​Bhutan is a small landlocked Kingdom, located in the South East of the Himalayas, sandwiched between China and India. The country is beautiful, but poor. Given its location and lack of natural resources, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck realized that the fate of his flock was to remain poor until the end of Time. Thinking about poverty and misery, he felt that poor people were not exclusively destined for misery and unhappiness. There are other things in life that bring happiness, the monarch thought, not just income and wealth. Hence, way back in the 1970s the king introduced the Gross National Happiness (GNH) concept.

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The king’s successor, Jigme Khesor Namgyel Wangchuck, aka Dasho Khesar, embraces GNH with zeal, as demonstrated in the entertaining documentary Agent of Happiness. The film follows two pollsters asking Bhutanese people how happy they are. At the end of each interview the pollsters sit down to decide what score to give. Unfortunately, the vast majority of interviewees were not terribly happy. Only one well-to-do Bhutanese beamed with happiness. Seated between his three wives, he said that he was very happy indeed. He even added that his wives were very happy as well, although they did not radiate any happiness at all.  

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The subtly depicted irony of the documentary is that one of the pollsters himself was deeply unhappy. This was not caused by a lack of money (after all, he had a nice government job) but by the fact that he was unsuccessful in finding a bride, further aggravated by the fact that he was a Nepalese (which hindered his career and marriage prospects) and had to take care of his ailing old mother(who did not intend to die soon).

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After having watched Agent of Happiness, I was curious what Bhutan’s ranking in the 2024 World Happiness Report would be. To my disappointment Bhutan was not included in the list. Finland topped the 2024 list, followed by nine other high-income countries. Lebanon and Afghanistan shared the bottom of the list. The scores are based on subjective answers to questions such as how satisfied one is with one’s life these days. Feelings of misery (i.e., low life satisfaction) are also investigated and ranked. The final rankings are based on life evaluations, being the more stable measure of the quality of people’s lives.

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When Agents of Happiness had ended, my wife, a very down-to-earth observer, concluded that Bhutanese people are unhappy simply because they are poor. From older research conducted by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, I had concluded that up to an annual income of $75.000,- people became happier as their income rose. But beyond that figure, happiness would not increase any longer.

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However, this insight proved to be wrong. Mathhew Killingsworth challenged Kahneman’s and Deaton’s insight. He found that happiness continued to increase when income rose beyond the $75,000.- threshold. Kahneman took up the challenge and invited Killingsworth to find out whether Killingsworth was right and he (and Deaton) was wrong.

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Together they had a go at the data they had gathered resulting from interviews of a representative sample of people. The first conclusion they drew was that, besides income and happiness, there is another dimension that plays a part: personality. For people with a limited capacity for happiness there is indeed a threshold somewhere between $100,000.- and $120,000,-. Beyond it, these people don’t get any happier. But for people with a sunny disposition, happiness continues to increase as they get richer. Better even, their happiness increases faster than the rise in income.

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But hang on, happiness and life satisfaction are different concepts. After all, one can experience spells of deeply felt happiness in a miserable situation. The world literature is loaded with examples. Take Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, a simple carpenter sent to a Siberian prison camp without any legal justification. Poor Ivan, daily trying to fight hunger and Siberia’s freezing temperatures, enjoyed such a spell. At night, when evaluating the day, he realized that he had achieved a lot: during lunch he managed to get an extra bowl of oatmeal, he constructed a perfectly fitting wall, and he found a small piece of iron of which he would make a sharp knife - a very precious possession in a prison camp. Realizing all this, Ivan Denisovich fell asleep completely happy.

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Or take Vaclav Havel, the dissident Czech playwright, detained by the Communist authorities on account of his subversive plays. In one of his letters to Olga, his wife, he writes that on a sunny day, when looking out of his small cell window, he saw a tree branch full of shining leaves. This gave him a sudden deep sense of happiness.

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Neither Denisovich nor Havel had an income to speak of, yet both experienced sudden happiness. So, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck was not entirely wrong when he argued that happiness was not only dependent on a decent income.

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A final inspirational word for people having difficulties with feeling happy. New insights in neuro psychology tell us that happiness and well-being are best regarded as skills that can be enhanced through training. Hence, for those whose happiness now stops at the $100,00.- $120,00.- threshold, a happier future is beckoning.

 

Peter de Haan                                                                                                                                                                                                     January 2025