The Geography of Bliss

Chapter 10: AMERICA

Dockominium. The word hung in the air like a perfectly ripe mango. I didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded big and juicy, and I couldn’t wait to dive in.

The word was uttered by my friend Craig Baggott. Craig was a big, ungainly man with a shaggy flop of grayish hair and eyes that twinkled mischievously when he said things like “dockominium.” Which Craig did often.

Craig could make magic with a ribbon of toilet paper, twirling it gracefully in a maneuver he dubbed “the toilet- paper dance.” Craig loved cars and Mountain Dew—two passions he often combined in spur-of-the-moment cross- country road trips. He would just grab one of his kids, a few gallons of Dew and hit the road. Craig didn’t stop for bathroom breaks. I don’t think it was a macho thing but rather, that Craig, not a conventionally religious man, found some sort of transcendent peace on the open road and didn’t want to interrupt it.

Craig was more at ease, more comfortable in his own skin, than anyone I’ve known. All of the energy that most of us expend worrying about our careers and our marriage and our nasal hair, Craig channeled into just being Craig. This was, I’m sure, a far more efficient and noble use of the energy we call life.

So when Craig uttered the word “dockominium,” I paid attention. As you might have guessed by now, a dockominium is a combination of a dock and a condominium. I do not especially care for either docks or condominiums, but somehow I found the combination irresistible. The dock part of “dockominium” sounded frivolous and—let’s not mince words here—irresponsible, for what is a dock without a boat, and what is a boat but a floating money pit? But the “ominium” part of “dockominium” anchored the entire enterprise in a bedrock of financial probity, for what is a condominium but an investment, and what is an investment but the exact opposite of a boat? Thus the genius of the dockominium.

I envisioned a carefree, happy life that consisted mainly of sipping drinks with tiny umbrellas in them. The inhabitants of dockominiums, I imagined, tanned easily. They never wore ties and, I bet, rarely felt the need to tuck in their shirts. I desperately wanted to be one of them.

Miami, Craig assured me, is where these dockominiums could be found. Why not? I thought. After a decade bouncing around the world as a foreign correspondent, it was time to come home, and Miami seemed like a good place to reenter America. A baby step back home. Miami had tropical weather, corruption, and political turmoil. All of these things I had grown used to overseas. Miami, along with Hawaii and parts of California, is America’s Garden of Eden. Some people (the elderly) come to Miami to die, while others (Cubans) come to be reborn. I wasn’t elderly or Cuban, but I wanted to make a fresh start, so I figured that made me the ideal Miami resident.

My wife and I landed at Miami’s shabby airport on a reconnaissance visit. We stepped out of the terminal and smack into the delicious heat and humidity. Many languages filled the moist air, not one of them English. Yes, I thought, breathing it all in, I could be happy here.

It was the next day when we got the call. It was from another of Craig’s friends. Craig had collapsed while playing a game of Tetris. His teenage daughter had found him on the floor. She did all the right things—calling 911, propping open the door as she ran to the elevator to meet the paramedics—but it was too late. Craig was gone. In his report, the coroner ascribed Craig’s death to a massive cardiac infarction. I had my own theory, though. Craig’s heart, so big and generous, had simply given out from overuse.

Words spoken by the dead carry a special urgency that render them impossible to ignore. And so it was with Craig’s Miami prophecy. I knew then, tears stinging my eyes, that I was moving to Miami. No question about it.

Miami is associated with happiness, if not paradise itself. Beaches. Palm trees. Sunshine. But paradise comes with its own inherent pressures. It screams: “Be happy, God damn it!” I remember driving by a billboard on the way to work one day. There was a photo of a yellow convertible VW Beetle and, underneath, the words, “Woe isn’t you. Dare to be happy.” What is that ad saying? It’s saying, I think, that at the dawn of the twenty-first century, American happiness isn’t left to the gods or to fortune, as was the case for most of human history. No, happiness is there for the taking. All we need is enough willpower to summon it, enough gumption to try it in the first place, and of course enough cash to afford a convertible VW Beetle with optional satellite radio and leather interior.

America’s current fixation with finding happiness coincides with an era of unprecedented material prosperity. Many commentators have suggested this is not a coincidence. As early as the 1840s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that America was populated by “so many lucky men, restless in the midst of their abundance.” Or, as Kevin Rushby writes in his recent history of paradise, “All talk of paradise only starts when something has been lost.” What have we lost? I wonder.

America’s place on the happiness spectrum is not as high as you might think, given our superpower status. We are not, by any measure, the happiest nation on earth. One study, by Adrian White at the University of Leicester in Britain, ranked the United States as the world’s twenty-third happiest nation, behind countries such as Costa Rica, Malta, and Malaysia. True, most Americans—84 percent, according to one study—describe themselves as either “very” or “pretty” happy, but it’s safe to say that the United States is not as happy as it is wealthy.

Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that we are less happy today than ever before, as psychologist David Myers has shown in his book The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty. Since 1960, the divorce rate has doubled, the teen-suicide rate tripled, the violent-crime rate quadrupled, and the prison population quintupled. Then there are the increased rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental-health problems. (There is robust evidence that what we’re witnessing is a genuine increase in these disorders and not merely a greater willingness to diagnose them.) What about all that money? We are the wealthiest country in the world, the wealthiest nation ever. On the one hand, all this cash is good. Basic survival is not an issue for most Americans. Wealthier Americans are, on average, (slightly) happier than poorer ones. Yet one fact bedevils the money- equals-happiness argument: As a nation, we are three times richer than we were in 1950 yet no happier. What is going on?

Clearly, one dynamic at work is rising expectations. We compare ourselves not to the America of 1950 but the America of today and, more specifically, to our neighbors of today. We give lip service to the notion that money can’t buy happiness but act as if it does. When asked what would improve the quality of their lives, Americans’ number- one answer was money, according to a University of Michigan study.

The self-help industrial complex hasn’t helped. By telling us that happiness lives inside us, it’s turned us inward just when we should be looking outward. Not to money but to other people, to community and to the kind of human bonds that so clearly are the sources of our happiness.

Americans work longer hours and commute greater distances than virtually any other people in the world. Commuting, in particular, has been found to be detrimental to our happiness, as well as our physical health. Every minute spent on the road is one less minute that we can spend with family and friends—the kind of activities, in other words, that make us happy.

Political scientist Robert Putnam makes a convincing case in his book Bowling Alone that our sense of connection is fraying. We spend less time visiting family and friends; we belong to fewer community groups. Increasingly, we lead fragmented lives. The Internet and other technologies may salve our loneliness, but they have not, I believe, eliminated it.

Americans, like everyone, are notoriously bad at predicting what will make us happy and what will not. This quirk of the human psyche is especially frustrating for Americans because we, more than any other nation, have the means at our disposal to pursue happiness so vigorously. A Bangladeshi farmer might believe that a Mercedes S-Class will make him happy, but he will probably die having never test-driven that belief. Not so with us Americans. We are able to acquire many of the things that we think will make us happy and therefore suffer the confusion and disappointment when they do not.

Over the past fifty years, America’s happiness levels have remained remarkably stable, unperturbed by cataclysmic events. After the attacks of September 11 2001, researchers found no marked decrease in U.S. happiness levels. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis precipitated a brief increase in national happiness. Most people of the world derive happiness from the quotidian. Historian Will Durant has said, “History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The [real] history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.”

We remain a profoundly optimistic nation. Two thirds of Americans say they are hopeful about the future. Hopeful, I guess, that we will be happier.

When it comes to thinking about happiness, pondering it, worrying about it, cogitating over it, bemoaning our lack of it, and, of course, pursuing it, the United States is indeed a superpower. Eight out of ten Americans say they think about their happiness at least once a week. The sheer size and scope of the self-help industrial complex is testimony to both our discontent and our belief in the possibility of self- renewal.

No other nation’s founding document so prominently celebrates happiness. Of course, the Declaration of Independence only enshrines the right to pursue happiness. It’s up to us, as Benjamin Franklin once quipped, to catch it. We do this in a number of ways, some legal, some not. Some wise, others not so much.

One way Americans pursue happiness is by physically moving. Indeed, ours is a nation founded on restlessness. What were the pilgrims if not hedonic refugees, searching for happiness someplace else? And what is our much- heralded “frontier spirit” if not a yearning for a happier place? “In America, getting on in the world means getting out of the world we have known before,” wrote the editor and teacher Ellery Sedgwick in his autobiography, The Happy Profession.

Sedgwick wrote those words in 1946. Since then, we’ve become even more mobile. Every year, nearly forty million Americans move. Some, no doubt, pick up stakes for job opportunities or to be near a sick relative. But many move simply because they believe they’ll be happier somewhere else.

That certainly worked for the hedonic refugees I met on the road—Linda, Lisa, Rob, Jared. Is it the “energy” of these places that attracted these people to them? I’m not so sure. A better explanation, I think, is that they gave themselves permission to be different people in different places.

The ability to choose where we live is, in the scheme of human history, a very recent phenomenon. Over the centuries, most people grew where they were planted. It took some catastrophe—flood or famine or the marauding hordes of Mongols who moved in next door (there goes the neighborhood!)—to prompt a relocation. With the exception of the very rich, who frankly have always been a bit unstable, people didn’t move for kicks. Adventure, in the good sense of the word, is a modern concept. For most of history, adventure was something inflicted upon you, not something you sought out and certainly not something you paid for. That old Chinese saying “May you live in interesting times” was actually meant as a curse.

Where is the happiest place in the United States? Here the science of happiness fails me. I could not find one definitive report that answers that question. Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan told me that people get happier the farther west they move. His theory, though, contradicts the findings of David Schkade of the University of California at San Diego. He and his colleagues surveyed people in California and Michigan and found that they were equally happy (or unhappy, depending on your perspective). The people in Michigan thought they would be happier if they moved to California, a belief that Schkade calls a “focusing illusion.” Sitting in cold, bleak Michigan, these people imagined a happier life in California, but they failed to take into account the negative side to life there: traffic jams, high real-estate prices, and wildfires, to name a few. “Nothing you focus on will make as much difference as you think,” he concludes.

I’ve seen other reports that the Midwest is the happiest place, or the Ozark region, or small cities with populations of less than one hundred thousand. It’s frustratingly inconclusive. One thing is clear though: The differences within countries are not nearly as great as the differences between countries.

I’ve tried to like Miami. I really have. I’ve done my best to fit in. I’ve gone to the beach. I studied Spanish. I’ve drunk large quantities of Cuban coffee. I briefly considered getting breast implants. And yet all of the sunshine has left me feeling cold.

Maybe I would like Miami if I were Latino. Latin American nations are unexpectedly happy, given their relative poverty. Some studies suggest that Latinos retain this happiness bonus when they immigrate to the United States. I asked my friend Joe Garcia, a Cuban American, about this. He thinks there’s something to it.

Partly it’s the Latino focus on family. “It’s part of a communal living arrangement. You are part of something much bigger than yourself,” said Joe as we lounged, Miami-fashion, at a see-and-be-seen café. “And there’s this emphasis on living in the moment. We have an expression in Spanish that translates as ‘What you’ve danced can’t be taken away.’ “

Nice in theory, but I’m a lousy dancer. No wonder Miami isn’t for me.

One man’s paradise can be another’s hell, and the converse holds true as well. When European missionaries first landed in Greenland several centuries ago, intent on converting the pagan natives to Christianity, they offered the usual carrot-and-stick approach: Convert and you get a shot at heaven; don’t, and you will be condemned to an eternity in hell.

“What is this hell like?” asked the curious Greenlanders. “Oh, it is very, very hot,” replied the missionaries. “It is hot all of the time.”

The Greenlanders surveyed the frozen Arctic tundra that was their home and replied, “We’ll take hell, thank you.”

“Paradise gets old,” says my neighbor Andy, when I raise this sensitive question. We’re sitting in his house in Miami. Andy is preparing to sell it and get out of town. He’s had enough.

He moved here twenty-two years ago, not because it was paradise but because he was fresh out of the army and had just landed a job. He was young and single. Life was good. Yet he never felt like he belonged in Miami. It didn’t fit him.

Andy is, as he puts it, a “freshwater person, not an ocean person.” He says this as if it were a biological predisposition, like body type or cholesterol levels.

The events of August 1992 shed some light on why Andy is so down on Miami. It’s been fifteen years, but Andy can still hear, in his mind’s ear, the low rumbling sound, like a freight train; he can still feel the house shake, can still remember waking up and finding boats in his front yard, even though he didn’t live near the water. “It was really, really freaky,” he says of Hurricane Andrew, now the second-most destructive hurricane in U.S. history, after Hurricane Katrina.

The debris was piled nine feet high outside. There was no electricity for two months. And yet people kept moving to southern Florida, seeking paradise in what was, for Andy, a living hell.

Andy craves a change of seasons. A real change of seasons, not Miami’s two seasons: hot and unbearably hot. He wants to feel the gradient of temperatures and the shift in the quality of the air, to experience a natural cycle, to sense the passage of time. In Miami, one month blurs into the next, and life seems painfully eternal.

Andy was never culturally comfortable, as he puts it, in Miami. He doesn’t speak Spanish, and that has hurt his prospects as a real-estate agent. He finds the people, no matter their ethnicity, rude.

“I’ve been here for twenty-two years, and I can’t take it any longer.”

“When did you snap?” I ask.

“It’s been one long snap. I’ve got to get out of here.” “Is there anything you’ll miss about Miami?”

“Not a thing. Not the weather, not the trees, not the beach. Nothing.”

Clearly, Andy is a man who should have left Miami a while ago. Staying in a place too long is like staying in a relationship too long. You grow bitter, and the chances of domestic violence increase. Reconciliation becomes impossible.

Andy did his research and fixed his sights on North Carolina. The mountainous western part of the state. Asheville in particular. The small city, population about seventy thousand, fits a lot of his criteria; it has mountains, which he loves. And seasons.

He visited and instantly felt at peace there. It’s not quite a spiritual feeling—that’s not a word that Andy would use— but Asheville does have a calming, narcotic effect on him. He also likes the scale. Asheville is big enough to have a thriving arts scene and a choice of restaurants yet not so big that it is burdened with big-city problems, such as traffic jams and high crime rates. Andy concedes he probably won’t go to many art shows or theater performances, but he likes to know they are there, just in case.

Andy’s biggest fear: that he’s discovered Asheville too late. “I don’t want to get up there and find that the rest of Florida has already moved there.”

Cynthia Andros is three years ahead of Andy. She’s already moved to Asheville. She grew up in Miami and feels about as affectionately toward the city as Andy does.

We’re sitting at a Japanese restaurant in Asheville eating sushi. “I can eat a lot of sushi,” Cynthia warns, so we order extra—heaps of tekka maki, worthy of Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. For such a small city, Asheville has an inordinate number of Asian restaurants, yoga studios, and “men’s ritual gatherings.”

Cynthia’s a restless soul, having lived in Paris and San Diego, among other places. Three years ago, she decided it was time for a move. She sat down with a map and research material and attempted to calculate—yes, that’s the word, calculate—where she would be happiest. It was that deliberate.

Cynthia had her criteria. She wouldn’t move someplace flat, either topographically or culturally. She wanted four seasons but a temperate environment. That eliminated Minneapolis, which otherwise scored high. She can’t live in places of low humidity; she gets headaches. So that eliminated states such as Arizona and New Mexico. Food was, important, too. She needed regular access to not only feta cheese but “a variety of feta cheeses.”

Cynthia is a nature photographer, so she had to be close to the natural world. (Biophilia at work again.) She needed an arts scene and live music and other signs of cultural life.

In the end, though, it wasn’t the rational, calculating part of Cynthia’s brain that made the decision to move to Asheville but the intuitive part. She was visiting her parents in Sarasota, Florida, and North Carolina began popping up everywhere. She saw billboards for North Carolina. TV commercials for North Carolina. She would pick up a magazine, randomly and—bam!—there would be a story about North Carolina. In particular, the mountains of North Carolina. Cynthia had never been to North Carolina, yet here was the place, insinuating itself into her life.

“It blew me away, and what could I do but laugh? So I laughed.”

I’m not sure what to make of her story. At first, I recoil when I hear such fantastic tales. I don’t believe in signs— outside of India, that is, where everything is a sign. But then I thought about it. Are Cynthia’s signs really so different from my experience with Craig? That was a sign, too, though I didn’t think of it that way at the time.

Cynthia looked at a map of North Carolina and discovered that there are mountains only in the western part of the state and there is only one city in the mountains: Asheville. So she visited. A few months later, she moved to Asheville.

Cynthia feels comfortable and accepted, at least within Asheville proper. “Look,” she says, sotto voce, “if I step out of Asheville, I’m in hard-core, Bible Belt, southern, small- minded towns. There are people there who don’t travel. I’ve met so many people who haven’t been on an airplane. You wouldn’t believe it.”

It dawns on me that Asheville is an island. A crunchy island of peevish liberalism in a state that is not so liberal. Islands can be places of paradise or self-exile, and I’m not sure which category Asheville falls into.

I ask Cynthia if she is happy in Asheville.

“Yes,” she says. She likes the fact that she can get anywhere within a fifteen-minute drive. She likes the mountains, so close and embracing. She likes the fact that she can see the opera or a theater performance. Asheville doesn’t meet all of her criteria—there’s no large body of water nearby and no major airport—but even paradise requires some compromises.

Cynthia, though, isn’t quite ready to call Asheville home. It is home “for now,” she says. And that, I realize, is the problem with hedonic floaters like Cynthia and with many of us Americans and our perpetual pursuit of happiness. We may be fairly happy now, but there’s always tomorrow and the prospect of a happier place, a happier life. So all options are left on the table. We never fully commit. That is, I think, a dangerous thing. We can’t love a place, or a person, if we always have one foot out the door.

Laurey Masterton ended up in Asheville for very different reasons. It was the late 1980s, and Laurey was working in New York as a lighting director for theatrical productions. She needed a break and signed up for an Outward Bound program. At the time, there were five Outward Bound locations in the United States. She chose the one in North Carolina because of the snakes. Laurey was terrified of snakes, and North Carolina had more poisonous snakes than any other location. So she chose that one. She figured if she was going to confront her fears, she might as well do so in a big way.

Laurey fell in love with the Blue Ridge Mountains. She also discovered she had leadership skills. Soon, she enrolled as an Outward Bound instructor, packed her bags, and moved to Asheville. At first, life was difficult. She was used to being in the middle of it all, but in Ashevlle there was no all. She stuck it out, though. “I felt like I was in the right place,” she said.

One evening, she was cooking dinner for her landlord, who was holding a party. There were a number of Asheville bigwigs at the party, and one of them said to Laurey, “You’re a good cook. You should open a restaurant.” She gave Laurey a book about how to do just that and offered some advice.

Laurey calls it the golden thread. A path appears, faint at first, but increasingly clear if you’re willing to look closely. And Laurey did look. She opened a catering company, then a restaurant. When I met her recently, on a showery summer day in Asheville, we sat drinking coffee at her expansive new restaurant downtown.

I like Laurey instantly, in a way I haven’t felt since I met Karma Ura in Bhutan. So when Laurey tells me that both her parents died, a few months apart, when she was twelve and that she is a two-time cancer survivor, it makes sense. What doesn’t kill you not only makes you stronger but also more honest.

Laurey is happy in Asheville. Whenever she returns from a trip, the first thing that strikes her when she gets off the plane is the softness of the air, as if it is caressing her skin. That and the mountains. Laurey feels like they are hugging her. “I respond deeply to a sense of place,” she says. A five-minute drive from her house and she is deep in the woods or deep in a Thai restaurant. She’s a member of the Chamber of Commerce but can still show up for work wearing shorts and sneakers.

Laurey believes there is something special about Asheville. She’s heard so many amazing stories about how people ended up here that she’s no longer surprised when she hears another one. “A lot of people spin the globe and their finger stops on Asheville.”

She acknowledges that there is tension in Asheville. Tension among the old-timers who don’t want anything to change and the newcomers who want everything to change and the people who have been here for ten years and want to lock the door behind them.

When she moved to Asheville, there were literally tumbleweeds blowing down the main street and maybe two restaurants in town. The other day, she went out to dinner and was shocked to find she didn’t recognize a single person. That has never happened before.

“Is Asheville home?” I ask.

Again, that slight hesitation. That lack of commitment. “I’ve been here for twenty years, so I guess this is home. All the parts I care about are here.”

Her answer makes me recall something an Icelandic film director had told me. There is one simple question, he said, the answer to which identifies your true home. That question is: “Where do you want to die?”

“Where do you want to die?” I ask Laurey.

“In Vermont, where I grew up,” she says. There, not Asheville, is where she wants her ashes scattered.

The problem with finding paradise is that others might find it, too. And that is what’s happening with Asheville. Word is out that this is a great place to live. Money magazine, Outside magazine, and others, they’ve all said so.

Asheville is on the cusp. It could go either way. Cynthia has seen it happen before. It happened in Destin, Florida. She lived there for several years and watched it change “from a quiet seaside fishing village to a greedy, overpopulated, uptight anywhere.” And she’s afraid the same thing might happen to Asheville. Paradise is a moving target.