The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner
I will admit that I was initially put off by the title of NPR correspondent Eric Weiner’s engaging, highly readable travelogue, The Geography of Bliss. That conjunction of the global and the delightful conjured visions of a frequently flying chick lit heroine named, without irony – you guessed it. Thankfully (happily?), the book’s title is a minor bump along the road to an otherwise largely satisfying read.
While the author’s self-confessed grumpiness kills any chance of a candy-colored happily ever after, the nature of Weiner’s project insures against the opposite extreme: “What if,” Weiner writes in his introduction, “I spent a year traveling the globe, seeking out not the world’s well-trodden trouble spots but, rather, its unheralded happy places?” Candace Bushnell might not have signed up for the journey, but neither would William T. Vollmann have.
That year of traveling keeps Weiner zigzagging over an impressive swath of the Northern hemisphere, with junkets to nine countries spread across various geographic regions of Asia and Europe before return to the United States. Along the way, Weiner examines the pithy conventional wisdom on happiness – that it can’t be bought, and so on – and recent findings on the emotional state. Though Weiner hits enough global-travel clichés (a hashish bar in the Netherlands, a sex show in Thailand, an ashram in India) to make his journey recognizable, the best passages aren’t the ones that evoke place or custom but those in which the author taps locals’ minds for interpretation of their cultures’ emotional well-being. In the chapter on Switzerland, “Happiness Is Boredom,” the ongoing dialogue the author conducts with himself, his Swiss contacts and the more canonical wisdom of such thinkers as Bertrand Russell leads to these insights: the urbane Swiss owe no small part of their collective happiness to their relationship with nature, their lack of envy and ostentation to the small town-like close knitting of their social fabric. Whether or not Swiss happiness truly is boredom is another question, one whose cultural components are indirectly alluded to in the image of an ex-pat Hollywood agent nervously thumbing her Blackberry, and surprise from the Swiss that, statistically speaking, they are happy.
The further Weiner travels, geographically and culturally, the more perspicacious his book seems to become about happiness in the United States. This is partly due to the range of farther flung countries he visits. In India, though Weiner does visit that ashram and socialize among the Indian middle class, he of course glimpses that country’s endemic poverty – and concludes that, in certain fundamental ways, it is less grinding than extreme poverty in the United States, the Indian “houseless” (as Weiner refers to the indigent of India) maintaining strong social and familial ties all but unknown among the American homeless. On the other hand, the oil kingdom of Qatar is, in Weiner’s analysis, a Wahhabite Brave New World whose dry cultural well is greased with Starbucks coffee. Happiness isn’t, it seems, a reserve of iced mocha vast enough to caffeinate the world for the next hundred years.
But Weiner’s a-ha moment in an exotic country comes during a conversation with Karma Ura, who runs Bhutan’s most important think tank (which, as Weiner notes, “also happens to be Bhutan’s only think tank”). “I have achieved happiness,” Ura tells Weiner, “because I don’t have unrealistic expectations.” This perspective is so opposite Weiner’s own (“In America,” he writes, “high expectations are…the force behind our dreams and, by extension, our pursuit of happiness”) that Ura’s expounding temporarily disarms Weiner of his personal guardedness. He drops his guard to tell Ura the story of a recent visit to the hospital, scheduled by the author after be began experiencing numbness in his extremities and shortness of breath; MRI results confirmed that these symptoms were brought on by a panic attack, by hypochondria. “You need to think about death for five minutes every day,” Ura responds. “It will cure you, sanitize you.” His rationale? Human beings must be prepared for death, as most Westerners are not. Ura then reveals that he was once a cancer patient.
“Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so,” wrote John Stuart Mill. Indeed, Weiner’s findings mostly confirm the old adage about the preferability of existing as a happy Forrest Gump rather than as an unhappy Socrates. Weiner relates the story of his firing from the New York Times, which came a few weeks after the paper’s executive editor labeled his work “naïve and unsophisticated.” It is only in Iceland, where “being naïve is okay because you can always start over,” as it’s put by a relatively young music producer on his career, that Weiner finally gets over the insult. “The world, I now conclude, would be a far better place with a bit more naïveté,” writes Weiner.
But Weiner’s book suffers less from simplicity than from not treading certain paths. His travels begin in the Netherlands, with a visit to the Dutch professor who compiles the World Database of Happiness. The ostensibly scientific focus is, for all intents and purposes, mostly forgotten once the WDH has been left behind. And that’s a shame. Some of the most interesting, and promising, recent neurology research has focused on the relationship between the brain’s structure and its functioning. Could happiness be a well-wired brain? Is it possible to rewire one’s brain and thus recalibrate the happiness gauge of one’s psyche? That Weiner devotes almost no space to such questions is understandable on the one hand – it’s the geography, not the neurology, he’s after – and puzzling on the other: as Sharon Begley describes in her book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, neuroscientists are now beginning how meditation practice actually changes the brain’s physiology; two of the nine countries Weiner visits are predominantly Buddhist; another the birthplace of the Buddha himself. And geography, like all received stimuli, influences the way we think.
The Geography of Bliss ultimately begs larger questions about the nature of happiness. To what extent is happiness a function of culture, and vice versa? And does happiness translate easily from one culture to another? Weiner’s findings suggest a negative answer to the latter, as he admits that much of what accounts for the happiness of other cultures would be an acquired taste for most in the United States.
It’s not a giveaway to say that nowhere does Weiner find utopia. The happiness he does encounter reflects in the book itself: imperfect but charming, and as stimulating for the questions it raises as for those it answers.
