Hot off the press is the newest report of the Global Flourishing Study — an ongoing project managed by Harvard and Baylor which checks in with hundreds of thousands of folks in 22 countries to see how they’re doing. “Flourishing” might best be described as truly crushing this thing called life. You’re happy, you’re healthy, you’re at peace. Once again this year, the Scandinavian countries came out on top.
The big surprise was who came out on the bottom: Japan, the UK, and the United States. Countries with among the highest GDP in the world.
WTF?
For most of human history “prosperity equals happiness” was taken as a kind of natural law; our whole economic system was founded on it. Then came the New Age countermessage that “money doesn’t buy happiness,” repeated so often it became cliché (though nobody actually believed it). The new Harvard data pushes the case. Not only does money NOT buy happiness, too much money actually buys UNHAPPINESS. In general, in the Harvard study, the higher a country’s GDP, the lower its flourishing score. In terms of quality of life, the lower-income countries measured have it all over the wealthy ones. The richer the country, the “poorer” its citizens, in this sense.
Poring over the results of their Flourishing study, seeing the scores of countries like Indonesia blow away their own U S of A, the American psychologists floated the million-dollar question: ‘How do we get to Indonesia?’
The answer might be hiding in a scientific paper published a quarter century ago.
Appearing in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences under the title The Weirdest People in the World, the paper called out the arrogant egocentrism of Western social science by revealing a gross bias in the way research is conducted. The test subjects from whom psychologists draw their generalizations about how “people” behave come from a select pool. Mostly, the guinea pigs are psych undergraduate students trying to earn beer money by participating in studies. The wild leap is that this small and largely homogenous group accurately represents “the universal human.”
Turns out that’s bonkers.
These sample subjects are actually WEIRD. That is, they come from Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic societies. “Our sample is the West, but not the Rest,” as co-author Steve Heine put it. The Rest is much bigger than us, and it’s growing much faster.
And, as it turns out, “The Rest” has much to teach us.
The traits that constitute Western WEIRDness add up to a certain kind of mind. We rely heavily on analytic thinking over more holistic approaches to problem-solving. (Thanks, Aristotle.) We toil away in silos, rather than co-operatively, and we press on deep into the night; we are capitalism’s cowboys, its shoeleather entrepreneurs and silent giggers and solo coders (Thanks, Protestant work ethic). We’ve thrown off childish spiritual pursuits — like going to church or even believing in a higher power. We’re bowling along, and that is a weird thing to do — and a dead-end on the camino of the fulfilling life.
By contrast, the rest of the world has structures of kinship and social interdependence — including economic and political and inter-generational bonds — that are alien to the modern Westerner. It has thrown in with family, tradition and faith — the very things the West is retreating from, with disastrous results.
Outside the climate-controlled bubble of Western WEIRDness, the secret of life is being run up the flag. That secret turns out to be the very things the flourishing study identified. Things like physical and mental health. Civic engagement and a will to vote. A comfortable place to live. A spiritual story that gives your life meaning. And people around you who love you. To truly flourish, the elements of your life must resonate with your deepest values. Yes, having enough money to pay the bills matters; having enough to blow on a speedboat does not.
In fact, material wealth is the one trait that actually seems to come at the expense of others. The things that drive up GDP — an ethic of long work hours and eyes-on-the-prize individual focus on making partner or crushing your quarterly numbers — actually drive down happiness and connection and fulfillment and peace. (Japan, which came dead last in the flourishing sweepstakes, emerges as a cautionary tale. In its breakneck embrace of hyper-capitalism over the last century and a half, it tossed many of its cultural and social and religious traditions over the side — the very things that could have balmed the widespread mental-health crises the country is seeing now, especially among its young.)
So this is how we get to Indonesia — that is, how we recover from the state we find ourselves in, socially and spiritually bereft: We lose the arrogance and stop being so WEIRD. We make the effort to hang out with our families and neighbors. Eat together. Co-create stuff. Find common cause. Volunteer. Reflect. Hold hands and face the sunrise.
It’s simple. Not easy, but simple.
Morally we are slackers, and the supposed best and brightest among us are the biggest slackers of all, according to the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. He singles out for particular scorn hard-driving students who charge out of grad school into the hindering professions — hedge funds or corporate law or PR or consulting. He urges them to instead investigate sectors that generate more meaning and social value ... even though they pay less money. Because making meaning — in your own life and as part of the weave of your community — is just better than being rich.
(”In the Sixties, fifty percent of college students said making as much money as possible was a really important life goal,” Bregman told a reporter recently. “Today that’s eighty to ninety percent. For me, that shows that this is not human nature. It is culture. It can change.”)
As for young Lefties, the challenge is to be less self-involved and self-righteous and borderline pious in their purist abstemiousness. (Don’t eat meat, don’t fly, don’t use plastic straws, don’t have kids...) Instead, take some of that energy you’re burning playing defense — reducing your footprint to so close to zero you might as well not have existed — and use it to make positive, ambitious change.
These things are good for the world and good for us: Building community. Doing good for good’s sake. Being grateful for what you’re able to manage. And not posting about any of it, ya bastard.
That’s the way most of the rest of the world gets it done.
And the rest of the world is right.
Our culture has fooled us into a wrongheaded way to live. It’s time to unwind all that now. When the writers at this magazine talk about the “vibe shift” Western culture desperately needs right now, this is what we’re talking about.
Step into it.
— Harry Flood
Sounds spot on.
The problem with GDP is it measures “quantity” of money without considering “quality” of expenditure ie. where is the money spent.
Measuring the wealth that a country produces without considering where, how and on who and what it is spent, tells us nothing about quality of life and flourishing.
We can all of course accurately speculate on why these details aren’t openly expressed… because they highlight what we all already know: the rich are getting absurdly richer and the poor are being increasing squeezed out over the edge into poverty, famine, sickness, disease and oblivion.
What we measure we can direct and change.
Ask better questions get more useful answers.
Focus on flourishing - instead of money for fat cats - and we might be able to begin to cocreate outcomes of universal flourishing for all.