We all want to know who the happiest person in the world is. Who’s the best friend, who’s the best spouse, who’s the best parent, who’s the happiest person on earth?
You may have an answer.
But when it comes to yourself, when it comes to your innermost self, there’s only one correct answer: none of them.
The happiest person in the world isn’t any of us. It’s whoever’s happiest at the moment.
The happiest person in the world isn’t any of us. It’s whoever’s happiest right now.
Which makes it the most pointless question in the world. Because it’s impossible to know who’s the happiest person in the world at any given time.
There’s no singular answer to that question either. Because whenever you ask, “Who’s the happiest person in the world?”, you get different, unrelated, sometimes contradictory answers.
Perhaps, the most famous and well-studied example of the ridiculousness of the question is the case of Dr. Ishval Weiss, a psychiatrist who performed an experiment similar to the one in the movie Up in the Air, except this time, instead of asking a simple question about the happiness of a single person, Weiss asked about the happiness of an entire culture.
As a culture, America was only just beginning to recover from the Great Depression.
The US was still mired in the great depression, and many of its citizens still had faith in the economy and the stock market.
There were few if any doubts left among the average person that the economy was healthy and that the stock market was a legitimate measurement of the economy as a whole.
America was happy.
Dr. Weiss’s key finding was that even though there were still large numbers of people who saw the stock market as a legitimate measure of the economy, others were now beginning to change their minds.
This was a very unexpected finding. Usually when you do an experiment like this, you’d expect to find that the majority of people now believed the economy was healthy, and changing their minds in the middle of a global depression was no big deal.
You’d be wrong.
The US was still mired in the same circular thinking it had when the stock market was healthy. The stock market would always be first, everything else would come later.
This time, however, it was different. The economy had crashed, and now the stock market was only just beginning to recover. The US was still mired in a similar sort of irrational thinking.
America was in a very unhealthy and self-sabotaging debate. It was still arguing about the merits of austerity versus stimulus, about whether to keep paying the national debt or to spend more money on unemployment benefits and infrastructure.
The US was stuck in debate mode.
This was something else entirely. This was a new and very profound insight.
It turns out that the people who believed the stock market was the most legitimate measure of the economy were exactly the same people who believed the best person to have a child was their firstborn child.
That’s right: the happiest people in the world don’t care about the stock market at all. They don’t care about the stock market at all. They’re the ones who have the happiest babies.
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense.
When the economy is good, people are happy. When the economy is bad, people are still happy.
The happiest person in the world won’t have any impact on the happiness of anyone else. There’s an intrinsic happiness that comes from the soul-calming of the good economy, and there’s an intrinsic sadness that comes from the crippling of hope.
The happiest person in the world won’t have any impact on the happiness of anyone else. There’s an intrinsic happiness that comes from the soul-calming of the good economy, and there’s an intrinsic sadness that comes from the crippling of hope.
It’s a simple, but profound truth. A truth that explains why China became so unhappy, why so many other countries around the world became so unhappy, and why the world as a whole is becoming more unhappy.
The happiest people in the world don’t care about the stock market. They don’t care about the fundamentals of the economy. They don’t care about the number of people who lost their jobs last week. Those are just noise signals, distractions that distract us from the fact that the truth of the matter is, fundamentally, an abundance of joy.
The happiest person in the world doesn’t care about anything except for themselves. If you don’t believe me, ask your friends. Ask your family. Ask yourself.
The happiest person in the world isn’t a computer. The happiest person in the world isn’t a psychologist. The happiest person in the world isn’t a businessperson.