Bhutan Happiness Quotes

I would not have done anything differently. All of the moments in my life, everyone I have met, every trip I have taken, every success I have enjoyed, every blunder I have made, every loss I have endured has been just right. I am not saying that they were all good or that they happened for a reason...but they have been right. They have been okay. As far as revelations go its pretty lame, I know. Okay is not bliss or even happiness. Okay is not the basis for a new religion or self help movement. Okay won't get me on Oprah, but okay is a start and for that I am grateful. Can I thank Bhutan for this breakthrough? It's hard to say […] It is a strange place, peculiar in ways large and small. You lose your bearings here and when that happens a crack forms in your armor. A crack large enough, if you're lucky, to let in a few shafts of light.

I submit that comfort is a diversion, and it’s not related to happiness.

It was the ruling King of Bhutan himself who, in the 1980s, set up a system that measured national advancement according to Gross National Happiness rather than Gross Domestic Product.

He rarely wanted to own any of the stuff; he was happy just to look.

Grotesquely, there are cheerleaders for the king of Bhutan because of his claim that he seeks to increase gross national happiness, when Bhutan is one of the poorest and one of the more authoritarian countries in the world.

Ask yourself if you are happy and you cease to be so.” That was John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century British philosopher who believed that happiness should be approached sideways, “like a crab.” Is Bhutan a nation of crabs? Or is this whole notion of Gross National Happiness just a clever marketing ploy, like the one Aruba dreamed up a few years ago. “Come to Aruba: the island where happiness lives.

As you rusticate, you'll encounter beauty and ugliness, peace and danger. But it will be real and of the earth. I'm an optimistic person, but deep inside all optimists, there's a bound-and-gagged pessimist sitting in the basement, struggling to get out. I believe if we don't deconstruct our lives and learn to be more earthbound and earth-friendly and sustainable, and try to live with all God's creatures, even if they're not big-eyed and behind bars in a zoo, or on our screen savers, then sooner than expected we'll be forced to, through political mandate or economics or from overuse of our resources.

In America, few people are happy, but everyone talks about happiness constantly. In Bhutan, most people are happy, but no one talks about it. This is a land devoid of introspection, bereft of self-help books, and woefully lacking in existential angst. There is no Bhutanese Dr. Phil. There is, in fact, only one psychiatrist in the entire country. He is not named Phil and, I am sad to report, does not even have his own television show.

Death cannot just be a matter of hospitals and funeral homes and insurance and money transactions,” he said. “You need some sort of pedagogy. In Bhutan we learn that to see yourself as not always a living person, but also a dying person, is a very important pedagogy of life. Death here is part of the culture and communication.

Article 9 of Bhutan’s constitution says: “The State shall strive to promote those circumstances that will enable the successful pursuit of Gross National Happiness.

The greatest religion gives suffering to nobody,” reads a weather-beaten sign, quoting the Buddha, at Chele La pass, the highest motorable point in the country, near Paro. This maxim is everywhere evident. As a Bhutanese friend and I walked in the mountains one afternoon, he reflexively removed insects from the path and gently placed them in the verge, out of harm’s way. Early one morning in Thimphu, I saw a group of young schoolboys, in their spotless white-sleeved ghos, crouching over a mouse on the street, gently offering it food. In Bhutan, the horses that trudge up the steep trail to the Tiger’s Nest monastery are reserved for out-of-shape tourists; Bhutanese don’t consider horses beasts of burden and prefer not to make them suffer under heavy loads. Even harvesting honey is considered a sign of disrespect for the industrious bees; my young guide, Kezang, admonished me for buying a bottle of Bhutanese honey to take home. (Chastened, I left it there.) In

Happiness, he said, warming his hands around a fresh cup of coffee, is a choice. “You have to brew it in yourself. Even from a lump of food, we choose each grain to suit our need. Likewise, in the philosophical manner, we choose to be who we are.

Bhutan's per capita income is less than a thousand dollars per year and most of its people are Buddhists with no belief in Yahweh, Jesus, or Allah. Nonetheless, the people of this small Himalayan nation rank in the top ten of the world when it comes to happiness.

The well-being of people was to be considered before the sheer generations of goods and cash, before rampant growth just for the sake of an upward slope on a graph. Quality of life was to take precedence over financial and material success. Compassion toward and cooperation with your fellow citizens was fundamental, essential, rather than mowing down the other guy with abandon so you could succeed.

Being, not having. Happiness above wealth. It sounded great to me; Bhutan certainly appeared to have its priorities straight. At least, it seemed to have the same priorities I was craving more of in my world.

Recall that GDP, gross domestic product, the dominant metric in economics for the last century, consists of a combination of consumption, plus private investments, plus government spending, plus exports-minus-imports. Criticisms of GDP are many, as it includes destructive activities as positive economic numbers, and excludes many kinds of negative externalities, as well as issues of health, social reproduction, citizen satisfaction, and so on. Alternative measures that compensate for these deficiencies include: the Genuine Progress Indicator, which uses twenty-six different variables to determine its single index number; the UN’s Human Development Index, developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990, which combines life expectancy, education levels, and gross national income per capita (later the UN introduced the inequality-adjusted HDI); the UN’s Inclusive Wealth Report, which combines manufactured capital, human capital, natural capital, adjusted by factors including carbon emissions; the Happy Planet Index, created by the New Economic Forum, which combines well-being as reported by citizens, life expectancy, and inequality of outcomes, divided by ecological footprint (by this rubric the US scores 20.1 out of 100, and comes in 108th out of 140 countries rated); the Food Sustainability Index, formulated by Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, which uses fifty-eight metrics to measure food security, welfare, and ecological sustainability; the Ecological Footprint, as developed by the Global Footprint Network, which estimates how much land it would take to sustainably support the lifestyle of a town or country, an amount always larger by considerable margins than the political entities being evaluated, except for Cuba and a few other countries; and Bhutan’s famous Gross National Happiness, which uses thirty-three metrics to measure the titular quality in quantitative terms.

It was the ruling King of Bhutan himself who, in the 1980s, set up a system that measured national advancement according to Gross National Happiness rather than Gross Domestic Product.