A Kingdom That Measures Happiness Instead of GDP

Bhutan doesn't try to convince you of anything. It just sits there, impossibly high in the Himalayas, being itself.

There are no traffic lights in the entire country. Not one. Instead there are white-gloved policemen doing a kind of slow-motion dance in the intersections of the capital, and somehow it works better than any light ever could.

The national sport is archery, played with modern compound bows next to 500-year-old fortresses, and the losing team has to buy the winners a case of beer on the spot. Nobody seems to mind losing very much.

Every building, from the airport to the ATM kiosks, is required by law to look like a monastery — sloped roofs, painted wood, dragons over the doorways. The country decided a long time ago that it would rather be beautiful than efficient, and it has mostly kept that promise to itself.

Television and the internet didn't arrive until 1999. Bhutan let the rest of the world race ahead for decades, then let it in all at once, like opening a window in a room that's been sealed a long time — a little dizzying, a little thrilling, all at once.

And there's the phrase everyone eventually mentions: Gross National Happiness, an actual metric the government tracks alongside GDP. It sounds like a slogan until you spend a few days there and realize they might actually mean it.

Bhutan doesn't explain itself well from the outside. You mostly have to go, get a little lost in the mountain fog, and let the mystery stay a mystery a while longer.

Distilled from Wait But Why