Retirement is a big life transition. Big transitions suck, even if they end up pointing in the direction you'd like.
I optimized for early financial independence. I did lucrative things and made money (with skills I enjoyed using). Then I used the opportunity to do less lucrative, even more interesting/enjoyable things.
I'm a schoolteacher at the moment. Who knows what I'll do next!
Founded a venture-backed startup at 19; sold it. Could have retired at 23.
Kept accidentally falling into interesting work every couple of years; doing it for awhile, and retiring again. Some of it lucrative, some of it not.
Accidentally started coaching school robotics teams at 38. They did well; role grew in scope. Now I am 43; teaching HS economics, MS robotics/engineering, and a few other random things full time.
From a financial standpoint he/she could be retired. Teaching in public education (my assumption) isn't particularly lucrative so it mostly depends on his/her lifestyle and spending.
If you don't mind disclosing. What amount of wealth made you feel comfortable to fall into other interesting work? Is there a number that made you not worry about money?
Not saying that the overall idea is wrong but that figure is way too low currently for most large metro areas in the US. And below poverty level in others.
With $75k and a family of two kids you are not going to be saving much for retirement, if anything. Medical bills can completely bankrupt you in an instant. You can’t just pick any restaurant you want without doing some research on price first. You can’t afford much of a vacation anywhere either, except perhaps taking the kids to Disneyland once a year.
Nobody optimizes for happiness but they do optimize for "cheerfulness".
> The goal of life is cheerfulness (euthymia), which is not the same as pleasure . . . but the state in which the soul continues calmly and stably, disturbed by no fear or superstition or any other emotion
> “True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”
GP probably meant childlike – open heart, a state of wonder, curiosity and play. Healthy people seem to have this quality bookended on each side of their life.
It’s really interesting to read this as my children are currently screaming unhappily because they aren’t being allowed to eat ice cream until they vomit…
I think the opposite. Everyone thinks they're optimizing for happiness. It's nearly impossible to target because there are far, far too many unknowns. But nobody just aims to have a ton of money for no reason. They do it because they want money. Why? They think they'll be happier when they have it.
Some have a whole-life plan, and some are just living day-to-day, but everyone trying to earn "more money" is aiming to be happier.
There are some who aim for happiness only in the short term, too. People call them lazy, or good-for-nothing a lot of the time. They're not trying to make others happy, just themselves. And so far as they can tell, it's working because if they knuckled down and worked hard, they could earn more money... But they'd definitely be less happy in the short term.
There are even some who optimize for other people's happiness. It brings them happiness, too, of course, but probably not as much as it brings others. That's called charity, selflessness, or altruism.
But everyone optimizes for happiness. They just don't always get it.
I used to think this until I made a career change that moved me from the top 10% earners to the top 1%. I am much, much happier, on a daily and multi year basis. Less stress, less worry, more optimistic.
n=1. The science has been done on this and as far as I know, the results have been pretty consistent and have held up so far.(edit: turns out that's incorrect--there have been contradictory results released in the last couple years)
My household is in higher single digit top percentage range and I'm not even sure whether or not I think moving to the top percent would make me happier.
In the name of science I will be talking with my boss on Monday.
That’s interesting, I recently started listening to a podcast about this subject which started in 2019. Didn’t know there had been contradictory results released since then.
The implications of the differences in methodologies is pretty interesting itself.
I’m an Australian who spent a few years in the Bay Area at a startup. It’s pretty clear to me that the idea that your life will be better when you’re successful / rich is a cultural belief. You don’t look for proof for things everyone in your community believes.
I currently live in Melbourne. My bubble’s equivalent myth is around being creative. If you don’t make art or get involved in hobbies, why not? What’s gone wrong that makes you so boring? None of my friends here obsess about money, or work harder than they need to at their day jobs. When we socialise we talk about comedy shows we’ve seen and things like that.
There’s hundreds of examples of these cultural beliefs once you start looking. Eg, gender roles, when it’s appropriate to lie, the expected stages of relationships, the importance of money, etc etc. The best way to notice this stuff in ourselves is by travelling. Spending serious time in other countries is good for the soul.
In Melbourne, with some of the highest property and rent price / income in the world? My friends there are firmly stuck in the rat race. Melbourne has become money obsessed too, not as bad as SF/SV, but sadly getting that way due to the insane housing costs and creeping American individualism.
But it’s weirdly even more classist - you either have parents to help you out with a home loan, or you don’t, and if not you don’t get to care about being creative (long term) because you can’t afford it.
I think it really depends on your social group. I met a lot of my friends here from doing improv classes and things like that. I'm sure if I worked a 9-5 job and made friends there my social network would be quite different.
After living in SF and Sydney, Melbourne still feels crazy cheap to me. And property prices are set to drop another 15% over the next 18 months[1].
I guess? But that’s not really a very good comparison? It’s apples and oranges, unless
your friend ground in SF was similarly majorly from improv (or a similar creative endeavor). Like, if I moved anywhere and made most of my friends from a particular hobby they would be different from my current work friends. That doesn’t say much about the respective places.
I guess for me my anecdote is; I have a wide variety of friends in Melbourne (having grown up there) and every time I go back it feels like a very large % of every conversation turns to property. It’s become some kind of sick national obsession, and it’s a thin proxy for money obsession. Startup/sv talk is at least sometimes interesting in comparison
Yeah I hear you, and that’s why I framed it as a cultural belief (of your social bubbles) not a national belief.
I’m not friends with a random sample of people in Melbourne. And I bet you aren’t either. Your high school will be skewed based on the ethnicity & socioeconomic status of the area. And they’re all the same age. 36 year olds have different pub conversation topics than 18 year olds or 80 year olds.
People from Sydney (where I grew up) often ask what Melbourne is like. I honestly don’t know what the average person here is like. But I really like the specific people I’ve befriended.
At some point “why do all my friends talk about boring things” should become “why don’t I have more interesting friends?”. And I don’t think Melbourne (or SF) has any shortage of interesting people no matter what you’re interested in. But you do have to put effort in to look.
Making friends as an adult is harder than it was in high school. If you haven’t made that effort in Melbourne, I don’t think to entirely blame Melbourne for your boring friend group.
I totally agree that noones friends are a random sample. Definitely not mine, and I haven’t lived there for awhile now so they are static, and probably even less representative.
I guess I read your initial post as some generalization like “sf folk are so money obsessed I moved to Melbourne and they’re all about the arts”. Which i obviously disagree with, but I think now isn’t what you were trying to say so, sorry for that!
The book 'Stumbling on Happiness' by Dan Gilbert is great on this topic.
People are very bad at predicting what will make them happy. Much better to see what people who are happy now actually did, rather than imagine what will make you happy.
Adding to that, I'm reading Antidote by Oliver Burkeman. One of the points that I really related to was that more you think about happiness, more likely you will find yourself unhappy. Essentially the pursuit/expectation of happiness paradoxically will make your brain think of all the things wrong in your life. I don't know how it started, I think that's been true for me. I never thought about happiness when I was young. There were things that were not perfect -- not enough money, no girlfriend, not having clarity on what to do next, failures, envy in general -- but I was still much happier relatively and I was by no means thinking about happiness back then. Just accepted it is what it is, and kept going on with life.
The, admittedly reductive, viewpoint I take: people who presumably “have it all” because they gained financial freedom are often depressed because they’ve earned a freedom that others told them they wanted.
Many of us are “pipelined”. The course of our lives is not determined by some conscious self-realization, but rather follows a prescribed track. I think (at least American) schooling is largely a failure because it does not teach self reflection. We fail students by failing to even introduce most of them to philosophical thinking. Instead, our schools are focused on teaching the skills required to produce laborers that will ultimately buoy up the economic system.
But the reality is, most people don’t want to be laborers, so when everything is framed like this we equate freedom with freedom from labor. But that isn’t the form of freedom most people really want. People want a more radical freedom grounded in self-fulfillment. All the FIRE folks chase freedom from labor but never spend any time doing philosophical reflection, thus they never realize how they actually want to self-define and shape their lives, thus they face ennui and depression once their grand battle for freedom from labor ends.
In other words, Sartre and De Beauvoir had much to teach us.
Its hard to enlighten your way into happiness when you have an infection. I think alot of “happiness” is based in health, physical, emotional, and the health of those you interact with. Atleast those are somewhat quantifiable ways to avoid needless suffering.
For equivalent levels of wealth, people who think less are usually happier. The reason thinking causes happiness is that thinking tends to cause wealth.
Not sure about the cultural dig at the English (that was probably very context-dependent and an in-joke for Germans/German speakers). But in general, Nietzsche probably meant something like "Man strives for power" by which he might have meant something more like self-expression that raw physical or political power.
I would personally say that most people strive for meaning (as in, living a meaningful life) even if they think they are striving for "happiness", which to me comes off as a very shallow and hedonistic aim.
Contentedness, idle comfort, and calm recreation are things though. I’m sure a zillion other people could name the zillion times more things which either give them joy or which they could anticipate finding joy in. It’s not an empty observation that some subset (however ill defined) or people find disappointment finishing whatever their task. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with your reference to philosophy, but I think it’s all too easy to use a philosophical observation that a concept isn’t “a thing” when what you mean is probably it’s an abstraction for lots of things with disparate factors and implications.
> but I think it’s all too easy to use a philosophical observation
that a concept isn't "a thing" when what you mean is probably it's
an abstraction for lots of things with disparate factors and
implications
Absolutely. And it's a bit of an empty neologism. What I'm getting at
is those things we think we've a solid definition of, but are slippery
and gets away. The "thing" is the misguided idea that there's a common
'object' there.
Happiness is a thing, but the thing it is, is roughly just “whatever internal state is (largely involuntarily) reflected outwardly in order to indicate to others that things are going well (typically compared to some baseline) in one’s evaluation”.
One’s happiness is for others to see, so they know what is good for oneself. One should often work to further the happiness of others because this is often in many ways a pretty good proxy for what is to their benefit, but for oneself, one tends to have better access to what is to one’s benefit, and what one wants, than what one would get just by evaluating the impacts on one’s own happiness, instead of what that happiness is a proxy for. (Though possibly one might fool oneself about some things regarding what one wants, and taking into account one’s own happiness may at times help defend against fooling oneself this way?)
> Happiness is a thing, but the thing it is, is roughly just “whatever internal state is (largely involuntarily) reflected outwardly in order to indicate to others that things are going well (typically compared to some baseline) in one’s evaluation”.
Not at all necessary, there is plenty of literature -- and I know such people out there as well -- whose happiness almost doesn't manifest. It's an internal process and you can tell they are happy when you see them (facial expression, look in the eyes, general demeanor) but they in no shape or form try to indicate things are going well for them. Not by saying things on the topic, not by proving it with numbers (e.g. a number of houses/flats they own), and not even by trying to preach their approach to life to other people.
I meant that their facial expression, look in their eyes, etc. is an unconscious (and therefore harder to fake) signal of whether things are going well for them.
I didn't mean that people are happy when they intend to communicate that things are going well for them, but rather, happiness is that which leads them to unconsciously communicate it. (where by "going well for them" I mean like, "for what they care about". Someone could by in their dying moments, but receive very good news about e.g. their loved ones and their life's work, and be happy.)
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. As a toy example, to become a world-class athlete in some sport tends to require you start around kindergarten. Naturally then, you cannot wait until you are twenty-five to become wise & discover your purpose & calling is to become a prodigy at that sport.
It's hard to discover all the world has to offer while still young enough to act upon it.
I think it's more about how can you make the most of your life despite being "pipelined". It's not realistic for everyone to pursue fulfillment by aiming to be world renowned in a specific area, for both the reasons you mentioned and there aren't enough areas where everyone to have their own individual hyperspecialized niche. However, your point does apply at a more modest level as well; if you're fulfillment requires costly institutional education, your socioeconomic background could close doors prematurely
The real truth of the world that nobody likes to acknowledge is just that. The vast majority of the population is 'pipelined' simply because it's logistically impossible for more than a few million people to be the 'best' (or even top 10) of the most obscure niches, even in our hyper specialized world.
> people who presumably “have it all” because they gained financial freedom are often depressed…
Is this the case though? I know it’s not your main point, but it’s a premise that I think should be questioned. I can think of reasons why it probably wouldn’t be true, and I wouldn’t be surprised if data indicates that financial freedom correlates strongly with mental health. And I can think of many reasons why this popular notion (that the wealthy are often unfulfilled and miserable) might persist even if it’s not really true in general.
We are biological devices whose purpose in life is to replicate, as driven by our selfish genes. Happiness is just one metaphenomena that evolution opportunistically takes advantage of in order to achieve this purpose. It is a "purpose" in the narrow sense that algorithms that do not achieve it are removed from the population.
Over the course of a life, human happiness is primarily dependent on fulfilling the purpose as a replicator, genetically and memetically. We are sculpted in detail by being descended from billions of generations of successful replicators. There is much temporary, but little long term happiness in ignoring those forces.
Having a family, writing a book, creating a piece of art, or a functional invention, or a community. These are means of replication, to be optimized if you wish to increase happiness as a side effect.
What is the purpose of the system of replicators? Does it have one? Is it an end in its own right?
In my experience, people who see themselves as part of the pursuit of the purpose of the system are also able to find happiness even if they do not personally replicate in some obvious biological or memetic way.
> human happiness is primarily dependent on fulfilling the purpose as a replicator
With a species as complex as humans it becomes much less clear what being an effective replicator entails. Someone like Alexander Fleming (inventor of penecilin) has probably done more to augment human replication than a million typical humans. And of course this effect isn't limited to medical specialists. A more salient example would be any of the creators of or contributors to dating apps.
In the past, I've found Bezos regret minimization framework to be a great way to figure out if you are making the right decision leading to happiness. Although, there might be a line of divergence for some things between regret minimization, and happiness maximization (e.g. short term pleasures for long-term long lasting gains).
Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.
Frankl's status as a Holocaust survivor affords him a special
perspective that few get, or would want to. On the other side of PTSD,
for a lucky few, is "post traumatic growth". I won't claim it's a
super-power but it gives a perspective in which many "meaningless"
things melt away and one sees the world vividly.
IIRC (it's a while since I read Frankl) logotherapy starts from a
point of utter meaninglessness, in the camps or on the battlefield
where people die for no reason. With all the "meaning" stripped away
one is free to build ones own.
Frankl gave an enormous gift with that book and his work in clinical
practice, up there with Donald Winnicott. Sadly very little makes it
into ordinary life, perhaps because the subject matter is too
challenging.
> Everyone I know is scheming for the future. They’ve got big goals [...] people don’t seem to think too much about the specifics of what would happen after their goal is achieved.
Most people I know seem to have so many goals and projects that there is no danger of them running out of things to achieve.
"Happiness" feels under-specified here. I think it's more like Maslow's hierarchy of needs [0]. Which actions, both in the moment and in the long-term, (1) shore up the base of your pyramid and (2) carry you further up it?
People seem to think a lot about the lower layers, e.g.:
- I am hungry, what will I eat?
- How are the people that I love doing?
But people seem to spend relatively little effort reasoning about the top. Self-actualization looks different for everyone, and for a particular person it tends to evolve. What would make today a great day for you? What would make the next year great? How do you get there?
Relatively few people seem to reach a durable state of "I am so happy that I desire only to maintain my current happy situation". Perhaps a big component of happiness is the state of working toward (or at least anticipation of reaching) continuously evolving goals.
Or, maybe I have strong "type A" bias and have something to learn from people who do much less.
People who optimize for happiness aren't bragging about having done so, usually. Its hard to do so without coming across as smug and holier than thou, "I have achieved nirvana and you haven't, striving peasant."
Many disregarded, lower income, "lower class" people have as much ability as people paid many times the income, but they have chosen to balance their life differently, often for greater happiness for themselves or others. Those people who have too many dogs, for example.
I'm reminded of xkcd's train full of people all thinking the same thing: "Look at these people. Glassy-eyed automatons going about their daily lives, never stopping to look around and think! I'm the only conscious human in a world of sheep." (https://xkcd.com/610/)
We do not have access to the internal experiences of other people, so we should not presume to judge them.
There's a lot of good stuff in the article, but there's no need to perpetuate this absurd "world of sheep" perspective.
About a year ago I wrote an article about a similar topic.
It’s so easy to fall into the goals trap, where external goals dictate our happiness. It’s addictive, specially if you achieve them. It might seem contradictory but achieving external goals usually drifts us away from happiness.
> Imagine where you would like to end and draw a mental map of which
personality traits or skills you need in order to get there
Interesting adaptive system take. Adapt the model/ego ideal. Random
theory as to why people don't do that... if you think the goal is
necessary to get the ideal, then changing yourself might make you not
want the goal any more. Given the superpower to simply decide to be
happy, but risk becoming Diogenes instead of Alexander the Great, who
would take it? You'd have to be a-priori happy with missing out on all
you presently hold dear [1].
[1] Read "Missing Out" by Adam Phillips for a deep and disturbing
account of how powerful that can be,
can recommend a kayak to improve your current state of happiness if you don't already own one. it's like an adventure vehicle, exercise machine, nature and relaxation transportation thing.. Even if you are poor and short on money, a kayak can even help you eat better if you start fishing from it.
Optimizing for happiness is a hopeless endeavor stymied by the hedonic treadmill. Instead it's far more productive to observe the emotional need for happiness at a distance, like a tide that rolls in and out. Like all emotions, the only thing we control is how we respond to them. Becoming too attached, even to happiness is a fool's errand.
Didn't they measure the brain waves of some specific bud hist monks in a very high altitude area and determine that they were the "happiest" (or maybe "content" is the better word) people in terms of what we can scientifically measure?
Those folks from the FIRE communities are forgetting the most important part of it. “Build the life you want, then save for it”. They started saving, and then pulled the trigger to retire to…nothing.
I still think FIRE is the best path to happiness. Not having financial pressures gives so much freedom Ime. That doesn’t mean people don’t mess it up though.
I think one of the better strategies for optimizing happiness is to try to surround yourself with as many happy people as possible and make that sphere as broad as possible.
I tend to be on the liberal side politically, and honestly, that’s what it’s mostly about. It’s selfishness masquerading as compassasion.
> Everyone I know is scheming for the future. They’ve got big goals and get up every day and work like mad to try to achieve them.
> Like—say your startup goes public and you become a billionaire. What now? What will you buy, where will you live, what will you eat for lunch?
First of all, the everybody/nobody in this article is scoped to the author's circle/bubble.
IME, a lot of founder types are pretty happy just working and not doing much else. After their company IPOs, they will probably just start another company. They aren't necessarily working to retire.
Having enough money that you don't have to work is never a bad thing, IMO. I have a chunk of money right now from selling some stock, not enough to retire (with my lifestyle), but enough for now. Boredom is a lot easier to solve than not having enough money. (I have kids, and lots of code I want to write; I'll always be busy, and if I'm bored it's because the things I'm busy doing are boring.) I'm sure it's fair to say that retiring takes some adjustment. You can take some time to get in touch with yourself. You can work if you want. You have a lot more options.
The reason people don't focus on their happiness IME is they weren't brought up to. I was brought up to go to school every day, do my homework, and achieve. Not to prioritize myself and building a fun, joyful, fulfilling life for myself. It's a matter of culture. And there are also stages of life where it makes sense to focus on one's career.
Yeah some of us enjoy work. People pay me to do what I started doing for fun at 9 years old? Hells yeah! More!!
If I win the lottery tomorrow (IPO or otherwise), I’d probably continue to have a job of some sort. Maybe I would prioritize a different reward than cashflow, but my day to day wouldn’t change much.
Seems more like code for "speaks too much about something they have no experience of".
In the context of this discussion chain, like someone wealthy enough not to have to work who won't stop talking about how starvation is not a real problem.
Notice how you subtly restricted the domain for the word to socio-economic status, where it's often clear as day, and backed up by numbers, who's privileged (the wall St. investor vacationing in the Maldives) and who's not (the starving child in Yemen).
Compare and contrast that with the vast majority of other uses and users of the word, where an attribute that is far from being obviously optimal (e.g. straight and\or white and\or male) is taken as a sign that you have a better life than those of another attribute and - furthermore - that the person with this attribute is fundamentally incapable of imagining the lives of those supposedly deprieved of their invisible privileges.
I don't actually believe that _is_ the vast majority of cases of people using the word. In my experience it's ususally deployed pretty fairly (i.e. people in this discussion acknowleding their overwhelming financial privilege).
Perhaps we exist in very different spheres of discussion.
Perhaps. Here[1][2][3][4] is the first page of google results for 'privilege' (filtered from dictionary entries and google maps locations) for example. Keep in mind that this *is* the 1st page, the full extent of it, after filtering the irrelevant things mentioned, there is exactly 0 cases of the legitimate use.
[1] and [2] contains the exact same attitude and wordings which you admitted isn't a fair use and claimed doesn't constitute the majority of uses of the word.
[1] :
>>White privilege
>>Gender privilege
>>Heterosexual privilege
[2] :
>>these privileged social identities—of people who have historically occupied positions of dominance over others—include whites, males, heterosexuals
>I'm not watching a youtube video.
They are 4 minutes and 5 minutes, respectively, and contains the same views expressed in [1] and [2] and the vast majority of other uses of the word.
I literally showed you 4 examples of how people use those words to silence and make light of other people's opinions and struggles, and they weren't particularly hard to find.
You linked to neutral explanations of how privilege might be defined -- which look like useful resources -- so thanks for that. They don't indicate any instances of silencing.
I don't think we can have any further useful dialogue, so I won't respond after this.
The fact that you can't see a tool for silencing as it is means you're either naive or intentionally evasive, in both cases you don't get to play dumb and wonder at why people don't agree with you.
And advertising you won't respond is not useful info to me.
It would seem as if the author cherrypicked some people who retired early and got bored or are unhappy, ignoring or overlooking that possibly a larger % of people with crappy jobs feel that way too.
If I'm going to be unhappy either way, I'd rather have enough money to at least be comfortable and not worry about the future. It's hard to imagine I'd be able to be as happy without at least that much, though.
Having been on both sides of this argument, here's the other side's perspective:
Picture two hamsters. Each knows they ate recently, but it's been a while. Is their owner coming back to feed them soon? They don't know, in a constant state of uncertainty.
One hamster realizes that running on the wheel and being very loud sometimes causes them to get fed. They don't know it will help, but it might. So this hamster spends all their time on the wheel.
The other hamster relaxes, enjoying life and trusting in what life will provide.
--
Personally, I think happiness vs. work is just a tale which people like to convey as a binary choice. Neither is better than the other, because in reality it's not a binary choice but a gradient of luck. The impact of the choice isn't what matters, it's personal perspective of best outcome that matters.
I agree with your assessment that most people don't have a choice not to work, but I'm not sure I find the metaphor to be a compelling case for it. In both the hamster scenario and real life, there's a choice to work or not which has some variable effect on the likelihood of getting fed, but due to the effect of the hamster's work being minuscule compared to a human's in terms of influencing whether they're fed, the choice to work or not is easy. This might just be one of those things where I tend to interpret things too directly, but the idea that "choosing not to run on the wheel is like choosing to be happy" feels like a way less obvious interpretation than "choosing to run on the wheel is choosing to work".
The metaphor is that there is some baseline you must do to get fed each day / live. For the hamster, it just happens by nature of living in a cage - but it's not pleasant ("will I get fed today?" being a constant concern) For people who work low income jobs, it's similar and the cage is the job(s).
Both hamsters are in a cage (job to live), and yes - when one is more noisy, runs more, etc. (works real hard) the owner notices it more frequently and gives it food, treats, etc. (better pay)
> They don't know it will help, but it might. So this hamster spends all their time on the wheel.
This is the salient part of the analogy. I like it a lot.
I don't know that all this hard work and reaching for career heights will matter in the end.. but I'm not more confident in a different strategy (else I would do that). So I justify my immediate misery for a chance to benefit the future.
I think my then problem way too much focus on the future.
Great analogy, but I was waiting for the part where the hamsters suddenly have unlimited food. In that scenario, does they each continue their previous lifestyle to a certain extent? The hard working hamster continues running on the wheel because he realizes he enjoys it?
"trusting in what life will provide" is a bit new-age I feel.
The analogy is comforting. But maybe something more realistic would be like this:
--
Picture two hamsters. One works constantly to pay off his hamster-mansion, and hamster-sports-car. He can't spend much time with his family. The hamster-kids are at a fancy hamster-school far way.
The other hamsters earns less, but makes time for playing boardgames with the hamper-family. They have a modest hampster-home, and all take a low cost trip to visit their hamster family throughout the year.
I believe a lot more people would find enjoyment and happyness even in jobs that you would not ordinarily classify as “enjoyable” or exciting, if the conditions of their work would not have them constantly worry about being able to survive or just make their work so much more miserable than it needs to be.
Stress is a huge driver of unhappyness in work and there is often so much unnecessary pressure on time and success, it is insane. I often wonder how much more happy AND (as a result) productive people would be if they could actually work as they are meant to be instead of the norm being this stress-driven, restrictive and underpaid treadmill.
Mostly I found that it is not so much about earning more money, but about earning enough money to be able to live a normal, healthy life, that contributes to overall happyness. Anything after that may not actually lead to a happier life, because of the effects of hedonic adaptation mentioned in the article.
> Boredom is a lot easier to solve than not having enough money...The reason people don't focus on their happiness IME is they weren't brought up to
I think you hit the nail on the head but then reached an odd conclusion. The reason most people don’t prioritise their happiness is because they can’t afford to. Many people on this forum (myself, and by the sounds of things, you too) are massively financially privileged. Many of my friends are too, but many are also very much not. One of my best friends is staying in a relationship she’s unhappy in, because she can’t afford rent otherwise. It’s a shocking reminder for me how lucky I am.
This is very well said, but even if you limit the scope to people who can afford it, many really struggle to let go.
Including me. I have a good salary and savings and I keep saying to myself that there's nothing preventing me from having a cozy little life and stop worrying. And yet for years I kept pushing in my career in a way that didn't really make me happy, and I still struggle to let go.
I resonate with this. I'm not 100% FI, can't simply coast from here.. but I could make it work with almost any salary given my savings and lifestyle. Yet I still interview for better paying gigs, and generally turn up the heat on a career I don't love. My answer to "why do I do that" is difficult to give..
It is difficult to answer to that question, and I do not know your specific case, your psychological make-up, your memories, your history and the way you see yourself. However, although I do not know you, I have already listed some possible, if not likely, explanations.
Giving up something at which one is obviously good, for which one is recognized, and which could be the core, or if not the core, a substantial part of one's identity, is challenging. One would have to create another identity, be comfortable saying "I'm not working" when others might think there is something fishy going on, whispering to each other "I don't know what's the matter with her, she doesn't seem to work."
Not getting money when there is money to be had is seen as a serious sin in certain societies in which sweat, pain, and labor are seen as virtuous and relaxing, and doing something for the sake of doing it is the occupation of the lazy and of those with noble origins.
My solution has been to have no external identity, in the sense that what I am is what I can do, but not what I do. For some people I am a sportsperson, for others an aspiring writer, for another group a software engineer. To myself, I am just myself.
I think you meant to say you have no "internal identity"?
You have an external identity by virtue of other's witnessing you. They think something, whether or not you choose to recognize it or manage it or 'internalize it'.
And I'm not sure I'd buy that you have no internal identity unless you are completely in the present moment 100% of the time (which is un-human). Perhaps it's that you have a relationship with yourself that is quite settled - you accept all the parts of yourself and are largely unswayed by what other's think. That sounds like a zen place to be, but also unrealistic. I may go through periods where I'm fully myself without influence, but clearly I have a history which has made me.
And it's not all unwise to have an identity which is affected by what others project. Seems important to learn how to be part of a functioning society.
As for me, I wrote elsewhere in this thread about it feeling like a sacrifice I'm making for future me.
I don't know that all this hard work and reaching for career heights will matter in the end.. but I'm not more confident in a different strategy (else I would do that). So I justify my immediate misery for a chance to benefit the future.
We can of course pick apart and find fault in the emphasis being on the future, or why I this strategy.. but no path is without faults.
"External identity" was a hasty definition on my part. It means that I do not identify with the way others identify me.
I was a professional sportsman for years, and that was the way many people saw me. When I stopped, I no longer played that sport, without torment or suffering: when I decided to move on, I didn't need others to move with me. If I had to wait for others, I would have had a "crisis of identityt".
When I stopped being an academic researcher, I moved on quickly. In a week, I saw myself as a software engineer; if other people with whom I had a personal or professional relationship continued to see me as a scientist (and a "failed" scientist at that point), that didn't affect me.
I don't have a Zen attitude or life. I feel as joyful, angry or bored, depending on my internal state, as anyone else. But I've never, as far as I can remember, had an identity crisis that wouldn't allow me to pursue other paths without being particularly concerned about how others identify me. And I see it is as a strength. I had been concerned with "identity", each move would have been ten times more painful than it was.
It's not that I don't care how others see me -- I dress very fancy for a reason.
It's that it is my life.
If you do what do you do because you think that it will be better for you in the end, you don't have identity problems, you followed a rational path.
I agree for me it really is a matter of identity. Unlike you, I struggle with the idea that I might be seen, but more importantly, that I might see myself as a failed academic. But I'm very slowly accepting that I may be happier building different identities, it's just taking time.
It seems to me that the truth is somewhere in the middle. There are those who are stuck in in unfortunate financial circumstances and are not able to think of happiness and fulfilment as an immediate goal. But then there are those who actively choose not to optimise for their happiness despite being financially secure, or maybe even those who (subconsciously) are too attached to non-optimising-for-happiness goals.
Absolutely. There are some billionaires (Zuckerberg, like him or hate him) who seem like they're having the time of their lives in the chase.
Perhaps it's just people who don't enjoy their work, that are projecting themselves onto the working rich. Once you start with a faulty axiom (working intensely isn't fun), you start getting twisted conclusions (oh it must be psychological trauma, or those people just aren't reflective).
The OP seems to know the happiness literature well. He cites the studies showing emotional affect doesn't go up with money, but life satisfaction does. This seems to clearly suggest more money is >= less money. But his conclusion is literally the opposite to fit his essay's narrative: that if you make it rich, you'll just be sad and bored. This is not what empirically happens.
The statement "if you get rich, you will just be sad and bored" is one of the most obvious psychological operations by the rich and wealthy I have read about. It goes hand in hand with "money doesn't buy happiness" or "there is dignity in hard work (that leads to nothing, like moving boxes from here to there)."
I am earning 10 times what I was earning before -- I was living decently earlier anyway -- and my life is considerably better, with broader and deeper horizons, more creative and purposeful. I can travel wherever I want, I can help others when I can, eat the food I want. I don't go on a spending spree, I don't have a big car, fancy watches or other material possessions that can be associated with "having made it." But my life has improved a great deal. And if I had more money, my life would have even greater potential, aspirations and achievements. One might say, "But if a loved one were to die, your money would not help." Perhaps. But how would a lack of money help?
Perhaps they weren't brought up to because when you focus on individual happiness too much society collapses? Maybe right now we are living in the ashes of the civilizations that,worked and are in the process of collapsing them by switching to individual happiness as our value metric?
I think this is incredibly self evident but I’ll say it anyway, becoming well acquainted with the fact that you’re gonna die is the best way to gain clarity on what’s important. It’s the backdrop to everything else. It’s still shocking to me that people don’t understand how important this is to living a life that YOU want.
Statistical studies of happiness are interesting, but I feel they are borderline useless for practical application. There's just too much subjectivity lost in the quantification of happiness. Individuals are not populations.
On a personal level I feel the fastest way to feel unhappy is to worry too much about whether I am happy. Trying to design a goals or future state in pursuit of happiness feels like setting myself up for disappointment. All else being equal, having money is better than not having it, being engaged in some mentally challenging "work" is better than being bored, having good family and friend relationships is better than being isolated, but trying to optimize these things with some kind of master plan feels like it induces FOMO and general anxiety about the finite possibilities for one life.
I prefer to go with the flow, stay engaged in whatever I'm doing, and keep my eyes open for opportunities. I'm not sure if this makes me "happy", but I'm sure more content when I'm operating then when I try too hard to size up the big picture.
> On a personal level I feel the fastest way to feel unhappy is to worry too much about whether I am happy
These are wise words that I needed to hear after a hard day and feeling like I've always been getting the short end of the stick lately. Thank you for writing them.
I think you’re right about the way to be unhappy. You might even generalize it to be: too much self preoccupation. The most miserable people I know are self absorbed. The happiest ones are always focused on something other than themselves. I’ve found this same pattern plays out in my own life.
Most of the time people are talking about a kind of 'cognitive' happiness. Which is essentially divorced from the experience of positive valence emotions on a day to day basis. If you ask prisoners if they are happy, they will say no because it would be weird for them to say yes, wouldn't it? it would break our expectations and their own. It would break the model we all have of how we are supposed to feel about this or that.
I think it is actually a rare thing for a person to have enough awareness and memory to be able to accurately judge how much positive valence emotion they have on average over the period of months. To notice it you have to be present, you have to stop and notice the experience of eating that tasty sandwich or taking that hot bath, or winning that international tournament. And most people, by and large, don't. Especially thinker types like you might find on hacker news.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadI think Piketty makes a good argument against GDP if you're keen on learning more about the topic.
Retirement is a big life transition. Big transitions suck, even if they end up pointing in the direction you'd like.
I optimized for early financial independence. I did lucrative things and made money (with skills I enjoyed using). Then I used the opportunity to do less lucrative, even more interesting/enjoyable things.
I'm a schoolteacher at the moment. Who knows what I'll do next!
Kept accidentally falling into interesting work every couple of years; doing it for awhile, and retiring again. Some of it lucrative, some of it not.
Accidentally started coaching school robotics teams at 38. They did well; role grew in scope. Now I am 43; teaching HS economics, MS robotics/engineering, and a few other random things full time.
People do optimize prosperity, and prosperity generally leads to happiness.
It's well correlated up to a certain level of wealth / income, and then only very loosely correlated.
The leveling out is around $75k of annual income. Most of us here have optimized income beyond that point.
With $75k and a family of two kids you are not going to be saving much for retirement, if anything. Medical bills can completely bankrupt you in an instant. You can’t just pick any restaurant you want without doing some research on price first. You can’t afford much of a vacation anywhere either, except perhaps taking the kids to Disneyland once a year.
> The goal of life is cheerfulness (euthymia), which is not the same as pleasure . . . but the state in which the soul continues calmly and stably, disturbed by no fear or superstition or any other emotion
> “True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”
https://www.lookingforwisdom.com/democritus/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Tranquillitate_Animi
I forget other people had healthy families until I read something like this!
Being completely serious ( I think)
Some have a whole-life plan, and some are just living day-to-day, but everyone trying to earn "more money" is aiming to be happier.
There are some who aim for happiness only in the short term, too. People call them lazy, or good-for-nothing a lot of the time. They're not trying to make others happy, just themselves. And so far as they can tell, it's working because if they knuckled down and worked hard, they could earn more money... But they'd definitely be less happy in the short term.
There are even some who optimize for other people's happiness. It brings them happiness, too, of course, but probably not as much as it brings others. That's called charity, selflessness, or altruism.
But everyone optimizes for happiness. They just don't always get it.
My household is in higher single digit top percentage range and I'm not even sure whether or not I think moving to the top percent would make me happier.
In the name of science I will be talking with my boss on Monday.
The implications of the differences in methodologies is pretty interesting itself.
I currently live in Melbourne. My bubble’s equivalent myth is around being creative. If you don’t make art or get involved in hobbies, why not? What’s gone wrong that makes you so boring? None of my friends here obsess about money, or work harder than they need to at their day jobs. When we socialise we talk about comedy shows we’ve seen and things like that.
There’s hundreds of examples of these cultural beliefs once you start looking. Eg, gender roles, when it’s appropriate to lie, the expected stages of relationships, the importance of money, etc etc. The best way to notice this stuff in ourselves is by travelling. Spending serious time in other countries is good for the soul.
After living in SF and Sydney, Melbourne still feels crazy cheap to me. And property prices are set to drop another 15% over the next 18 months[1].
[1] https://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/buying/australia...
I guess for me my anecdote is; I have a wide variety of friends in Melbourne (having grown up there) and every time I go back it feels like a very large % of every conversation turns to property. It’s become some kind of sick national obsession, and it’s a thin proxy for money obsession. Startup/sv talk is at least sometimes interesting in comparison
I’m not friends with a random sample of people in Melbourne. And I bet you aren’t either. Your high school will be skewed based on the ethnicity & socioeconomic status of the area. And they’re all the same age. 36 year olds have different pub conversation topics than 18 year olds or 80 year olds.
People from Sydney (where I grew up) often ask what Melbourne is like. I honestly don’t know what the average person here is like. But I really like the specific people I’ve befriended.
At some point “why do all my friends talk about boring things” should become “why don’t I have more interesting friends?”. And I don’t think Melbourne (or SF) has any shortage of interesting people no matter what you’re interested in. But you do have to put effort in to look.
Making friends as an adult is harder than it was in high school. If you haven’t made that effort in Melbourne, I don’t think to entirely blame Melbourne for your boring friend group.
I guess I read your initial post as some generalization like “sf folk are so money obsessed I moved to Melbourne and they’re all about the arts”. Which i obviously disagree with, but I think now isn’t what you were trying to say so, sorry for that!
People are very bad at predicting what will make them happy. Much better to see what people who are happy now actually did, rather than imagine what will make you happy.
The, admittedly reductive, viewpoint I take: people who presumably “have it all” because they gained financial freedom are often depressed because they’ve earned a freedom that others told them they wanted.
Many of us are “pipelined”. The course of our lives is not determined by some conscious self-realization, but rather follows a prescribed track. I think (at least American) schooling is largely a failure because it does not teach self reflection. We fail students by failing to even introduce most of them to philosophical thinking. Instead, our schools are focused on teaching the skills required to produce laborers that will ultimately buoy up the economic system.
But the reality is, most people don’t want to be laborers, so when everything is framed like this we equate freedom with freedom from labor. But that isn’t the form of freedom most people really want. People want a more radical freedom grounded in self-fulfillment. All the FIRE folks chase freedom from labor but never spend any time doing philosophical reflection, thus they never realize how they actually want to self-define and shape their lives, thus they face ennui and depression once their grand battle for freedom from labor ends.
In other words, Sartre and De Beauvoir had much to teach us.
Negative freedoms are half a deal. All the old philosophers have a lot to teach us. We just don't have time to pay attention to them now.
Maybe Nietzsche said it well:
"Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that"
What did he mean?
> So if we aren't optimizing happiness, why not?
Because "happiness" isn't a thing. It's an idea we have about a thing that most of us are not courageous enough to name, let alone take for ourselves.
I would personally say that most people strive for meaning (as in, living a meaningful life) even if they think they are striving for "happiness", which to me comes off as a very shallow and hedonistic aim.
I may have heard... it was specifically a barb aimed at John Stuart Mill.
Absolutely. And it's a bit of an empty neologism. What I'm getting at is those things we think we've a solid definition of, but are slippery and gets away. The "thing" is the misguided idea that there's a common 'object' there.
One’s happiness is for others to see, so they know what is good for oneself. One should often work to further the happiness of others because this is often in many ways a pretty good proxy for what is to their benefit, but for oneself, one tends to have better access to what is to one’s benefit, and what one wants, than what one would get just by evaluating the impacts on one’s own happiness, instead of what that happiness is a proxy for. (Though possibly one might fool oneself about some things regarding what one wants, and taking into account one’s own happiness may at times help defend against fooling oneself this way?)
That's one of the best definitions of happiness I've heard. Nicely put sir.
Not at all necessary, there is plenty of literature -- and I know such people out there as well -- whose happiness almost doesn't manifest. It's an internal process and you can tell they are happy when you see them (facial expression, look in the eyes, general demeanor) but they in no shape or form try to indicate things are going well for them. Not by saying things on the topic, not by proving it with numbers (e.g. a number of houses/flats they own), and not even by trying to preach their approach to life to other people.
I didn't mean that people are happy when they intend to communicate that things are going well for them, but rather, happiness is that which leads them to unconsciously communicate it. (where by "going well for them" I mean like, "for what they care about". Someone could by in their dying moments, but receive very good news about e.g. their loved ones and their life's work, and be happy.)
Hmm, not sure that's valid, any more than it's valid to say that chronic diseases in general are always better than acute ones.
It's hard to discover all the world has to offer while still young enough to act upon it.
I don't know as much about other sports but for professional climbing you need to have started before 11 to make a living in the comp circuit.
Is this the case though? I know it’s not your main point, but it’s a premise that I think should be questioned. I can think of reasons why it probably wouldn’t be true, and I wouldn’t be surprised if data indicates that financial freedom correlates strongly with mental health. And I can think of many reasons why this popular notion (that the wealthy are often unfulfilled and miserable) might persist even if it’s not really true in general.
Over the course of a life, human happiness is primarily dependent on fulfilling the purpose as a replicator, genetically and memetically. We are sculpted in detail by being descended from billions of generations of successful replicators. There is much temporary, but little long term happiness in ignoring those forces.
Having a family, writing a book, creating a piece of art, or a functional invention, or a community. These are means of replication, to be optimized if you wish to increase happiness as a side effect.
In my experience, people who see themselves as part of the pursuit of the purpose of the system are also able to find happiness even if they do not personally replicate in some obvious biological or memetic way.
With a species as complex as humans it becomes much less clear what being an effective replicator entails. Someone like Alexander Fleming (inventor of penecilin) has probably done more to augment human replication than a million typical humans. And of course this effect isn't limited to medical specialists. A more salient example would be any of the creators of or contributors to dating apps.
For Frankl, meaning came from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty.
~ from Viktor Frankl on the Human Search for Meaning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32283033
Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.
~ Viktor Frankl
IIRC (it's a while since I read Frankl) logotherapy starts from a point of utter meaninglessness, in the camps or on the battlefield where people die for no reason. With all the "meaning" stripped away one is free to build ones own.
Frankl gave an enormous gift with that book and his work in clinical practice, up there with Donald Winnicott. Sadly very little makes it into ordinary life, perhaps because the subject matter is too challenging.
Most people I know seem to have so many goals and projects that there is no danger of them running out of things to achieve.
People seem to think a lot about the lower layers, e.g.:
- I am hungry, what will I eat?
- How are the people that I love doing?
But people seem to spend relatively little effort reasoning about the top. Self-actualization looks different for everyone, and for a particular person it tends to evolve. What would make today a great day for you? What would make the next year great? How do you get there?
Relatively few people seem to reach a durable state of "I am so happy that I desire only to maintain my current happy situation". Perhaps a big component of happiness is the state of working toward (or at least anticipation of reaching) continuously evolving goals.
Or, maybe I have strong "type A" bias and have something to learn from people who do much less.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Many disregarded, lower income, "lower class" people have as much ability as people paid many times the income, but they have chosen to balance their life differently, often for greater happiness for themselves or others. Those people who have too many dogs, for example.
I'm reminded of xkcd's train full of people all thinking the same thing: "Look at these people. Glassy-eyed automatons going about their daily lives, never stopping to look around and think! I'm the only conscious human in a world of sheep." (https://xkcd.com/610/)
We do not have access to the internal experiences of other people, so we should not presume to judge them.
There's a lot of good stuff in the article, but there's no need to perpetuate this absurd "world of sheep" perspective.
Here’s the article if anyone is interested on reading further! https://syrusakbary.medium.com/achieve-your-goals-happily-e2...
Interesting adaptive system take. Adapt the model/ego ideal. Random theory as to why people don't do that... if you think the goal is necessary to get the ideal, then changing yourself might make you not want the goal any more. Given the superpower to simply decide to be happy, but risk becoming Diogenes instead of Alexander the Great, who would take it? You'd have to be a-priori happy with missing out on all you presently hold dear [1].
[1] Read "Missing Out" by Adam Phillips for a deep and disturbing account of how powerful that can be,
I still think FIRE is the best path to happiness. Not having financial pressures gives so much freedom Ime. That doesn’t mean people don’t mess it up though.
Struggling productively has its own value. If you "win" and stop, you can easily be inadvertently giving up something important to you.
I keep making my way back to work.
I tend to be on the liberal side politically, and honestly, that’s what it’s mostly about. It’s selfishness masquerading as compassasion.
> Like—say your startup goes public and you become a billionaire. What now? What will you buy, where will you live, what will you eat for lunch?
First of all, the everybody/nobody in this article is scoped to the author's circle/bubble.
IME, a lot of founder types are pretty happy just working and not doing much else. After their company IPOs, they will probably just start another company. They aren't necessarily working to retire.
Having enough money that you don't have to work is never a bad thing, IMO. I have a chunk of money right now from selling some stock, not enough to retire (with my lifestyle), but enough for now. Boredom is a lot easier to solve than not having enough money. (I have kids, and lots of code I want to write; I'll always be busy, and if I'm bored it's because the things I'm busy doing are boring.) I'm sure it's fair to say that retiring takes some adjustment. You can take some time to get in touch with yourself. You can work if you want. You have a lot more options.
The reason people don't focus on their happiness IME is they weren't brought up to. I was brought up to go to school every day, do my homework, and achieve. Not to prioritize myself and building a fun, joyful, fulfilling life for myself. It's a matter of culture. And there are also stages of life where it makes sense to focus on one's career.
If I win the lottery tomorrow (IPO or otherwise), I’d probably continue to have a job of some sort. Maybe I would prioritize a different reward than cashflow, but my day to day wouldn’t change much.
Some characters are fine just chilling, some want to do a “job” like working at a hospital.
But none of them have anything near the level of problems of their staff, who need their job to live.
In the context of this discussion chain, like someone wealthy enough not to have to work who won't stop talking about how starvation is not a real problem.
Compare and contrast that with the vast majority of other uses and users of the word, where an attribute that is far from being obviously optimal (e.g. straight and\or white and\or male) is taken as a sign that you have a better life than those of another attribute and - furthermore - that the person with this attribute is fundamentally incapable of imagining the lives of those supposedly deprieved of their invisible privileges.
Perhaps we exist in very different spheres of discussion.
[1] https://www.hivelearning.com/site/resource/diversity-inclusi...
[2] https://guides.rider.edu/privilege
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD5f8GuNuGQ
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ea5WudpEAs
[1] :
>>White privilege
>>Gender privilege
>>Heterosexual privilege
[2] :
>>these privileged social identities—of people who have historically occupied positions of dominance over others—include whites, males, heterosexuals
>I'm not watching a youtube video.
They are 4 minutes and 5 minutes, respectively, and contains the same views expressed in [1] and [2] and the vast majority of other uses of the word.
I think that 'privilege' is _sometimes_ used in accusatory bad faith, but I don't think this is the majority.
I think in good faith it's a useful framework.
Sounds like you have 'privilege privilege' and you should stand back and let others with lived experience speak their truth about this.
/s (especially about the 'stand back' bit!) but also this is how it's used in the majority of cases that I see :(
Everyone seems to be railing against the shadow of bad use invocation of 'privilege', but there's no actual instances of that happening directly.
Just things that 'people have seen'.
I don't think we can have any further useful dialogue, so I won't respond after this.
And advertising you won't respond is not useful info to me.
If I won the lottery, I'd invest it into projects for the good of the general public, and areas that need help.
Picture two hamsters. Each knows they ate recently, but it's been a while. Is their owner coming back to feed them soon? They don't know, in a constant state of uncertainty.
One hamster realizes that running on the wheel and being very loud sometimes causes them to get fed. They don't know it will help, but it might. So this hamster spends all their time on the wheel.
The other hamster relaxes, enjoying life and trusting in what life will provide.
--
Personally, I think happiness vs. work is just a tale which people like to convey as a binary choice. Neither is better than the other, because in reality it's not a binary choice but a gradient of luck. The impact of the choice isn't what matters, it's personal perspective of best outcome that matters.
Both hamsters are in a cage (job to live), and yes - when one is more noisy, runs more, etc. (works real hard) the owner notices it more frequently and gives it food, treats, etc. (better pay)
The question is, which hamster has a better life?
neither of them, because they're both dependant on someone else to give them food
This is the salient part of the analogy. I like it a lot.
I don't know that all this hard work and reaching for career heights will matter in the end.. but I'm not more confident in a different strategy (else I would do that). So I justify my immediate misery for a chance to benefit the future.
I think my then problem way too much focus on the future.
The analogy is comforting. But maybe something more realistic would be like this:
--
Picture two hamsters. One works constantly to pay off his hamster-mansion, and hamster-sports-car. He can't spend much time with his family. The hamster-kids are at a fancy hamster-school far way.
The other hamsters earns less, but makes time for playing boardgames with the hamper-family. They have a modest hampster-home, and all take a low cost trip to visit their hamster family throughout the year.
Stress is a huge driver of unhappyness in work and there is often so much unnecessary pressure on time and success, it is insane. I often wonder how much more happy AND (as a result) productive people would be if they could actually work as they are meant to be instead of the norm being this stress-driven, restrictive and underpaid treadmill.
Mostly I found that it is not so much about earning more money, but about earning enough money to be able to live a normal, healthy life, that contributes to overall happyness. Anything after that may not actually lead to a happier life, because of the effects of hedonic adaptation mentioned in the article.
- The job should pay enough
- The work environment should be healthy and supportive
I think you hit the nail on the head but then reached an odd conclusion. The reason most people don’t prioritise their happiness is because they can’t afford to. Many people on this forum (myself, and by the sounds of things, you too) are massively financially privileged. Many of my friends are too, but many are also very much not. One of my best friends is staying in a relationship she’s unhappy in, because she can’t afford rent otherwise. It’s a shocking reminder for me how lucky I am.
Including me. I have a good salary and savings and I keep saying to myself that there's nothing preventing me from having a cozy little life and stop worrying. And yet for years I kept pushing in my career in a way that didn't really make me happy, and I still struggle to let go.
Giving up something at which one is obviously good, for which one is recognized, and which could be the core, or if not the core, a substantial part of one's identity, is challenging. One would have to create another identity, be comfortable saying "I'm not working" when others might think there is something fishy going on, whispering to each other "I don't know what's the matter with her, she doesn't seem to work."
Not getting money when there is money to be had is seen as a serious sin in certain societies in which sweat, pain, and labor are seen as virtuous and relaxing, and doing something for the sake of doing it is the occupation of the lazy and of those with noble origins.
My solution has been to have no external identity, in the sense that what I am is what I can do, but not what I do. For some people I am a sportsperson, for others an aspiring writer, for another group a software engineer. To myself, I am just myself.
You have an external identity by virtue of other's witnessing you. They think something, whether or not you choose to recognize it or manage it or 'internalize it'.
And I'm not sure I'd buy that you have no internal identity unless you are completely in the present moment 100% of the time (which is un-human). Perhaps it's that you have a relationship with yourself that is quite settled - you accept all the parts of yourself and are largely unswayed by what other's think. That sounds like a zen place to be, but also unrealistic. I may go through periods where I'm fully myself without influence, but clearly I have a history which has made me.
And it's not all unwise to have an identity which is affected by what others project. Seems important to learn how to be part of a functioning society.
As for me, I wrote elsewhere in this thread about it feeling like a sacrifice I'm making for future me. I don't know that all this hard work and reaching for career heights will matter in the end.. but I'm not more confident in a different strategy (else I would do that). So I justify my immediate misery for a chance to benefit the future.
We can of course pick apart and find fault in the emphasis being on the future, or why I this strategy.. but no path is without faults.
I was a professional sportsman for years, and that was the way many people saw me. When I stopped, I no longer played that sport, without torment or suffering: when I decided to move on, I didn't need others to move with me. If I had to wait for others, I would have had a "crisis of identityt". When I stopped being an academic researcher, I moved on quickly. In a week, I saw myself as a software engineer; if other people with whom I had a personal or professional relationship continued to see me as a scientist (and a "failed" scientist at that point), that didn't affect me.
I don't have a Zen attitude or life. I feel as joyful, angry or bored, depending on my internal state, as anyone else. But I've never, as far as I can remember, had an identity crisis that wouldn't allow me to pursue other paths without being particularly concerned about how others identify me. And I see it is as a strength. I had been concerned with "identity", each move would have been ten times more painful than it was.
It's not that I don't care how others see me -- I dress very fancy for a reason. It's that it is my life.
If you do what do you do because you think that it will be better for you in the end, you don't have identity problems, you followed a rational path.
Perhaps it's just people who don't enjoy their work, that are projecting themselves onto the working rich. Once you start with a faulty axiom (working intensely isn't fun), you start getting twisted conclusions (oh it must be psychological trauma, or those people just aren't reflective).
The OP seems to know the happiness literature well. He cites the studies showing emotional affect doesn't go up with money, but life satisfaction does. This seems to clearly suggest more money is >= less money. But his conclusion is literally the opposite to fit his essay's narrative: that if you make it rich, you'll just be sad and bored. This is not what empirically happens.
I am earning 10 times what I was earning before -- I was living decently earlier anyway -- and my life is considerably better, with broader and deeper horizons, more creative and purposeful. I can travel wherever I want, I can help others when I can, eat the food I want. I don't go on a spending spree, I don't have a big car, fancy watches or other material possessions that can be associated with "having made it." But my life has improved a great deal. And if I had more money, my life would have even greater potential, aspirations and achievements. One might say, "But if a loved one were to die, your money would not help." Perhaps. But how would a lack of money help?
You don't want to be rich, says the rich man who benefits by you being poor.
On a personal level I feel the fastest way to feel unhappy is to worry too much about whether I am happy. Trying to design a goals or future state in pursuit of happiness feels like setting myself up for disappointment. All else being equal, having money is better than not having it, being engaged in some mentally challenging "work" is better than being bored, having good family and friend relationships is better than being isolated, but trying to optimize these things with some kind of master plan feels like it induces FOMO and general anxiety about the finite possibilities for one life.
I prefer to go with the flow, stay engaged in whatever I'm doing, and keep my eyes open for opportunities. I'm not sure if this makes me "happy", but I'm sure more content when I'm operating then when I try too hard to size up the big picture.
These are wise words that I needed to hear after a hard day and feeling like I've always been getting the short end of the stick lately. Thank you for writing them.
I think it is actually a rare thing for a person to have enough awareness and memory to be able to accurately judge how much positive valence emotion they have on average over the period of months. To notice it you have to be present, you have to stop and notice the experience of eating that tasty sandwich or taking that hot bath, or winning that international tournament. And most people, by and large, don't. Especially thinker types like you might find on hacker news.