Tshering Tobgay – TEDxThimphu TRANSCRIPT
TED is about ideas. It’s about smart ideas. TED is about smart people sharing smart ideas with other smart people.
I have a smart idea. It’s happiness. But I’ve stolen that smart idea, so, in a way, it makes me smart.
That idea is also very common. How common? I did a search online, and not on Google. I did a specific search on ted.com, and a lot of talks came up on “happiness.”
Here is a sampling; this is just a sampling. Dan Gilbert. He asks, “Why are we happy?” And then he goes on to say that we human beings can “synthesize” happiness; we can “manufacture” happiness. If we don’t get what we want, we can convince ourselves that that is actually good for us.
Nancy Etcoff. She tells us about the science of happiness. Who you see there is our friend Sigmund Freud, who said that happiness is not in our fate, that the pursuit of happiness is doomed. Look at him!
This is the real Nancy Etcoff. She really believes that we can train ourselves to be happy, and she really looks happy, indeed.
Now, my search for happiness on ted.com ultimately took me to spirituality and to Buddhism. Matthieu Ricard is somebody who comes to Bhutan quite often, and he says we can train our minds to develop good habits, habits that lead us to happiness.
Chip Conley talks of measuring happiness and measuring what really counts in life. And what he talks about is what he learned about measuring what really counts in life, from two people.
One is a Vietnamese refugee who took on an American name called Vivian, and Vivian worked as a housekeeper for one of his old hotels that he owned.
And the other person he learned from is His Majesty, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the fourth king of Bhutan. He’s been to Bhutan, so he talks about Gross National Happiness.
And then, to TEDx in Canada – Silver Cameron. He talks of Gross National Happiness in Canada. He’s visited Bhutan, some time last year. He attended a GNH Conference, so he knew everything about GNH, and he talked about GNH.
He talked about the four pillars of GNH, nine domains of happiness, and 72 indicators to measure happiness. This is what he talks about, and we’ll stay with GHN.
Now in Bhutan, we have GNH for everything! Democracy, media, education, farming, and most recently, ICT. Just last week, we had an ICT Conference for GNH. There is so much GNH going on in Bhutan that we are convinced that we are happy. Really, really convinced.
Happiness is a place. That place is Bhutan. Somehow, happiness seems to be hardwired in us. Or perhaps it’s the air, the thin air in the high mountains. But happiness is a place, and that place is Bhutan.
In 2009, a production crew came from Brazil to Bhutan to discover that place, and they wanted to interview me, and I was very happy to be interviewed.
The anchor lady, the one who was actually doing the interviewing, was a very attractive Brazilian lady. She wore a very disappointed look. She said, “What’s this? We came into the airport, and the first thing we see in this very beautiful airport are people, Bhutanese, lugging around large … television sets. Where is GNH?” she says. She’s very disappointed.
So I said, “What did you expect? Shangri-La? Did you expect that Bhutan is one big monastery, populated with nothing else but happy monks?”
“No,” I said. I said, “Bhutan is a real country, with real people, with real desires, and, yes, some of us like larger size flat-screen television sets.
So, anyway, our discussions got me thinking, “What is happiness?” If happiness matters, what is happiness? I’m not talking about illegal medication that can give you happiness or illegal drugs that can give you happiness. I’m talking about real happiness, sustainable happiness, a genuine contentment.
So, in Bhutan, we are told that to be happy, we need to balance material progress with spiritual growth. We are taught that we need to protect the natural environment, we need to fight against global warming, we need to nurture and celebrate our culture, we need to practice good governance. We need to meditate.
And we are told that we can actually measure happiness, that happiness has nine domains: domains called health and education, living standards, good governance, culture, ecology, time-use and psychological well-being. And that they can be divided into 72 distinct measurable indices. It’s complicating stuff for me. It’s very difficult.
And to make matters worse, we’ve had conventions and conferences, internationally and within Bhutan. And we have, as a result, a whole new breed of specialists and superspecialists telling us what happiness is and how to be happy.
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