Eric Weiner - The Geography of Bliss

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Some places are like family. They annoy us to no end, especially during the holidays, but we keep coming back for more because we know, deep in our hearts, that our destinies are intertwined.

Eric Weiner
It is a fact of human nature that we derive pleasure from watching others engage in pleasurable acts. This explains the popularity of two enterprises: pornography and cafés.

Eric Weiner
It's not what we believe that makes us happy but the act of believing. In anything.

Eric Weiner
There's no one on the island telling them they're not good enough, so they just go ahead and sing and paint and write.

Eric Weiner
We help other people because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we're counting on some future payback. There is a word for this; love.

Eric Weiner
I've spent most of my life trying to think my way to happiness, and my failure to achieve that goal only proves, in my mind, that I am not a good enough thinker. It never occurred to me that the source of my unhappiness is not flawed thinking but thinking itself.

Eric Weiner
Until the eighteenth century, people believed that biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, was a real place. It appeared on maps — located, ironically, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now modern-day Iraq.

Eric Weiner
I've always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is finding the right corner.

Eric Weiner
So the greatest source of happiness is other people — and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house, and if we're really wealthy, to an estate. We think we're moving up, but really we're walling off ourselves.

Eric Weiner
Only a fool or philosopher would make sweeping generalizations about the nature of happiness. I am no philosopher, so here goes: Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

Eric Weiner
For me, a place unvisited is like an unrequited love. A dull ache that- try as you might to think it away, to convince yourself that she really wasn't the right country for you- just won't leave you in peace.

Eric Weiner
The high cost of alcohol (and pretty much everything else) in Iceland is another explanation for their take-no-prisoners style of drinking. Since booze is so expensive, Icelanders figure if you're not going to get drunk you're wasting your money. It is difficult to argue with such sturdy, Nordic logic.

Eric Weiner
A love of language may not guarantee happiness, but it allows you to express your despair eloquently, and that is worth something. As any poet (or blogger) knows, misery expressed is misery reduced.

Eric Weiner
Icelanders, for obvious reasons, have several words for ice. The particular kind underneath my feet at the moment is called "hálka": flying ice. The ice doesn't fly, you do.

Eric Weiner
We are shaped not only by our current geography but by our ancestral one as well. Americans, for instance, retain a frontier spirit even though the only frontier that remains is that vast open space between the SUV and strip mall. We are our past.

Eric Weiner
Every country has its cocktail-party question. A simple one-sentence query, the answer to which unlocks a motherlode of information about the person you just met.... In Switzerland it is, Where are you from? That is all you need to know about someone.

Eric Weiner
That's why we feel so disoriented, irritated even, when these touchstones from our past are altered. We don't like it when our hometown changes, even in small ways. It's unsettling. The playground! It used to be right here, I swear. Mess with our hometown, and you're messing with our past, with who we are. Nobody likes that.

Eric Weiner
Part of positive psychology is about being positive, but sometimes laughter and clowns are not appropriate. Some people don't want to be happy, and that's okay. They want meaningful lives, and those are not always the same as happy lives.

Eric Weiner
Compromise is a skill, and like all skills it atrophies from lack of use.

Eric Weiner
Getting someone behind the wheel of a car is like putting them into deep hypnosis; their true self comes out. In vehicle veritas.

Eric Weiner
We can't love a place or a person if we always have one foot out the door.

Eric Weiner