Buddhism

Information is empowering, but too much can it can also be debilitating. Information Overload costs the U.S. economy $900 billion per year. In this interesting video a few of the world’s leading managers discuss the problem. In Defense of Distraction discusses how our brains are adapting to make the most of the new information-rich environments we live in:

More than any other organ, the brain is designed to change based on experience, a feature called neuroplasticity. London taxi drivers, for instance, have enlarged hippocampi (the brain region for memory and spatial processing)—a neural reward for paying attention to the tangle of the city’s streets. As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flitting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools. Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly.

However, for those of us still struggling to keep up, the article suggests meditation:

Neuroscientists have become obsessed, in recent years, with Buddhists, whose attentional discipline can apparently confer all kinds of benefits even on non-Buddhists. (Some psychologists predict that, in the same way we go out for a jog now, in the future we’ll all do daily 20-to-30-minute “secular attentional workouts.”) … attention is a limited resource… our moment-by-moment choice of attentional targets determines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives. Rapt’s epigraph comes from the psychologist and philosopher William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

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Running a country is not easy. As hard as you try, you simply can’t make everyone happy. Or can you?

In the late Eighteenth century, Englishman Jeremy Bentham suggested a Utilitarian approach –governments should aim to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. His contemporaries in the New World agreed and declared “the pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right. They were off to a good start.

But this focus on good feelings was not to last. The new nineteenth century thinkers found happiness too hard to measure and thus an impractical way to judge progress. Governments backed off and shifted their focus to less subjective metrics like economic growth and crime rates. And that might have been the end of it if not for another Englishman, a Psychologist named Adrian White. In 2006, Mr White published a surprising study. Using data from 80,000 respondents, he ranked all of the countries of the world on their peoples’ relative happiness. It didn’t shock anyone that Denmark, with their high standard of living, came out on top or that a war-torn country like Burundi came last. But what confused many people was that the remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan came in 8^th place, a comfortable 15 places ahead of the United States.

Bhutan did this despite ranking near the bottom of the world on quality of life measures. Bhutan comes 134th out of 177 countries in the Human Development Index rankings, for example. To put that in context, people born in Bhutan die about 20 years earlier than those born in Canada. The difference, I suppose, is that in Bhuan they’re dying a little bit happier.

How much happier? Only 3% of Bhutanese report being unhappy. This is quite a figure considering that psychologists say that 1 in 10 people suffer from some form of mental illness (most commonly depression). Even depressed people, it seems, are happy in Bhutan.

So how do they do it?

Quite simply, the government in Bhutan targeted the increase in their people’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) with a single-mindedness that would actually make us in the western world a little bit uncomfortable. Not only do they measure alongside Gross National Product (GNP), they put people’s happiness above everything else. (Update: I’ve just discovered that in 1990, Bhutan expelled 100,000 ethnic outsiders from the country –apparently in an attempt to boost the country’s average happiness. To me that seems a bit of a cheat. This is one of the dangers of putting too much stock in one measure of success. Human rights and everything else is overlooked. As a school teacher I’ve had a lot of similar discussions about how we measure success in schools.)

The government and the people of Bhutan deliberately sacrifice economic growth, tobacco, plastic bags, foreign investment and television –just to name a few– because they are seen as impedements to contentment.(Update: However, despite these limitations Bhutan had the second fastest economic growth of any country in the world in 2007).

Clearly these kinds of limits wouldn’t be easy for us to swallow in the west and yet we’d like the government to do more. A BBC survey recently indicated that 81% of British people think the government should focus more on making them happier, rather than wealthier. But again, I might not want them to go as far as taking away my TV.

I’ve been reading a lot about Bhutan, trying to figure out what lessons we could practically apply over here to give us a bit of the happiness they enjoy. The best thing I’ve uncovered is summed up in this quote by a western-educated Bhutanese man; he says, “the real appeal of Bhutan is that we feel human” (Frontline). To me that says a lot.

When you have a community of people committed to an ideal, even something as simple and obvious as trying to make their country a happier place, that’s a powerful thing. Part of that power is the willingness to make sacrifices.

World Map of Happiness – Top 10