Cold, dark, and happy

I arrive to blowing snow and an inky black sky as dark and vast as outer space. It is 10 a.m.

“When does the sun rise?” I ask the nice man at reception.

He looks at me like I’m daft. “The sun? Oh, I don’t think you’ll be seeing the sun today.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

He says this like it’s an obvious fact, as in, “Oh, it’s Sunday, so of course the shops are closed today.”

Not see the sun? I don’t like the way this sounds. In the past, the sun has always been there for me, the one celestial body I could count on. (Unlike Pluto, which for decades led me to believe it was an actual planet.)

I had plenty of time to ponder celestial bodies on the long ?ight from Miami. Flying from Florida to Iceland in the dead of win­ter is at best counterintuitive and at worst sheer lunacy. I have my reasons, though. According to the World Data­base of Happiness, Iceland consistently ranks as one of the happiest countries in the world. In some surveys, it ranks No. 1.

When I ?rst saw the data, I had the same reaction you’re prob­ably having now. Iceland? As in land of ice? Yes, that Iceland. As for the winter part, I ?gured anyone could be happy dur­ing the Icelandic summers, when the sun shines at midnight and the weather turns “pleasantly not cold,” as one Icelander put it. But the winter, yes, the cold, dark winter, that was the real test of Icelandic happiness.

I plop down on my hotel bed and drift off to sleep for a few hours. This is easy to do in the middle of the day since it looks an awful lot like the middle of the night. When I awake, the sky has lightened a bit, achieving a state of pleasantly not dark, but pleas­antly not dark isn’t the same as light any more than pleasantly not cold is the same as warm.

How, I wonder, staring out my hotel window into black noth­ingness, can Icelan­ders possibly be happy living under this veil?

I immediately like Reykjavik, though. Iceland’s capital is not so much a small city as a cosmopolitan village. The best of both worlds. Small-town neighborliness but with sushi, too. Anywhere you can’t reach in Reykjavik within a 10-minute walk probably isn’t worth reaching. I like this—not only because it limits the amount of time I spend trying to stay upright on the ice but also because it feels right. Most cities are bigger than necessary. Beyond a certain point, the liabilities of urban life start to outweigh the bene?ts.

Reykjavik is in no danger of crossing that Rubicon. The entire population of Iceland is only 300,000.

On a practical level, Iceland’s smallness means that parents needn’t bother with that old bromide about not talking to strang­ers. There are no strangers in Iceland. People are constantly run­ning into friends and acquaintances. It’s not unusual for people to show up 30 minutes late for work because en route they encountered a parade of friends. This is a perfectly valid excuse, by the way, for being late. On the downside, Iceland is the worst place in the world to have an affair: Geneticists have found that every­one in the country is related to everyone else, going back seven or eight generations. (One woman told me how unnerving this can be. “You’ve slept with this guy you’ve just met and then the next day you’re at a family reunion, and there he is in the corner eating smoked ?sh. You’re like—‘Oh, my God, I just slept with my second cousin.’”)

Sliding around Reykjavik, it doesn’t take long to realize that the city is an exceptionally creative place. Every other building, it seems, is an art gallery or a music store or a cafe ?lled with writ­ers penning the Great Icelandic Novel. History’s great thinkers have long pointed to a connection between creativity and happiness. But why, exactly, does creativity thrive here?

One answer may be the land itself. Iceland’s land doesn’t just sit there. It hisses. It spits. It belches and, on occasion, farts. There are, I’m told, sound geological reasons for this. None of which interests me. What interests me is that Icelanders say that all this hissing and spitting and belching is a source of creative inspiration and, indirectly, happiness. People talk about energy here more than anywhere else I’ve been.

It must be said that something about Reykjavik itself seems less than solid. Physically, the city feels ?eeting, temporary. I half expect to hear someone shout, “Cut, that’s a wrap,” and see stagehands cart away the place en masse. The architecture, such as it is, partly explains this feeling. Many of the buildings are made from corrugated steel and look ?imsy. Then there are the cliffs, mountains, and sea, which loom around every corner, threatening to erase the city. One minute I’m immersed in urbanity—cafes, designer shops—then I turn down a street and suddenly the view has trans?gured to a wild, natural one.

Icelanders seem to thrive on this sense of impend­ing doom, on the provisional nature of life. It keeps them on their toes, ?res their imaginations. Kristin, a television producer I met, told me about a recent walk she took, just 10 minutes from her house in a suburb of Reykjavik, which abuts a lava ?eld: “Not another human being in sight. If I fell and broke an ankle, I’d die of exposure in a matter of hours.” It sounded frightening to me, but she found it exhilarating. Is this the same thrill that motivates the skydiver or the motorcycle stuntman? I don’t think so. She’s not talking about an adrenaline rush but rather a deep, timeless connection to nature—a connec­tion that includes the prospect of death but is not de?ned by it.

Over the centuries, of course, the world has witnessed a handful of golden ages—places and times of immense creativity and human flourishing. I’m not ready to say that tiny, quirky Reykjavik is another Renaissance-era Florence, but the two cities have a few things in com­mon. The same population, roughly 95,000. And in Reykjavik, as in 14th-century Florence, there is no creative elite. Art is produced and enjoyed by everyone.

Hipness itself is endemic in Iceland, afflicting not only the young but also the middle-aged. People like Larus Johannesson, who owns a small music store and a recording label. Everyone knows Larus. People told me, if I wanted to understand Iceland’s rampant creativity, I must meet Larus.

We meet at his record store, a cozy hodgepodge of couches and CDs. Larus is wearing a plaid sports coat and black-rimmed glasses, which he presses against his nose when making an impor­tant point.

To say Larus has an eclectic background is like saying Roger Federer dabbles in tennis. In his 40-odd years, Larus has earned a living not only as a professional chess player but also as a journalist, a construction-company executive, a theologian, and, now, a music producer. “I know,” he says, sensing my disbelief. “But that kind of résumé is completely normal in Iceland.”

Having multiple identities is, he believes, conducive to happiness. This runs counter to the prevailing belief in the United States and other Western nations, where specialization is considered the highest good. Academics, doctors, and other professionals spend lifetimes learning more and more about less and less. In Iceland, people learn more and more about more and more.

I ask Larus about the creative buzz in the Reykjavik air. Where does it come from—and how can I get some?

He presses his glasses against his nose.

“Envy.”

“What about it?”

“There’s not much in Iceland.”

The lack of envy he’s talking about is a bit different from what I’d recently seen in Switzerland. The Swiss suppress envy by hiding things. Icelanders suppress envy by sharing them. Icelandic musicians help one another out, Larus explains. If one band needs an amp or a lead guitarist, another band will help them out, no questions asked. Ideas, too, flow freely, unencumbered by envy.

This relative lack of envy is one sure sign of a golden age, says the British historian Peter Hall. When he described turn-of-the-last-century Paris in his marvelous book Cities in Civilization, Hall could just as easily have been describing 21st-century Reykjavik: “They lived and worked in each other’s pockets. Any innovation, any new trend, was immediately known, and could be freely in­corporated into the work of any of the others.” Like the Parisian artists of 1900, Icelanders compete, but in the way the word was originally intended. The roots of the word “compete” are the Latin competure, which means to “seek with.”

Okay, I had found another piece of the puzzle. Minimum envy. But I sensed I was still missing something. How can it be that this ?yspeck of a nation produces more artists and writers per capita than any other?

“It’s because of failure,” says Larus, pushing his glasses hard against the bridge of his nose.

“Failure?”

“Yes, failure doesn’t carry a stigma in Iceland. In fact, in a way, we admire failures.”

“Admire failures? That sounds ... crazy. Nobody admires failure.”

“Let me put it this way. We like people who fail if they fail with the best intentions. Maybe they failed because they weren’t ruthless enough, for instance.”

The more I thought about this, the more sense it made. For if you are free to fail, you are free to try. We Americans like to think that we, too, embrace failure, and it’s true, up to a point. We love a good failure story as long as it ends with success.

Larus tells me that it’s perfectly normal for Icelandic teenagers to start a garage band and have the full support of their parents. These kids don’t expect success. It’s the trying that counts. Be­sides, if they fail, they can always start over, thanks to the Euro­pean social-welfare net.

Before visiting Iceland, I had always associated happy places with palm trees and beaches and blue drinks and, of course, swim-up bars. That’s paradise, right? The global travel industry certainly wants us to think so. Bliss, the ads tell us, lies someplace else, and that some­place else is sunny and 80 degrees.

But the number crunchers at the World Database of Happiness say that, once again, we’ve got it wrong. Climate matters, but not the way we think. All things considered, cold or temperate climes produce happier people than warm, tropical ones. Theories abound as to why. My favorite now is one I call the Get-Along-or-Die Theory. In warm places, this theory states, life is too easy; your next meal simply falls from a coconut tree. Cooperation with others is optional. In colder places, though, cooperation is mandatory. Everyone must work together to ensure a good harvest or a hearty haul of cod. Or everyone dies. Together.

Interdepen­dence is the mother of affection, in other words. We humans need one another, so we cooperate—for purely sel?sh reasons at ?rst. At some point, though, the needing fades. We help other people because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we’re counting on some future payback.

From The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner. ©2008 by Eric Weiner. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, N.Y. All rights reserved.