Happiness is Anyone and Anything at All

I've been reading this book about Happiness lately, "The Geography of Bliss" by Eric Weiner in which the author travels the globe to individual countries that "happiness scientists" say are really happy and one country (Moldova) that isn't happy at all.

I'm not done with it but halfway through the book, one of the big takeaways I’m getting is that the countries (so far it's been Switzerland, Bhutan, and Iceland) that have the happiest people are the one's whose cultures don’t preach having high expectations about life. What I mean is here in America, we have THE AMERICAN DREAM which preaches that if you work hard, you too can own several SUVs, a huge flat screen tv, and a McMansion but still be unhappy because your neighbor owns an even bigger SUV and an even bigger flat screen tv so you work harder and for more hours at a job you don’t really like so you can buy a better SUV and a better flat screen tv and you still can’t get a good enough one so you charge it on your credit card and by constantly trying to one-up your neighbor, you’re buying more and more consumer goods which builds the economy so that a bunch of executives can make millions of dollars a month in options that are rewarded to them by the stock holders for cleverly cutting costs of their products by outsourcing the production of the materials to China. And thus, you have the #1 economy in the world that makes it the #1 richest country in the world and thus making us the #1 country in the world. This makes us happy because God personally slaughtered millions of Native Americans so as to create the greatest, most perfect country in the history of not only mankind, but alien kind too. This doesn’t, however, make us happy, at least on a personal level.

The countries in the book that are happy are mainly happy because nobody who lives there has any illusion as to who they are and what their country is. There was a story on “60 Minutes” about Denmark, which is supposedly the happiest place on earth that doesn’t involve mouse ears, and the story said that Danes were happy because they had no illusion that Denmark was a world power in the past and won’t be a world power in the future and are quite okay with it and quite okay with being okay about it. So they have their little socialized country with their socialized free education and socialized free health care and socialized welfare benefits and live quite contently just, you know, living. Having a bigger SUV than your neighbor doesn’t really matter to them because it’s not part of their country’s culture to really care one way or the other. Of course, they wouldn’t want an SUV because they’re into being environmentally conscious and don’t want to do anything to destroy the world.

What does this mean? That my theory about the best thing a parent can do is to crush their children's spirits at an early age is probably the best thing one can do to them. "Oh, no, you can't really become President because unless you go to Harvard or Yale from an exclusive Private School and yes, Obama becamse President without coming from a privileged background but he's one smart motherfucker and even he can't save the country because we're fucked." Or "yes, you can become a world famous reporter but you'd have to spend years making no money for some small, local paper and then when you finally make it big, you'll get laid off because the industry is dying and you'll have to go back to making peanuts at some blog where you'll have to spend half your time twittering." Or even "yes, you can be a famous actress and no, you don't have to have any talent, but you'll have to work very very hard before hand to make enough money to pay for a boob job and to puff up your lips and you better do it soon because no actress can get a decent job after 35. Or you could just release sex tape. What's a sex tape? Well, when two people love each other, they sometimes film themselves showing how much they love each other and when they need more publicity, have somebody ‘accidently’ leak that tape of those two people showing their love to each other because people love watching two people showing their love, especially if one of them is a celebrity."

It also means that I really want to move to Denmark. Or Holland. Or Iceland.