I attended a dinner at the NYU Torch Club organized by Natalie Jeremijenko and Colin Beavan that focused on the question “Does happiness have to cost the earth?”

The invitation (which I was relayed by serendipitous proxy) read something like “in this time of environmental and economic crisis there is an opportunity for activists and cultural workers to help rebuild in a better way. We musn’t wait for policy to trickle down, but need to take initiative ourselves.”

Something like that.

Anyway.

The dinner started with a presentation by Nic Marks, who brought up a couple of tidbits near and dear to my currently Ghana Think Tank obsessed self. He introduced the Happy Planet Index, which measures well-being against environmental footprint. And his statistics seemed to bear out a lot of what I have been discovering in our Ghana Think Tank. The United States has a very high footprint (we are currently engaged in 9 planet living - which means we would need nine more earths to maintain or current level of national consumption) but not such high well-being, as opposed to wealth Middle East States like the United Arab Emirates, with both the highest well-being and footprint. Sub-Saharan Africa suprisingly had a low well-being paired with its low footprint (I found the average Toucountouna person happier than the average New Yorker of my upbringing), and China came in as just under one planet living! South American countries had the healthiest ratio of happiness to planetary destruction, whatever that means.

And while the bottom 20% of a UK sample of people were the unhappiest, after that it evened out: the super wealthy are no happier than the merely well off, or even the somewhat struggling. And this jived with much of what I’ve discovered through the Ghana Think Tank process. In one clip from the video the think tank in El Salvador sent us, a person is feeling genuinely sorry for a Westporter whose children are out of touch with their grandparents. An employee of a tiny rural radio station in El Salvador feels pity for a person from Westport, CT, one of the wealthiest communities in the US. That wasn’t all that surprising to me, as the happiest people I have ever lived with were in the poorest and most rural community I have ever lived in, but this story struck a chord with several people at that dinner.

Nic brought up another point that rang true to the approaches we are trying to instill into the Ghana Think Tank process: that while the idea of polar bears drowning in the arctic is really awful, it is your own children’s health that really matters to you. Keep it specific, in other words.

We then had 90 seconds each to talk about our own work, how it related to the questions at hand, and how we measure value and participation in our own work. I told the El Salvadoran feeling sorry for the Westporter story, which I figured covered value, but forget the participation part, which anyway is covered by the polar bear story,

So, what did I come away from this all with? The feeling that I am a stubborn and naive punk amidst these people working with the system, but the conviction that small, stubborn and extreme feels right! Futility as freedom from constraints might be a euphamism for masturbation is innefectual, no matter where you spray it. Or you believe in new beginnings because though you don’t know where your headed, you do know you’re going somewhere, and you trust yourself.

These generalities may be useless, but after living so happily with so little I’d rather dismantle than negotiate. Nic spoke of hope as happiness, but for me merely trying is happiness. And if wealth doesn’t correlate to happiness, what does? I think Rachelle Beaudoin needs to do a serious study to see how hotness correlates to happiness. Is happiness the question? Is futility the focus? Is nothing sublime?

^{What did you expect, a conclusion? You’re clearly new here. Read on.}