The Happiness Gene

By: Tamara Gestetner

I just got back from Thailand where I took my daughter for her bat mitzvah trip. It was just the two of us, me and my twelve-year-old daughter who’s already asking me the kinds of questions for which I don’t always have the right answers. I don’t write polished versions of my life in this column. I write what is actually happening. So, this is not a travel piece; it’s about something I came home with that I’m still trying to figure out.

My parents always used to say I had a happy gene. It was practically a family joke. No matter what life threw at me, I would land on solid ground, humming along like nothing could ever knock me off my feet for long. My mantra, they used to tease, was “hakuna matata” before I even knew it was a real phrase from a real movie and not just something my father made up to describe me. And here’s the strange part. At the elephant sanctuary we visited outside Chiang Mai in Thailand, one of the trainers, a man who spends his entire day up to his knees in mud with these enormous, gentle creatures, was walking around singing “Hakuna Matata” to himself, fully into it, not performing for the tourists, just genuinely present in his own life. I stood there watching him and thought: that used to be me. When did I stop being that carefree?

Because, if I’m being perfectly honest, the older I get, the harder I have to work to find that same ease. Between building a practice, a podcast, a newspaper column, raising kids, and trying to be a decent partner, most days I’m moving too fast to even check whether the hum is still in there. It’s not that I’m unhappy. It’s that I rarely stop long enough to notice if I’ve still got the zest. Thailand was the first time in a long time that I actually sat still long enough to ask the question.

So, watching my daughter light up at that sanctuary, watching her laugh with strangers who did not speak a word of English, watching the way she trusted the day to be good before it had proven itself, I started to think about something I never actually looked into. Is happiness something you’re born with? Is it genetic and fixed, something you have the way you inherited your mother’s eyes and your father’s nose? Or is it something that erodes over time, something that life slowly sands off of you if you let it, one heartbreak and one disappointment at a time.

And then came a harder question right behind it. Is anyone in Thailand depressed? I mean that seriously, not rhetorically. Because I did not see it, not the way I see it here in New York. Not the way I sit with it every single week in my office. I saw a Thai woman sweeping dirt outside her home at six in the morning, humming to herself. I saw an old Buddhist monk catch me staring and just smile, like he already knew exactly what I was trying to figure out. And I kept coming back to one family, six of them somehow balancing on a single motorbike, weaving through traffic in a way that should have terrified anyone. Nobody looked stressed. The kids were laughing, really laughing, one of them holding onto his mother’s waist with his head tilted back like he didn’t have a single worry riding on the back of that bike. The mother was smiling too, not the strained smile of someone getting through a difficult day, but something that looked like it came easily, like it was just her resting face.

I remember thinking: If I saw an American family of six crammed onto one motorbike with no seatbelts, I would assume they were having the worst day of their lives. These six looked like they were having a completely ordinary, perfectly good day.

And I sat with a man from one of the villages who told me what it used to be like growing up there. He said there wasn’t a single day when he wasn’t in someone else’s home. If his parents were out working the farm, it didn’t matter because the mother next door would set a plate down for him without being asked, without it being a big deal. Nobody was keeping score. Nobody was trying to be more than the family across the path. He said it almost sheepishly, like he was embarrassed to make it sound so profound. Everyone was just trying to survive, nothing more, and somehow that was enough to make people happy.

Then he told me the culture there is shifting now. His words, not mine. It has become more about how I can benefit myself rather than about the “we.” The open doors, the shared food, the assumption that someone else’s child is still your responsibility, all of that is fading as the place gets pulled more toward the West, to that same stew of consumerism we’ve been marinating in for generations. He wasn’t bitter when he said it. He said it the way you’d talk about the seasons changing, something you can’t really control. I couldn’t get it out of my head on the flight home. Here I was, coming from a place where more was better, sitting across from a man whose community was aspiring to the same value system, yet explaining to me how much those aspirations were costing his community.

Because we’re not exactly a model of mental health over here in the U.S., despite what we tell ourselves. Nearly one in five American adults has been diagnosed with anxiety at some point. Roughly half of us report having struggled with depression, anxiety, or some other emotional weight in just the past year. The World Happiness Report keeps putting us somewhere in the twenties, behind Finland for the ninth year running, behind Costa Rica, a country with a fraction of our GDP. We have more in the West by any statistical measurement, yet we’re somehow less happy than people with dirt floors and no plan B.

I was thinking about Marie Kondo a lot as I stood in those villages. Her whole philosophy, the one that turned into a worldwide movement, was so simple it almost sounded silly. Keep only what brings you joy. Let everything else go. People treated it like a tidying trick, a way to sort your sweaters good from bad, but I think what actually made it catch on was something deeper. There’s real psychology behind it. Cluttered spaces have been shown to raise cortisol, the stress hormone, especially in women. Every extra object in a room is one more thing your brain has to process and decide about, even unconsciously, and all of those tiny unfinished decisions pile up into a kind of background noise that never turns off. A cluttered house is not just visually messy; it is cognitively loud. And I do not think that principle stops at our closets. I think it applies to our whole lives. The extra commitments we say yes to that we do not actually want. The friendships we keep out of guilt instead of joy. The version of success we chase because someone told us to want it twenty years ago and we never stopped to ask if we still do. That is clutter too, just a kind you cannot donate to Goodwill. And watching the Thai people in those little villages who owned so little that there was almost nothing left to declutter, made me understand something about them in a whole new light. Their minds were not fighting the same “noise” that ours are. They had less to manage, less to think about, so there was more room left over for the things that actually made life feel good.

I remember an old Seinfeld episode where Elaine’s boss, Mr. Peterman, goes off to Burma trying to find himself after a total breakdown, chasing some kind of clarity he could not locate in his own life in New York. It was a joke on the show, the rich man flying halfway around the world to sit in silence because he could not sit still at home. But I’m not actually sure it was a joke. Why do we do that? Why do we fly to Third World countries with a fraction of our wealth to sit on a cushion and meditate, to finally feel some peace when theoretically we could do the same thing at home?

What is it about poverty, distance, and anonymity that lets us forget the performance? We go looking for the things that don’t cost money and somehow, they end up costing us a lot: the flights, the hotels, the time off. We spend years of our lives accumulating the very things that we have to travel away from in order to get some peace.

And it’s not just what fills our houses. It’s what fills our hands. I could not stop noticing during the entire trip to Thailand how rarely anyone in those villages looked down at their screens. People were looking at each other. Actually looking, the way you look at someone when you’re having a conversation with them, not half-listening like we do here in New York while scrolling under the table.

Back home, I sit across from people at the office or at my own kitchen table and half of them are somewhere else entirely, engrossed on their phones. Research on this is not even subtle anymore.

Just having a phone on the table (even face down and shut off) has been shown to make people feel more distracted and less enjoyment in each other’s company. As a species, we are wired for connection. It’s not a nice concept; it’s a neurological fact; it’s how we survived long enough to build our societies. And now we have a device that quietly interrupts the very thing we’re built for thousands of times a day. A device we believe is connecting us, but is slowly driving us apart.

Ben Zoma asked a question in Pirkei Avot that has been sitting with me since I landed. Who is rich? The one who is happy with their lot. Not the one who has the most; the one who has made peace with what is his. It sounds almost too simple to write in an article, the kind of line you nod at and keep scrolling. But sit with it for a moment and it stops sounding like a nice sentiment and starts sounding like an accusation, at least it did to me somewhere over the Pacific as I watched my daughter sleeping in the seat next to me, completely at ease, more content in that moment than I’ve been in months.

I do not know if happiness is genetic. I do not know if I still have the version of that gene my parents used to joke about, or if it is just harder to hear these days with everything else going on: four kids, a full calendar, and a phone that never stops buzzing. But I know my daughter watched an elephant trainer sing to himself in the mud and did not need a single fact to explain why he seemed so content. She just felt it and kept walking. I’m the one who came home and started researching studies, trying to find the report that would explain what she understood standing there in her sandals without trying.

I’m not going to pretend that I have this wrapped up. I do not. I am back in my regular life now, back to the calendar and the deadlines and the same low hum of never quite being caught up. The version of me that stood in that mud already feels a little further away than I would like. Maybe that’s the most honest thing I can say about it. Not that I found the answer to happiness in Thailand, but that I saw, for a few days, what life looks like when people don’t chase it, but live it. n

Tamara Gestetner, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and certified mediator based in Cedarhurst who helps individuals and couples navigate relationships, career questions, and the challenges people face in everyday life. She is also the host of the podcast Talk2Tamara. Readers are welcome to submit questions or topics they would like addressed in future columns. Tamara can be reached at TamaraGestetner.com, [email protected], or 646-239-5686.