Eric Weiner: “The world is not flat. It is round and getting rounder all the time”
This is a new one in my mini-series of interviews conducted for the upcoming book. Eric Weiner (pictured above) is a journalist and foreign correspondent. Over the past decade, he has reported from more than 30 countries. He traveled to Iraq several times during the reign of Saddam Hussein. He was in Afghanistan in 2001, when the Taliban regime fell.
Eric also is the author of a terrific non-fiction book that made me want to pick his brains: For “The Geography of Bliss” (German edition here) he decided to visit some of the world’s most contented places. Using the ancient philosophers and the much more recent “science of happiness” as his guide, he traveled the world in search of the happiest places.
As his website says: “Many authors have attempted to describe what happiness is; fewer have shown us where it is, and what we can learn from the inhabitants of different cultures. As Weiner makes his way from Iceland (one of the world’s happiest countries) to Bhutan (where the king has made Gross National Happiness a national priority) to Moldova (not a happy place), he calls upon the collective wisdom of “the self-help industrial complex” to help him navigate the path to contentment.”
Though it’s not the focus of his book I wanted to know what Eric has to say about technology driven global mobility and the flat (or spiky?) world of today. Here’s the first part of the interview. The second part will follow in a few days.
Eric, do you think that with globalisation and modern communication technology today we can actually live (more or less) wherever we want? Is the world flat or spiky (Friedman versus Florida)?
Well, for inhabitants of the wealthy, developed work, yes, we certainly have more choices than ever about where we can live. (Though relatively few of us take advantage of those choices.) I definitely do NOT agree with Friedman. The world is not flat. It is round, and getting rounder all the time. Cultural differences still matter, and in fact I’d argue that in some ways new technologies expand rather than reduce those differences (here’s an example).
Did you – besides your personal curiosity – have globally mobile people in mind when you wrote the book?
No, I didn’t write the book for globally mobile people (the kind who read Monocle magazine, for instance) I wrote the book for people who are curious about other cultures but may not have traveled that much themselves.
Is the quest for the happiest place something many more people SHOULD undertake? Should we all think more on a global scale when planning our lives?
Not necessarily, The point of my book was not–pick up and move to, say, Iceland, because you’ll be happier there. You can incorporate the lessons of Iceland (or Bhutan or Thailand) without actually moving there.
What’s with job, friends, family and all the other necessities that keep us in one place?
Ahhh, the anchors of life. These are good things: well, friends at least. I’m not so sure about job and family. Actually, I think more of us could move abroad but we feel trapped so we don’t. It’s fear, really. But, as I said, I’m not advocating a sort-of mass migration to the world’s happiest countries. For one thing, if everyone moved there, they’d no longer be so happy!
In hindsight, which place did you in the end consider the happiest? Why didn’t you relocate there?
That’s a tough question. I’m not sure I can answer it. I will say that Iceland and Bhutan were my favorite countries, if not actually the happiest. I like them because they are “off the map.’ They don’t follow the rules of the rest of the world. I don’t feel a huge desire to move there, though. I’d like to think I have internalized the lessons of Iceland and Bhutan.
