Gross
National Happiness
By Albert B. Kelly
If you’re reading this,
then you know we’re looking up the barrel at another Thanksgiving Holiday, a
time of the year when we pause, reflect, and maybe cultivate and nurture a
sense of gratitude, the giving of thanks, for people and things in our lives.
If that fails, there’s
always eating like a gluttonous Roman while watching football and then shopping
til you drop; secure in the knowledge that you’ve done your part to ensure that
retailers the world over get off to a good start on fourth quarter earnings.
It’s certainly hard to
drill down on Thanksgiving and get intimate with the real meaning of the
holiday when stores are pushing us out the door to start Black Friday on
Thursday. That’s why recently I was pleasantly surprised to learn a few things
about the country of Bhutan.
I’d never heard of Bhutan
before and except for an article by journalist Madeline Drexler from a
publication called “Tricycle” that a friend shared; I would still be in the
dark about this country of 742k at the eastern end of the Himalayas.
According to the piece,
Article 9 of the Bhutan Constitution says, “The State shall strive to promote
those circumstances that will enable the successful pursuit of “Gross National
Happiness”. Imagine that.
To me, living in a country
and culture that measures success and the good life in materials things (think
Gross Domestic Product or GDP), seeing “Gross National Happiness” enshrined in
a constitution is kind of surprising…but in a good way.
Of course that leads to
the question of how a person defines “happiness” and how you would go about
measuring how much of it you actually had once you got around to defining it.
But to me, it seems a good thing to wrestle with because it makes you think
about what you really value in life.
In visiting Bhutan and
speaking with its residents, Madeline Drexler noted in her article that when it
came to defining happiness, there was something of a difference between older
rural citizens and younger urbanized residents.
Older villagers pointed
out that as long as they had food, water, fire, and shelter they had what they
needed and happiness was more about compassion and being good at heart. In
contrast, younger Bhutanese struggle with unemployment, drug abuse and related
issues of modern life much as we do.
It wasn’t always that way
in Bhutan. Over the last few decades, modernity changed everything. My guess is
that urbanization and material growth, stuff most young Bhutanese are expected
to embrace, changed expectations and assumptions and when that happens, the
difference between wants and needs gets fuzzy.
This fuzziness between
wants and needs happens all the time. It’s why holidays get commercialized and
monetized, why many measure happiness by the amount of stuff they have, why the
average family carries thousands in credit card debt, why shopping is an
addiction for some, why a 2 year-old iPhone is no longer adequate.
It is worth noting that
also enshrined in their constitution, Bhutan requires that no less than 60% of
the land must remain under forest cover (what we call open space), there is no
capital punishment, there are roughly 16 recognized holidays and “domains” like
good governance, balanced use of time, cultural and environmental preservation are
the support beams that hold up the framework for “Gross National Happiness”.
They may not always
achieve their goals and they have problems to be sure, but the idea that these
things, above purely material stuff, is the constitutional soil to cultivate the
idea of national happiness- what we might call quality of life- it gives them a
good filter to distinguish the important from the unimportant
My take away, as we
approach Thanksgiving and Christmas beyond, is that happiness, like thankfulness,
is easier to come by if not tied to material prosperity. Sometimes it’s enough
to have what we truly need, which is often far different than what advertisers
say we need.
Maybe it’s enough to have
a safe place to be, decent nourishment for the body, love to nourish the soul, and
honest work to nourish the mind.
If there’s anything more,
maybe it’s having ample opportunities to do kindnesses to others as a way to
nourish the spirit. Thankfulness, at least the kind that sticks around for a while,
comes from within and it’s hard to measure, whether in Bhutan or here in in
Bridgeton. Here’s to a Happy Thanksgiving.