“It’s not easy to do the right thing” – lessons on GNH from Bhutan

6 November 2015 04:16 ,

These days I’m spending in Paro, Bhutan, attending the international conference on Gross National Happiness (GNH). I’ll share more detail when I’m back. But this is what I learned so far:

1. GNH is a gift of Bhutan to the world

Panellists are flanked by the 4th and the 5th king of Bhutan at the podium.

Panellists are flanked by the 4th and the 5th king of Bhutan at the podium.

Imagine your country is quietly sitting in a remote area of the world, the Himalayas. Then, by launching (and redeveloping) GNH you’re thrust on the world scene. People from all over the world flock to your country to learn and be inspired by the wisdom that “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product”. This phrase was first expressed by King Jigme Singye Wangchuck in 1979. Now, people in countries as diverse as Bolivia, United States, Japan, Ecuador, Bangladesh, UK, Brazil, Germany and South Africa all come to benefit from the Bhutanese generosity in sharing the idea.

2. We are in the third phase of development of GNH

The concept of GNH dates back to the 1970s and the name to 1979. But for a couple of decades it remained a philosophical concept, valuable to the Bhutanese but seen as too abstract for outsiders. That changed in the late 1990s and the 2000s, when with international support and interest GNH was further engineered to become an index with 9 domains. It also gave rise to two surveys, in 2010 and 2015, mapping the level of GNH in Bhutan. (In the 2015 survey with 7153 individuals, 43.4% were ‘extensively’ or ‘deeply’ happy).

Now we are in the third phase. The main question now is not what GNH is about, but how can it be implemented in policy and hands-on projects. There are a set of policy tools and institutions in Bhutan available, but practical implementation is patchy now. But watch this space – GNH is in movement.

3. GNH is not an excuse not to do the right thing

The most powerful presentation by far was by Dasho Neten Zangmo. She served in high functions in the Bhutanese administration, most recently as anti-corruption chief. When her term ended last June, she didn’t stay in the capital Thimphu. Instead, she went back to a small village in Samdrup Junkhar in Eastern Bhutan, to promote zero waste, environmental preservation, and organic farming (the rise of education in Bhutan has made young people better equipped. But it also results in unemployment and a lack of new farmers unique in Bhutan’s history). In Bhutan as in Western countries, everybody say they care about the environment. But doing the right thing is not easy – it’s hard to avoid plastic bottles.

The fundamental underlying point is another one: if GNH is only about providing an alternative indicator, it is not enough. We need material change in the way we look at and act in development and progress in both developed and developing countries. Or in academic terms, a paradigm shift.

GNH is not only an inspiration. It should ultimately change our actions. GNH should help us to DO the right thing.

Comments? Write jasper (@) forastateofhappiness.com.

Bhutanese performance during one of the breaks

Bhutanese performance during one of the breaks

Posted in: events, happy countries , Tagged: , , ,

Realising the Bhutanese dream

27 October 2015 21:53 ,

A couple of years ago I heard about an idea that eventually changed my life. That idea was Gross National Happiness (GNH).

It sounds dramatic, but it is true. I must have heard about it before, but I was first truly captivated by the idea of GNH through a TED talk by Chip Conley with the title ‘Measuring What Makes Life Worthwhile’. At the time, I wrote a blog post for TEDxAmsterdam making the case to measure happiness and change the state.

No, the rest was not history. But everything that followed brought me to the creation of this blog, my coming of age as a happiness researcher and speaker, and ultimately to my trip to Bhutan to explore GNH.

Explore Gross National Happiness

Because indeed, four years after this first blog post, I finally have the chance to travel to Bhutan. I’ll be in the fortunate position to attend a conference on Gross National Happiness “From GNH Philosophy to Practice and Policy” at the Centre for Bhutan Studies. The CBS is a research institute on Bhutan and GNH, based in the capital Thimphu. While GNH as an idea dates back to the 1970s, it has been developed more thoroughly in the 2000s and 2010s. The 2012 GNH survey found that 8% of Bhutanese is ‘deeply happy’ and 32% ‘extensively’ happy. 48% of the 700,000-odd Bhutanese citizens scores ‘narrowly happy’, which means achieving a sufficient level in 50% of the 33 indicators. Only 10% of Bhutanese is unhappy.

GNH is not only something that is being researched and benchmarked. Importantly, the policy requires that new government proposal need to be assessed for their impact on GNH. For instance, Bhutan has decided not to join the World Trade Organisation (WTO) after a finding that it would not contribute to GNH.

A country full of paradoxes like any other

Making a dream come true is risky.

It can be dangerous to make a trip I’ve so long looked forward to. Due to GNH, Bhutan has long been a darling of Western travelers looking for philosophy, spirituality, and ultimately, happiness. Some Western observers have idealised or ‘Shangrilised’ Bhutan as a country.

Others, on the other extreme, have criticised the country as hypocrite for its low level of development, the use of GNH as an excuse for a failure to meaningfully increase the quality of life, or for ethnic violence in the 1990s.

Only when I am there I’ll know whether I am falling in either of these traps.

I’ve had several years the time to do my research and hopefully I have a balanced image of the place. Recently in my preparations of the trip, I read the book ‘A splendid isolation‘ by journalist Madeline Drexler. She aims to offer a balanced approach, highlighting that Bhutan like any other country on the world is full of paradoxes:

  • Tobacco advertising and smoking are forbidden – but in 2011, there was an outcry when a monk was sentenced for three years for smuggling in chewing tobacco for a value of $2.50.
  • There is a target of 100% organic crops – but many food products are imported from India.
  • Economic development is a policy objective – but self-owned business are seen as ungenerous to the collective.
  • Anti-litter laws are strict – but citizens ignore them.

Well, all I can do is promise to share my experience upon my return.

And for the mean time, I’ll leave you with a documentary that made a great impression on me. In a few words, it shows how Bhutan as a country is struggling with the arrival of modern times. Or more precisely, with the arrival of TVs – replacing yaks – in the countryside.

Posted in: happy countries, personal , Tagged: , ,

The Unhappy States of America: three decades of decline in happiness

12 October 2015 15:06 ,

In the United States, the self-proclaimed greatest country on earth, people are in for a surprise when you ask them to guess how high the US ranks in the World Happiness Report 2015. The US takes the fifteenth spot with a 7.119, falling just below – God-forbid … Mexico! The top-three countries Switzerland, Iceland and Denmark trail the US by about 0.4 points.

unhappy America

Source: The Economist

Like any country in the world, the US is full of contradictions. On the one hand, it is the second largest economy, the leader of the Western world (except France), and home to the revolutionary digital industries of Silicon Valley. On the other hand, news about the US often talks about growing inequality, racial tensions, hardly affordable healthcare and education, a rising use of anti-depressants, and an inexplicable rigidity in gun policies. By some Europeans, it seen as a developed country trapped inside a developing one.

What went wrong?

So was the US a better place three decades ago?

Some people think it was. Proponents of alternative economic indicators to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) have argued that since the start of neo-liberal Reaganomics, the focus has been too much on economic growth and too little on quality of life as a whole. For instance, the US Genuine Progress Indicator aims to measure exactly that: genuine progress, based on performance on economic, environmental and social issues. Comparing US scores from the 1950s until recent, it sees a peak in the 1970s. Since, the benefits of economic growth have been off-set by the cost of income inequality, leisure time, and environmental degradation.

Other studies, however, draw other conclusions. It’s often written  that happiness levels are remarkably stable in Western developed countries in the last 50 years. The World Values Survey does not show major movements since the 1980s. The World Happiness Report scores the US in 2015 (data from 2012-2014) only marginally lower, about -0.2, than in 2005-2007.

Three decades of growing inequality

Inequality is very often cited as one of the reasons related to the decreasing life satisfaction in the US. Stanford University has pooled a set of charts documenting the rise of inequality in the last decades:

  • In 1979, CEOs earned 35 times as much as the average production worker. In 2009, 185 times (after a peak of almost 300 in 2000!).
  • In real terms, only college graduates have seen their wages grow since 1979. This is not the case for people who attended but didn’t graduate college, or only have a high school degree. This ‘education wage premium’, however, comes at the cost of student loans up to $50,000 or $100,000, begging the question what is college worth?
  • From 1983 to 2007, the share of wealth of the upper 10% has increased from 68.2 to 73.1%, while the bottom 50% went from 6.1 to 4.2%.

The World Happiness Report also points out that increasing female labour market participation could be a factor in changes in happiness: since the mid-1970s, the share of female labour has increased. At the same time, the ‘happiness advantage’ of women over men has reversed, likely because many women tend to have lesser quality jobs in the US market.

What can be done about it?

At least according to the stereotypes, Americans more than any other nations are able to set an objective and go for it. That’s what the American dream is about. Professor Jeffrey Sachs, one of the contributors to the World Happiness Report, points out a couple of the answers. Increasing equality and social trust is where the answer starts. That also means a mental shift: a state providing healthcare or financing education shouldn’t be seen as giving ‘hand-outs’ or ‘redistribution’, but as a state that ensures that everybody can get ahead. In short, it’s about throwing some of solutions from Switzerland, Iceland or Denmark into the United States. If the US wants to be the best and greatest in happiness, drastically reducing social immobility and inequality is the first step to go.

Posted in: happy countries, science , Tagged: , ,

Seligman, a founding father of positive psychology

28 September 2015 21:53 ,

George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. For most people in the United States and elsewhere, these names probably ring a bell. Together with may others, these man count under the Founding Fathers of the United States.

Could anybody be considered as a the founding father of happiness studies, or ‘positive psychology’ as the academic discipline is usually called? On such a list, academics like Christopher Peterson, Ed Diener, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Daniel Kahneman, and Ruut Veenhoven deserve to be mentioned. And although every movement grows as result of interaction and cross-fertilisation, Martin Seligman probably is the primus inter pares. As president of the American Psychological Association, Seligman decided to focus his term on positive psychology.

What are Seligman’s achievements?

Getting up from a 2 to a 5…

As Seligman very well explains in his TED talk, psychology from its emergence in the early 20th century has been preoccupied with curing ill people. Psychologists have aimed to get people who score a 2 or a 3 up to a 5 or a 6. As a result of the focus on misery, psychologist have developed a complex system of classification and treatment of disorders. A large amount of psychological disorders that make people miserable can now be treated: a great advance for science.

… or from a 5 to an 8?

At the same time, there has been less attention for getting people that already score a 5 or a 6  up to a 7, 8 or 9 – or to understand what a 9 in happiness actually means. Come in Selligman and other positive psychologists. Since the 1980s, many scholars have measured and modeled happiness, and researched the link with happiness. Happiness is correlated with a lot of positive things, from longer healthy life years to better marriages and social relationships, and better performance in the education systems.

What an 8 means: flourishing

One of the most important contributions from Seligman is modeling what happiness is about, and what makes people ‘flourish’ in their personal life. Flourish is also the title of his 2011 book in which explains his ideas. This model is summarised with the acronym ‘PERMA’, standing for:

  • Positive Relations
  • Engagement
  • positive Relations
  • Meaning; and
  • Accomplishment

… as five elements contributing to a pleasant, good, or meaningful life.

The PERMA model. Source: Authentic Happiness pages, Penn University

The PERMA model. Source: Authentic Happiness website, Penn University

 

The next step: positive interventions

Then, the next step of the field of positive psychology is to find out what it is that gets people up to the higher numbers. This is where we get to ‘positive interventions’, or steps that can contribute to our happiness. Dr. Seligman and his team have developed and tested some twelve positive interventions.

In his talk, Seligman describes a few of them:

  • Three good things. Every evening, write down ‘three good things’ that happen during that day. This exercise trains gratitude
  • Have a beautiful day. The concept here is to ‘design’ a day to spend in a very pleasant way.
  • Gratitude visit. Think of someone important in your life who you couldn’t thank enough for their support to you. Write down why you appreciate what they’ve done for you. And then go and visit them to tell them.

Which of these would you like to try?

 

Posted in: science, TED talk, video , Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

Happiness: it’s not just your genes, stupid!

17 September 2015 08:17 ,

One of the most quoted facts about happiness goes as follows:

50% of happiness is determined by your genes.

10% of happiness is determined by the circumstances in which you live.

40% of happiness is determined by your actions, your attitude or optimism, and the way you handle situations.

These figures are often quoted by positive psychologists to back up claims that at least a part of our happiness is man-made. It’s a comforting message: despite the fact that there is a certain genetic disposition to be happy, there are many things in life that we can change to be happy. 40% is a large margin of manoeuvre! Imagine that we could control 40% of the weather, or the traffic on the our way to work.

According to these theories, happiness would look like this:

Source:

Source: Funders and Founders, based on material in ‘The How of Happiness’

The famous 50-10-40% formula is prominent in work done by positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky. Based on a body of research in this field, she and her colleagues argued that approximately 50% of variance in happiness is determined by genes, and 10% of variance in happiness is determined by circumstances. Automatically, that would leave 40% that we can influence.

 

Except that, there is a lot that’s wrong with the figures and the interpretation.

 

Variance in happiness does not equal happiness

To start with the first important nuance: these figures explain the variance in happiness – or the variation in happiness between different people. That is, genetic factors – or the presence of heritable personal traits – can explain about 50% of the difference in happiness levels between two people. It’s a small, but important detail. It means that if one person scores a 7 out of 10, and another person scores an 8, 50% of that 1-point difference could be due to genetic traits. That is not the same as saying that for a person that scores an 8, half of its level of happiness, or 4 points, are due to genetics.

 

Why 50% genetic, and not 40% or 60%?

Where does this theory come from? A 1996 study by Lykken and Tellegen compared well-being levels of samples of pairs of identical and non-identical twins in Minnesota, either raised together or apart. This differentiation allows to test both the impact of same or different genetics (identical vs non-identical) vs same or different environment (raised together or apart), e.g. both nature and nurture effects. Namely, identical twins share the same genes, and non-identical ones do not.

Lykken and Telleken found that the correlation of levels of well-being of identical twins in both cases are around 50%, significantly higher than for non-identical ones (2-8%). As such, they conclude that around half the variation is determined by genetics. This would leave another half determined by other factors. But it is important to note that this particular study has a limited sample. The smallest groups consists of only 36 pairs or 72 people. From a sample of twins in Minnesota, it is hard to draw so strong conclusions for human population as such.

 

Is it so simple?

The variance in happiness is not the full answer. In a comment of the preference of positive psychologists to favour well-rounded figures, Todd Kashdan notes a couple of other issues with genetics.

The first points is that personal traits – influenced by genetics – are not stable over life. Traits are shaped by a process called ’emergenesis’. When a characteristic is ’emergenic’, it is affected by the interaction of a couple of genes together. This might result in a behavioural predisposition to be extravert, self-controlled, or any other trait. (And similarly, there is not one ‘happiness gene’).

So far so good. But the way these genes work out is affected by many other factors. One example Kashdan mentions is that toxins or nutriments in a person’s environment can switch genes ‘on’ and ‘off’. In turn, the functioning of an individual gene can affect such an emergenic factor. If you add or take away a block from a tower, it will look different.

This reminds me of another example I learned about at a course on happiness. A certain individual may have a genetic predisposition for leadership. But if he grows up in an environment where resulting actions are suppressed, the talent will not come to fruition. As such, genes could be seen as ‘enabling’ factors, that only result in an outcome (such as happiness) when underlying conditions are met.

 

Genes interact with the environment

Another important issue notes is the interaction of genes and environment. In the same article, Kashdan writes that

Much of what influences our personality has to do with the presence of (positive and negative) life events and our response to choice points. Do I approach or avoid my co-worker who regularly demeans me? Do I wake up early and workout or sleep in? Do I ask out the girl I’ve had a crush on for months or do I keep my feelings to myself? No single decision matters but the patterns do. The decisions we make, the people we surround ourselves with, and the behaviors we engage in, are the building blocks for the quality of our lives. Small changes accumulate over time leading to large changes in who we become.

Our personality is the result of a complex process, in which genes and environment interact. Can we really put a hard number on that?

 

Happiness is not a formula

My answer is no. There is no comfortable formula for happiness. What we can say, is that our genes play an important role in determining happiness. But so do other factors, including our circumstances, environment, and our actions. Happiness is not a hard science. It is a way too complex phenomenon to quantify. But maybe that’s one of the reasons why it is so fascinating.

Rather than like a pie chart with three elements, happiness may rather look like a complex system:

The Internet as a Complex System. Source: opto.org

The Internet as a Complex System. Source: opto.org

Posted in: science , Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

Inside Out: our emotions make use who we are

7 September 2015 09:24 ,

What would happen if our emotions would just disappear? Are we able to regulate our behaviour if we wouldn’t be able to feel joy or sadness anymore?

Those questions form the main idea behind the recent Disney-Pixar movie Inside Out. The movie finds a simple solution to represent the complexity of human emotions. The emotions of the main character, the 11-year-old Riley, are steered in her head by five personas: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. They are represented by coloured characters, jointly managing her actions. Mostly they act in concordance, but sometimes there are conflicts between emotions wanting Riley to feel differently.

Riley's emotions Anger, Disgust, Joy, Fear, and Sadness.

Riley’s emotions Anger, Disgust, Joy, Fear, and Sadness.

For Riley, a happy and positive girl, the energetic personality of Joy is the dominant emotion. Joy doesn’t refrain from bossing around the other four emotions as she deems fit to make Riley feel joyful. Beyond determining how Riley feels, the emotions also serve as administrators of her memory. Every day, they collect her memories (in the form of the colourful balls at the back of the image, and associated with one of the emotions), before they are shipped off to her long-term memory.

Inside Out shows the complexity of interacting emotions, but also demonstrates how our emotions make us who we are. When Riley and her family move from her beloved Minnesota to a small and dirty house in San Francisco, she becomes unhappy. And when Joy and Sadness get lost, Riley is unable to feel these emotions.

Riley’s personality flattens as the remaining emotions Fear, Disgust and Anger are made responsible to administer her behaviour. With a less rich variation in emotions – and no positive emotions – Riley becomes a more grey personality, and the entire tone of the movie changes.

Emotions makes us who we are. Without Joy and Sadness, Riley is not herself anymore. Riley’s inability to communicate with her parents and her schoolmates also demonstrates how important emotions are to make individuals function in a social group. In a way, Riley becomes like a psychopath unable to have feelings. It’s true that psychopaths can commit the most heinous crimes, precisely because of their inability to feel remorse (small parenthesis: it appears that CEOs are more likely than a typical person to have characteristics of psychopaths – it increases the chance of success in business).

Beyond demonstrating the importance of positive emotions that positive psychologists are so interested in, the movie also very visually shows how people and their emotions interact. One of the most interesting scenes in the movie is a family dinner, where it shows Riley’s three remaining emotions, but also how all five emotions in her father’s and mother’s head steer the interaction.

As a human being it happens so often that we interact with someone – our partner, a family member, a friend or a colleague – whose reaction we don’t understand. Rather than wondering why they behave as erratically as they do, we could try to image five contrary emotions in their heads, attempting to find an emotional ‘correct’ response. Inside Out’s visual representation of the complexity of emotions does not only make a nice film for children and adults, but also helps us imagine how other people could feel.

Posted in: arts, video , Tagged: , , , , ,

Index: For A State of Happiness, season 2014-2015

27 July 2015 23:37 ,

It’s almost August, time for summer holidays… or to catch up with some of the posts on For A State of Happiness that you may have missed?

These are the topics I covered in the last eleven months, of the season 2014-2015:

September

October

November

December

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

thats-all-folks

 

… for this season!

Read all? There’s always season 2013-2014, and For A State of Happiness will be back in September.

Posted in: about For A State of Happiness , Tagged:

Spinach is not the key to happiness. And neither is Coca Cola.

21 July 2015 14:42 ,

Sex sells. But happiness might sell even better.

Marketers know that very well. They claim that purchasing their products – as opposed to their competitor’s – make a consumer happy. I already commented a bit on this a couple of months ago, in two posts about the psychological effects of food, and about marketing food with happiness claims.

Since, I came across this sign:

happiness

Beyond this a funny and simple sign in front of a bar with a cheeky claim about happiness, I also saw a perfected version of the message “Buy us = happiness” from Coca-Cola.

The giant sugared drinks producer is becoming the strongest commercial happiness provider. After taking happiness as a theme via ‘Share Happiness’ and ‘Open Happiness’ campaigns, it now has launched regional campaigns under the name ‘Choose Happiness’. In Belgium, one of the posters alludes to Brussels’ symbol Manneken Pis. It looks like this:

CocaCola

 

The science of food and happiness states that marketers very occasionally do have a point when they claim that their products can increase people’s happiness or positive emotions. ‘Comfort foods” fatty acids affect neural signals in the brain, and can result in a weaker response to sad images. And the production of serotonin, the neurotransmitter most linked to positive emotions and happiness, can be aided by products like spinach, turkey and bananas. Before you stock up on spinach, consider that this implies a limited positive link, and by no means a direct and automatic effect. Spinach is not the key to happiness.

And, sorry to disappoint you, neither are gin-tonic and Coca-Cola. The sugar rush of a Coke can give a momentary positive stimulus to your mood. But the same is true for a Pepsi, and neither equals happiness. Slogans like ‘Choose Happiness’ misleadingly suggest an automatic effect. Of course we rationally know that all the expression of fun, social status, and the good life are artificial tricks to seduce us.

But by claiming happiness, marketers enter a very personal life domain. If, as Coca Cola seems to argue, people have full control of their own happiness (‘success is a choice’),it implies that the easiest way to be successful is by consuming their product. It also transmits the message that failure is a choice, and that is our own fault if we are unhappy. That’s not something that I as a consumer want to hear from a company.

In a way, I prefer the cheeky slogan of a bar, saying that a gin tonic brings us closer to happiness. It’s a lot more playful way of attracting attention.

If I wanted a drink of happiness, I’d go for a gin-tonic.

Posted in: personal, science , Tagged: , , , , ,

If urgent, be patient

15 July 2015 08:50 ,

A couple of years ago, a blog post about life and happiness went viral. It was written by a nurse named Bronnie Ware in New South Wales, Australia. As a nurse, she took care of people with terminal diseases, washing them, feeding them, talking to them. Her work is hard, her days are long. She is the care-taker of people who are about to die. The proximity of their death helps people to reflect and find wisdom. And listening to terminal ill people taught Bronnie a lot about life. She wrote down what she learnt in a blog post.

Five regrets of the dying

It was called: ‘five regrets of the dying’. And the five regrets went like this:

  • I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others wanted
  • I wish I had the courage to express my feelings
  • I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
  • I wish that I had let myself be happier
  • And I wish I hadn’t worked so much.

The last regret, coming at such a moment of life when the latest seconds are ticking away, I believe, is one of the most important pieces of wisdom about life and happiness. In short, it goes into one of the fundamental complexities many people are facing: to find work-life balance.

If urgent, please text

New technologies ubiquitous in the 21st century make it even more challenging to find the right balance between work and family or private life. With smartphones and 4G, we can be be in touch with friends or colleagues from the supermarket, queuing for a French fries, or the toilet. I liked to joke that if phone were waterproof, technology would invade the last place where we are free with our thoughts. But apparently – and scarily – there are already at least 13 waterproof phones!

In some working environments – such as consulting, where I spent my working days – it is a natural facet of a service attitude that comes with the job to be available to clients and colleagues outside working hours. Sometimes, with a good dose of exaggeration and self-pity, we joke that we don’t have a problem with work-life balance, because work takes priority anyway. And when we are not available, for a meeting, a conference, or a day off, we typically inform colleagues. Usually, my message goes something like: if you have an urgent question, please send a text. Or in short: if urgent, please text.

Finding the right balance

Striking the right balance is hard. Some of the consequence of an incorrect balance are small: you may come home too late to go to the supermarket, end up tired on the couch for a night, or fail to make plans for the weekend. But some of the potential consequences are a lot more significant. Around 22% of workers experiences extreme stress. 4 out of 10 workers in the US go beyond 50 hours. And burnouts risk to lead to a depression, which is suffered by about one out of six people during their life time. Beyond that, an unhealthy family life is related to marital stress and behavioural problems of children.

The boss can help…

Companies increasingly recognise the problem, either out of the goodness of their heart or because of the realisation of negative impact on staff turnover, sick leave, and productivity. There are many things bosses can do and are doing to increase work-life balance and happiness at work. They can allow part-time working, or flexible working hours, or limit working hours. They can ensure child-care facilities.

Something that would be useful for me as an individual, but arguably difficult for my sector is setting limits when you can access emails. In Germany, Labour Ministry guidelines prescribe that the ministry’s hierarchy cannot call their subordinates after working hours. And Volkswagen has installed a system that makes that people can’t send or receive emails half an hour after working time.

… but ultimately it’s up to ourselves to balance work and life

But as I already hinted before, work-life balance is a personal issue, and comes a lot with your personal attitude about work. The key points are:

  • be honest to yourself. A career is a choice. Some choices are incompatible with a healthy family life. A challenging job where you need to work very long hours or to travel all the time makes it difficult to balance a private life
  • manage your time. Sometimes there are key deadlines to meet, and work requires to stay a bit longer. But in many cases, the decision to leave a bit earlier or to stick around a bit is up to you. In quiet times – as July should be – there is space to take it a bit easier without affecting quality.

Some of these attitude can be changed. As I said, my habit is to inform my colleagues: “if urgent, please text”. A couple of weeks ago, shockingly, I had to go somewhere where I couldn’t bring my phone. So instead I wrote: if urgent be patient.

That’s what I strive for – to keep patience and calm even facing urgencies. Because I realise that in a couple of years time, I don’t want to wake up and realise I am turning into one of these people who in front of the eyes of death tell those around them: I wish I hadn’t worked so much.

If urgent, be patient.

Posted in: personal , Tagged: , , , , ,

Hope in the Greek crisis of happiness

8 July 2015 09:33 ,

As so many in Brussels I’ve been following all the news about the Greek crisis on a daily basis in the last weeks. I have followed these events professionally. I reviewed the politically progress in the talks, the economic impact on the eurozone, and contemplated the scenarios for further developments.

But with this professional distance, it is easy to forget how saddening these developments are .

Staying away of the question who is at fault, the tragedy is that politicians don’t come closer to each other. Countless meetings at ministerial level and several Euro Area Summits are ineffective.

The referendum about the latest EU reform proposals divided families between those who wanted to show their opposition to austerity and those who felt that no deal might be worse than a bad deal.

And Greek society suffers under extreme stress, as pharmacies run out of some medicines and banks don’t release more than sixty euros per day.

Pensioners – who often have the only income for a family of unemployed people – have to cue hours to receive 120 euros of their pension.

The best way to sum the crisis up may have been the picture of the crying Greek pensioner that made way of media in the last day. The photo is by Sakis Mitrolidis (AFP). The man on the photo broke down after being refused his ‘allowance’ by four banks in a row in Thessaloniki.

Photo by AFP/Sakis Mitrolidis

Photo by AFP/Sakis Mitrolidis

 

Effects on happiness

It should not be a surprise that a country in crisis is not a happy country. In psychology, there is a concept of ‘loss aversion’. Humans are surprisingly adapted to live in hardship. That is, if they are used to it. The impact of winning an additional hundred of euros in income is marginal compared to the negative effects of losing one hundred euros. In dollar terms, Greeks are not so miserable with a GDP per capita of  $21,687 in 2014. That’s about 1,5 times Polish GDP and twice the level of Turkey or Mexico. But whilst the latte three have grown their income in the last five years, Greek GDP is about 20% lower than five years ago.

This crisis also has a marked effects on happiness levels. The 2015 World Happiness Report does not only have figures for 2012-2014, but also compares them with the period 2005-2007. Greece is the biggest loser in happiness worldwide, scoring almost 1.5 points lower now than before the crisis. On a ten points scale, Greece’s happiness now stands at 4.857, ranking 102 out of 158 countries polled.

When Greek Prime Minister Tsipras and EU leaders that do want to show solidarity, they speak about taking measures to address the humanitarian crisis. Apart from that, there is also a psychological crisis or a ‘crisis of happiness’. Well-being of Greeks is further under pressure.

What to do?

It is clear that a political solution is needed to take away some of the uncertainty and distress. I am optimistic that yesterday’s Summit, the latest in the row, is allowing some progress. There is no financial programme yet, but the message is that it can be done in the next five days.

For the crisis of happiness, what we need is positive stories coming out of Greece. Shows of solidarity and support help.

A great example in the last week is the effort of Thom Feeney. He decided that if EU leaders couldn’t agree on a bailout, he would crowdfund €1.6 bn for Greece to repay the IMF himself. Maybe not so surprisingly, the effort failed (and the money was reimbursed), but with over €1.9 mln collected in a week time, his campaign did send a more positive signal about EU populations’ support for Greece. It’s now followed by a second campaign, aiming to raise €1 mln in humanitarian aid.

Screenshot Indiegogo

Screenshot Indiegogo

 

Also in the case of the Greek pensioner, the severest crisis resulted in a positive response. An Australian-Greek businessman – whose father grew up in the same village – heard about the story and decided to support the man with twelve months of pensions money.

These are only two stories. They reach a small number of people and can by no means solve all of the crisis. But they offer glimmers of hope that the days of gloom may be over.

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