Quotes of the Day

Often the simplest questions have the most interesting answers. A few winters back, I was sitting over a cup of instant hot chocolate in Reykjavík, Iceland, with a fellow American, Eric Weiner. He was in town researching a book about happiness, trying to get to the bottom of why Icelanders consistently say they are content in a country they have nicknamed the "Ice Cube." I happened to live on the Ice Cube at the time, but I was taken aback when Weiner asked me, point blank, "Are you happy here?"

He has posed the same question to hundreds of people in ten different countries while researching his new book, The Geography of Bliss. Equal parts travel memoir, self-help screed and reportage, the book takes something everyone has wondered — Does where you live determine how happy you are? — and uses it to plumb the psyches of nations that are statistically the happiest places on earth: countries such as Iceland, Qatar and Switzerland that "possess, in spades ... money, pleasure, spirituality, family, and chocolate." In a year of traveling, Weiner visited not only well-adjusted locales, but also places where people say life is just so-so and one where the people are truly miserable, all the while asking himself and the reader: If you lived here, "would you be happy then?"

Weiner says his own disposition is akin to that of his favorite Winnie the Pooh character, Eeyore the despondent donkey. That — along with the fact that he has worked as a journalist in more than 30 countries and for a decade was a correspondent for U.S. nonprofit radio-news syndicator NPR — means he takes a skeptical and fact-based approach. The first place he lands is the World Database of Happiness (WDH), a Dutch institute that scientifically researches perceptions of happiness in various societies around the world, and ranks countries in order of contentment. At WDH, Weiner learns some of the cold, hard facts about the conditions under which we feel warm and fuzzy. East Asian cultures, he finds, report lower levels of individual happiness, which researchers chalk up to the overriding value placed on social harmony, while Americans "are guilty of inflating our contentment to impress." Married people and optimists are happier than singles and pessimists, women and men tend to be equally happy, and everyone is least happy on the way to work.

Of course, as the author proceeds to interview the good people of Switzerland, Bhutan, Qatar, Iceland, Moldova, Thailand, Great Britain, India and the U.S., he begins to acknowledge what he and all of us were aware of from the start: there is no single road to happiness. Heavy drinking, for instance, seems a benign diversion in Iceland but has ground Moldova to a depressed halt. The Swiss consistently say they are happy, but Weiner finds the country well run and well behaved to the point that two dogs he observes in a park one afternoon are "not on leashes but don't attempt to run off. They are Swiss dogs."

The book's absence of a singular, cohesive revelation won't stop you from enjoying its vignettes of Indian traffic or the cozy London pub, however. Weiner's travel writing delivers nourishing moments of humor and lucidity. (Travel, he reminds us, comes from the French word travail, or work, a thing that was for centuries relegated to unlucky pilgrims, nomads and soldiers who were forced to wander.) Sardonic observation is his particular gift. In the capital of Moldova — among the least happy places in the world according to the WDH — he walks past a couple of cops who "like all Moldovan men, have a thuggish quality and look like they could use a bath. Unlike most Moldovan men, they are markedly pudgy. It's never a good sign when a country's people are thin and its police fat."

At times, Weiner's gruffness comes off as a strained attempt to stay in the kind of character his book's structure requires, but his skill as a narrator outweighs this mannerism. Geography may not always offer the elegant packaging of virtuoso travel writers like Paul Theroux or Jan Morris, yet I know who I'd rather have sitting next to me on public transportation in Bangkok, passing sunburned sexpats in the bars of Patpong while wondering what it all means.

So did living in one of the happiest places on earth make me happy? Having lived in a dozen cities and some 30 flats in the past 10 years, I'd spent more than a little time wondering about the connection between place and peace, and whether I'd be happier in the next place. I can't remember what my answer was that day with Weiner in Reykjavík, but, like a typical American, I recall vividly not wanting to come off as unhappy. If he asked me the same question today, I probably still wouldn't be able to say, but reading about Weiner's travels and travails has led me to at least one important conclusion. I may not know the exact combination of GDP, proximity to clean water and availability of fresh fruit that translates into happiness for 77.3% of humanity, but I have realized that it's not such a terrible thing to be still trying to work out my own formula.

• Krista Mahr