In the Land of Happiness
Bhutan has its own national theory of happiness. How cool is that?
I traveled to Bhutan in January of this year and am just now getting around to writing about it. This is the first in a three-part series I’ll publish on this fascinating and hard-to-visit country. Bhutan is famous for its centuries of drastically isolationist policies (particularly in the first half of the 20th century), its commitment to sustainable development (e.g., as the first carbon-negative country on the planet), and its prioritization of “gross national happiness” over gross domestic product. Unlike other exceptionally remote, isolated countries to which tourists rarely go, Bhutan is not a brutal dictatorship. It is peaceful, beautiful, and intentionally optimizes for the quality (over quantity) of its visitors’ experiences. Does that make it, as so many observers have proposed, a kind of fairytale paradise? As ever, the reality is more complicated.
To the Land of Happiness
To land in Bhutan is to feel, mostly because you are told repeatedly, that you are part of something special. The experience of the foreign tourist is carefully and intentionally designed to convince you that this country is singular—that no matter where else you’ve been on this planet, you’ve never been anywhere quite like this.
My indoctrination to this idea came earlier this year, in January 2023, when I traveled from Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, to Paro, the only international airport in the remote Himalayan outpost of Bhutan. This is not a normal flight to take. It is not a bustling leg of the global commerce circuit. To even get from Vietnam to Bhutan, a special flight must be requisitioned. The only reason that I found myself embarking under these conditions was the invitation of a family friend whose tourist company specializes in taking Vietnamese people to obscure Central Asian destinations. Bhutan is the most highly sought, and I had just so happened to be in country when the longstanding invitation to make the pilgrimage was finally able to be accepted. And so it was that I found myself en route to Bhutan with myself, my mother, and the giddy energy of about eighty Vietnamese people anticipating an opportunity to see a country few people ever get to see. It was quite possibly the most delighted I’ve ever been.
The first sign that Bhutan is not your usual tourist destination is the flight. Not only does it have to be specially chartered, it leaves at an hour of ungodly earliness, before the morning dew has yet to settle on the grass outside the airport. Given that the flight is specially scheduled, it might seem advisable for it to take off at a more reasonable time. However, Bhutan operates according to a special logic. For the foreign tourist, it costs money simply to exist there. For every day a tourist spends in the country, they pay a fee. This fee is designed in essence to pay for other tourists not to be there. The Bhutanese government is stingy with its visas and under the auspices of their “High value, low volume” policy opens a small number of spots to outsiders every year. Prior to the pandemic, it was on the order of a couple hundred thousand visitors per year. Compare this to Nepal, a country of similar cultural and geographical makeup, which welcomes well over a million tourists each year. As part of the same policy, tourists in Bhutan must be accompanied by a tour guide. The Bhutanese government doesn’t trust outsiders to wander the country unfettered, so they dispatch a local to oversee every group of tourists in their exploration of the nation’s landmarks. This is meant both to increase the quality of the visitor’s experience, as well as make sure they don’t do any of the things that tourists so often do to screw with one’s national heritage, like discarding a Snickers wrapper on the grounds of an important historical monument.
The other thing about flying into Bhutan is that only Bhutanese people are allowed to do it. The only airlines allowed to fly in and out of the country are operated by the Bhutanese government. The international airport at Paro is not a normal airport. It requires a pilot to maneuver swooping in and out of mountainous terrain at an altitude so low a passenger could reach out the window and brush the treetops below. Not only is run-up treacherous, but the runway is short. It is one of the most dangerous runways in the world. Landing at it requires a set of skills that would almost certainly qualify someone to be a stunt pilot on the set of Top Gun 2. At some point in the flight, the pilot addresses the passengers that the Himalayan range, including Mount Everest, is viewable from the left window, at which point the forty people not on that side of the plane scramble over to get a view. Boarding the plane in Vietnam, the temperature was 31 degrees centigrade (88°F). Landing in Bhutan, it was a decidedly more brisk -1°C.
The air in Bhutan is thin but highly oxygenated. Paro stands at 2,400 meters above sea level, about a kilometer higher than Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu. Yet somewhere between 50% and 75% of the country’s entire area is forested. But once one acclimatizes to this novel sensation of respiration, there’s an even more striking observation to be made. There are no other planes on the runway. Not a single one. Whereas most airports carefully ferry passengers to and from the tarmac in front of an airplane, or dispense them directly from the terminal to the fuselage, freshly disembarked tourists in Bhutan are allowed to sort of wander off the plane, snap some photos, and have a look around. They can’t wander very far. It’s not like there are any other groups for them to get mixed up with. Nor will they be reduced to a smudge on the runway by an incoming plane. There’s only one building nearby, a monastery-looking structure where the terminal should be. The structure is a single white block, pristine as a new stack of printer paper, with uniform rows of dark red windows. In the center is the unmistakably Himalayan pattern of repetitive, ornate design. The building is painstakingly well-kept, in a way that gives it an air of spiritual significance (a visitor to Bhutan quickly learns that this is the preferred architectural style for any building of national importance, monastic chic). Eventually, the group of new arrivals has nothing else to do but wander toward it.
The current of excitement running through that mountain air is palpable. There’s an immediate sense of solidarity in collective anticipation of what’s about to happen. You are about to do something few people get to do. You are about to enter Bhutan.
Dzong at the Top of the World
To say that the country of Bhutan is remote is to engage in a kind of droll understatement. As far back as the country’s historical record stretches, Bhutan has never been colonized or conquered by an outside power. This is a rather more significant distinction than it might at first seem, as the British had the opportunity to do so in the heyday of their empire. Bhutan hovers like a balloon above two of Britain’s former colonial strongholds, India and Myanmar (colonial alias: Burma). Bhutan’s entire southern border runs along the part of India wedged above Bangladesh. One way of reading Bhutan’s history during the colonial period is that the British, having firmly established themselves to the south in India, briefly considered proceeding north into Bhutan, then decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. They couldn’t be bothered to climb the requisite hills.
Not only is Bhutan isolated from the rest of the world but the country also sought to separate itself from its neighbors. For instance, Bhutan and Nepal are essentially brother states with fundamentally different theories about how those states should be run. They are similar in relative size (at least to their behemoth neighbors, China and India), geography, and economy, but whereas Nepal has had a policy of coaxing as many foreigners into its borders as possible Bhutan has played its hand a little closer to the vest. Bhutan’s policy concerning tourism has largely been to watch Nepal make a decision, see how it plays out over twenty or so years, then consider how best to implement a comparable policy based on what went wrong in Nepal’s experiment. For example, everyone knows that Mountain Everest is the world’s tallest mountain and most people will be familiar with its south base camp, in Nepal, which is the. most popular way to approach it. But most people won’t be aware that the world’s tallest unclimbed mountain is Gangkhar Puensum in Bhutan. The reason it is unclimbed is not that it is unclimbable, but that Bhutan doesn’t want people on it. In 1994, the Bhutanese government declared that the mountain was sacred—a common theme in the Bhutanese relationship to the land—and prohibited outsiders from clambering over it for recreational purposes.
Since its formal incorporation as a nation-state in 1907, Bhutan has prioritized cultural preservation to a degree that is likely unmatched by any other country on the planet. Bhutan has consistently chosen to make less money from tourism, discouraged its citizens from courting outside influence, and supported its cultural traditions and institutions in a way that from a Western perspective seems almost backward. As a result of its isolationist policies, Bhutan has maintained what makes the country and its people special in a way that the rest of the globalized world has not. One symbol of this effort is the Bhutanese national obsession with the dzong—the fortified monastery that characterizes all major buildings from the airport terminal to the country’s largest and most prominent sites of government and religion. The Bhutanese call their language Dzongkha, literally: the language of the fortress. And it is this sense of fortification that pervades the way they insulate themselves from the outside world.
One of the reasons that Bhutan has been able to shun globalization and still maintain its status as a sovereign nation is its dependence on India. Bhutan is a net importer, with the majority of its food (such as rice) coming across the Indian border. Its main source of income, likewise, is selling hydroelectric power to the Indian government. This exporting of energy is actually a foundation stone of Bhutan’s economy. Bhutan is the only nation in South Asia that has a surplus of energy available for export, and so India, densely populated as it is, has few options to turn to if it wants to supplement its own energy resources. Hydroelectric power constitutes about 20% of Bhutan’s economy, and almost 50% of its national revenue comes from taxes imposed on hydroelectric companies. While the Bhutanese people as a whole aren’t especially rich, the country’s monarchy is actually rather wealthy. Think: hydroelectric energy is to Bhutan as oil is to Saudi Arabia.
It is worth noting that whereas usually this kind of wealth inequality—a rich aristocracy ruling over a population consisting mostly of peasant farmers—would stir resentment, the Bhutanese people have an immensely positive disposition toward their king. On the whole, they were rather reluctant to engage in democratic processes when they were first implemented in Bhutan in 2008, mostly because they would take power away from the beloved monarchy. This isn’t a Uzbekistani approval-is-the-correct-answer public opinion pole, either; the positivity isn’t an artifact of a hereditary king coercing his population into a forced smile for the rest of the world to see. For the past century, Bhutan has been blessed with a uniquely good succession of five kings. Perhaps uniquely good in all of modern history.
In short, Bhutan in its modern history has only had to deal with one country, India—and by extension of India’s history, Britain—and so despite its strong sense of cultural identity, the nation remains a relative unknown to outsiders. There is no Starbucks in Bhutan, no Pret a Manger. The King, the Clown, and the Colonel are nowhere to be found here. Bhutan maintains an embassy in only six countries, and only three countries—India, Bangladesh, and Kuwait—maintain embassies in Bhutan. Its national language, Dzongkha, is fortress-speak. Spoken by only half a million people, it isn’t even featured on Google Translate. Yet no app is necessary to see that the theme of the fortress runs through every aspect of the nation’s affairs: dzongkhag (the local municipalities), dzongda (the district attorneys), dzongdag (royal appointees to each municipality). Bhutan, in every sense, is the fortress at the peak of the world.
The Log Cabin of Wangchuck
After arriving at the airport, and making the acquaintance of our government-approved tour guides, our group was shuttled into Paro—Bhutan’s second fastest-growing city, after its capital, Thimphu—for lunch. The central business district of Paro, if you want to call it that, was essentially a single street. The structures are mostly wooden. Though the city’s population is growing, there isn’t any obvious presence of construction downtown. The street is lined with shops, the kind tourists might like to shop at, if there were in fact any tourists. As far as I could tell, it was just us.
We were escorted to a restaurant, what seemed to be the only game in town for serving food to a large-ish group of foreigners. The restaurant featured two wooden stories and had the bright piney finish of a cabin in rural America. On the bottom floor was a Western-style coffee shop, complete with an espresso machine and pastry case. The restaurant was on the top floor and stylistically would have been at home and unremarkable as a fixture in any anonymous small town on the globe. The menu was filled mostly with food customarily suited to a generic cosmopolitan palate—a stereotypical if somewhat incoherent mix of Western specialties: pizza, burgers, various Panda Express-style Chinese dishes, spaghetti, and tomato soup.
This being my first meal in Bhutan, I was eager to try a local specialty. I lodged this request with the waitress, and she directed me to the appropriate page of the menu. I had never heard of any of it. The English descriptions weren’t especially illustrative. I asked the young woman what she recommended. She asked if I liked spicy. I told her yes. It is a matter of identity to me to be the kind of white tourist whose tolerance for spicy food becomes a subject of local lore, ideally passed down from generation to generation like a family heirloom. She recommended ema datshi, a kind of curry with cheese she told me.
“Cheese like paneer?” I asked her.
“No, not really,” she said.
She asked how spicy I wanted it. I told her to make it the way she’d normally eat it herself. The rest of the table opted to order an eclectic set of more familiar dishes.
Ema datshi is one of the main national dishes of Bhutan. In Dzongkha, ema means chili and datshi means cheese, most commonly from a yak. This is a rather euphemistic label for what the dish really is. To get a sense of it, imagine a standard-issue Thai green curry. Now, replace the coconut milk base with a kind of thin cottage cheese. It’s not identifiably cheese, per se, but rather a dairy-based template for the curry. So far, so good. Supposing it’s a basic Western version of Thai curry you’ve got in your mind’s eye, let’s say it includes the following: bamboo shoots, carrots, onions, bell peppers, and chicken. For ema datshi, replace the bamboo shoots with chilis. Spicy, skinny, eyebrow-scorching chilis. They look, like a kind of evolutionarily adapted subterfuge, like green beans. Then replace the carrots with chilis. After this replace the bell pepper and onions with chilis. Finally, substitute the chicken for, you guessed it—chilis. With these substitutes, you have pretty well grasped the concept behind the dish. The most appropriate English translation would be something along the lines of “Satan’s cheese curry.” And you know what? All things considered, it was pretty tasty. I think even now, my stomach lining has, at the time of this writing, mostly regenerated. The body is an amazing thing.
After lunch, we were shuttled off to a history museum. Specifically the National Museum of Bhutan, a tall, cylindrical building in the traditional style built into the side of a steep hill. Just outside the city of Paro, it was originally built as a dzong, erected in 1651, and repurposed in 1968 to house a selection of the nation’s culturally important artifacts. The museum’s floor plan was laid out rather in the manner of an Ikea, with a single one-way lane for pedestrian traffic winding its way through the many items on display over the building’s seven floors. The majority of the public collection featured items of anthropological interest: elaborately designed wicker baskets, ceremonial clothing, assorted weapons, agricultural implements made of iron, religious symbols, rows of large urns, used in centuries past for holding wine or the remains of ancestors or, perhaps, both. There was a lot to take in.
The trek through the museum was lightly narrated by our guides. For our sub-group of six people, two guides were assigned. The tall one, named Tenzin, was the charismatic, wide-smiling historical authority and leader of our group. He was accompanied by Pulpo, who acted as a kind of secret service agent. He was stocky, perpetually clad in black aviators (even indoors), and not given to offering verbal communication unless addressed directly. The exceptions to his taciturn disposition came mainly when he identified an opening to deploy a one-liner from the stock he’d accumulated over years of working with tourists. He had feel for perfectly timed mischief. At a later opportunity in the trip, while on a long hike, I asked Tenzin what he knew about Pulpo. He reported that Puplo had played some role in Bhutan’s military. Other than that, he knew nothing. Later on the same hike, I floated the question of background casually in Pulpo’s direction. The only thing he’d say was that he preferred his current job to his old one.
The nation of Bhutan, Tenzin told us, was unified in the 17th century by a monk named Ngawang Namgyal. It was this monk, whom Tenzin referred to by the title Zhabdrung, which gave Bhutan its endonym, Drukyal: land of the thunder dragon. It was also Zhabdrung who instilled in Bhutan’s people and landscape a flair for the high-walled, white fortress. These early Dzongs were designed to keep out Tibetan invaders, the very same people Zhabdrung had been fleeing when he settled in Bhutan. Tenzin told us a story concerning this founding father, which I wrote down at the time but had a hard time confirming in third-party sources. Allegedly, on his way out of Tibet, Zhabdrung had used his escape as an opportunity to lift some sacred artifacts. This perhaps goes some way toward explaining why the Tibetans insisted on invading the nascent Bhutanese settlement. At length, emerging from his newly erected dzong, Zhabdrung presented himself to the Tibetan invaders. In one hand, he held the sacred artifact they sought. In the other, an orange. Zhabdrung made as if to insert the artifact in the orange. With a great heave, he chucked the orange into the nearby river. Such was the depth and rapidity of the river, that the orange—and thus the artifact—was now irretrievably lost to eternity. Evidently, the Tibetans were taken in by this act of prestidigitation and with a collective shrug shuffled on home.
By far the most arresting exhibition at the museum was a row of portraits and significant objects delineating the Bhutan’s five successive kings. The Bhutanese head of state is known as Druk Gyalpo, or the Dragon King. As I mentioned, the Bhutanese monarch has produced a line of the kind of wise and gracious rulers who would make Plato stand back and take note. It seems rather unlikely that an unbroken line of five kings is each a more level-headed and selfless leader than the previous one. But that has been the case in Bhutan for the past century with the House of Wangchuck.
Each of Bhutan’s kings has his own signature accomplishment, marking off his epoch in the country’s history. The first king, Ugyen Wangchuck, is credited with founding the modern Bhutanese state. In November 1908, he was unanimously elected to head the government by a collection of worthy elites—clergy, aristocratic families, local officials—who recognized his hereditary claim to the Bhutanese thrown. His signal achievement was the signing of the Treaty of Punakha, in 1910, which codified Bhutan’s independent status from India and colonial Britain. In return for the guarantee of independence, as well as some amount of financial backing, Bhutan agreed to cede all control of its foreign relations to the British. In the style of many national founders, Ugyan Wangchuck was considered by his contemporaries to be a master statesman.
The second king, Jigme Wangchuck, built on his father’s legacy. Taking over after the first king’s death in 1926, the second Druk Gyalpo continued his father’s isolationist policies for thirty years. During this time he made two contributions which would pay dividends for his country into this century: the Treaty of Friendship with India (providing the country with enough economic autonomy to ignore the rest of the world) and to begin building modern—well, relatively modern—infrastructure.
Upon his death, the third Druk Gyalpo ascended the throne at age 16, having already studied abroad in India and the UK. It was the third king who broke from his predecessor’s strictly isolationist policies and began to open Bhutan to the outside world. Legal codes were reformed. Legislative procedures were modernized. For the first time, foreigners were allowed to enter. Then, after twenty years at the helm, the third king died in 1972. The throne was passed to his son, who was also only 16 years of age. It was the 4th Druk Gyalpo who instituted the policies of social and sustainable development for which Bhutan is famous. He was the one who came up with the idea of Gross National Happiness. Bhutan is the world’s first carbon-negative country largely because of reforms which he set in motion.
The fourth king, perhaps being surprised at his own ability to live past his son’s 16th birthday, shocked the country in 2005 by announcing his intent to abdicate the throne. His son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, assumed the throne in 2006, though the public coronation did not take place until November 2008—to mark the 100th anniversary of Bhutan’s monarchy.
The fifth king is by far the most modern of the Druk Gyalpo lineage. His first act as king was to democratize the country. He oversaw the drafting of the nation’s constitution and traveled throughout the country in order to explain it in person to his constituents. He is known for his encouragement of young people to seek education and to set higher standards for themselves in business and civil service. In 2021, he decriminalized same-sex marriage in Bhutan. While this may seem somewhat late to the game, there’s no rule that says small, autonomous, highly religious nation-states have to adopt this policy at all.
Perhaps most importantly, he was the first king of Bhutan whose royal wedding was an international media event. It helps, surely, that King Jigme has the suave, rounded looks of a young Elvis Presley. Upon the announcement of engagement to his selected Dragon Queen, King Jigme put out a press release stating: “Now, many will have their own idea of what a Queen should be like—that she should be uniquely beautiful, intelligent and graceful... For the Queen, what is most important is that at all times, as an individual she must be a good human being, and as Queen, she must be unwavering in her commitment to serve the People and Country. As my queen, I have found such a person and her name is Jetsun Pema.” Their son, Bhutan’s heir apparent, was born in February of 2016. Pictures of the current royal family can be seen in nearly every room—public, private, religious, commercial, significant, mundane—around the country.
One fact about the current king which I found particularly compelling was his educational background. After beginning his education in Bhutan, he enrolled at Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, Wheaton College (also in Massachusetts), and then the Diplomatic Studies Programme at Magdalen College, Oxford. I wonder what his peers in rural Massachusetts made of him. Can’t you just imagine it? “So Jigme, remind me. What did you say you were going to do after graduation?” Oh, you know. Same as everyone else I suppose. A bit of this, bit of that. Head back home, move in with my parents, take over the family business, get married, bring democracy to my people. You know. The usual.
Gross National Happiness: Not necessarily a measure of happiness
The concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH), instituted in 1972 by Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the fourth Dragon King of Bhutan, was an attempt to recognize that a country is more than its economy. What is notable about the idea is not that it measures happiness per se—there’s a lot more to it than that—but that it is something besides GDP to gauge the nation’s trajectory.
In recent years, the rationale behind Gross Domestic Product’s hold on the imaginations of governments around the world has come into question. For example, in 2015 the Duke University economic historian Dirk Philipsen published a book called The Big Little Number, a critique of how GDP has shaped the global economy. In an interview on the book, he said that GDP is “the only measure that has ever existed in history, I think, that has been followed by regimes around the world, and that people from the right to the left subscribe to. It is what scholars call a ‘truly hegemonic’ metric. That’s amazing, because it is a metric that essentially measures the well-being of capital—not of people, and not of the environment.”
GDP is meant to measure the total value of goods and services produced by a country. But it leaves a lot out. In terms of capital, that includes unpaid work, the trading or purchase of used goods, off-the-books transactions, and large swathes of informal economic activity (which potentially includes more than 50% of workers globally). Given that the point of a healthy economy is to improve the lives of its denizens, the use of GDP as a hegemonic metric assumes that human well-being can be assessed in entirely material terms. It is this assumption that the country of Bhutan rejects.
At the center of Bhutan’s vision for GNH is sustainable development. The country’s economic growth should first and foremost support the enrichment of its environment and culture, in addition to the psychological well-being of its citizens. As such, direct measures of happiness actually make up only a small portion of the overall GNH figure. The final number reflects nine categories, which can be seen in the graphic below (taken from Bhutan’s official GNH website). Each of these categories—such as education, health, community vitality, psychological well-being, and ecological diversity—is given equal weight. Within each of those categories are yet finer distinctions, which are given greater or lesser weight within the larger category. For example, the category of Cultural Diversity and Resilience is divided into ten points. Of those ten points, two are given to speaking the native language, two are given to adhering to a code of proper etiquette known as driglam namzha, three are given to “cultural participation,” and three are given to the cultivation of artisan skills (called zorig chusum). Another example is “Time Use.” This category is given the same weight as the other eight, but it is divided into just two equal parts: work and sleep. (Can you imagine, if 5% of the governing metric of the US were based on whether its citizens got a good night’s sleep?) In this way, the country’s overall GNH figure is comprised of 33 individual metrics which in some way or another contribute to the overall well-being of Bhutanese society and its citizens.
The core vision of Bhutan’s measure of GNH is sustainability not just in the sense of positive environmental impact, but in the sense of being far, far less likely to do something that will have a long-term detrimental effect on the country’s citizens in the name of stimulating the economy. When a country relies on GDP alone to measure its national success, all sorts of nuances can be overlooked—not the least of which is the health of its people and environment. Bhutan was able to become the world’s first carbon-neutral country not just because it has a lot of trees, but because it values its forests as more than just the dollar amount its timber would fetch on the international market. To the Bhutanese, their forests have intrinsic environmental value, as well as spiritual value. Many of the forests in Bhutan, such as a particularly vast one called Nyalalum, are believed to be inhabited by evil spirits. No economic activity of any kind, including building a residence anywhere nearby, happens on any appreciable scale. While this sentiment does not factor directly into the GNH calculation, it is representative of the fact that the leaders of Bhutan govern in a way which reflects this multifaceted, highly nuanced way of assessing value.
Over time, Bhutan’s GNH index has gone up—implying that the country is happier, on the path to truly sustainable development. In 2010, the country’s overall GNH score was 0.743 (on a 0-1 range). In 2022, that number increased by almost four points to 0.781. Another way Bhutan draws a verdict from the GNH figure is to assign a happiness label to every individual citizen. For those who are considered Happy, they can either be Deeply Happy (77% or above) or Extensively Happy (66%-76%). Bhutan’s goal is to get every citizen to a 66% score or above on the index. Those who are below this figure are deemed “Not-Yet-Happy.” Citizens between 50% and 65% are considered Narrowly Happy, and those scoring less than 50% are labeled as “Unhappy.” In 2015, the overall Happiness ratio was 43% Happy to 57% Not-Yet-Happy. That figure tilted slightly in favor of the population urban, with 55% of those living in cities surpassing the ideal happiness threshold while the same was true for only 38% of the rural population.
By 2022, the overall number of people above the 66% happiness threshold in the country had risen to 48.1%. This breaks down into approximately 10% of the country being Deeply Happy, 39% Extensively Happy, and 46% Narrowly Happy, leaving only 6% of the country below the 50% mark of the happiness index threshold.
From a psychological perspective, what Bhutan’s GNH index gets right is that an individual’s overall happiness is not a simple function of self-reported happiness alone. In the West, our primary means of measuring happiness is to ask people whether or not they feel happy (Daniel Gilbert gave a strong defense of this methodological approach, based on his decades of research, in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness). However, one well-documented feature of happiness—both in empirical psychological research, and long before it—is that the more one asks the question “But am I really happy?” the less one tends to think the answer is yes. As John Stuart Mill once wrote: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is for you to have as your purpose in life not happiness but something external to it.” A while back, I wrote a piece arguing that the only way for an individual to maximize their happiness is to maximize for the root causes of happiness—particularly, as Mill suggested, a purpose greater than oneself. This is the same kind of core belief underlying Bhutan’s happiness philosophy.
The crucial innovation in Bhutan’s happiness index is that it defines happiness externally to an individual. Whether or not an individual claims to be happy is considered, but only as a single aspect of a larger story. If the individual: is a member of a community with a thriving cultural tradition and an increasing material standard of living, is governed by leadership who takes their best interest to heart, is able to get enough sleep every night, has a job which they enjoy but does not claim the entirety of their time, invests in their education, holds themselves to a standard of appropriate community conduct, invests in their own spiritual and religious enrichment, and lives in a clean, beautiful, and well-maintained area—then it is assumed that that person will be, on the whole, happy. It’s hard to argue with that.
My interactions with my Bhutanese guides and other locals seemed to support this conception of happiness. They are undoubtedly proud to be a member of a nation with GNH at the core of its development goals. But they spoke of happiness more as an abstract concept, more like a religious identity such as Buddhism, rather than constantly trying to convince outsiders that everyone in Bhutan smiles all the time no matter what the circumstances might be. Feeling happy and telling other people about it is a small part of the Bhutanese national theory of happiness. Both in the way it is measured in GNH, and in the way it is expressed by its citizens. I liked this a lot.
One of our guides, Tenzin, reported that since the pandemic, the country’s conception of GNH has started to shift. He described it as a “reality check.” Covid put pressure on the entirety of the global economy. But places like Bhutan were especially vulnerable. While the country is modest in its economic ambitions, it nonetheless leans heavily on a few key corridors of trade. For example, selling power to India and in return importing crucial staple crops such as rice. Also, tourism. Even though Bhutan doesn’t bring that many people in, it still relies on the influx of foreign money, particularly the high per diem tax for tourists to enter the country. Any disruption to these can cause a major fissure in the foundations of national happiness. This is another thing Bhutan is beginning to realize about psychological well-being: economic precarity does not make a good basis for individual happiness.
Happiness is a function of expectations. This is what it means for happiness to be relative: two individuals might have the same material standard of living but feel very differently about it depending on their expectations about what that level is supposed to be. Emerging from centuries of isolation, the expectations of Bhutanese citizens are changing. They’re engaging more with the outside world; more of them have studied abroad. They’re reluctant to continue traditional means of employment, such as yak herding. They see what everyone beyond the borders of their country has in terms of material possessions, and many of them are wondering—very reasonably—whether the maintenance of their nation’s cultural institutions is really worth trading for the allures of modernity. How far can the Bhutanese push the project of modernizing their country while still preserving their treasured national identity?
Whatever the answer is, we’re about to find out. Bhutan recently lowered its tourist tax. That means that it’s going to be increasingly possible for people like you and me—outsiders—to get our hands on the Bhutanese brand of happiness. It’s a turning point for a country that has for a long time built more fences than bridges. They’re eager to bring more people into the country, and with them foreign money—a move that will certainly have a positive impact on their GDP. Whether the same will be true of GNH, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
I wasn't expecting such an educational piece! The thoughts about happiness gave much to contemplate.