Money=Happiness: Take Two (or Three?)

Here's another great argument against the money-equals-happiness myth, offering some great advice on what has been proven to correlate to happiness (close friendships, good physical health, good marriages, etc.) and a few great links on the income-spending gap and a paper called Does Economic Growth Improve Human Morale?

Richer Than Peers = Happiness?

Happiness is Besting the Joneses: "The results showed that the richer people were relative to their peers of the same age, the happier they tended to be."

So relative wealth is more important in influencing happiness than the actual level of wealth -- I guess that makes sense. Your sense of how well you're doing tends to be determined by what you're comparing yourself to. I dug up a draft of the paper (PDF), summarizing their fascinating research. The articles reporting on the research overemphasize the effect of overall wealth on happiness, but the paper goes much deeper into interesting territory:

"That is, if your consumption lowers my happiness, then I must consume more to keep up. As a result, we all end up consuming more than is socially optimal. Because consumption uses up resources, we would all be better off if we consumed less and released those resources for other purposes that more effectively promote our happiness, such as more resources deveoted to community endeavors, or more time spent with friends and family. The consequences for society are perverse, then, when relative income effects dominate."

I've been bumping into that exact issue, and obviously it's not an easy one. I was also nodding along with one of their concluding statements that asks the best question:

"Given that most individuals spend a substantial fraction of their adult lives working to earn income -- some at jobs they dislike -- one wonders why income does not have a greater effect on happiness. Neither the absolute nor the relative income effect is very large. Why do we work so hard to earn money if there is no guarantee that riches bring happiness?"

Born to Buy

I keep forgetting to write a bit about Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (page includes first chapter), which threw me for a loop a few weeks ago. Here's a review and an excerpt from an article that mentions the study the author did as part of her research for the book:

"While some of this material is covered in the other books, what makes this book special is the chapter in which Schor presents her own research study. Her subjects were 300 fifth- and sixth- graders living in or around the Boston area. Each student took a 157-item survey that assessed not only the child's involvement in consumer culture but also measures of physical, and mental, well-being. Schor's main conclusion is deeply disturbing. She writes that high consumer involvement is a significant cause of 'depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and psychosomatic complaints.'"

Like Bowling Alone, which brilliantly (and systematically) links TV culture to the decline of civic engagement over the past 50 years, Born to Buy creates a compelling link between the time kids spend watching TV to consumerism and from those measures of consumerism directly to a general decline in well-being. Heavy duty.

Web Apps to Organize Your Future

I've been hearing how people love products from 37signals. Their first web application was focused on project management (Basecamp), but they've got two new (well, to me anyway) sites that look interesting: Backpack and Ta-Da List. They're simple approaches to organizing your goals and to-do lists, but seem to have lots of cool features in nice interfaces. Backpack is like a beefed-up (but easier to use) wiki to help you create pages around whatever concept you want.

I've also been playing with ConnectViaBooks, which does a search based on the books you've read and connects you to people you'll likely have things in common with...and noticed that the 43Things folks have added
All Consuming to their stable of social software niftiness. Lots of action in this space, methinks. They're all tools for collaborating with other people who share your interests and goals, potentially helping each other while you're in the process of setting and achieving your own.

Life Caching

From an updated take on what Trendwatching is calling Life Caching comes a link to another company doing personal history consulting/projects for paying customers called eDv, the "personal motion picture company". Lots of interesting links in the report, including HP's StoryCast, and I liked this simple graphic showing how some of these ideas could be combined with goal-setting.
Update: Another great post on the topic, with a juicy collection of links as well.

Busy

Rob's thinking about our addiction to being busy:

"One has moved from a major global metropolis to the Island and another away from a big city to a smaller one. They both told me how uncomfortable they are with the slower pace and with what appears to be the low brow culture.

They miss being Busy.

What is it about 'Busy'. Ask someone how they are and you will often get the response 'Busy'. No one tells you what they are doing, they just comment on the process of their activity. The saddest part of the Busy addiction is that usually busy people are involved in activity that ends up nowhere."

He goes on to theorize that active parents probably spend too much time keeping their kids busy with too many structured activities and sports, perhaps preparing them for the hamster-wheel approach to time-management.

11-Year-Olds Deciding Whether They'll Stay in School

Many children make post-GCSE choices by age of 11, study suggests

"The research analysed the responses of 11-year-old children, in their first term of secondary education, to a question about whether or not they planned to stay in education after they were 16. Some 11% said they would definitely leave, and 67% said they would stay on. The remainder were not sure. These results were then compared with the actual outcomes for the same young people.

Of those who said they would leave, two thirds actually did so. While of those who said they would stay on, almost four-fifths actually did so. Girls were more likely to stay on than boys, and young people from families in middle class occupations were more likely to stay on than other young people. Both these differences were also apparent in the earlier expressions of intentions."

First the Twixters, Now the Yeppies

So we've got another trendy label for 20somethings who are unsure about how they fit into the grown-up world. First it was Twixters and now we have Yeppies. As with Gen X, Gen Y, and NextGen, I think these new names tend to be rather dumb and not particularly illuminating. Despite the superfluous label, Kate Fox has done some interesting research on how young adults are approaching their lifestyles, and it's been picked up by news outlets in the U.K.:

The Yeppies* shop around for ideal life

"'Yeppies are unsure how to achieve their ambitions so they experiment through a shopping-style approach, trying to find the perfect job, the ideal relationship and the most fulfilling lifestyle.'

They postpone big, life-altering decisions until they feel they have exhausted all their options. 'It will be increasingly regarded as normal for young people to continue "Life Shopping" well into their late twenties and thirties. The way things are going, by 2012 thirty will be the new twenty as the "official" age for transition to adulthood; people getting married in their twenties will be regarded as too young or too immature to make such a big decision,' Fox said."

Since When Did Work Bring You Happiness?

"These days, we expect to actively enjoy our work, and feel that we have failed if enjoyment is not forthcoming. Ever since the Sixties, we have had it drummed into us that we are entitled -- even obliged -- to seek personal fulfillment in every aspect of our lives."

Those of you who have been following my meandering through the study of lifestyle choices already know why this stuff fires me up. Much of what I've outlined here is in the realm of the theoretical, as in "people might be generally happier with their decisions if they thought about their lifestyles as a whole, rather than looking at them in isolation (job change)." What these articles indicate is that people are already attempting to do so (practising lifestylism?), perhaps with mixed success. I'm excited about the idea of creating tools for these people (and others who haven't really been thinking this way yet) to help them envision better (more authentic, meaningful, productive) future lifestyles that manifest their values.

Preparing Kids

Thoughtful writing about helping kids learn to really engage in their lives, finding the middle ground between TV-as-babysitter and overscheduling their lives so that every moment is structured for them: Preparing Kids for the Future Economy. Do regimented childhoods full of every possible organized extracurricular activity prepare kids for a life of following directions and waiting for someone to provide the impetus for action?

"By age 2, their daughter, Lydia, had a schedule of structured daily activities. Soon after, the lessons started: piano, French, fencing, and so forth. They wanted Lydia to have every advantage in the competitive climb. Lydia's sweet, but she's uncomfortable when there is 'nothing to do.' She'll declare, 'I'm bored,' while flipping on the tube. She waits for her folks to tell her what's next and then plows through the weekly schedule. When I ask her if she's having fun, she stares at me blankly.

While I don't agree that everything bad is good for you, Lydia's life reminds me that everything good can be bad for you. Flo and John haven't prepared her for the future but for today's workplace in which success and happiness depend on excellent performance according to prescribed criteria. This approach is making plenty of people miserable. According to the latest Conference Board report, only 14% of U.S. employees are very satisfied with their jobs; 25% say they're just showing up to collect a paycheck; and 66% say they can't identify with their employer's business objectives. Why get our kids ready for a world that's already in cardiac arrest? What will replace it?"

Via the Future of Work blog.

Thesis Update

A few readers and colleagues have expressed interest in my thesis project, so you all get a quick update.

Last summer I started this site to collect ideas about the conflict between our values and our lifestyle choices, how decisions in one area of our lives affect other areas, and specifically how young people learn about and envision their future options. I borrowed the term lifestylism as the title of the project, as a way of unifying those concepts.

So now I've got a year's worth of research, reading and writing represented in the blog and I officially start working on the thesis in September. I still need an advisor, and I'm hoping to finish early next year. I've narrowed my topic a lot since my initial pondering and a bit more since my recent focusing efforts.

I plan to explore the aspirations of teenagers (educational, career, relionships, family, lifestyle) in education and outside of school, figure out how successful they've been in achieving those goals in the past decade or two, then create a proposal outlining how to use the web to help teens build engaging, holistic (lifestyle-oriented, rather than just career/college planning) reprentations of possible futures as a way to get them on the path to achieving their goals (or at least taking steps to pursue interesting things that will land them somewhere they didn't expect).

Materialism and Lifestylism

Materialism and the Evolution of Consciousness

This essay by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi rocked my world today. It's an attempt to answer the question of why so many of us have turned to materialism as the factor that motivates most of our lifestyle decisions (how we spend our time and money), even while we would say that we valued experiences, relationships, accomplishments and other non-material goals. I'm tempted to quote the entire article, but this will do for a taste:

"Thus evolution has built two contradictory motivations into our nervous system: pleasure, which is the well-being we feel when eating, resting and procreating; and enjoyment, which is the exhilarating sensation we feel when going beyond the requirements of survival (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993; Ryan and Deci, 2000; Waterman, 1993). Pleasure is a powerful source of motivation, but it does not produce change; it is a conservative force that makes us want to satisfy existing needs, achieve comfort and relaxation. It is the motivation that makes us look for material resources to improve the quality of life – after all these are scarce and everyone wants them, so they must be valuable. The concreteness of material goals also makes them seem more real than more complex goals. But the improvement that money, power, and comfort produce is often simply that of removing momentarily the anxiety we all experience when confronting mortality and finitude. 'More stuff' promises security and comfort, even when the benefits are short-lived and we need ever more stuff to regain equanimity in the face of the slings and arrows inherent in living. There is nothing wrong with seeking pleasure in material goals, but individuals for whom it becomes the main reason for living are not going to grow beyond what the genes have programmed them to desire."

So pleasure, in this sense, does not equal or lead to happiness. We get pleasure from a new toy or outfit, but it probably doesn't contribute much to our long-term happiness. The activities that are more likely to yield more lasting happiness tend to be more challenging and connect us to the people around us.

My interest in this all stems from my naive belief that if people could design lifestyles for themselves that were more closely aligned with their deeply held values, they would be less materialistic, watch less TV, work on more meaningful projects, spend more time with their loved ones and contribute more to their communities. Wouldn't the act of deciding in advance (design) how to best integrate the many strands of your future lifestyle choices help us engage in our lives to a greater degree and focus more attention/time/energy/money on the things that matter?

Work-Life Balance

I appreciated this personal account of trying to find work-life balance from a successful venture capitalist. Really personal:

"At age 34 when – on a long weekend with friends where I was completely absent and struggling to get through a difficult deal (for a company that eventually failed) – Amy turned to me and said 'I’m done. I’m not mad – I just can’t do this anymore. You either have to change, or it’s over.'"

I haven't much liked the idea of work-life balance because it seems to imply an either/or, rather than some sort of integration that acknowledges work as one component of a rich life full of relationships, creativity, learning, and relaxation...work-life balance always makes "life" sound like the remainder, or what's left over after work. That said, this is a great overview of the types of changes he had to make to save his marriage and make his lifestyle work. Thanks to Will for the link.

Value x Time = Happiness Level?

Help. I've hit an interesting and thorny challenge.

Let's say you're creating a picture of your future lifestyle. Each activity or action you plan to do has a time cost and an effect on your well-being. What I'm trying to do is figure out how varying experiences contribute to overall happiness.

For example, maybe you work 40 hours a week at a job you dislike. For pretty much the whole time you're working, the effect on your mental, emotional health is negative. In that same week, you engage in your beloved recreational pursuit (maybe windsurfing) for about four hours -- during that time, your mental, emotional and physical health is off the chart in the positive.

What I'm trying to do is to find a way to display an average or cumulative level of happiness over a period of time that includes all different kinds of activities. So let's stay with our example and assume that I want to be able to show a general happiness level for the week in which you were miserable for 40 hours at work and thrilled for four hours while you were windsurfing.

The main question is this: should those two activities have equal weight in the weekly calculation of happiness? Or should happiness (or negative effect) derived from each activity be multiplied by the amount of time spent doing it before averaging it out for the week?

Another quick example. You're a teacher, but you don't much like teaching. What you love about it is having 10 weeks of vacation every year. Over the course of your year, what is the net effect of having 42 weeks that you've rated as negative and 10 weeks of bliss? Or you're an oil-patch welder who hates his dangerous, uncomfortable, exhausting work, but you work two weeks on and two weeks off...and you love the time off. Is the net happiness result over the course of one month neutral?

I realize these are oversimplifications and generalizations, but I think there's the kernel of something important in this process. My theory is that wide fluctuation in happiness over the course of a day, week or month is probably not healthy for most of us. But I wonder if the inverse is true? Would less fluctuation always be better?

Social Network Mapping

Dave Pollard is thinking about mapping relationships with people, groups, places and things, and pondering how identity can be represented in ways that could help us understand our lives better.

"An application of all this that intrigues me is in assessing how we should (and can) change ourselves. I tend to agree with many of you that if we are to have any credibility as change advocates we need to be a role model, we need to show not tell people what needs to be done. We need to be the change. So do we start by a navel-gazing process that entails some personal, individual decisions and bold actions? Or, if our relationships and networks define us, do we start by first finding or redefining the circles, the communities to which we (and others) belong and then let those new and altered communities redefine and change us?"

He's approaching the complexity of relationships in exactly the right way, I think. We tend to view the strands of our lives (work, marriage, friendships, leisure, etc.) in isolation, as if a decision made in one strand wouldn't affect the others...or worse, thinking that a change in one would miraculously fix problems in others without any real sense of why that might be.

Find Your Spot

The Future of Work linked to this interesting web tool: Find Your Spot. You take an eight-page quiz with lifestyle and location questions, then get a list of recommended towns and cities that match your selections. From the FAQ:

Are you tired of your present job, your current community, or the terrible weather around you? Would you like to discover the perfect place for your style and interests? Thanks to advances in technology and the economy, more people than ever are choosing where to live based on the factors that really matter to them – the weather, schools, recreational activities, cost of living, and general quality of life. At FindYourSpot.com, you can discover the perfect place for you AND find a great job, a great real estate professional, a great house, great travel deals...all in one central location.

That last part reveals a bit about the business model, I think. I suppose they're hoping to make some money on job/travel/real-estate referrals and interest-based marketing, which is fine. What I love about this model is that it is a relatively simple way to envision what your life might look like someplace else, getting you thinking about the weather there, jobs, house prices and lifestyle factors. The implementation isn't super slick, but the concept is great.

It sounds like NHL players could use a tool like this, too. The theory goes that since the new salary cap will equalize salaries across the league somewhat, players aren't just going to choose the team offering the most money -- they're looking at new factors:

"You don't buy free agents anymore, you sell them on the merits of joining your team. Lifestyle, climate, city, coach, teammates, chance to win a championship and a dozen other variables have become the new determining factors in who plays where."