success

The Swiss are a clever lot. The Swiss with their chocolate, with their watches, with their four national languages- with their famous neutrality and abundance of boarding schools- have life figured out in a way that Americans with their stocks and bonds and sugarfree frappacinos cannot master. Standing stout, obscure, landlocked by cloud-scraping mountains and clean Romansch air, Switzerland is the happiest country in the world.

A very wise person- a Buddhist philosopher, actually- once said that a country's success should be determined not in terms of Gross National Revenue but Gross National Happiness. I think that this is one of the most ridiculously legitimate statements to ever leave man's mouth. It kind of shocks one into realizing how strangely the past centurees of advancing humanity have clothed and clouded things that as humans we intrinsically know (and makes one wonder what other salient truths will be surfaced by cow-worshipping monks of the Hindu Kush).

My father, a well-off engineer with a pension and medical benefits, drove this peg of truth into my skull. One day he shook his balding black head and declared that he would never work until he died. He said:

"What a miserable end that would be; what a miserable end to a miserable existance."

And I sat and I sat and I wondered how this tired old man could truly be a glorious example of American prosperity. This red-blooded, tax-paying, Conservative, Presbyterian, tired, old, successful man. Successful and unhappy. From rags to riches; the clear-headed immigrant; the Semite, grown overweight and bitter; four cars and a marraigeable daughter; wealthy and miserable, the American dream.

Success?

Perhaps we have a thing or two to learn from the Swiss.