Actually, happiness isn't within

Some cultures are simply better at producing happy citizens than others.

By Eric Weiner

from the January 7, 2008 edition

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A new year is upon us, and the self-help industrial complex is in full swing, pestering us to slim down, bulk up, become a new you, a better you, a happier you. Yes, it's all about you. The 1970s may have been the "Me Decade," but the naught years are shaping up to be the "You Decade."

There is, it turns out, little difference between You and Me. Both outlooks reflect a firmly held and particularly American belief that happiness lies deep inside the inner you, or me, or whatever.

The self-help industry has it wrong. Social scientists studying happiness (or subjective well-being, to use the academic term) have found that external factors – quality of government, social interactions and, to an extent, money – determine our happiness more than anything else. In other words, happiness does not reside inside of you. Happiness is out there.

Which particular "out there" makes a huge difference in your happiness level. National levels of contentment vary widely, from the morose Moldavians to the chronically cheerful Danes. Happiness, it turns out, is like oil. Some countries are awash in it; others are bone dry.

In fact, psychologists at the University of Leicester in Britain recently produced the world's first map of happiness. Using data from the emerging science of happiness, they created a color-coded atlas of bliss, a topography of the human spirit, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. It's not climate or topography or some mysterious "energy" that is at work here, but national culture. Some cultures are simply better at producing happy citizens than others.

Not surprisingly, democracies tend to fare better than dictatorships, though it's not clear which way the river of causality flows. Perhaps happy countries tend to embrace democracy and not the other way around.

Trust of others is another prerequisite for a happy nation, and that is a troubling fact for fans of American happiness. In 1960, 58 percent of Americans felt most people could be trusted. By the 1990s, only 35 percent held that view. Indeed, given our economic and military muscle, the US occupies a modest spot on the atlas of bliss. We are not as happy as we are wealthy.

The map contains more than a few surprises. Latin American countries, for instance, are among the happiest in the world, despite their relative poverty and often shaky political situations. "The Latino bonus" is what some researchers have dubbed this phenomenon. One explanation: the close family ties found in Latin American countries and among many Hispanics in the US.

Jean-Paul Sartre famously declared that "Hell is other people." Sartre got it wrong, or perhaps he was hanging out with the wrong people. The emerging science of happiness has found that the single biggest determinant of our happiness is the quantity and the quality of our relationships.

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