I read an article from an Economist I got my hands on a couple weeks ago, entitled, “The Rich, The Poor and Bulgaria”, which discusses the newfound evidence that there is a strong correlation between wealth and happiness—not just within a particular country as previously thought—but across countries (except Bulgaria, whose potent unhappiness is simply off the charts). In other words, it takes the wind out of the sails of every spiritual guru who proffers, “Money doesn’t buy happiness.”
My own faith in that mantra was established one summer after my sophomore year when I went to southwestern Mexico to improve my Spanish. I came to know some of the happiest—and poorest—people I had ever known, to that date. Then, I came to the even poorer regions of rural Ghana, and my belief in this relativity notion of happiness was only strengthened: people take life as it comes here, and they laugh all the time—sometimes more than I find natural! Of course, one might posit that laughing is not proof of contentedness, but, be that as it may, visceral happiness DOES have some real connection with inner well-being and therefore cannot be discounted.
So doesn’t the Economist’s position contradict my observations I’ve made of happy, poor people? Actually, not entirely. In fact, all the while that Ghanaians are smiling and laughing, they are also incessantly complaining about low wages, job insecurity, corrupt government, or just simply how much they are “suffering” (one ex-pat told me he thinks they have started using this word, in particular, as interaction with—and jealousy of—the West has grown). Almost every Ghanaian I have met has—sometimes jokingly, sometimes not so much—asked me to take them back with me to “Europe,” a term which locals use to refer to the utopia they imagine existing amongst all Western lands. Against this utopia, they see themselves as terribly suffering. Suffering, yet happy…
So here is my qualified theory (or at least my attempt at making sense of my observations without stepping on the feet of those divinely ordained, all-knowing Economist writers): basically, there is happiness of the moment (or what they call “hedonic” well-being), and then long-term happiness, i.e., how you feel about your life on the whole (what they call “global” well-being). My feeling is that Ghanaians rank high on the former and dismal on the second, whereas we Westerners may be somewhere in between on both. Putting the two measures together, one can see how Ghanaians might net a ‘Gross National Happiness’ lower than Americans or Germans—just as the Economist makes claim—and yet continue to keep laughing about seemingly nothing at all!
Actually, I find this discussion of comparative happiness to be particularly interesting in light of the current era of globalization. While the article lays to waste the established theory that happiness is relative to the particular lot we find ourselves in, I might say that the theory still holds—it’s just that the “lot” just got a LOT bigger: Ghanaians are not just interacting with Ghanaians but Westerners too, be it through ex-pats like myself, Coca-cola, or Hollywood. In short, we are all beginning to compare ourselves against more and more people, for better or worse.
**For those of you who were hoping to get an actual update on my life here: Sorry, but thanks for making it this far, and I promise to give one next time!
