Can't Buy Me Love... But What about Happiness?

Novinite Insider » EDITORIAL | Author: Valeriya Krasteva |February 12, 2011, Saturday // 14:08
Bulgaria: Can't Buy Me Love... But What about Happiness?

It was recently announced that Brazil, which is thought to be one of the most cheerful countries in the world thanks to its carnival and beaches and samba spirit, is considering inserting the phrase "pursuit of happiness" into Article 6 of its constitution.

The bill is expected to be approved by the Senate and to proceed to the lower house. Its initiator, Cristovam Buarque, a senator and former Education Minister, states that the phrase would help ordinary people start holding to account the government that has long been accused of not providing basic services to the poor.

According to Mauro Motoryn, Director of Brazil's Happier Movement, the bill should be taken seriously, especially in a country, which is trying to cope with its economic and social inequalities.

"Happiness isn't a game, people confuse it with something that is superfluous and it isn't. We need quality health care, which we don't have. We need quality education, which we don't have. It's about creating conditions for people to pursue happiness, preparing us to be a more advanced society in the future," Motoryn said.

Brazil is far not the first country to include the pursuit and obtaining of happiness as an official right in its constitution.

The concept was included in the US Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness," the declaration says.

However, maybe it is less known that it s was the Kingdom of Bhutan, a small landlocked country, nestled in the Himalayas between India and China, that first introduced the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) as an alternative to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1972..

In its new constitution from 2005, the Kingdom of Bhutan officially stated commitment to maximizing the level of the nation's well being.

The concept for GNH was developed in an attempt to define an indicator that measures quality of life or social progress in more holistic and psychological terms than gross domestic product (GDP).

According to supporters of the idea, the GNH value is an index function of the total average per capita of the following measures: economic wellness, environmental wellness, physical wellness, mental wellness, workplace wellness, social wellness, political wellness.

The example of Bhutan was later followed by other countries.

In 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy made a similar pledge in France. He said that well being's assessment will be based on figures related to work-life balance, recycling, household chores and even levels of traffic congestion.

In 2010, British PM David Cameron also announced plans to start measuring the national mood and help build a more family-friendly Britain.

Other countries that have come up with indexes to measure national happiness are Australia, Canada, China, Ecuador, Bolivia, and now Brazil.

Since Brazil inaugurated its new president, Bulgaria-descended Dilma Rousseff, the native country of her father has been hoping that there will be improvement in the relations between the two counties and that Bulgaria would become more noticeable on the world map.

And who knows, maybe Bulgaria's ruling party GERB will follow Brazil's example and propose the establishing of "pursuit of happiness" as a right in the constitution. Although Bulgarians will have to pursue a lot more than Brazilians, considering the fact that they are the saddest nation in the world, according to a recent survey.

At the end of Decembero 2010, The Economist published an article that defined Bulgaria as the saddest place on Earth, based on its income per person. And who wouldn't be sad to live in a country where the minimum monthly wage is EUR 120?

The numerous protests in Bulgaria against the government's failure to provide normal health care, education, culture, and what not only makes me think that having "the pursuit of happiness" as a constitutional right is just what Bulgarians need.

Skeptics would probably say that inserting such a vague "right" would not do much good and would probably be widely ignored. And surely, Bulgarians would have to be very patient before they see any result. But it would at least be a start because it would put one goal written down.

One of the advices that popular American motivational speaker and consultant Brian Tracy gives people is exactly to write down their goals.

He explains that people with clear, written goals accomplish far more in a shorter period of time and increase their chance for success by ten times. The reason is that you break down the major goal to smaller steps, which you need to do in order to achieve your goal, and you start accomplishing them one by one.

Maybe it will not work on Bulgarian territory. Maybe a potential "pursuit of happiness" right will become widely ignored.

But maybe it won't. As Leo Burnett famously said: "When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either."

Or in other words, if they declare "the pursuit of happiness" as a constitutional right in Bulgaria, the nation may not quite become the happiest in the world, but it won't remain the saddest one either. Hopefully. 

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