happiness by nationality

According to a recent survey, the world's happiest countries are:

Nigeria
Mexico
Venezuela
El Salvador
Puerto Rico

The least happy countries are:

Russia
Armenia
Romania

Why is it that I've recently become fixated on what are supposedly the world's most unhappy countries as well as the second happiest country?

How does Mexico stay so happy? I run through a list of cliches. Is it the close-knit families? The complex way they embrace death? The hearts on the line and the singing in the pulquerias? What answers does Mexico hold? According to Octavio Paz, the Mexican is a brand of stoic, costuming his loneliness with the colors of the fiesta. I need answers, Mexico. How, with all your scabbed street children, dispossessed indios, and one-armed beggars, did you find your way to happiness? Is it that simple Catholic acceptance of suffering as essential and cathartic? Perhaps it is this. Perhaps only by welcoming suffering into our lives may we find a kind of rest.



Armenia is obvious. Transcaucasia, along with former Yugoslavia and Israel/Palestine, seems to love to obsess over how their magnificent national destiny has been foiled in some way. They don't have what they're owed. This kind of preoccupation can only breed discontent. Why Russia? Because its major project, communism, has failed? Because the satellites have split, rejected them like teenagers seeking self-agency? I've heard that Russians prize a sense of suffering? Does this mean that they're actually quite content?

But why Romania? Is it their forlorn, heart-ravaging landscape? Is it the wake of Ceauşescu's surreal tyranny? Bucharest transformed to a crumbling waste of concrete right angles? I remember going on a mini-tour through Maramureş, Romania. As we passed through yet another wooden town populated with old people in traditional dress, my guide told me that this particular town had a reputation for melancholy. Why, he could not tell me, but they were known as the most miserable in all of Maramureş. I looked at the wood-slat roofs shining like fish scales, at spoiled, elderly faces of the residents, the unruly green of the flora. I couldn't see anything to distinguish it from any of the other area towns. Its name is lost to me now. Its wretchedness remains a mystery. I wonder, then, if that village would be considered the most unhappy place in the world. And still it looked charming. Still the spotted hens scratched after worms and tended their lovely spring chicks.



Where is this data from? How was this study conducted? How do we chart our emotions?

And why are so many of our recent heroes so stricken? We love the charismatic dispossessed. It is symptomatic.

At the end, I am left with more questions than answers. Beyond this survey, more generally speaking, as I move through life I continue to accrue questions. The answers I find are few and far between and almost always stumbled upon by accident or folly. And these answers, they will soon become obsolete. I know this and still I continue with my question-posing, still craving my temporary answers. Anything to orient me for a few days.