I have often heard Europeans say, after a long stay in the United States, that Europe seems strangely small to them. There are various expressions in different cultures that allude to this cultural contagion. Anglo-Saxons, for example, used an expression for those who spent time in Africa: to go black under the skin, "turn black under the skin." That is why Chesterton said that when you travel, the most interesting thing is not so much to discover other countries but to return to your country and see it as if it were a foreign country, as if you were a stranger in your own country.
And is that when you adopt another culture, you open your eyes and look from another perspective, you stop taking for granted what you have always done, you change the yardstick to measure people. Nothing seems so evident, so normal. You stop being the center of the world, of the normality that was so familiar to you.
When we dive and immerse ourselves in other cultures, we almost always discover some unexpected aspect, we prioritize some specific value that we had not paid much attention to, or a way of doing that can be attractive to us and that we can incorporate into our way of living.
At a collective level, this is what is happening with our way of measuring happiness. And it all started in a small Buddhist kingdom hidden in the Himalaya mountains ...