Tue 8 Jan 2008
Theories abound as to why cold or temperate climes produce happier people than warm, tropical ones. My favorite theory is one I call the Get-Along-or-Die Theory. In warm places, this theory states, life is too easy; your next meal simply falls from a coconut tree. Cooperation with others is optional. In colder places, though, cooperation is mandatory. Everyone must work together to ensure a good harvest or a hearty haul of cod. Or everyone dies. Together.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but interdependence is the mother of affection. We humans need one another, so we cooperate — for purely selfish reasons at first. At some point, though, the needing fades and all that remains is the cooperation. We help other people because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we’re counting on some future payback. There is a word for this: love.
January 8th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I had always thought that the opposite was true, that warmer climes developed less intense, happier and more relaxed people by virtue of the sheer abundance of the things necessary for good livin’. Cold weather climates have created the most acquisitive and intensely analytical cultures, and I (lazily) chalk that up to the requirement that they must plan meticulously for the annual scarcity — and in the process inflate the value of the means of survival.
In short, without the ability to cast-net for mullet in February, Great Britain turned to imperialism and Immanuel Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason.
But then, as a warm-climate dude, I am far from objective.
January 9th, 2008 at 7:36 am
I hear ya Brah – I mean the rise of central heating in England DIRECTLY correlates to the fall of the Empire. Think about it. They no longer had to leave home to get warm and eat an orange. So they didn’t.
BUT, based on Ruut Veenhoven’s Database of Happiness (http://worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl/index.html) people like the Danes and Icelanders are the happiest folks on earth – right behind the Bhutanese, a kingdom whose monarch dispensed with the notion of Gross National Product as a gauge of well-being and decreed that his people would aspire to Gross National Happiness (GNH) instead – AND THEY DON”T HAVE A BEACH!Now keep in mind that Ruut also lists the Fins at the top of the happiness heap and I believe they have one of the highest rates of suicide in Europe.
I think this idea of happiness being tied to how integral you feel to your community resonated with me because of how I got the inspiration to go on this trip. After seeing Into The Wild I felt like I was living a life of marking time. We could argue the finer points of this move for days, and should, over beers and cigars. My point here is, if you remember at the end Chris writes something like ‘Happiness is nothing if its not shared”. This blog in my American right to excersize my pursuit of happiness and share it with you, my community. Even if you happen to live blissfully smoking mullet while oranges rain down.
January 25th, 2008 at 2:07 am
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