InsideOut: Interview with Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss)

by Owen Lipstein



Eric Weiner’s book, “The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World” (Twelve, 2008) is part travelog, part meditation, part journalistic discovery. But the most intriguing part of the book is Weiner himself, and his approach to his subject: “My last name is pronounced ‘whiner’ and I do my best to live up to that name.” This is no dispassionate, pseudo-scholarly book. This is one man’s search for the ineffable.

InsideOut: Talk to us about smiling.



Eric Weiner: It seemed to me that if I was researching a book on happiness and happy places, that I had to go to a place that was known as “the land of smiles” [Thailand]. One thing I found, though, is that a smile is much more complicated for the Thais than it is for the rest of us. They have actually many different kinds of smiles, and not all of them, by any means, are about happiness or mirth. The Thais will smile at funerals or other sad events. They have a dozen different types of smiles, including my favorite — the “trying to smile but can’t smile.” I think they basically remind us that the smile is a social gesture, not a personal one. The Thais are not very introspective people. It is true of most Southeast Asians. Not introspective in the way that we’ve defined it. They don’t buy self-help books. They probably wouldn’t buy my book. Basically they don’t really believe in the examined life. They even have an expression that translates roughly as, “You think too much,” or “Don’t think too much.” When I first heard that, it came as kind of a shock to me. Why would a culture discourage the very act of thinking? The Thais believe that thinking can be detrimental to your mental health. The Inuits also share that belief.



IO: It seemed that the people you encountered in Thailand were genuinely enjoying themselves. Is that fair to say?



EW: Yeah, I think it is fair to say. They are able to drop things. There is no paradise, but I was trying in this book to point out the positives of these places, which is the opposite of what I have been doing for most of my career as a foreign correspondent, which is pointing out the negatives. Thailand is not perfect. It can be actually a fairly violent place, but there are lessons on the art of happiness to be learned there, I think.



IO: Let’s talk about Great Britain. I thought that was a particularly witty chapter. You sort of nailed the Anybody who is cheerful or too optimistic must be a) not very educated, and b) probably American idea there.



EW: They are very suspicious of this notion of happiness, and self-help books and that sort of thing. They see it as a transatlantic import, and by that, of course, they mean American. But I did find that I think the Brits are happier than they let on. The 19th-century philosophy of utilitarianism was born in London, and this is the notion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. And they do seem to subscribe to that. On a personal level, they are pretty grumpy. They take perverse pleasure in their grumpiness.

IO: Let’s talk about Qatar.



EW: The experiment taking place in Qatar is [to] take a poor, and let’s face it, mostly backward country, and add lots and lots of oil and natural gas, and therefore money. Do they become happier?



IO: And your answer was basically, yes; it seems to make everybody a little happier.



EW: Yes, but it creates a whole new set of problems that didn’t exist before, when they were poor. No one there wants to go back to their hardscrabble days when they were eeking out a living in the desert. But the money has created a new set of problems, which is that it puts up barriers between people, and if happiness is other people, than the money to that extent is counterproductive.

I don’t want to glorify the poor of the world and say the poor are the happiest people in the world. They are not, but [since getting wealthier], the [people of Qatar] have literally put up walls. They live behind these fortress-like houses.



IO: Moldova. I never want to go there.



EW: Moldova is the least happy country in the world, statistically. I wanted to go there and see what that would look like. I found that it is an unhappy place. The reality on the ground backs up the studies. I’m not sure where to start. There are so many reasons.

It’s not just the financial reason. The Moldovans will tell me that they are a very poor country, and they are. It’s poor, but it’s not as poor as Sub-Saharan Africa or Zimbabwe, yet they are less happy than those African countries. Why is that? Well, they are not comparing themselves to Tanzania and Zimbabwe. They are comparing themselves to their neighbors — to Romania, Poland, Germany and France. They are on the edge of Europe. That’s what we do. We compare ourselves to our neighbors — the guy next door who just got a new car — not to Warren Buffet or Bill Gates.

IO: What comes through in that chapter is just this sort of boredom in Moldova, the lack of curiosity, the feeling of monotone.



EW: Yeah, it’s sort of one of those places where everything seems to in black or white, but not in color. I found it to be a sad place, ripe with envy and mistrust.



IO: I thought you were most jovial in India. Tell us why.



EW: I just loved India. I have always loved it. I lived there for two years in the mid-1990s. I still go back. It’s one of those places that is like family: There’s love and hate all wrapped up together. I just think it is the best and worst of humanity. When I was living there, I was a foreign correspondent for NPR, and I was focusing for the most part on the serious stories on economic development, nuclear weapons and that sort of thing. I never really was able to delve into the more spiritual side of India, so I wanted to go back and do that, and make up for that missing piece of the puzzle. I went to an ashram.



IO: You mentioned in one of your interviews that writing about America was the most problematic for you. Why is that?



EW: I was living in Miami at the time I was writing the book, and I realized I was in what many people consider paradise, but I had a next-door neighbor who certainly did not consider it to be paradise, and couldn’t wait to get out. As he put it, “Paradise gets old.” He was heading to North Carolina. [So] I talked to a number of people in Asheville [North Carolina], who had moved there for various reasons. I just wanted to try to put my finger on the question of what happens when we move somewhere to be happy. Does it work?



IO: Well?



EW: It can and it can’t. You have to be committed to the place. I found quite a few people in Asheville who were not fully committed to being there. They were putting one toe in the water: Let me see if this place makes me happy… That doesn’t work.



IO: What are your conclusions? Is travel good for you? Do you think everybody should go to a happy country every once in a while?



EW: I’m not Dr. Phil. I don’t like to think of [travel] as a self-help. I would say that place does matter. Where we are affects who we are. National culture does affect who we are. There are a couple of things I took away. One is [from] the Thais: Don’t think too much. There is a place for not thinking. The gentleman from Bhutan told me — and reminded me — that happiness is other people; it is our relationships with other people. I think a lot of self-help books talk about just getting in touch with your inner child or your inner this-or-that, and it’s all about looking inward. I think that can be counterproductive, and tends to be kind of narcissistic, actually.



IO: People are forever interested in the subject of happiness. If you want to sell copies of a magazine, you mention the word “happiness.” Do you think it’s cheating to put the word “happiness” on the cover?



EW: No, I don’t. Happiness is the one thing that we want for itself. We want money, fame, or power for tertiary reasons, because we think it will make us happier, but happiness is a means and an end all wrapped up into one. We want to be happy not because it will get us something else, but simply for the sake of being happy. [In the book] I point out that if you ask a single working mom with three kids if she is happy, she would probably say that you are asking the wrong question. I can understand that. Happiness as defined today in America tends to be almost a kind of self-indulgent thing. I’ve read the classics about this, and I know that is not the way happiness was defined for many, many centuries. It was considered to be a virtuous activity of the soul — Aristotle’s words. We’ve come a long way from a virtuous activity of the soul to the smiley face. Happiness with a capital H — I’m all for it. Happiness with a small h — I can see the concern that it’s become sort of a cheap trick to sell magazines and books.



IO: Are you happier having written this book?



EW: Less unhappy, I would say. Not fully happy. I’ll be honest. It’s been satisfying, but human life can be a terrible thing. If you told me a few months ago that my book would’ve hit the New York Times Best-Seller list and get as high as No. 8 on the list, I would’ve said, “That’s all I ever dreamed for in life.” When you hit No. 8, you start looking at No. 7 and 6, and think, Why can’t I be higher?



IO: We are in a region — the Hudson River Valley — that is one of the most beautiful in the whole country. Any thoughts on people who are lucky enough to actually be living in this sort of commonly recognized paradise?



EW: Yeah, don’t broadcast that too far. Paradise discovered is paradise lost. Where is Athens, by the way?



IO: Athens is right across the river, heading west, from Hudson, New York, and two hours north of New York City. Most of us live very close to the river itself.



EW: That sort of balance of a small town with a big city not too far away is a good thing. I found that for a lot of the happiest places, it wasn’t what they had [that made them happy], but it was in the proportions they had it. Iceland did a good job of having this balance of things — European-style social safety net, and American-style entrepreneurial, go-go spirit.



IO: The Hudson is such a physical presence. Any thoughts on that?



EW: I’ve never actually had a chance to write about this in the book, but I did sort of ponder what it is about water and being near a body of water that makes us happy. There are a couple of evolutionary psychological theories. One is that when human beings evolved in the valley in East Africa, there were savannahs with these pools of waters that people were drawn towards because they represented survival.

There is something about water that we will pay a premium to be near. I am sure you pay more for a house with a river view than one without.

There are a lot of writers up there. Why is that?



IO: I think it is the physical beauty of the river that attracts people.



EW: Then if you get a craving for city life, you hop on the train for two hours.



IO: Right.



EW: It’s being awed by nature. In Iceland, I found that too. [N]ature is wild and dynamic, as opposed to stationary. There are a lot of hissing volcanoes and that sort of thing in Iceland. It sounds like you are talking about the grandeur and power of nature, and being close to that.