The Happiness Paradox: I Travelled To Every Country In The World. Here’s What I Learnt.
When less is all you have, joy becomes everything.
I’ve travelled to every country in the world, yes all 196 of them. Somewhere between a silent monastery in Bhutan and a night club in Brazil, it dawned on me: the people who seemed the happiest had the least reason to be, and those chasing happiness the hardest were often the ones furthest from it. It’s as if joy is a bird that lands on your shoulder only when you stop trying to catch it. I set out to ‘run the world’, and in doing so my perspective shifted forever. I am no longer the person that began that challenge. What I found was a strange, beautiful paradox at the heart of being human. Here’s my take aways.
It’s as if joy is a bird that lands on your shoulder only when you stop trying to catch it.
The happiness paradox
Breaking the illusion of normal
Rewriting the instinct for empathy
To be a better learner
We are so small and that matter
Peace is derived from connection
The Happiness Paradox
I’ve stood on the 57th floor of the 5 star Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singapore, surrounded by bright lights, infinity pool, and designer handbags dripping from arms. Everyone looked pristine. No one looked happy.
A few weeks later, I was sat cross-legged on a dirt floor in a wooden hut in northern Malawi. The roof leaked. The electricity was… well there wasn’t any, and the children were in absolute hysterics, over nothing more than the sound of my English accent and my burnt white boy complexion. That’s the paradox that kept showing up, country after country: the poorer the country, the more the smiles.
Now, before anyone mistakes this for romanticising poverty, let’s be clear: I’ve seen hardship that no one should have to endure. I’ve met families living off rice and river water, mothers burying children, whole villages rebuilding after cyclones or conflict. There is no poetry in starvation. No nobility in struggle. But there is, somehow, still joy.
And that joy is often louder, brighter, and more contagious in the places with the least.
The myth of more: In the developed world, we’re taught, subtly and not so subtly, that happiness lives just on the other side of more. More money, more stuff, more likes, more security, more productivity apps, more oat milk variations. And yet, travel cracks that illusion wide open.
In some of the most materially poor countries, I found people who danced without a reason, who shared without hesitation, who celebrated Tuesday like it was a national holiday.
I remember a woman in Madagascar who sold bananas by the roadside. Every morning, she sang. Loudly. I asked her once why she was so happy. She said, “Why not? The sun is here. My children are healthy. And you’ve stopped to talk to me.” Her banana stand didn’t accept credit cards. But it radiated wealth.
If you travel long enough, past the airports, past the brochures, past the curated tourist routes, you start to understand that joy has its own economy. And its own currency.
In Ghana, I met schoolchildren who ran barefoot over gravel just to greet me. They asked no questions about where I was from or what I did. They just wanted to know if I liked singing.
In Laos, I watched a group of elders play boules, their laughter echoing down the riverbank. One of them called out “You want to play?”
And in the Dominican Republic a grandmother in an old wooden stall offered me water, water that she was selling, but that i had no money for at the time. She gifted it to me with the parting words “water is life, as she pushed the bottle into my hands with a smile.
There’s a generosity of spirit that exists where material abundance does not. And a kind of unshakable gratitude for the smallest things - running water, ripe fruit, a neighbour who knows your name.
You learn quickly as a traveler that comfort does not always correlate with contentment. I’ve been more anxious in a five-star hotel in Japan than I was on a squeaky bunk bed in a rural Rwandan hostel, where the power cut out but the night went on.
We live in cultures of excess—often swaddled in insulation from the very things that make life textured and real. Noise. Weather. Struggle. Each other. But in many places I visited, life was lived in public—cooked on sidewalks, debated in markets, danced through in the streets. And with that openness came a resilience, a rootedness, and yes, a happiness that was somehow less brittle than the version I knew back home.
No guidebook tells you that you'll learn about yourself by watching how people treat their elders in Uzbekistan, or how children in Sudan will race alongside you just to keep you company.
No map shows you that in the moments when everything goes wrong, your bag is stolen, your bus is late, your stomach is inside out, you’ll find people whose kindness not only fixes the problem, but restores your faith in humanity.
Every border crossed offered a mirror. And in that mirror I saw how deeply culture shapes what we value, and how deeply travel reshapes what we should value.
The Smile as Defiance. Sometimes, those smiles were not just joy. They were defiance. A refusal to let hardship win. In Haiti, after earthquakes and hurricanes, people still gathered to sing and pray. In Gaza, amid rubble and checkpoints, children still play football with energy, just as they did before. In the slums of Mumbai, young women performed spoken word poetry that brought tears to my eyes.
It’s not that people are smiling because they are poor. It’s that they are smiling in spite of it. Which, when you think about it, might be the bravest kind of happiness there is.
Smiles Given Freely: After 196 countries, yes that’s all of them, the official ones anyway, I’ve learned that you don’t measure happiness by GDP. You measure it in connection, in generosity, in how quickly strangers become friends. And yes I knew this would be the essence of travel; because people told me so, but experiencing it is so much more profound that expecting it.
You measure it in invitations to dinner when you’re clearly lost. In borrowed phones or hotspot connections, and broken conversations and the universal language of shared laughter.
And yes, you measure it in smiles, especially the kind given freely, with no agenda, no transaction, just the simple delight of being alive together in this mad, magnificent world.
Breaking the Illusion of ‘Normal’
One of the most profound gifts that travel offers is the gentle but powerful way it unravels your assumptions. We often walk through life with a quiet certainty that the way we live is the default. The way we eat meals at specific times, the way we greet one another with handshakes or eye contact, the way we celebrate holidays, dress for work, sit in silence or speak over one another—these things all feel natural and right. We label them as normal, but in truth, they are only familiar. They are the customs and rhythms we have grown up with. They are not universal. They are local habits dressed up as objective truth.
Then you leave home. You step into a different country, a different culture, sometimes even just a different neighbourhood. And suddenly, all those things you thought were self-evident start to shift. You watch people eat dinner at midnight and wonder why you always thought six in the evening was late. You see afternoon naps built into the workday and question your own fatigue. You watch people haggle over prices with joy and skill and realise that fixed pricing is not the only way commerce can work. You witness different forms of worship, different family structures, different ways of raising children, loving partners, honouring the dead, celebrating the seasons. And with each new observation, a part of your old certainty dissolves.
What once seemed strange becomes simply different. And soon, different becomes intriguing. Then, over time, it becomes just another way to be human. You begin to understand that your version of normal is not the standard by which all other things are measured. It is one version among many.
This realisation is more than just interesting—it is transformative. It softens your need to judge what you do not immediately understand. It creates space for curiosity, for empathy, and for nuance. You start to see beauty in the unfamiliar. You become more willing to learn from what once confused you. You realise that every culture, every community, has its own logic, its own history, its own reasons. And that those reasons are valid, even if they are not your own.
The more you travel, the more you bear witness to lives being lived fully and joyfully in ways that are completely different from your own. And as that awareness grows, so does your tolerance. You begin to question the assumptions that shape your own habits. You begin to understand that truth is not a single outfit worn by everyone. It is a wardrobe filled with countless garments, each stitched with the thread of experience, context, and choice.
Travel does not ask you to abandon your roots. It simply invites you to see that other people have roots too—and that their roots are just as deep and just as meaningful. That shift in perspective is not just liberating. It is essential in a world that desperately needs more understanding and less certainty.
When you realise there is no singular way to be normal, you also realise there is no singular way to be right. And that is where true openness begins.
Rewriting the instinct for Empathy
Empathy is not something that can be taught in the traditional sense. You cannot simply sit someone down, explain the concept, and expect it to take root. Real empathy has to be experienced. It has to be felt in the body, processed through the heart, and remembered in the mind. And one of the most powerful, consistent ways to feel empathy is through travel.
When you arrive in a new place, you are often disoriented. The customs may be unfamiliar, the language foreign, and even basic social cues can seem elusive. You are suddenly dependent on the goodwill of people you have never met. And time and again, you find it. A local will stop to help you understand a menu. Someone will patiently direct you to the train station. A vendor will smile and gesture in kindness when words fail. These are not just transactional moments. They are profound human exchanges. In those seconds, you are not a tourist or a foreigner. You are simply one person connecting with another.
These small gestures embed themselves deep in your psyche. You might not even realize the shift taking place. But later, when you hear about a natural disaster in a country where someone once helped you with your luggage, or see footage of conflict in a city where a stranger once bought you tea, it hits differently. It is no longer just a news story. It becomes personal. The empathy you feel is instinctive, because you now associate those places with faces, voices, and real emotion. You no longer see a distant other. You see someone who, in another version of life, could have been your neighbour, your friend, your family. And that realisation changes the way you engage with the world.
To be a better learner
Formal education often rewards certainty. We are trained to seek the right answer, raise our hands only when we are sure, and avoid the embarrassment of being wrong. But travel turns that on its head. It places you in environments where you are rarely certain. You are surrounded by signs you cannot read, customs you do not understand, and systems that operate by different logic than your own. Suddenly, questions multiply. How do I order food here? Why is the train platform empty when it says the train should be arriving? What does this gesture mean in this culture?
This disorientation can be uncomfortable, but it is also deeply instructive. Travel teaches you to learn in a more open and humble way. You begin to listen more closely. You observe the world around you with sharper eyes. You ask for help without fear of appearing unintelligent. You become comfortable saying, “I don’t know.” And paradoxically, it is this comfort with uncertainty that makes you a better learner.
The lessons travel offers are not always packaged neatly. You learn not just about new places, but about yourself. You learn how to adapt. How to be patient. How to stay calm when things do not go to plan. This mindset begins to shape the way you approach life even after you return home. You are more curious. You interrupt less and listen more. You understand that you do not need to have all the answers to contribute meaningfully. And in a world full of strong opinions and quick judgments, that openness becomes one of your greatest strengths.
We are so small, and that matters.
Standing before something immense—a mountain range that stretches beyond the horizon, the ruins of a civilisation that existed thousands of years ago, or the endless expanse of the ocean—you are reminded of your scale. In these moments, your daily worries feel lighter, your ego feels quieter, and your sense of self begins to recalibrate. But rather than feeling insignificant, you begin to feel appropriately sized. You are no longer the center of the universe, but you are a meaningful part of it.
Travel often brings this perspective gently. It does not shout at you to change, but it nudges you toward humility. It reminds you that the world has been turning for millennia before your arrival, and it will continue long after you leave. Yet your presence still matters. The way you interact with others, the choices you make, the way you move through the world—all of it creates ripples. These ripples touch people and places in ways you may never fully understand.
This realisation can be grounding. It teaches you that you do not need to control everything in order to have an impact. You simply need to show up fully. Travel offers a quiet but powerful truth: you are a small part of something vast, and that is exactly as it should be. Your actions, however small, can still carry meaning. You are a dot on the map, yes, but every dot connects.
Peace is derived from connection
Travel—real travel, the kind that slows you down and makes you look around—has a way of quietly rewiring your brain. You land somewhere unfamiliar, thinking you're just here for the sights, but soon you're navigating street food menus with hand gestures and laughing with a stranger over a language neither of you speaks well. Something shifts. You stop seeing people as categories—nations, beliefs, news headlines—and start seeing them as just people. There's an unspoken empathy that sneaks in when you share a bench, a taxi, a moment. You might not realise it then, but your worldview gets stretched, and once it stretches, it doesn't snap back.
That stretch is what peace actually looks like. Not the grand declarations, but the quiet rewrites in the mind. Travel doesn’t eliminate conflict, but it dilutes the fuel for it—fear, ignorance, the illusion of difference. And for that, I’m grateful. Every trip I've taken has made the world feel a little less like us vs. them and more like just us. It’s humbling, really, to realise how alike we all are in our quirks and kindnesses.
Peace is a word we often hear in lofty contexts. It is written into treaties, spoken in political speeches, and hoped for in times of conflict. But for many people, peace remains a concept more than a feeling. It is distant and abstract. Travel, however, can make peace tangible.
When you travel, you inevitably find yourself in situations that require connection. You might share a cramped bus with people who speak no common language. You might get lost in a rural village and be guided back by a teenager who simply wants to help. You might end up laughing over a shared misunderstanding with someone from a culture completely different from your own. These are not headline moments. They are quiet, almost mundane. And yet, they are the essence of peace.
These encounters reveal something fundamental: that beneath all the complexities of language, politics, religion, and history, there exists a shared human rhythm. We all want to be safe. We all want to be heard. We all crave belonging. When you experience this again and again in places that are unfamiliar, you stop thinking of peace as an idea and begin to feel it as a memory. A real one. One that you want to recreate and protect.
Peace is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of understanding. And every time you sit across from someone and see them not as a stranger, but as someone with the same hopes and worries as you, that understanding grows stronger. Travel helps plant those seeds. And in doing so, it nurtures a deeper, quieter, more lasting version of peace.
So What Do We Do With This Information?
It’s easy to read stories like these and feel inspired, or even a little guilty. Inspired by the depth of joy that exists in places with so little. Guilty for how often we forget to notice the abundance in our own lives. But this isn’t about guilt. And it’s not about idealising poverty or romanticising difference. It’s about waking up—to joy, to empathy, to the many ways there are to be human. So what do we do with that? What do we take home from all this?
First, resist the myth of more. The next time you find yourself thinking that one more thing a raise, a new gadget, a shinier car, will finally make you happy, pause. Ask yourself: what am I really craving? Is it connection? Purpose? Belonging? Often, the answer isn’t more stuff. It’s more presence. More gratitude. More being, less buying.
Second, practice seeing. Travel teaches you how to notice—tiny smiles, unexpected generosity, laughter in the middle of hard days. You don’t have to fly across the globe to do this. Start where you are. Who smiled at you today? Who held the door? Who made space for someone else? Happiness isn’t always loud. But it’s often right in front of you—if you’re looking for it.
Third, give freely. The greatest lesson from seeing every country is that generosity is not a luxury. It’s a choice. It’s sharing what you have—your time, your attention, your kindness—without expecting anything back. You don’t need wealth to be rich in spirit. You just need a willingness to show up for others, even in small ways. A conversation. A compliment. A smile.
Fourth, stay curious. Let travel be the start of your education, not the end of it. Ask questions. Read widely. Listen more than you speak. Let go of the idea that your version of normal is the best or only one. The world is wide, and wisdom wears many faces.
Fifth, remember our scale. When life feels overwhelming, zoom out. Recall the oceans, the mountain ranges, the night skies you’ve stood under. Let that perspective soften your grip on the things that don’t matter. Let it remind you that being small doesn’t mean being insignificant. It means you’re part of something bigger. So act accordingly. Be kind. Be aware. Be a good steward of your corner of the world.
And finally, travel not to escape, but to engage: Whether it’s a new country or a new conversation, approach difference with openness, not fear. Be humble enough to not know. Brave enough to learn. And kind enough to hold space for stories other than your own.
If there’s one thing travel teaches over and over again, it’s this: people are good. Not perfect. But good. And when we slow down long enough to see each other, really see each other, the world softens. The walls lower. The smiles appear. And peace, quiet, stubborn, beautiful peace—gets a chance to grow.
