happiness

Abstract

In 1974, the King of the small Himalayan nation of Bhutan announced to the world that his country would no longer pursue rapid economic growth like all other nations. Instead, Bhutan would measure its success in terms of gross national happiness. However, the king did not explain how he was going to measure national happiness. Anyway, the initiative was welcomed, and today we see how the concept of happiness has moved from the spheres of poetry and philosophy to the sphere of real politics and economics. The flow of various studies on happiness is increasing. The project “World Happiness Database” supported by the University of Dordrecht, the Netherlands is an attempt at least to enumerate such studies. But it is obvious that a group of enthusiasts cannot keep up with the flood of publications. A year ago, the database contained about 40,000 publications, with another 20,000 awaiting processing. About 800 books, articles and reports are added to this list every year.
Since the time of Vedic sages and ancient philosophers, humanity has accumulated a huge number of definitions of happiness, and none of them can be considered outdated. The Dordrecht database proceeds from the simplest and most obvious definition: happiness is satisfaction with life. It means that people are as happy as they enjoy their life. There is only one way to determine a person’s level of happiness: to ask them directly or by indirect hints. People’s everyday actions indicate the direction of their happiness, where it is necessary to move to achieve it.
Everyone strives for it, everyone thinks about it. Independently (from us)), the Festival ARCHSTOYANIE has chosen “Happiness exists” as the theme for this summer, and the International Union of Architects has announced “architecture for well-being” as the theme for the World Architecture Day. This issue contains some reflections of architects on what all science (according to the Strugatskys) deals with: human happiness (we use this quote from the Strugatskys as an epigraph to the round-table discussion).
In this issue, we did not try to discover any single, unambiguously correct viewpoint on the concept of happiness and the ways of its achievement. Rather, we focused on showing at least a fragment of the endless spectrum of opinions and approaches to this eternal theme.