Happyland

I was reading this study which ranked the world’s nations according to which ones were the happiest, and I mentioned to Helena that Denmark took the top spot (hey, I just realized – top spot is a palindrome).  She said, without any hesitation whatsoever, “That’s because they have Lego.”

This is it. Right here. The secret to a happy and meaningful life.

Of course, any study which tries to measure something as abstract as happiness must be taken with a liberal grain of the proverbial salt.  What does happiness even mean?

When I looked at the criteria they used – economic security, good health care, sociability, close family units and wide networks of friends, longevity – it made some sense.

There’s a bit more to happiness than that.  There are literally billions of people in the world who are poor but happy and a fair percentage of rich people are miserable and neurotic but, other factors being equal, it’s better to be rich than poor.  I agree with that.

It seems to me that their criteria for measuring happiness pretty accurately reflects Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  First, you’ve got to eat.  Unless you have a roof over your head, your entire being is going to be focused on getting a roof over your head.  Once you’ve got those covered, you can worry about networking and making friends.  After that, you can search for meaning in your life.

Another of Maslow’s great insights (everybody just remembers the hierarchy of needs) was this:  why is it we study the insane people to try and figure out how to avoid being like them, when we could be investigating the successful, happy, well adjusted people and try to be like them?

Good point.  If the Danes are the happiest people on earth, and the welfare society is part of the reason for that, it’s an argument in favor of the Danish system (all of the Scandinavian countries scored high – the bottom 30 or so were almost all African), and makes them worthy of emulation, despite their high number of suicidal alcoholics, which apparently was not considered in the study.

(the Czech Republic came in 35th, which is not too surprising when you see the grimmer than death faces of the people on the Metro every morning, and the U.S. was 11th, on which I call bullshit.)

Bottom line, though, happiness is a personal thing and you can be happy if you choose to.  Don’t worry.