back to reading books, as my “To Be Read” pile is growing quite rapidly from Paperback Swap.  My goal is to stay at one book a month & in August I  finished reading The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World.  I love geography & travel, and I’m fascinated by the growing field of the science of happiness.  Did you even know there was such a science???  It’s a fascinating read about geography, culture, people, places, religion, philosophy, politics, history, traditions, and the human spirit.

The author is a former journalist who sets out to study why happiness levels vary so much from country to country.  Obviously, one of the great struggles in the book is how to best quantify happiness- what does it really mean?  He visits some of the happier places, such as The Netherlands & Switzerland, which are very  happy for their own reasons.  Some of the easier things to understand are “modern” way of living, stability, freedom, family, history & a sense of culture (patriotism or nationalism).

Obviously, here in America, we often associate happiness with wealth & material possessions.  The author visits the very poor but happy Bhutan & the extremely rich and unhappy Qatar.  Once the basic needs for food & shelter have been met, many people can be very happy.  But, given all the money in the world, people still need culture & family & at some point too much money is just as bad as too little money.

Iceland, with it’s sunless winters & endless summer days would be poised to be a brutal place to survive & thrive among the treacherous environment and extreme weather.  Yet, Icelanders have survived & thrived with their sense of community and rhythm to the land, along with a healthy dose of alcohol.  But visit a place like Moldova, a former soviet republic, where various cultures are mixed & the government can’t be trusted and you are in one of the unhappiest places on earth.  What we learn there is that a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness caused by revolutions and government failure that drives people to leave as fast as they can & those that remain behind are desperately unhappy.

The next stop is Thailand, where we begin to see how religion and spirituality play a central role in many parts of the world.  How we view this world and where we think we are going for the next one dictate a great deal about our general attitude towards life.  The next stop brings us a dour little town in Great Britain, and then we continue onto India and finally to the United States to examine what is happiness in each of those places.  Obviously happiness is complex and complicated-  there are hundreds of words to describe the various aspects of happiness and they can change on a day to day basis.  I thought this book was a quick, easy read with a fascinating mini-tour of so many countries & what makes each of them tick in their own little happy way.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Everybody survived the bachelor & bachelorette parties…sorry, there won’t be any pictures!