Lesson 7 - Cultural Differences in Well-being

The Happy Movie

Before we left to see what was going on for Constitution Day, we watched a portion of the Happy movie. This was a documentary about what makes people happy, but shows the differences between culture. For instance, it was described how in Japan, work is emphasized to the point where there have been deaths due to overworking. Another story was about a woman who was very beautiful when she was younger, but then endured an accident with a truck that left her physically disfigured. She described how her feelings about life changed from wanting to end it, to embracing it and feeling more fulfilled in life than she had before the accident.

One family that was depicted was a family in Louisiana, who did not have a lot of material wealth, but still described themselves as being very happy. They described how they would get together at least once a week with the extended family and eat together - sometimes with food that they caught themselves. Two theories can be used to help understand these cross-cultural aspects of well-being: one from Hofstede, who focused on the values behind well-being, and one from Geertz, who focused on the meaning behind well-being. Hofstede proposed several aspects on which a culture could be graded on in terms of their values in reference to well-being. For instance, one value is short vs. long term orientation. This family could be viewed as having more short term orientation, because they were not looking months in advance on what they wanted to do, but rather they focused on getting together on a weekly basis to eat together. Geertz looked at the difference between thin and thick descriptions, and described how thick descriptions can be used to understand the meaning behind cultural differences. In the case of the family from Louisiana, their eating together points towards a deeper idea of the importance they place on time they spend together, which means that they are spending less time working. It can be seen that this family doesn't need a lot of material wealth, and thus is not distracted by trying to obtain the most things, but rather focuses on enjoying time with one another.