571
uhc_video
On the other side of the planet, we found the happiest place in the Americas, just about 200 miles south of the Texan border, in and around Monterey, Mexico, in Nuevo Leon. And this is the part of the world where, what’s most important, when you do the world values survey, etc., what you find is most important to these people is not money, it’s not a hobby. On average, people make about $5,000 a year, which is enough to cover that basic five.
But the first and most important thing to these people, in general, is family. And their definition of family transcends kids, and brothers and sisters and your spouse, to include aunts and uncles, godparents, grandma and grandpa, even the cousins in America, which provide not only a safety network, or, and a financial network but also the assurance that they will be nudged in a more or less constant social interaction.
We find that the happiest place, the happiest people in the world, report somewhere between 7 and 8 hours of face-to-face social contact every single day. These people in Nuevo Leon are nudged into that with Quinceañera and birthdays and weddings almost every day of the week.
The second most important value, to these people, is their religion. About 85% of them belong to some religion, which highlights the notion we also see worldwide that religious people tend to report higher levels of happiness than non-religious people.
Finally, we found the happiest people in the world about 300 miles north of Copenhagen, up and around, Aarhus, Denmark. It is the second biggest city in Denmark about 300,000 people. It’s an area where it’s very easy to get around, foot traffic, very easy access to recreation. It is also a place where people are very tolerant. Right around the outskirts of town, there are three nudist colonies.
Now, I use these pictures not to send the message that these people are extreme but you can be black or white or old or female and everybody fits in very well. People are tolerated. Not that I condone this behavior, mind you, but it’s a big deal here in America, that gays have been able to be part of the military or feel like they can marry, but gays have been marrying in Denmark since 1968.
And not only can you marry freely for the last generation, one of the parents is free to take almost a whole year off of work to make sure that new baby comes into the world is cared for properly during that first year. As you know, that first year of life for an infant is so important, when it comes to how the rest of that child’s life child’s life unfolds.
They’re very trusting people. You never see a Dane walk across the street when the light is red. Mothers will meet every morning for coffee, to have coffee together but instead of bringing their children to the table they will let their toddlers sit out in the lobby and little babies who tend to cry are just parked outside. They know full well that nobody is going to mess with their little baby. A Danish woman tried this in New York City and ended up in jail for three weeks.
They are not a particularly outgoing people. As the adage goes in Denmark, the difference between the extraverted Dane and the introverted Dane is the extraverted Dane is the one looking down at your shoes instead of his own.
But it turns out there are policies that help make these introverted people assure that they are getting that 6 or 7 hours of social interactivity every day. Danes work on average about 37 and a half hours a week. They kinda knock off at about 3 in the afternoon. And about 90% of Danes belong to government-subsidized clubs, everything from cold-water swimming, to model trains. We actually spent a few nights with this club of sort of odd-looking women, who wore floppy looking hats and jump rabbits. Highly bred racing animals.
This is not a place where ambition is highly praised. A Danish conceit known as the Jante Law reminds everybody in Denmark, that you’re no better than anybody else. It’s very Minnesotan in that notion that the tall tree tends to get chopped down. People are taxed very highly here. The garbage man will make about as much as a lawyer. The average CEO only makes about three times as much as the line worker.
So, because everybody is taxed to the mean, and because of this Jante law, what you have are 4.5 million people who tend to be engaged in jobs that promote flow, that promote a sense of a challenge, of using your talents, of jobs that every once in a while, 2 or 3 hours can just float away.
Now an important point about Danes is they do have very high taxes. But the things that cause us a lot of worry are absent from their lives. When you talk about happiness, people often think about getting more joy in your life. But happiness is just as much about getting the worry out of your life. In Denmark here, nobody has to worry about education. You don’t have to worry about, can I send my kid to school? You don’t have to worry about your health care. Everybody has free health care. If I get sick, will I be taken care of? And in Denmark, you don’t have to worry about what happens when you get old. Social Security is covered, for everybody.
If you look at these three cultures, you see one set of characteristics that are unique to each. Another set of characteristics that are common to at least two, and then the common denominators. And then if you look at the 10 million or so data points from these well-being surveys taken from around the world and you draw correlations, what sorts of things are accompanying the happiest people in the world, you see that more important that GDP, that trust is most highly correlated with happiness in nations. Security. Status equality. It’s not so much financial equality but can I, can the doctor and the garbage man live on the same block?
Freedom is important but it turns out it’s more important on a national level, to be able to start your own business, economic freedom, than political freedom.
Access to leisure and green spaces also very high correlated to happiness. Tolerance. Can I be different and feel like I fit in? And then, is this a place where it is easy for me to live out my values? And that is where the cultural component comes in.
When you look at 1.4 million surveys in America you find that the happiest people in America, they tend to sleep 8 to 9 hours a day. They learn new and interesting things every day – this is important for employers. It is easy for them to get clean and safe water, that’s a correlation. Have safe places to recreate. Have enough money, that ante, to visit a dentist each year. And then they are socializing about 7 hours a day.
I argue, in thrive, that the only real way to stack the deck in favor of happiness, is to set up your environment so you will be more likely to be happy, and I break it down into 6 different domains.
There’s our community. The biggest variable in the happiness formula is where you live. If you move from an unhappy place to a happy place, you, you’re like to start reporting closer to the level of your adoptive home.
When it comes to workplace, the biggest determinant of whether or not employees like their job is if they have a best friend at work. When it comes to socializing, for every new happy friend you add to your social network, your own happiness goes up by about 15%.
When it comes to financial life it seems that the optimal amount of money to make a year is about $80,000 a year. You get no more day-to-day, moment-to-moment, experienced happiness after 80,000. When you get into hundreds of thousands and millions you may evaluate your life better, but you won’t experience it any better.
When it comes to your home, I think the biggest thing you can do to your home, to create a happier home in general, is to make sure you only have one TV screen. Happiest people only watch about 45 minutes of TV a day.
And then when it comes to yourself, it’s knowing your sense of purpose. Knowing what you are good at, what you love to do, and a place to put those gifts to work in your life.
About 40% of your happiness is dictated by your genes; about 20% of it is chance. It’s very hard to be happy if you have chronic pain or depression, or if you’re a Packers fan in Minnesota. But the final 40% is up to you. And positive psychology and motivational courses, and so forth, may work and only tend to work on the short term. I argue that it is making permanent of semi-permanent changes to your environment.
I interviewed, who I believe is the greatest happiness expert in America, the University of Chicago psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He’s this big, burly guy, who looks like a Bavarian tavern owner and I spent two days with him. And I asked him, he calls himself, he goes by the name Mike. I say, Mike, if you could distill down 40 years of research on happiness, and you could think of one, the most important thing, the most important factor to determining happiness, what would it be? And he looked down, and he breathed hard; looked down through his thick glasses and then he looked back up at me and he said, “You have to work at it.”
Thank you very much.
