Just Let Go

In The Geography of Bliss (Reviews, Oct. 22), Eric Weiner searches for the happiest place on Earth.

Why did you decide to study happiness?

Normally, news correspondents—and I was a foreign correspondent for 10 years—go to the least happy countries, where there's war or famine or civil strife and we look for the least happy people and spend lots of time interviewing them. So I tried to flip that on its head, to spend a year traveling to the happiest countries in the world, to spend time with the happiest people their.

So which country did you enjoy the most?

I enjoyed everywhere except Moldova, but even Moldova had unexpected charms. My favorites were Bhutan and Iceland: Bhutan, because it's still such a fantastical place, Iceland because it was so extremely cozy and inviting and unexpected. I wasn't expecting to enjoy Iceland in the middle of January, but I did. They have that “enjoyment of misery” in Iceland—maybe if you're a grump, Iceland is kindred spirits. They're happy, but not frothy, smiley-face happy. It's a melancholic happiness. I was sorry to leave.

Wherever you went, it seemed you were happier once you developed routines?

Yes, familiarity breeds contentment, not just contempt. I try to make myself at home, to plant myself, to be a regular. That's the weird thing about the way I travel. I travel to break out of my routine at home, but once I go somewhere, then it's “ok, this is going to be my coffee-shop, and this is where I'll buy my newspaper every morning.” I create mini-routines, thousands of miles from home.

What about that old-fashioned idea that personal achievements make us happy?

Accomplishments are so fleeting—there's always the next thing to conquer. One study found that people are happiest just before they accomplish something big. Just before you finish writing a book, when you know you're going to make it and you're just polishing—that's the best.

And it wouldn't really matter where you were?

Right. Some lessons from my travels have nothing to do with geography per se. Some are positive, like the Thai attitude of mai pen lai, which translates roughly to “just let it go.” Or the object lessons from Moldova, which boil down to don't be Moldovan if you can help it, but if you happen to be Moldovan, don't be subsumed by this envy that seems to eat the place up. My idea was to treat the world as a laboratory of ideas, to see what we can learn from countries that have a different mix of happiness ingredients.