In the end, Weiner arrives at conclusions that have been pretty self-evident all along: There’s more than one path to happiness. What does it say about the project that a chapter devoted to one of the saddest places on earth is the funniest? Maybe it just shows that sadness is more fun and in a strange way, offers more color to work with. “Luba’s English consists entirely of the words “no” and “feevty-feevty,” the latter of which she invariably accompanies with a see-sawing of her palm,” Weiner writes. Here he rents part of an apartment from an old grandmother, Luba. It is ironic that Weiner is at his funniest when he writes about Moldova, a country that is rated way low on Veenhoven’s World Database of Happiness. Really? Snake charmers? In pandering to such clichés, you can tell that Weiner is only trying hard to be funny but it fails. In another instance, Weiner describes an earlier stay in India with a touch of nostalgia: “Monkeys occasionally wandered into my apartment. “He says he's busy,” Weiner writes, “possibly with human sacrifices.” The problem is that in many places, his humor seems very affected and worse, it comes at the expense of reaffirming some old clichés about the places he travels to.įor example, when he first hears about Hilmar, the head of the Heathen faith in Iceland, he discovers that Hilmar is temporarily occupied and can't meet Weiner right away. To that end, Weiner tries hard to be funny. It is evident that Weiner set out to write a light-hearted book-one that would make us happier and wiser in the end.
#Summary of the geography of bliss by eric weiner driver
Cars have “personal climate controls” so that driver and passenger need not negotiate a mutually agreeable temperature,” he writes. Contrast that with the West: “In the west and in the United States especially, we try to eliminate the need for compromise. And in Bhutan, Weiner finds that people learn the fine art of compromise.
“Happy people have no reason to think they live rather than question living,” he learns. In Thailand, Weiner is told not to think much about happiness. Beliefs we may admire or, in the case of the sock-and-sandal combo, find utterly abhorrent. “The citizens of these countries, though, clearly believe in something,” Weiner writes, “they believe in six weeks of vacation, in human rights, in democracy, in lazy afternoons spent in cafés, in wearing socks and sandals at the same time. It doesn’t explain why the happiest countries in the world-Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands-are hardly religious at all. In Qatar, Weiner is told that belief in religion is important. As he travels around the world, Weiner finds that a country’s culture and beliefs in large part, drive the factors that make its citizens happy. “When I tell people about my project, everyone asks the same two questions: How can you measure happiness? How can you even define it?” writes Weiner in The Geography of Bliss. It is also very cold - breaking another misconception about happiness: Warm, sunny paradises are not always spectacularly happy.
One of the happiest countries in the world, Iceland, for example, is almost all white in its ethnic makeup. Turns out income distribution does not determine happiness nor does the diversity of a country’s society. Veenhoven’s database has shattered some pre-conceived notions about happiness. Weiner's first stop is the Netherlands where the godfather of happiness research-Professor Ruut Veenhoven-has been crunching happiness numbers for years and has meticulously charted the results into what he calls The World Database of Happiness. For a year, he travels the world trying to find what makes the happy places tick. The one thing really going for NPR correspondent Eric Weiner’s new book The Geography of Bliss, is its thesis: finding the happiest places on earth. "The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World "