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Living Well Is the Best Revenge. Where’s the best place to live in the whole wide world?

I’ve had it with the rat race. I’m tired of scrambling to make a buck, tired of working for The Man. America is the unending hamster wheel to oblivion, where apparently you win if you die while in possession of a plasma TV, the fattest mortgage or the bitchinest Beemer ever.

There has got to be a place left in the world where a man can be reflective rather than reactive, where mellow is the coin of the realm. Like Blake, I’d like to kiss a little of the joy as it flies before shuffling off this mortal coil. And I don’t want to have to be laden like a Spanish galleon to do it.

I used to believe that my salvation lay in France. Ah, the French … now they know how to live. Those wonderful cafes, those enticingly short work weeks, their joie de vivre. My bookshelves are crammed with authors whose French sensibilities have beguiled me since my teens. Wie Gott in Frankreich, "like God in France," is no empty German phrase.

Or, maybe, if France didn’t work out, I could transform myself into an indolent Spaniard or a drowsy Italian. A friend of mine, recently returned from Croatia, tells me the Dalmatian Coast is a bastion of easy living just now. But these are just foolish, romantic notions. If the European idyll ever existed at all, it exists no longer. The imperatives of the global economy, extolled and fueled by amped-up capitalists everywhere, put the kibosh on that.

So, where to go?

By Tony Long

Full Story: http://wired.com/news/columns/0,71379-0.html?tw=wn_index_5

The Happy Planet Index: http://www.happyplanetindex.org/list.htm

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