Cheatsheet: "The Geography of Bliss" by Eric Weiner

Recommended for Startup Investors?

No

Why

Not directly related to startup investing in any way. That said, it has a fascinating concept of a world tour exploring the themes of happiness and national cultures interpretation of this. Makes me wonder what a "Geography of Entrepreneurship" would look like. In addition, in the 2020's, 1) is there a golden age taking place somewhere? 2) if so, what is the golden age centered around, 3) how do we find it?

Concepts

• Netherlands: Happiness is a Number
• Switzerland: Happiness is Boredom
• Bhutan: Happiness is a Policy
• Qatar: Happiness is a Winning Lottery Ticket
• Iceland: Happiness is a Failure
• Moldova: Happiness is Somewhere Else
• Thailand: Happiness is Not Thinking
• Great Britain: Happiness is a Work-In-Progress
• India: Happiness is a Contradiction
• United States: Happiness is Home
• East Asian Happiness gap
• Maybe philosophers are unhappy because most of the time they're lonely brooding pasty skinned white guys who wrote philosophy

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/76479.A_Field_Guide_to_Getting_Lost

Facts

Netherlands

• Happiness and Democracy Studies (Ronald Inglehart): https://www3.nd.edu/~adutt/activities/documents/InglehartHappinessandDemocracy1.pdf
• East Asian Happiness Gap: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.876.4820&rep=rep1&type=pdf
• Alpha blondie coffee shop in Rotterdam

Switzerland

• Each year more people go to zoos in Switerzland than all events combined
• The concept of "homesickness" comes from Switzerland, where passports don't have place of birth but have ancestral homeland
• The Swiss are wealthy and patient which is a rare combination

Bhutan

• "Rich people in the West have not touched fresh bodies and wounds"
• After $15k a year, link between economic growth and happiness is disconnected
• Travel comes from the trevail
• 90% of Bhutanese who study abroad return to Bhutan afterwards
• "Lama Licker"

Qatar

• Chinese say that goal is to be a good ancestor
• Flanders Netherlands is where the first lottery was held
• Happiness and luck are etymologically from the same word

Iceland

• Bracketed indulgence is a popular characteristic of the Icelandics
• Iceland loves its writers
• Free food is a big deal because very expensive
• Icelandic everyone is related. Has impacts. For example, America tolerates high unemployment (5-6%) and low inflation (1-2%.) These allowances are flipped in Iceland. Because everyone is literally family, they accept greater collective pain (inflation) versus greater individual pain (unemployment.)
• Culture in Iceland is being invented
• Icelandic like Chinese "I learned Icelandic in order to learn how to think"
• Odin is god of verse and violence
• "Misery expressed is misery reduced"
• Denmark and Sweden have more population than Iceland but less creative
• "The land itself is a source of creativity and volcano changes"
• People talk about energy
• Swiss suppress envy by hiding things, Iceland suppressed envy by sharing them
• "Compete" used to etymologically mean to "seek with"
• "Failure doesn't carry a stigma in Iceland—in a way we admire failures"
• A pinch of self delusion is good for happiness
• Crap in art does the same thing as in agriculture, it's fertilizer for the good stuff, but you can't have one without the other.
• Iceland superstitions between "knowing and not knowing", very Chinese
• Joseph Campbell met the leader of the Heathens
• "Vikings didn't plunder/raid any more than others, Irish settlers just wanted to discredit Vikings"
• Middle-wise
• Iceland Airways employed a Stopover Iceland policy as a way to promote tourism
• "Gone Native", Hedonic refugees
• Rogner is a happy artist
• Happiness and unhappiness two different coins so you can have both at the same time (rather than alternating)
• Boredom and happiness are all choices

Moldova

• Moldovan culture is essentially Romanian. Became a democracy but not happy.
• Ronald Inglehart: culture is trust and tolerance, internal and external trust
• "Substituting real values with money values"
• Powerlessness kills happiness more than anything
• Weiner prefers ersatz politeness to genuine rudeness
• Solid identities are important
• Seeing Moldovan unhappiness did not make Weiner happier (e.g. no "relative unhappiness")
• "Not our problem" is not a philosophy, quality of a society is more important than one's place in society

Thailand

• Thai dating customs: method, motive, opportunity, sexpats,
• Thai permissiveness vs. Dutch permissiveness
• "You're too serious, don't think too much"

Great Britain

• Diversity is not necessarily helpful for happiness
• Town of Slough, where the BBC did 50 person Slough happiness studies
• "You come home because this is where you live"
• There are toothpaste people and toilet paper people

India

• India makes foreign cultures subsume to them
• Bangalore is India's SV, and used to be the garden city before IT took over
• Happiness is a U shape in life
• Koshi's Bangalore

United States

• Paradise is only talked about when something is lost
• Miami and those who move there, Weiner now lives there
• "Where do you want to die?" is the place that really identifies home
• Summary of happiness end of book

Procedures

• N/A

Bonus Resources