The mundane happiness in life is a function of a specific multiplicitous relationship between time and space. By mundane happiness I refer to that realm of feelings and sensations without the dramatics of life such as deaths, disasters, grave illness or marriage, childbirths etc.
In other words, I propose that time and space are co-determinants of the sense of being mundanely happy in life.
Life in Nordic countries such as Norway, Denmark and Sweden are often said to be the happiest on earth, and the explanation, according to my formula, is that people there have plenty of space as well as time. This is self-evident from the fact that these are sparsely populated wealthy welfare states.
England/UK shares some but much pared down characters of these countries, and that explains my feeling of being generally happy there, despite its foreignness.
Life in Asia, which may be well-represented by that of Hong Kong or Singapore, is in general very unhappy, because of the lack of space and time in people's lives.
Mao wanted China to have a large population, as did Lee more recently want for Singapore. Both succeeded. India, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam...all these are countries of very high population densities. Given this, the mundane happiness of Asia hinges on the second factor on the right side of the equation. And there is bad news here too.
Despite the increasing prosperity of Asia, people no longer have any time. They are too embroiled in working (production) and enjoying life (consumption) that there's no time left, and life becomes stressful. Taking holidays, as contemporary individuals ritualistically do, is no longer an act of leisure and sign of having time. It is nowadays almost a compulsory activity or, an obligation, that actually brings people stress.
Truly 'having time' is not measured by whether or not, or how much leisure activities you engage in. As Baudrillard has shown, consumption of leisure is merely another form of production, and fundamental to the productive system which is responsible for our unhappiness in the first place.
Instead, truly having time is the luxury of having no worry about one's future, of having no anxiety, and having peace. Most individuals in Asia have no time (1) either because they are too worried about their material survival that they have to spend all their time securing one, (2) or they are too fixated on a better (than Thou) future that they spend all their time striving at one. Increasing population in Asia are shifting from the from type (1) having no time to type (2). Most Southeast Asian countries are predominantly type (1), China is in the process of tipping from type (1) to type (2). Singapore and Hong Kong are predominantly type (2) unhappiness. The deliberate lack of welfarism in these countries is justified in the name of continual economic growth, as is official discourse in Singapore. The logic is, if we make people happy, they will actually be happy, and that cannot be allowed to happen, because the administrators have decided that if unhappiness=growth, then happiness=recession.
Hong Kong and Singapore, being city state/entities, are purer in naturea and thus easier to characterise. China, although vast, but due to the population scale, is also almost uniform. Otherwise, in a country of some variation in terms of distribution of economic activities and population, there will be happiness variations within a country. Good example, Japan. In its large cities, there is a pervasive type (2) unhappiness that is of the same essence with HK or SG. In Japan's suburbs or rural areas, however, the happiness approaches that of Nordic countries.
