It also means that while some things work extremely well, other things are rotten in the state of Denmark. Scandinavian countries may do well in the happiness rankings – but neither Danes, Norwegians nor Swedes hold a monopoly on happiness. Living in Denmark has taught me that, while we can all learn a lot from the Scandinavian countries when it comes to quality of life, we can find lessons in happiness from people from all over the world. The keys to happiness are buried around the world, and it is our job to gather them up.
If we look at the World Happiness Report, there is a four-point happiness gap between the happiest and unhappiest countries, and three points of these four are explained by six factors: togetherness or sense of community, money, health, freedom, trust and kindness. I have dedicated one chapter to each of these factors, and in each we will explore why these things affect well-being, we will take lessons of happiness from people from around the world and we will uncover the ways in which we ourselves may become happier – and, in the end, how we may put these pieces together to create a treasure map of happiness.
Meanwhile, 80 per cent of the difference in happiness across the world happens within countries. In other words, you may find very happy Danes and very unhappy Danes – and you may find very happy and very unhappy Togolese. So it is one thing to look at the policies countries offer; our behaviour and our perspective on life are another thing entirely.
So, what are the common denominators among the world’s happiest people, what can be learned from countries around the globe when it comes to happiness and what actions may be taken in order to make ourselves happier? These are some of the questions this book seeks to answer: it will uncover the secrets of the world’s happiest people and look for the good that does exist in the world. Let’s go on a treasure hunt!
HOW DO YOU MEASURE HAPPINESS?
On the morning of 9 November 2016, I was woken at 5 a.m. by the emergency alarm in the hotel I was staying in. I was in the heart of Paris for a round of interviews and the city was approaching the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the city.
Outside the lobby, the guests gathered, bleary-eyed, in their white bathrobes. At 5.30 a.m., the hotel was given the all-clear, but there was no point in me trying to get back to sleep. Adrenalin was still pumping through me, and I had just returned from Asia, so my body clock was seven hours ahead of local time. I decided I might as well work and opened my suitcase to get my laptop. That’s when I discovered I had left my brand-new computer on the plane (always check the seat pocket!). And I hadn’t backed up the first chapters of this book anywhere other than on the now missing laptop.
I was frustrated, tired and angry with myself. I thought I could do with some good news and realized the votes would by now have been counted in the US presidential election and I thought it might cheer me up to see the victory speech of the first female US president, so I turned on the news.
That day I had eight interviews lined up. Eight journalists, who would most likely all ask the question: ‘You study happiness – so how happy are you?’
So, how happy was I? Can you quantify feelings? How do we measure happiness?
The way the world has been measuring happiness for decades can be summed up like this: Imagine two friends meeting after a long time. ‘How are you?’ the one friend asks the other. ‘I make 40,800 euros per year,’ she replies. No one talks like this, but this is how we have been measuring well-being traditionally. We have been saying that money equals happiness. And while money may matter – it is not the only thing that contributes to our happiness.
Unfortunately, that is how we have been measuring happiness up until recently. We have been using income as a proxy for happiness, well-being or quality of life and using GDP per capita to measure our progress as nations. One of the reasons for this is that income – national or personal – is objective. However, happiness is not. Happiness is subjective.
This is often the first response I get when people hear that the Happiness Research Institute tries to measure happiness:
‘How can you measure happiness, it is so subjective?’
Yes, of course happiness is subjective, and it should be. To me, that is not an issue. What I care about in my research is how you feel about your life. That is what counts. I believe you are the best judge of whether you are happy or not. How you feel is our new metric – and then I try to understand why you feel that way. If you are happier than your neighbour, who has the bigger house, the fancy car and the perfect spouse, by our measures, you are the one that is doing something right.
Working with subjective measures is difficult, but it is not impossible. We do it all the time when it comes to stress, anxiety and depression, which are also subjective phenomena. At the end of the day, it is all about how we as individuals perceive our lives.
Happiness can mean different things to different people. You may have one perception of what happiness is, I may have another. Right now, we put the happiness label on different things, which, from a scientific point of view, makes it difficult to work around. So, the first thing we must do is to break the concept of happiness down into its various parts.
For instance, if we were to look at how the economy is doing, we could break it down into indicators such as GDP, growth and interest and unemployment rates. Each indicator gives us additional information about how the economy is doing. The same thing goes for happiness. It is an umbrella term. So, we break it down and look at the different components. Let’s go back to that morning in Paris. How happy was I?
When we look at how I was feeling at that moment, I was angry with myself for forgetting the computer, I was tired, and I was sad to hear that a lot of Americans would be facing four difficult years. In short, I was angry, tired and sad. Happy? Not so much, and pretty far from sitting on a sun-bathed balcony in the Alps eating leftover pizza with friends. On the other hand, I was in the middle of a book tour and had the privilege of talking to people around the world about my work and about happiness, so, overall, life was not treating me badly.
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THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF HAPPINESS
The first lesson in happiness research is to distinguish between being happy right now and being happy overall. We call these two states, respectively, the affective dimension and the cognitive dimension.
The affective – or hedonic – dimension examines the emotions people experience on an everyday basis. If you look at yesterday, were you depressed, sad, anxious, worried? Did you laugh? Did you feel happy? Did you feel loved?
In order to look at the cognitive dimension, people have to take a step back and evaluate their lives. How satisfied are you with your life overall? How happy are you in general? Think of the best possible life you could lead, and the worst possible. Where do you feel you stand right now? For you, the best possible life imaginable may involve fame and fortune, or it might mean staying at home to home-school your kids. To me, those are equally valid dreams. When trying to evaluate happiness, the important information is what your dream is and how close you feel to living that dream.