Spirit in Action
Curing Affluenza: The Happiness Initiative
Exploration of The Happiness Initiative through a visit with John de Graaf & Laura Musikanski. Laura is Executive Director of Sustainable Seattle. John has created 15 PBS documentaries including the well-known Affluenza. He is Executive Director of Take Back Your Time.
- Broadcast on:
- 11 Sep 2011
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sync deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Today for Spirit in Action, we have the great privilege of welcoming two fearless workers for something we could all use more of Happiness. The Happiness Initiative is an effort to apply the tools of science to get us moving the right direction. It helps us really sort out what helps and hurts our quality of life. John DeGraf has created more than 15 PBS specials, including the well-known Afluenza. He's the executive director of Take Back Your Time, and John DeGraf is on the board of the Earth Island Institute. Also joining us is Laura Musikansky, executive director of Sustainable Seattle. Laura is a lawyer with an MBA and has worked with a number of organizations that are more large and small to address sustainability issues, including McDonald's, Chevron's, and many more. John DeGraf and Laura Musikansky are part of the staff of the Happiness Initiative, launched from Seattle, and working now with folks in Oregon, Iowa, Vermont, and in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. In fact, John will be visiting My Fair City on September 22 to help along Eau Claire's implementation of the Happiness Initiative. And what about your city, town, or state? Listen to what John and Laura have to say, and then contact them via happycounts.org, or follow the link from northernspiritradio.org. John DeGraf and Laura Musikansky join us by phone from Seattle. John and Laura, welcome to Spirit In Action. Good to be on your show. Thank you. And Laura, I understand that just this morning you climbed a mountain, and that's not something everybody else does before breakfast or around that time. What's this about? This is part of my time balance. This is how I am passionate and dedicated to this project, and I know my personality and I have a tendency to just zero and I'm something that I'm passionate about and do that. So I carve out some mornings to go out and be with nature, and that's one of the places where I find great spirit there. And so John, is it fair to assume that you have some time and you're not in the office working, advancing the cause of happiness? Well, I hope so. Lately, it seems like I've been spending a lot of time in the office, but no, I do, and I get out too, and I don't run up vertical mountains the way Laura does these days, but I love to spend time outdoors here in the Seattle area. We have a lot of wonderful, natural locations and things to do that, and so I like to do the same, I like to hike and so forth. Well, I'll say, Mark, that we've been having a few celebrations lately, 'cause John has his birthday, and I won't say them, but I'll let him say them, but it's a big birthday, so we have been taking some time off to celebrate, and I think that's another important piece, to celebrate everything that happens and then to celebrate people. I will say, I'm actually about to turn 65, and that's the time I was told that I should be out on the golf course and retiring from all of these kinds of things, so the question is why, in that circumstance, would I be working longer than ever, and the real reason is because I'm very, very excited about the project that Laura and I are involved with, and I have great passion for it. I have the hope that it can help change the world and deposit it direction, and that's what I've been doing for the previous, at least the years of my working life, and I want to keep going. Were you involved in such exploits before the movie "Afluenza" came out? Did you have history preceding that significantly involved in this kind of concern? Absolutely. I actually lived in your part of the world. I lived in Wisconsin, went to school in Wisconsin. I worked as a VISTA volunteer on the Bad River Chippewa Reservation. Your Ashland for a couple of years was very involved in social justice and Vietnam War movement things when I was on the campus, and so it was activism, actually, and my concerns for that got me first into radio at the University of Minnesota, Duluth radio station, and then into public television, where I spend many, many years, and I'm still there, making documentaries, one of which was "Afluenza." Most of that work was kind of went into the ozone. I produced those documentaries, and people saw them, but I wasn't doing much with them until "Afluenza." And then the interest in that really led me to getting back into activism again, and so I've come full circle now, and I think I'm doing a lot more activism today that I am telling. Could you explain to me a little bit about happiness and your pursuit of it, the general topic, and then the organization that both of you are active with? So when we talk about happiness, we certainly mean how you feel. That's the scientific term aspect, but how often do you feel happy? And we certainly mean your satisfaction with life, but that question of, you know, if you had your life to do over again, would you do it differently, and are you -- do you feel like you're living a meaningful life? But as, and maybe even perhaps more importantly, we're talking about the conditions of happiness. So when we're talking about the conditions of happiness, we're looking at the 10 domains of happiness, and these are informed by the work that's happening in Bhutan, and I'll main love a couple of them and give an example of what it means when you have conditions that can make you unhappy, and we use that term synonymously with well-being or quality of life or sustainability. So a couple of those conditions of happiness include good governance, a material well-being, and a quality environment, access to nature in a healthy environment. I'll give an example. Sean and I were giving one of our talks at a church, and we went through some of the survey questions and asked some people some questions, and then a few people came up with this idea that they had pretty much complete control over their happiness, that they could control their environment, they could do a lot to control their local government, et cetera, et cetera. Our response to that is that wonderful that you're in that position. But that's not true for a lot of people in the world, and I gave the example of there's a woman on our board whose son-in-law is in his not even middle ages, and he's buying a liver cancer, he's got heart problems, and he's got kidney cancer. He grew up next to a gas station. He's in the African-American community. You can't say that he has a lot of control over his environment. You can say that he's totally not very happy, and I know that he's not very happy. So this is what we mean when we talk about the conditions of happiness, and then when we look at our own lives and look at our connection that we know that we have with everybody on this planet, whether that's through our purchasing or it's through our career decisions or our decisions about how we live our daily lives. That's that piece of looking at happiness and looking at the conditions of happiness for ourselves and for others, and then that reach that we all could have. One of the things that I'm kind of wondering about, and I imagine our listeners are wondering about is, is this happiness a fancy pants academic idea? Is it a just folks idea? Do they meet somewhere? I'm aware that there's a lot of people in our world who will not take actions unless you've got academic backing for whatever you've said, and I'm also aware that there's been a vast increase in studies around happiness and leisure and all this. I didn't even know that there was such a post in college as leisure studies. Could you fill that in a little bit? Can I take that one on? I would just say if you take the learning answer, and I'll take the short answer. The short answer is yes, yes, and yes. That's on you, go ahead and explain it. As far as leisure studies is an important thing. The leisure studies really started in the 1960s when we were told in America, and I remember this from a class at the University of Wisconsin, that by the year 2000 with automation and technology changes and everything we'd be working 15 to 20 hours a week, we'd have eight to 10 weeks of vacation a year, we'd have more leisure time on our hands than we would know what to do with. I thought it was a problem I could deal with, but we didn't get that problem, and in fact we ended up working harder and longer than before, and so actually some of these recreation and leisure departments are being closed down. I think it's a terrible mistake, especially because our happiness survey shows, and many happiness surveys that are being done, show that one of the domains, and maybe the domain, where Americans fare worse than the 10 domains that Laura mentioned, is the domain of time balance. Our scores were the lowest in that. People feel very, very stressed and pressed for time, and that is a condition of well-being. It's a condition of happiness that is understood in the science, that you really time for things like social connection, which is absolutely important to happiness, for things like health, for things like participating in your community, all of these kinds of things, getting out into nature. One thing that all of these things require is a common denominator, and there's not enough time to do them, so I very much agree with Laura's description of happiness and of the domains, and there are a number more, and the idea is that we need to talk about where we're hurting in this country in terms of people not being able to meet the conditions of happiness, and what kind of policy changes, personal changes, and organizational changes we might use to improve those conditions for everybody, so that we all have the right, we all have equal opportunity for the pursuit of happiness as Thomas Jefferson put it. I would add that where does that question know about the academics, the grassroots, and where they meet in the middle? What does that apply to our project, the happiness initiative? So we have a survey and objective indicators, and the survey is developed by well-being or happiness scientists, so that the questions reveal results that are academically rigorous. From there, we look at how can this be a grassroots project, and what we've tried to do is we've tried to develop a happiness initiative, so anybody can conduct a happiness initiative, so anybody can grab that survey, can grab that objective indicators, find the data, and be able to put together a happiness report card for their community, whether that's a small community such as a neighborhood, or a business, or a town, or a city. And then from there, they can start looking at what are some of the actions that we need to be taking, as John mentioned, as individuals, as organizations, and as policy makers, that are going to improve our well-being, looking very broadly at well-being and looking at those interconnections. And one thing, Mark, on this is that your city Eau Claire, where you're based, is one of the first cities that's really taking this on. In a big way, we're very excited to report that we've had some wonderful conversations with the city manager, Mike Huggins there, Eau Claire, with folks from the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, from the Clear Vision Eau Claire organization, and they are going to launch there in the City of Happiness Initiative for Eau Claire in October, and we're going to be working with them on that. So that's a very exciting thing. I've been to Eau Claire many times. I know that it's a wonderful town, but every wonderful town has its weaknesses and things that can be improved. I think it's exciting that your town is taking this on. I'm pretty excited about it, too. Is it hard to get acceptance of this? I think when you talk about numbers, you know, we can talk about what the gross national product is. Can you latch there? Okay, this number is bigger than this number. When you talk about happiness as a measure, I'm sure a lot of people think that perhaps you've been smoking something. Well, then, I mean, the answer is going to be yes and no. Let's answer first in no part. So the United Nations adopted a resolution on July 19th of this year that asks countries to use happiness to start finding ways to measure happiness. And as we know in the UK, as well as in France, those leaders are starting to measure happiness, and they've actually called on all world leaders to measure happiness rather than just gross domestic product. Now, they're not praying that gross domestic product doesn't matter. They're saying that let's look at other things as well. And we're seeing now China looking at saying something like, "Well, we also are going to start measuring happiness gross domestic happiness rather than just gross domestic product, as well as Brazil." So in the US, we do, and we'll continue to get some skepticism and for various reasons that John can go into. But globally, this is an important trend that's happening. We expect the US to be lagging in adopting this trend. But sometimes there's some value in that that you can learn from your neighbors. So, John, did you want to talk about the skepticism and how we address that? Well, we do get skepticism, people saying, "Oh, happiness? What's that about?" and so forth. But we do need to remind people that this is the basis on which our country was founded, that the Declaration of Independence itself says that what it's all about is the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote those words, was very specific in many, many other ways. He said on many occasions that the pursuit of happiness or making possible the conditions of happiness was the sole or only purpose of government. I mean, Thomas Jefferson was very, very clear about that. So this isn't some wild idea or just exotic idea from a country like Bhutan. This is part of our American tradition. The difference between now and Jefferson's time is that we actually have really excellent tools to measure happiness and well-being that have been developed through the science over the last number of years. And Gallup in particular does an international Gallup Healthway survey of more than 150 countries, and we've done that manually, 1,000 people in each of those countries, 1,000 a day, actually, in the United States are asked a series of questions about their well-being or their happiness. And Gallup is able to plot how well each of these countries are doing, how well our states are doing, how well some of our cities are doing, at least for the major realm of overall well-being. What our survey and our work does is it takes that a lot deeper. It goes into some of the reasons why people may be more or less happy. And it gives people the opportunity to engage in that conversation themselves and to think about these questions and to think about their own lives in a way that they can't really get from a Gallup poll. But Gallup is doing very important work along these lines, and you can measure happiness. So what are some of the numbers? What historically are we like? What are the happy areas of the U.S. or internationally? Where do we want to go if we want to be happy? What do we do? Well, if we look at the United States, it doesn't seem like a big difference in that the score is for happiness in the happiest state, which just happens to be Hawaii. And there are a number of others. Actually, North Dakota has risen rather rapidly in this ranking. The score in Hawaii is 71. The score in the least happy state in the United States is 61 out of 100. That happens to be West Virginia. One thing that we do see is that some of the happier states tend to be in the West and the upper Midwest and those places. Some of the lowest scores tend to be in Appalachia and in the southern states and so forth. Now, if we look around the world, the picture that emerges is a fairly clear one, and that is that the highest scores consistently are in the Nordic or Scandinavian countries and the northern European countries. Denmark stands out as being at the top of the list year after year with Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the Netherlands not far behind. The U.S. does pretty well. We're generally in the top 20, although a recent world value survey ranked us as 23rd, so a little bit below that. But according to Gallup, we're generally in the top 20 for satisfaction with life, and that's a pretty good score. Gallup also measures what we call positive affect, because it's just kind of with your feeling directly now. Not your overall satisfaction with life, but in the last day, how much sadness did you feel, how much joy, how much anger, how much stress, and so forth. And when it comes to that, the United States actually does considerably less well, and the best countries in the world are countries like Costa Rica and things for that. The United States, in fact, does so poorly on some of these numbers that when Gallup looks at self-reported stress around the world, Gallup finds that the United States ranks 145 out of 151 countries' measures. People in only six other countries report more stress than Americans report, and that's a very alarming thing, because that stress leads to health impacts, that leads to all kinds of other negative implications for our society. We also rank very poorly when it comes to having a lot of anger, having a lot of worry and anxiety, and feeling frequently sad. Americans don't do so well in these numbers. Overall satisfaction with life, though we do pretty well. On this reporting about happiness, how much of it is subjective, and that is, I mean, I assume it's all subjective in one way or another, but I imagine in the United States we think we're happy because we're supposed to be happy. That is, we think we've got the most money and we've got the best country in the world, and therefore we're supposed to be happy. Does that second indicator you talked about kind of filtered that out, how much stress people have had in the past day? The question is how subjective is the survey, and I think is that the question mark? How much of is subjective and what does that subjectivity mean? Yeah, and how much we trust, because really what we want to do is make sure people's lives are better. Certainly their subjective experience of their life is part of that, but also if they're dying earlier, I don't know if you put other factors like that in there, what's the infant mortality rate, et cetera. Right, so let's look at the difference in objective and a subjective indicator. So an objective indicator would be something like air quality, or greenhouse gas emissions, and a subjective indicator would be something like, what percentage of the population expects that their children will have far fewer occasions and access to nature, or occasions to be able to enjoy nature. So an objective indicator would be life expectancy, and a subjective indicator would be something like, do you feel like you are able to live your life or that you're unable to live your life because of health concerns? Just enjoy your life, that kind of thing. Yeah, and Laura gets at that. I mean, there's just a number of these kind of things. You know, on the time balance question, that's another one. I mean, the subject questions ask people, you know, how much of your time can you spend doing the things that you want to do? How stressed do you feel? How pressed for time does your life feel like a race? You know, these kinds of questions. The objective data tells us actually what kind of long hours people are working, whether they have leisure time and so forth. So we combine the two because we really believe both are necessary. The objective indicators, the real information policymakers need to know what the facts are, but they also need to know how their citizens are perceiving those facts and how they're perceiving their life. And that's what this does. It gives the opportunity to look at both of those kind of things in all of the domains that we measure. And so that's what the science of well-being is saying. The policy makers are really, really need this to be able to get temperature of their constituents and to see what do their constituents perceive. So then that goes to, well, what kind of subjective data are you gathering? And, you know, what does it mean if it's just a bunch of survey results? Well, when you have enough survey results of your constituents, then you do have a good idea of how well your city, city of Eau Claire, or the city of Seattle is doing. But it also depends on what kind of questions you ask. So are you asking questions like, do you want to be able to volunteer more? Or in the last month, how often did you volunteer? But latter kind of question is telling you is giving you pretty hard data about people. And the former question is giving you something that's more maybe a little harder to put your finger on. Both of them are needed, and you'll see both of them in the survey when you go online to happyhounds.org and then punch that orange button. You'll see both of them. But you can see how when you get enough people taking the survey so that you can see that you think you have something close to a representative survey, which, of course, would be wonderful if you could just go ahead and pay for a representative survey. And we would love to have a funding for that if somebody wants to provide that. But when you get enough people taking the survey, you think it's some pretty important information about how Eau Claire is doing. We're speaking today to John de Graaff and Laura Musikowski. They're both part of the Happiness Initiative. Go to the website happyhounds.org. And you can find out more about each of them at a couple other sites. Laura's active with sustainable Seattle.org. John is Executive Director of Take Back Your Time. Their website is timeday.org. If you go to Happy Counts, hopefully you'll find links in both directions for these hard-working people who are working so hard to make sure that we take our proper leisure time to have mental, physical, and emotional, spiritual. The Happiness is really in so many different domains. Right, and we're building that part right now. We're building the science of happiness. What the science says, what are some of the activities science says will make you happier or lead to a happier and more balanced life. I'm going to suggest to them from people what they do to have a happier life. So this is a relatively new project for some of those aspects. We'd like to have those be more robust. Now some of the things we know, Mark, from Happiness Sciences, that actually much of that science confirms the teachings of our world's great spiritual or religious traditions. So for example, the adage in the Christian tradition that it's better to give than to receive, or in the Judeo-Christian tradition, that it's better to give than to receive, is actually backed up by the Happiness Science in that people who are generous with their time and their money and so forth tend to be considerably happier than those who are seeking those things solely for themselves. In fact, the researchers do all kinds of wonderful studies around this. John Hellowell, who's one of the leading researchers in the world on Happiness at the University of British Columbia, does an annual thing where he gives students in the class, they each get ten bucks. All the students and half of them are told to spend that money on themselves and half of them are told to spend it on some kind of other cause, a charity, give it away, figure out what to do with it, either together as a group or individually. And very consistently, once that happens, the people who actually gave the money away, who put it into something, report consistently higher well-being. That's the trend that we see all along. So there's a great confirmation of altruism, of caring, of sharing, of justice in the Happiness Research, of more egalitarian figures. There's definitely studies that have come out recently from the University of Virginia showing higher happiness levels in parts of the United States where the gap between rich and poor is less serious. So we learn a lot and it tells us that these kind of spiritual traditions have quite a bit to offer and that the science confirms those things. Is there someone who doesn't want us to know how happy we are or aren't? Is there a vested interest in the opposite direction? I don't think I would say that there's a vested interest in the opposite direction. I think that we have, since the inception of the gross domestic product, we have used that so singularly. And as with any paradigm shift, there are going to be people who don't want to change their focus. Now the gross domestic cause is a really important measure and it was conceived of for a really important purpose. It was conceived of in depression as a way to help people to get out of a really horrible place. And then it was used during World War II as a way to be able to manufacture the good, to spend a value that we went to war for. And most of my family was killed in that war in Europe because of being Jewish. So, you know, I don't believe in war, but I can see the value in that. But to be able to manufacture those munitions without starving people, without putting people in a place where they just couldn't even meet their basic needs. So that's actually a really valuable tool. But then we decided to use it as a singular measure for everything, you know, for the greater growth of everything. And it doesn't work in that way, as Laura points out. And Robert Kennedy was one of the first to make that clear. You know, he said that the gross national product really majored everything, except that which makes life worthwhile. For example, as Laura points out, there are many things that add to this thing called GD. Now we call it gross domestic product ever since 1991. But a lot of the things go into this. Anything really that money is spent on in the economy here. So if you have an oil spill and it requires expensive cleanup operations and so forth, that actually adds more to the GDP than if the oil made it successfully to the port. If you have cancer and it requires expensive treatments and poor health, it requires expensive treatments. It adds to the GDP. If you have divorce and family breakdown, which means people have to have two homes instead of one. There are expensive legal bills. All of that adds to the GDP. On the other hand, things that we know are really good for happiness, for health, for all of these things. Going out and taking a walk like Laura did in the woods today. That's great for happiness and for health, but it doesn't add one with. It's a waste of time as far as the GDP is concerned, volunteering in your community, taking care of your own children. All of those kind of things don't count. What we're saying is that all of those things need to count because they are really about what makes us happy and healthy, what really adds to our well-being in the long run. GDP tells us some things that are valuable, but it is not enough. We think that America needs this big conversation about broader measures of happiness. There are people who will resist that, who think that it's soft, you know, that it's fuzzy, those kind of things. There are also people who will not be happy with some of the basic happiness science, which actually shows us that extreme individualism is not good for happiness, that we are social people, that we need social connection and all of those kind of things. An extremely competitive individualistic society can be very hard on people's happiness and on health, and that's something that some people don't want to hear that message. And particularly in a time when we're having economic crises, one has to be other, the tendency is to just go back and try to rebuild the economy, and you know the quote by Einstein that saying you can't change something with the same thinking as it created the problem. But how hard is it to actually follow that? I mean, you see it in yourself when you're trying to change some kind of pattern and you just keep doing the same thing over and over again. So we're hoping that, you know, John mentioned unity of fighting the problem, GDP, but even the guy who created the measure of gross national product, which is not gross domestic product, because when he said, and I quote him, "The welfare of a nation can therefore scarcely be incurred from a measure of national income." And even he knew that this was not the right measure for guiding a nation and for guiding organizations or for guiding ourselves, and we know that inherently. When we only grade ourselves on how much money we make, and that's the only thing that matters, are we happy? You can't take it with you. Are we really happy? Because you've made a bunch of money today? We also know from the science, particularly from the work of Tim Casser and Richard Ryan, two prominent American psychologists, that people whose primary motivation is the amassing of stuff, that is, who go out and get the job because that job will give them the highest income and all of these kind of things, are much less happy than people whose primary motivation is making a difference and sharing and using their skills to benefit society as a whole. Now, it doesn't mean that you can't be rich and happy. There are people who give their skills to the good of society, and end up also being rich, and they're quite happy at the same time, and they often give a considerable amount of their money away. But the people whose primary motivation is just making more and more money. If some words are never happy because they can never have enough, they will never be Bill Gates and most are Bill Gates. And so there's always the idea of scarcity of never enough, and those people tend to be less happy. That's what the science shows. There's no question about it. There are in good indicators that as your income rises, your happiness may or may not rise with it. What is the overview of how that actually interacts? Actually, our survey has about 7,200 people to the survey, and we're analyzing the results now. And the science says that over a certain amount, and that amount can vary between about 75 to 80,000 per individual, right? So if you have a family of 12 making 80, that's the same thing as an individual person. Well, it is for family size, but it's a family of four. Yeah, but for that much, as you increase the amount of money that you make, you're not that much happier. Now, when you're below that, you're a heck of a lot happier. I grew up really, really poor. We didn't have enough money to make it by the end of the month, last two months, because of the month were pretty scarce. There wasn't really much food around at all. I remember when my uncle died, we got a little inheritance. We got about $5,000. We were a whole lot happier. We got fruit and vegetables for like six months. And we actually were able to go out and do some leisure activities, like go to a movie, which we just didn't have enough money to do. So when you are living below that level and well below that level, I've experienced in my childhood, more money makes you a heck of a lot happier. So we don't ignore that. The science kind of shows us that wealthier people in any society overall can be somewhat more satisfied, not always higher in affect, but more satisfied overall than poorer people in that society. But what the science also shows us is that if society's income as a whole rises, people beyond a certain point, people in general are not any happier. So the United States has increased the size of its gross domestic product. It has more than tripled, for instance, since the mid-1950s. And yet happiness levels in the United States overall remain totally flat. And the downside is that, in fact, rates of depression and anxiety and the mental illness have actually increased considerably during that time period. So the idea is that if society's aim is just getting richer and richer and richer, it doesn't do much for people. Individuals may benefit because they compare their satisfaction with life, with those who are poorer and so forth, and so it looks a little better. But the point is there are many other things that are far more important, and we understand that for whether you're going to be happy or not, having friends, having social connection, feeling that you make a contribution to others and to the community, being generous, having good health, having that kind of access to get outdoors in nature and let its charms affect you, having enough educational opportunity so that you become more and more curious about things and that you can learn from things. All of these things are actually more important than simply making more money. The statement about the increase in mental illness and depression, et cetera, is I think that's really an important thing to understand around when we say something like that. We're not saying that, you know, oh, mental illness is increased, depression is increased, we're saying that the conditions that create this, that add to this, those conditions have worsened so that there's an increase in the mental illness, and that's something that we can, we're all responsible for together, and we can all do something about together. If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, host of this Northern Spirit Radio production. Our website is northernspiritradio.org. If you go to the site, you'll find our archives of the past six years, links to our guests, like to John DeGrav and Laura Musikansky. The happinesscounts.org is a good place to find out information about the Happiness Initiative. You'll also find a place to leave comments. You can comment on particular shows or in general, and we love hearing from you. It helps us get the feedback that we need to make a better program for you. As I said, we're speaking with John DeGrav and Laura Musikansky of the Happiness Initiative. One thing I'd like us to move toward right now is talking a little bit about the spiritual or maybe religious. That could be part of the formula. The effects that spirituality, religion has in conjunction with happiness. I think, John, you have to start out by talking about Bhutan because I think they're the key, the lynchmen, the launching pad. In the sense, Bhutan's Grow National Happiness Initiative does come out of its Buddhist tradition and that concern, which the king expressed when he was asked, "The young king, Gigmi Wong Chuck, in 1972, he was crowned at the age of 16 upon the death of his father." He was asked the story goes, and it may be partly apocryphal, but the story goes that he was asked by an Australian reporter, "So, King Wong Chuck, what are you going to do to increase your country's Grow National Product?" And King Wong Chuck thought about this for a minute, and he said, "Well, frankly, I think that Grow National Happiness is more important than Grow National Product." And of course, this concern about happiness comes out of that Buddhist tradition. But I think it's also part of our other traditions, and I think the happiness studies show that there is a connection between spirituality. However, you want to look at it, and happiness, it's sometimes hard to know exactly what that connection is. For example, we know that people who are members of religious congregations who attend church tend to be all of the things being equal slightly happier than people who are not. What we don't know is exactly what the cause of that is. We're not sure whether that's because they have more of a purpose in life, which is shared by many other people who are not religious. That's probably part of it. Or whether it's that they have a tendency to get more social connection from the people that they know in church, and those kinds of opportunities that come together because we know how important social connection is for happiness. So the real issue here, though, is that it's just not about the money, and the spiritual sense that life is bigger than you, that you have a role to play, to contribute to the welfare of others, to the well-being of the whole of creation. All of that is very important for happiness. Laura, I'm sure you have something to add to that. Well, that question always sums me a little bit because we don't have a question in there that says anything directly about spirituality. We do have questions that ask you, are you spending time at a community organization, so that includes a church? I think the questions from me that speak to this are the questions at the very beginning around social connection with life that ask you things like the conditions of my life or how are the conditions of your life, are you satisfied with your life? Have you gotten the most important things that you want with your life, and if the kids you live your life over, would you change anything? And those are the kinds of questions that I think get people to sort of probe and think, "Well, what is important to me? What do I really want out of life?" And I think that, or just like personally being raised by a victim of World War II, my grandfather had spent the war in a camp and my father had escaped to England but had lived through three bombings. I was raised that there was no God because if there were, then how could that have happened? And it took me into my adulthood to recognize that there was something like God. And then from there, to be able to more fully develop a system of values and a purpose in my life. So I think that when we ask these kinds of questions, and that's an iterative process, right? I mean finding spirit, finding spirituality, finding God. It's not like you just find it banger there and all of a sudden you get guided by a light forever and everything is just set. It's part of personal growth. You're always finding a deeper, deeper connection to spirit. So I think to me, this survey asks these kinds of questions like, you know, if you could live your life over, would you change something? You know, what you're living the best possible life for yourself. Those kind of questions, they're probing you, they're asking you. And I think that's something that can drive people to a greater connection with spirituality. And the other part of it is the holistic nature of it. So we talked about the ten domains of happiness. And asking, I want to go through those now because we did earlier, but asking people questions about that. And it can lead to a greater understanding of our connection to each other and to spirit. So those ten domains have been, I mentioned the first ones as being material or being good governance in a healthy environment and access to nature. And then there's psychological well-being and physical health and time balance and then work experience. And then the three others are the community, the community vitality, your culture, and then education and capacity building. So when you look at your world in that kind of context, I think you're starting to see a connection there. We also do ask questions that relate to this along the same line that Laura's talking about, but a very specific thing. Do you have a sense of meaning in your life? Does life have a purpose for you? Do you feel like you're doing things for a reason? These are spiritual questions ultimately. So I think we get it that this way without asking questions about particular spiritual traditions and so forth. Bhutan's own questionnaire, which is started out, which much of ours is drawn from aspects of Bhutan's original questionnaire. That questionnaire takes about four hours to complete and one woman sainted while doing it. And it contains certain questions that are very culturally and spiritually specific to Buddhism and to Bhutan. Our survey does not do that. We're in a much more secular society. We want to make sure that everybody's concerns are understood. Is Bhutan happier than us? They must have a high question since they've got a department that focuses on it. Bhutan is not happier than us. And Bhutanese would never claim that, although occasionally you see immediate things of Bhutan, the world's happiest country. Bhutan has never claimed to be the world's happiest country. It's a very poor country. It has other kinds of things that are still hard for people without any question. It's dealing with a rather sudden transition to Westernization, to all of the influences of Western products and electronics and all of that stuff in the capital and the impact of that on its children. But Bhutan is becoming a much happier country and it's becoming a much more literate, much more healthy country. It is making enormous strides. So Bhutan is considering Bhutan's level of wealth overall. Bhutan is certainly probably the happiest country in the world that is as poor as Bhutan without any question. But it is tough for a country that has the problems that Bhutan faces to compete for overall life satisfaction with a Denmark or the United States for that matter. Exactly how much happier are the Scandinavian countries than us? Denmark being number one. Percentage-wise is it a significant difference? It's a pretty significant difference. It's about the difference between the highest and lowest American state. So if you look at the scores for Denmark, they tend to be in the low 80s overall for life satisfaction. The U.S. scores tend to be in the high 60s and low 70s. So that's a fairly significant difference. The world's happiest city, according to Gallup, the city called Ahus in Denmark, where the average happiness rating is 85. And Dan Butner, who's in the Minneapolis-St. Paul popular author, author of the book Blue Zones about health and the book Thrive, about happiness has gone to a number of places to find out why that is. And he reports in that book quite a bit about Denmark and his visit to the city of Ahus. So the differences may not seem that big, but actually a difference in the population of 10 points is quite significant to happiness researchers. So the world's happiest countries, like Denmark, score in the high 70s and low 80s, the world's least happy countries, which tend to be sub-Saharan African countries, tend to score in the high 40s and low 50s. And that's a very significant difference. Bhutan as a country is scoring in the mid to high 60s. So it's almost up to the U.S. It's pretty high, but it's obviously still not quite bare. It's a poor country. One of the things that you've mentioned a couple times along the way was that comparative poverty, the differences in distribution of wealth, rich people next to poor people, ends up affecting how happy people apparently seem to be or not. There was something on Fox News recently. They were talking about how poor people in the United States weren't really poor because a high percentage of them have a refrigerator, a microwave oven, a TV, etc. Could you talk about how that plays into this happiness studies? What the relationship is? Yeah, well, you know, just having these things is not, it doesn't play that much into happiness. Certainly, if you don't have some of the basics, then as Laura put it, you're going to be very, very unhappy. But much of this, of happiness is a comparative process. It's looking at what the expectations are in your society, how you compare to others, what access you have to what's taken as typical normal by most people in your society. And so if you lack access to those kinds of things, even if you have way more, obviously, as a poor American than an average Bhutanese person has, you're not as happy because you're really making comparisons to the average state of the society, the material opportunities that exist for people in that society and other opportunities. One of the things that we're trying to do also is to redefine in some ways the definition of social justice, so that includes all of these domains, access to all of these ways of pursuing happiness, all of these conditions, rather than simply the amount of money that people make. And we come back to Thomas Jefferson, Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Do people not pursue happiness if they're unhappy? One of the things I think is the main problem is most people believe that money is happiness, so therefore they go buy a lottery ticket and do not improve their situation. Well, if they don't have enough money to make their basic needs and you can see why people might do something like that if they feel like there's no other option. But something that John talked about earlier is that piece of consumption and is greater consumption leading us to greater happiness. The elephant in the room is that we're running out of natural resources to create more consumption, and no matter how productive, more productive we are, we're just plain running out of resources. So one of the things that we're doing with this work in providing the information to this policy makers, to the organizations, to individuals, is we're facing the music. We're going to have to get by with less. The growth that we have seen in the economy has been borrowing from the future and using our resources in a unsustainable fashion, so that means that there's some indication that that growth is never going to happen again like that. So what does that mean? It means that we're going to have to find ways, different ways to define consumption, different ways to make ourselves happy. It may not be going through the mall anymore. It may be spending some time on the front porch with your neighbors. It probably will. And so for yourselves, I assume looking at these studies, looking at how things happen in our society, how has it led you to individually to change your lives, John and Laura? Well, it's amazing that having a survey has led me to do his work more of it. No, I'm joking about that. But actually, it gives me a great sense of purpose and value in life to see this and to see that this sort of thing does have the possibility of getting us to think differently as a society. I've always, I think, understood the importance of social connection of friends, and my friends mean very, very much to me. I am still close friends with probably two dozen people that I went to high school with. I think since I'm 65, that's a long time ago. So I think that indicates the degree to which I understand that friendship is really, really so important in social connection. And giving, I mean, you know, Laura and I are doing this work as volunteers, so we don't want to do that forever. I would certainly like to receive some financial remuneration for our work. But we do that because we understand that giving and making a difference in the society is important for happiness. For myself, I absolutely love this work. And no matter what happens, if we are complete failures, or if, you know, we have a variation of our success, this time in my life has been phenomenal because of the people I'm working with. Because of John, and Elden, and Ben, Andrew, and Jacqueline, and Marie, it's just amazing, amazing people to be working with on something that feels like it's just the right thing at the right time. And that piece of that we're not yet funded and are still 80% volunteer, it hurts, but it's amazing work. But what are some of the changes that I've made personally in my life? I'm more conscientious of my time balance, and I know myself pretty well, so I do carve out those times to do things instead of, I think, people who are maybe a little more balanced in just the way they behave, they can stop working at five and go home to their families. I just have a tendency to get pretty passionate about things and stay with it. And then I'm also much more conscientious of some of the teachings of Daniel Kenneman, who is sort of the father of the wellbeing, which is that you're about as happy as the people around you. So if you want to be happy, you need to be around people who are happy. And that's a really interesting one. It doesn't mean that you just give up on your friends who are mentally ill, or your family members who are mentally ill or depressed. But it does mean that you need to be aware of the impact that being around people who are extremely unhappy, it will have on you, and to take some measures for your own happiness. That's an interesting part of the journey for me. And I share with Laura the same thing, I mean, we do have a wonderful team, great people, and that's a huge part of it. Not only are they pretty happy people, I think, but they're also committed in carrying people on all of that matters and curious people. To me, I mean, what keeps me going and excited about life and just looking forward to every day is that through this project and through the work that I do, I'm just constantly learning. And I'm learning new things about the world, I'm learning new things about myself and others. That's an exciting process. I think far too many people stop that process far too early and get in a rut. I don't want to be a rut. You know, I mean, my health isn't what it once was, but my mental health and my sense of being excited each day and of wanting to come and do things, they're absolutely unchanged. And I feel, you know, still feel like a 20 year old in the body of a 60 year old, but I'm very excited about life. This is part of that. One other little aspect that I've read about in preparing for this was the idea of vacation, that vacation matters, and that in the USA, we don't have a norm for vacation. You may start out with zero or maybe one week of vacation, as opposed to Europe, where the norm is four, five or six weeks of vacation per year, in addition to all of the holidays. Do you two take vacation and what would be a reasonable goal for the United States? Is there such a thing? You know, Kalak, the company that makes this here, they did something in the 30s where they actually took people to work six hours a day and they found that people were just as productive as six hours a day as they were at eight hours a day. And I'll say that my son-in-law was a Brazilian in Brazil. If you're working beyond eight hours, your boss comes and says go home. If you don't take your vacation, you don't come to work. It's the law there. Yeah, I think Laura's right. We don't understand it enough, but of course this is the subject that's dear to me because I worked on a campaign to try to get a national paid vacation law in the United States. And I don't know if you know this Mark, but we're one of only a handful of countries in the entire world that don't have a law mandating paid vacation. The other four countries, the Donor, Burma, Nepal, Suriname and Guiana, that's it. But somehow in this country, we don't think that vacation matters, and it does. The countries that are the happiest countries in the world, one of the things they all have in common is that they have among the shortest work hours. In the world, the longest vacations, people are very time-balanced. In those countries, there's a lot of emphasis on work-life balance. It matters. And it's so strange because 100 years ago, in 1910, our conservative Republican president, William Howard Taft, said that Americans should have two to three months off a year for vacation. A conservative Republican said this, and some of the leading business people of the day said, "Well, he was a little crazy, but a month wouldn't be so bad." Now, we somehow believe that it is shocking that people should have two weeks, three weeks off, and the median American vacation time now is slightly over a week of paid. That shocks people in every other country in the world. It's absolutely crazy. It's terrible for our health. It's terrible for our happiness. And yet, we do it. In fact, it's gotten so bad that in the state of Idaho, next door to us in Washington, 30% of Idaho companies since the recession began have illuminated paid vacations. And in some companies, vacation is now being done by lottery. A lottery decides whether you get a vacation or not. This is crazy. This is absolutely insane, and we need to speak up about this. This is not the way to health. It is not the way to happiness. It is not the way to a productive workforce. It doesn't do any good, and it needs to change. Well, I'm with you. Of course, I've made it a personal rule that I've taken vacation each year, and if they didn't provide paid vacation, I took unpaid vacation because there's so many important things in my life. I travel for at least 10 days or a couple weeks with a Quaker folk dance tour each year. There's large gatherings I go to. Those things are part of my mental and physical and spiritual health. I can't imagine how people get by without it, but then people make do with what they can do. And society is a lot of rewards for not taking a vacation, not taking a break, for working incredibly long hours. Like society wants women to be 17 years old and 98 pounds and flawless, which has its own lack of beauty there. And they want us to work really, really hard and just not stop working. So that's something that we have to look within ourselves and look within our community to change, to change our values. Yeah, one of the things that we do believe, Mark, and I probably think we're getting closer here at time, but one of the things I really do believe is that we have a lot to offer as Americans. We've had a lot to offer to the world over these years, but we also have a lot to learn from other people, especially about happiness and about the domains of happiness, and particularly in these areas like vacation. I think we need to be much more open to learning from other people and from other countries because we really don't have all the answers. What we need to start doing is asking the right questions, and I believe that's what the Happiness Initiative does. It asks the important questions about people's lives in all of the dimensions of their lives, not just money. And it engages every citizen who takes the survey in that personal question. It gives them their own score so that they can actually see how well they're doing and it allows them to participate in something that can change policy and change the larger picture in our society. So we are extremely excited about this project and what it does, and we're hoping to see thousands upon thousands of Americans take our new shorter survey when it comes out this fall. In cities all over to see more and more cities do what Eau Claire is doing. We think Eau Claire will be a great model for other cities, and we're just excited about it. Happycounts.org is the website. We've been speaking with John DeGraf and Laura Musikansky, both part of the Happiness Initiative. Go to their site, happycounts.org, and you'll find out a lot more about that. Both of you, it's been great speaking with you. You brought great happiness to my heart and just hearing you. And I want to leave you with a little bit of happiness yourself. It's a bumper sticker that you may or may not have run into. It said, "If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?" I like that. Thank you for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Today's Spirit in Action guests were John DeGraf and Laura Musikansky of the Happiness Initiative. Track them down via their site, happycounts.org, and get your area launched in the Happiness Initiative. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)