GDP counts everything but what matters. Oil spills, wars, deforestation, hospital bills — all of these inflate GDP as if they were signs of progress. Yet happiness, soil fertility, cultural resilience, clean water, and children playing safely in the street? GDP ignores them.
Gross National Happiness (GNH), first pioneered in Bhutan, invites a deeper measure: not “How much did we extract?” but “How well are we living?” It is a lens that values well-being over wealth, depth over speed, relationships over revenues. What if we measured success not in growth, but in cycles healed, needs met, trust built, and beauty created? Imagine designing policies, villages, or gardens with “happiness per hectare” or “well-being per watt” as the metric.