Twelve Publishers - The Geography of Bliss

SOME LAST WORDS ON 2008

By ERIC WEINER

Let’s cut to the chase. 2008 was not a happy year. The U.S. economy sputtered, then went splat. The news from abroad wasn’t much better. India suffered one if its worst ever terrorist attacks. China was hit by a devastating earthquake. Iceland, for years one of the world’s happiest countries, experienced a financial meltdown. (More about that later.)

So can we conclude that, given the grim headlines, we’re all miserable now? Is the world really a less happy place? Not necessarily. Happiness bubbles are made of sterner stuff than real estate or stock bubbles. It takes a lot to shake a nation’s happiness. The attacks of September 11^th did not do it. Surveys conducted shortly afterwards found no dip in national happiness.

Economic downturns, while less deadly, are more insidious than terrorism. A wider swath of the public is affected by the recession than the attacks of September 11^th. That’s the bad news . The good news is that the connection between happiness and economic vitality is, at best, tenuous. America is four times wealthier than it was in 1950, yet we are no happier. Wealth, it turns out, is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Beyond a certain point, it takes a lot more money to make us just a little bit happier.

Of course, if you've lost your job, or you're home, you're not likely to be happy. But for most of us that is, thankfully, not the case. We might be anxious about the economy, but that doesn't mean we're despondent. Researcher Ruut Veenhoven uses the term “worried happiness,” to describe how people cope with hardship. Veenhoven, who heads the World Database of Happiness in the Netherlands, concludes: “We can deal with hardship and even thrive when challenged to cope with it. Paradise is not a prerequisite for happiness.”

More good news: Economic hardship does not seem to leave a lasting imprint on a nation’s mood. Russian and Argentinean happiness levels bounced back quickly after their economic crises. The same is likely to happen here.

So if it’s not really money, then what exactly does make us happy? Study after study has found that the answer is, in two words, other people. The quality of our relationships is the single biggest factor in determining our happiness. People with warm, caring relationships—and, crucially, high levels of trust—report being happier than those without.

Which brings us back to poor Iceland. No other country has been hit harder by the economic downturn than this small island nation. With its banks insolvent and its currency in free-fall, Iceland teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. Presumably, that famous Icelandic bliss has also evaporated.

Or has it? People I’ve spoken with there are certainly anxious, on edge. But they’re not, by and large, miserable.

Why? For starters, Icelanders are accustomed, historically, to great upheaval. As Pall Stefansson points out in the Iceland Review, the current economic crisis is nothing compared to the eruption of Mount Laki in 1783. A quarter of Iceland’s population was killed. Such sentiment might seem like whistling in the dark (Icelanders know a thing or two about darkness) but I don’t think that’s the case.

Icelanders are remarkably resilient people. If you lived on a small, cold isolated island in the North Atlantic, you would be, too. They have a healthy attitude towards failure (“We embrace failure,” is how one person put it.) and that is serving them well now. Icelanders are a famously tight-knit bunch—more of an extended family than a nation. And, from what I can tell, those relationships remain intact, despite the financial hardship and, in a way, because of it. Here’s what Karl Blondal, deputy editor of the main newspaper in Iceland, said to me in an e-mail.

There is a lot of communal feeling, people address each other in a more caring way in the morning, neighbors inquire how each other is doing. One thing about living in a small community is that everyone you know, family and friends, is within reach - those who lose their jobs are not isolated, the risk of estrangement is not the same as it would be in bigger societies. Living standards will not be as luxurious, but this was an economic disaster, not a natural disaster. The infrastructure is intact, houses are standing, life will go on. As for happiness? Now we can wipe the slate clean. Who knows - this might just as well be an opportunity to forge a better, more open society where power is more diffused, and the old vested interests and economic blocks have been cleared out of the way.

In other words, Icelanders are in a deep state of “worried happiness.” That may not be the ideal state of mind but, given the alternative, it’s downright blissful.