The Geography of Bliss summary

Another country consistently scoring high on the happiness charts is Switzerland.

You might think of Switzerland as being a rather sleepy place, and the legacy of “Swiss precision” is one of the only reputations that can make the punctual Germans look lazy.

The next stop on our tour of the world’s happiest places is Bhutan.

If you’re not familiar with Bhutan, it’s a small and remote Himalayan country located between its big neighbors, India and China. If you’ve ever dreamed of living like a monk and spending your days devoted to the peace and quiet of meditation, Bhutan is the place for you.

Our next stop is a detour on the happiness tour, to a country that stands in great contrast to the penniless Bhutanese. It’s Qatar, an example of the old lesson that happiness can’t be bought.

Until the relatively recent oil boom of the 1980s, Qatar was just a deserted stretch of land, with one road and a few houses. While it has since been discovered that it is home to some of the world’s greatest reserves of oil and natural gas, the country is still 98 percent desert, an environment generally associated with unhappiness.

When you close your eyes and think of happiness, what kind of landscape comes to mind? Is it sunny blue skies with a grassy meadow or sandy beach?

These typical happy images are far from the daily life of Icelanders, yet their country is often near the top of the list when it comes to happiness.

If Iceland such a happy place, it would be common sense to think a hot and oppressive country might be the world’s unhappiest place. Perhaps somewhere in Africa? Alas, no. According to Veenhoven’s World Database of Happiness, the world’s true hub of misery is a small strip of Eastern European land located between Romania and the Ukraine, known as Moldova.

There are a number of factors making Moldovans so unhappy, but at the top is economics.

No exploration of the world’s happiest countries would be complete without a look at Thailand, known to some as the Land of Smiles.

You may know the saying about the Inuit people of the Arctic having multiple words for snow. Well, the Thais have a similar variety, but in this case it’s for different kinds of smiles. There’s “yim cheun chom,” the smile that expresses admiration; there’s “yim thak thaan,” the smile that says “I dislike your idea but go ahead;” and let’s not forget “yim sao,” the sad smile.

There’s a good chance you’ve experienced contagious laughter. But what about contagious happiness? Can a happy person enter an unhappy place and spread joy?

A group of TV producers in England were curious about these kinds of questions and applied them to the town of Slough, located just outside London and widely considered the dreariest place in the United Kingdom.

India is famous for its gurus, miracles and spirituality, and these characteristics attract thousands of Western tourists every year. Many of these travellers are people who are chasing bliss and feel the need to leave their comfortable environment for more exotic and happier lands of India.

When the author went to India, he went to hear the guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar speak to an audience about eternal bliss, but found that his words rang hollow.

The United States ranks high on most lists dealing with economics and spending. But happiness isn’t a currency, and there are a lot of researchers who place the United States relatively low on the joy scale.

Adrian White is one such researcher. He works at the University of Leicester in England and he ranks the United States as twenty-third happiest in the world, below considerably less affluent countries as Costa Rica, Malta and Malaysia.