No one seems to know how to define happiness. It took a German philosopher Immanuel Kant - a writer known for his difficult prose - to come up with the lame definition that happiness is not derived from reason, but of imagination.
Russian literature giant Leo Tolstoy was apparently as confused as Kant when asked to define happiness. He only said that if we want to be happy, just be it.
My favorite French philosopher Albert Camus does not help me much either. I was quite unhappy when he said that we would never be happy if we continue to search for what happiness consists of and that we would never live if we were looking for the meaning of life. With such a definition, Camus comes off more as a self-help guru than a Nobel laureate.
The Beatles went as far as saying that happiness is a warm gun, a definition that I can easily associate with Americans (especially card-carrying members of the National Rifle Association) who apparently equate the pursuit of happiness with gun ownership.
Given the fact that there are no agreed upon definition of happiness, I was really upset when my wife read to me an excerpt from the book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Place is the World penned by Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) correspondent Eric Weiner, which said that Indonesia is an unhappy country populated by unhappy people.
I was ticked off after reading more - and I don't usually read self-help books -and found out that people in the Himalayan country of Bhutan are happier than most of us. In fact, the king of the tiny state has made Gross National Happiness a national priority.
We are even less happy than our ASEAN neighbor in the north, Thailand. In Thailand, Weiner said that people were happy because they are not thinking about happiness very much.
Thai people have the expression of mai pen lai that roughly translates as "don't think too much." Camus would certainly agree with this expression.
But that was when I was still living the pampered life of the American Midwest, when the homeland in the orient seemed more exotic than ever, when homesickness - and the craving for sate kambing and pecel - clouded my informed judgment about the unpleasant nature of a distant home.
Reality hit hard when I returned to Jakarta three weeks ago. I began to recalibrate my judgment on Weiner. Could it be that Weiner was right?
How can you find happiness in a place blanketed with an endless supply of airborne toxic material? How can there be happiness in a place where every downpour could lead to severe flooding? Is happiness possible in a place where the sky has become a landfill, where the airwaves are filled with endless political campaigns, over-the-top reality television shows, shrieking soap operas or just plain bad pop songs?
Or are we really happy when we are always envious of our neighbors' new Blackberry Curves, iPhones or the trendiest nightclubs to hang out. After all, the key to happiness is the lack of envy, as Weiner said of the people of the Arctic country of Iceland.
My former neighbors who lived in the Chicago suburbs of McMansion - with their manicured lawn and shaded patio - were likely happier than my current neighbors in the southern suburbs of Jakarta.
The blue-collar folks who constantly crave for the slimmest model flat-screen television at Wal-Mart may worship at the altar of materialism, but at least they could drive down a traffic-free road or jog freely on an obstacle-free sidewalk. Most people who are bundled up for subzero temperatures during the Minneapolis winter might live in misery but at least they can move about the city on an efficient public transport system.
But then again, happiness is an elusive concept. What if it turns out that happiness does not come from owning things or from living in an orderly environment.
What if happiness does not come from always following rules and you can just drive off when there is no car in sight at any given intersection? What if it turns out that the greatest virtue in modern life is slacking off at work or having the freedom to eat any roadside vendor's place without fussing too much about cleanliness?
Or may be those Thai people are right after all. May be I should stop thinking whether I am happy or not.
- M. Taufiqurrahman
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