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.
