Plot Twist: Turns Out, Tanzanians Are Happier Than Americans

The secret to finding human flourishing might not be what we imagined.

“Americans fight over food.” 

Dorothy and Aishi sat in our living room in Tanzania, the summer after their freshman year of college in the States, eyes wide with incredulity. We had known these girls since they were ten years old, and though they were Tanzanian, they had grown up at our international school, so their accents and mannerisms could have passed them for American. Yet at heart, they had Tanzanian values, and their first foray into American culture made that very apparent.

“The girls in our dorm got into big fights over food,” they told us, appalled. “If you touched someone else’s food, it was a huge deal.” 

As Tanzanians, they were bewildered by this. In Tanzania, all food, at all times, is for sharing. Hoarding or hiding a secret stash was completely unconscionable. In Tanzania, it’s rude to eat in front of someone else without offering to share it with anyone around you, even if it’s your own personal lunch.

Tanzanians share. Full stop. 

Maybe that’s part of the reason new research shows they are happier than Americans. Apparently, it doesn’t matter that the average yearly income for a Tanzanian household is $2,000 and the average income for an American household is $80,000. Apparently, money doesn’t buy happiness. Which, of course, we already knew. But did we? 

The Global Flourishing Study, “a groundbreaking five-year longitudinal study of over 200,000 adults across 22 countries” just published some astonishing data, some of which states that Tanzania, one of the world’s poorest countries, has a higher average composite flourishing score than many affluent countries such as the US, Sweden, Germany, and Japan.  

This study, which took place over five years, surveyed participants’ feelings of happiness and loneliness, mental health, beliefs, generosity, service, and love towards others. The results were first published this April, and the analysis of this unprecedented wealth of data has just begun. I just signed up for their mailing list because this stuff is crazy fascinating.

Maybe I’m just fascinated because it proves to me that I’m not, actually, crazy. I flourished in Tanzania. This does not mean that life there was easy. It was frustrating and sometimes dangerous and often uncomfortable. My house was full of millipedes and centipedes and the power would regularly be off for days at a time and the roads, well, don’t get me started on the roads. But living a life with meaning and purpose? Off the charts. Enveloped by an incredible community? I was richer than a millionaire. 

The researchers in this study wrote, “Some countries with the greatest wealth and longevity may have achieved these goods at the cost of a fulfilling life….[The data] suggests that, for most people, flourishing is found above all in dense and overlapping networks of loving relationships.”

Turns out, the United States of America, which holds four percent of the world’s population and thirty percent of the world’s wealth, is one of the poorest when it comes to flourishing. Is it really that surprising? We spend the bulk of our time alone in front of screens that preach to us to spend the rest of our time buying cars and purses and area rugs and face cream that will make us happy, which is actually all a big lie. Our houses and garages may be as stuffed as our Pottery-Barn designer couch, but our personal lives look like “an epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” 

It was this time last summer when Gil and I took a team to Tanzania to put on a kids’ camp for a hundred kids in a city where summer activities for kids are hard to find. But we told the team, and told them again, and then again, that half of the goal for this trip was to learn from Tanzanians. We set up numerous dinners and meetings with our incredible Tanzanian friends who had way more to teach our team than what we could offer them in return. And this Global Flourishing study backs that up. 

(For example, read about my friend Lucy. And about my friend Emmanuel.)

Maybe we need to ask the Tanzanian church to send short-term teams to the States to teach American Christians about what contentment, hospitality, and flourishing could look like. 

When I teach new missionaries about cross-cultural differences, I point them to this Country Comparison Tool by The Culture Factor Group. Using this tool, the United States consistently ranked the highest in the world on the “individualistic” score, which wasn’t surprising considering Americans’ obsession with independence and autonomy. 

So it surprised me when, a year or two ago, I noticed that the United States’ ranking on individualism had significantly decreased. Confused, I dug into the website to see what the reason was. I found this: “The initial U.S. score…may have been too high. The sample back then consisted mostly of Caucasians, while the latest study represented other ethnic groups according to the national census. Caucasians still score more individualistic than Hispanics, for example.”

Ah, this is interesting: Caucasian Americans are the individualistic ones; it’s the ethnic minorities that statistically make America more communal. 

We don’t need Africa or Mexico to send us missions teams, because many already live here, a part of our neighborhoods and churches. But do we ever go to them for advice? What if we asked the Kenyans, Indonesians, or Mexicans in our lives, “What is missing from our church culture that your home culture does better? What can you teach us about hospitality? What can you show us about building community?”

My goal here isn’t to demean America. I am thankful to be American, and other cultures can learn a lot from American efficiency, productivity, innovation, and freedom. But I think every single American, no matter how materially prosperous we are, recognizes that there are some gaping holes in the fabric of our society. It’s clear we’re not going to patch the holes by throwing money at them. We’ve tried that already. 

Since God created the diversity of culture, and each culture glorifies different facets of God’s character, maybe a great way to discover the blueprint for human flourishing is by learning from other cultures. We may just happen to discover Biblical truth coming to life in insightful ways.

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