Nikos Dimou understood it long before Eurostat did. His book, “On the Unhappiness of Being Greek,” has seen 32 editions in eight languages from 1975 to the present day.
In this year’s Eurostat annual report on “quality of life indicators,” Austria took the lead with a score of 7.9 out of 10. Following closely in the second position, with a score of 7.7, were Poland, Finland, and Romania. Greeks find themselves among the five unhappiest nations in Europe, alongside Croatia (6.8), Germany (6.5), Montenegro (5.8), and Bulgaria at the bottom (5.6). Cypriots are somewhere in the middle, not bad at all, especially considering they are on par with Luxembourg, Estonia, and Italy.
Apart from the criticisms recorded half a century ago by Nikos Dimou, many of which still characterize us, the Greek reality, as expressed through the news, cannot seem to produce happiness: a dog was sexually abused until it died a torturous death, leading to outrage and even calls for boycotting the area as a tourist destination. Three dogs mauled a woman living in the adjacent house with their owner. A 71-year-old murdered his partner and callously stated upon arrest, “What happened, one less person.”
These incidents, among others, all in just one week. And before that: two trains collided head-on, resulting in 57 deaths; an entire province drowned in rain, leaving dozens homeless and hundreds losing their property. In Mati, 120 dead, and every year, thousands of hectares of forested and residential areas become engulfed in flames. People are stabbed on the street because they support a different football team; ships with migrants sink in the country’s waters, and femicides increase year by year. All these events produce unhappiness or may be produced due to unhappiness.
In the past, we thought, as in Cyprus, that the sun was enough to boost our emotions and make us happy. We used to say that the Swedes and other northerners have high suicide rates because their weather is gloomy. However, the sun, despite aiding extroversion, cannot alone make people happy. Our sun, our atmospheric light, is not exclusive to us; neither Austria nor Finland, Poland, or Romania, whose citizens express satisfaction with their lives, have it.
One of Dimou’s aphorisms says, “Other nations have institutions. We have reflections.” One of the factors of our unhappiness, both in Greece and Cyprus, is precisely this.
