Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis

It's sad, but I'm sure there's a certain kind of person who's gloating over this. As in "Haha, those assholes wanted happiness, but my awesome capitalism wins everytime!1!! Join us at the bottom, suckers!!1!"

Personally, I kinda feel like people probably have perverse psychological impulses that cause us to make ourselves unhappy and discontented unless there's certain specific external constraints to control those impulses. Modern technology, in its quest to remove all constraint, eagerly removed the necessary ones.

It's sort of like fitness: way back, there was no such activity as "exercise," because everyone got enough as a matter of course (e.g. by farming, hunting, walking everywhere). Now no one has to do any of that, "exercise" is a new chore that requires willpower, so we're all getting fat.

I don't think pursing happiness in itself is a noble goal, especially for a society at large. The article talks about some sort of happiness metric which is based on the standard of living and such. It just seems like Bhutan is sticking to a traditional bhuddist agrarian society, and not pursing some metric of happiness directly.

IDK about capitalism, but people seem to like it because it creates a dynamic society with internal competition, which is the kind of society young people want to immigrate to.

Young people don't want to live in a "utopia" where everything has been solved for them. That's the problem described in the article.

I remember reading someone who classified activities like exercise "surrogate actions" or something, but their point was that it was bad only because they aren't useful in modern society but that the impulse to pursue challenge like this is natural.