by Warren Longwell

Created on: January 30, 2010

“Happiness isn’t having what you want. It’s wanting what you have.” My father told me that about six months before he died, and I’m sure that the advice wasn’t original with him. He had probably picked it up from someone else, but when he knew it was his time to die, it became important to him that I had those words to guide me.

And then, a year later, I met an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea who expanded on what my father had said, and put some reason to those words when he told me, “You can actually graph human happiness, and make comparisons. That’s how predictable it is. I’m speaking culturally, now, not individually. Here’s how it works. For each culture you draw two circles, one showing the size of the collective expectations, and the other one showing the size of that culture’s reality. Then you superimpose one circle over the other. The closer they are in size, the happier the people are in that culture. And here’s the fundamental amazing revelation in the whole thing: the size of the circles doesn’t matter!”

The anthropologist held up his left hand with the fingers and thumb curled around like the letter C to indicate a circle about four inches in diameter. “Here’s the expectations of the people that live here in Papua New Guinea.” He then held up his right hand with his fingers and thumb forming an identical circle. “And here’s their reality.” Then he moved the left and right hands, one behind the other so that he was looking through the concentric circles as though through a telescope. “These people are basically a happy culture, even though their reality is rather meager. Remember, the size of the circles doesn’t matter.”

The anthropologist continued as he pulled his hands apart as though holding a basketball, to form a circle a foot in diameter. “Here’s the reality of America.” Then he reached out with his arms to indicate a giant circle four feet in diameter. “And here’s America’s expectations.” He put his hands on the table and said, “Of course everything will change when this part of New Guinea gets television. Then these oversized American expectations will prevail here too, and happiness will diminish accordingly.”

The size of the circles doesn’t matter. That’s the key, and contrary to what the man in Papua New Guinea told me, this also

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