As I run from work to class to The Eagle's office and a million other places, I sometimes wonder why I choose to do so much. It would be easier to do less. But when I sink down on the couch late at night enveloped in genuine fatigue, I remember: the satisfaction of being tired for a reason is reason enough. It makes me happy and that's plenty.
The pursuit of happiness, the overused maxim our founders formed this country to protect, is a universal aspiration. In 1972, Bhutani King Jigme Singye Wangchuk scoffed at the modern measurement of a country's success - gross national product - and proposed a new measure: gross national happiness.
Thirty-five years later, GNH has become a more significant measure used to gauge the success of a country. Though people may construe happiness as statistically impossible to determine quantitatively, scholars from many fields have done just that for several years now. There's even a Journal of Happiness Studies.
The International Institute of Management has developed a seven-component metric to measure GNH, which divides happiness into economic, environmental, physical, mental, workplace, social and political wellness. Statisticians can consider quantitative measurements such as divorce rates, rates of antidepressant use, amount of pollution and average debt to develop a measure of something as qualitative as happiness.
But who's to say that's accurate? What truly makes people happy?
The U.K.'s Office of National Statistics recently conducted a study that found that household wealth and expenditure greatly rose in the country during the ten-year period between 1987 and 2006, but that there was no correlation between that and a rise in happiness. Average net wealth has doubled, but satisfaction levels linger around 86 percent.
A Pew Research Study from 2006, though, showed a correlation between declared levels of wealth and happiness in the U.S. This study also found correlations between happiness, marriage and religiosity, but not pet ownership or having children.
Pew also found a correlation with being "very happy" and self-identifying as white or Hispanic. Blacks were 8 percent less likely to say they were "very happy." One starts to wonder, then, how much control do we have over our happiness, and how much control do others?
Social conditions clearly play a large role; the effect of unequal access to resources, such as education, jobs and clean water, cannot be denied. Yet, cross-culturally, happiness researcher Ed Diener found most people ranked themselves as a seven on a scale of zero to ten measuring their own happiness. And the University of Michigan's World Value Surveys ranked the happiest country in the world in 2004 as Nigeria, with Mexico in second place. Perhaps that's not what you would expect.
What I'm getting at is that I'm skeptical there's an objective way to say how happy anyone is, any one group is, any one nation is. There may be value in defining just what objectively makes people, individually and as a nation, happy. Happiness, in terms of GNH, at least, is something that one can aim for. I see nothing wrong with aiming for happiness if it means better and more food for starving nations, ending discrimination or reducing carbon emissions.
But as far as what will make you- or, moreover, me - happy, I'm at a loss. Scientific analyses have proven to me that happiness is elusive and self-definition of the state is, at best, illusive.
What I can tell you, though, is that I am happy. If you ask me again tomorrow, I might tell you different. But then, that is the nature of happiness, isn't it?
Kristen Powell is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Arts Editor for The Eagle.
