The United Nations celebrates each March 20 as the International Day of Happiness.

In this way, the United Nations notes the importance of happiness in the lives of people around the world. In 2015, the UN launched the 17 Sustainable Development Goals that seek to end poverty, reduce inequality, and protect the planet – three aspects that lead to well-being and happiness.

The Thammasat University Library owns many books about happiness in terms of anthropology; architecture; conduct of life; economic development; economics; ethics; income distribution; political science; psychology; quality of life; satisfaction; self-actualization; and well-being.

“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is a well-known phrase in the United States Declaration of Independence. The phrase gives three examples of rights which the Declaration says have been given to all humans by God, and which governments are created to protect.

Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the first version of the Declaration, may have been inspired by the English philosopher John Locke, whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding states that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.” The TU Library owns several books about the lives and works of Thomas Jefferson and John Locke.

As the United Nations website indicates, the resolution to proclaim 20 March the International Day of Happiness

recognizing the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in the lives of human beings around the world and the importance of their recognition in public policy objectives. It also recognized the need for a more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth that promotes sustainable development, poverty eradication, happiness and the well-being of all peoples. The resolution was initiated by Bhutan, a country which recognized the value of national happiness over national income since the early 1970s and famously adopted the goal of Gross National Happiness over Gross National Product. It also hosted a High Level Meeting on “Happiness and Well-Being: Defining a New Economic Paradigm” during the sixty-sixth session of the General Assembly.

Thailand and Happiness

There has been extensive academic research about happiness in the Kingdom, such as an article in the Thammasat Economic Journal from 2008, The determinants of happiness among Thai people: Some evidence from Chai Nat and Kanchanaburi.

The authors include Ajarn Rossarin Soottipong Gray and Ajarn Sasinee Thapsuwan. The abstract for the article reads as follows:

This study examines the level of happiness of Thai population in Chai Nat and Kanchanaburi provinces and its relationship to various determinants. Economic status perspectives in terms of “objective” (income, debt burden) and “subjective” (a feeling of relative poverty to their neighbors) factors are used as happiness determinants. The paper also examines the effects of non-economic factors on happiness including formal education attainment, physical health and perceived quality of the areas in which people live. Having analyzed these effects, it is found that despite their different geography, the findings of two provinces are similar. While the effect of income on happiness is inconclusive, the most important predictor is a feeling of being not poor compared to neighbors which is self-interpreted as a feeling of contentment with what one has. The policy of training one’s mind of contentment accompanying with working hard through fair and righteous means, which is a Buddhist teaching of Blessings of Life, should lead to real well-being and peace not only for Thailand but also other countries if adopted.

Thoughts on happiness

Here are some reflections on the subject of happiness, from books, many of which are in the collection of the TU Library:

• Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship.

Epicurus

• Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

Mahatma Gandhi

• The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

Thomas Jefferson

• Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity.

José Martí

• Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.

Pericles

• Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.

Aristotle, Politics

• HAPPINESS, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).

• The achievement of happiness requires not the … satisfaction of our needs … but the examination and transformation of those needs.

Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness (1984)

• The great end of all human industry, is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modelled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators. Even the lonely savage, who lies exposed to the inclemency of the elements and the fury of wild beasts, forgets not, for a moment, this grand object, of his being.

David Hume, “The Stoic”, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, part 1, essay 16, in The Philosophical Works of David Hume (1826)

• Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

Aldous Huxley, Essay “Distractions I” in Vedanta for the Western World (1945)

• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Thomas Jefferson’s final draft for the Declaration of Independence (July 1776).

• Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788).

• Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H.L. Mencken

• Little is needed to make a wise man happy, but nothing can content a fool.

La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

• No one can live a happy life, or even a supportable life, without the study of wisdom.

Seneca the Younger, Moral Letters

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)