The Happiness Project (22 page)

It was amusing to see that some people’s commandments directly contradicted other people’s commandments, but I could envision how different people would benefit from opposing advice:

As for me, six months into the project, I could say that although, as I’d realized in April, my basic temperament hadn’t changed, each day I felt more joy and less guilt; I had more fun, less anxiety. My life was pleasanter with cleaner closets and a cleaner conscience.

One thing that had surprised me as my project progressed was the importance of my physical state. It really mattered whether I got enough sleep, got regular exercise, didn’t let myself get too hungry, and kept myself warm. I’d learned to be more attentive to keeping myself feeling energetic and comfortable. On the other hand, one thing that didn’t surprise me was that the most direct boosts to my happiness came from the steps I devoted to social bonds. Jamie, Eliza, and Eleanor, my family, my friends—it was my efforts to strengthen those relationships that yielded the most gratifying results. What’s more, I noticed that my happiness made it easier for me to be patient, cheerful, kind, generous, and all the other qualities I was trying to cultivate. I found it easier to keep my resolutions, laugh off my annoyances, have enough energy for fun.

But the areas that had been toughest for me when I started were still the toughest. When I looked back on my Resolutions Charts, I could see definite patterns. The checks and X marks revealed that I was continuing to struggle to keep my temper, to go off the path, and to be generous, among many other things. In some ways, in fact, I’d made myself less happy; I’d
made myself far more aware of my faults, and I felt more disappointed with myself when I slipped up. My shortcomings stared up at me reproachfully from the page. One of my Secrets of Adulthood is “Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy,” and a heightened awareness of my failings, though salutary, wasn’t bringing me happiness in the short term—but in the long term, I was sure, I’d be happier as a consequence of behaving better. I was comforted by the words of my model Benjamin Franklin, who reflected of his own chart: “On the whole, though I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet as I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been had I not attempted it.”

Ironically, too, I suspected that I had lost some of my playtime to the happiness project. My resolutions were making me happier and I was having more fun, true, but it did feel as though I had less pure leisure time. Observing the evening tidy-up, remembering friends’ birthdays, showing up, making time for projects, and all the rest meant that I had less time to reread
David Copperfield
in bed. Though of course I could make a resolution to cover that activity, too.

Buy Some Happiness

M
ONEY

Indulge in a modest splurge.

Buy needful things.

Spend out.

Give something up.

T
he relationship between money and happiness was one of the most interesting, most complicated, and most sensitive questions in my study of happiness. People, including the experts, seemed very confused.

As I did my research, Gertrude Stein’s observation frequently floated through my mind: “Everyone has to make up their mind if money is money or money isn’t money and sooner or later they always do decide that money is money.” Money satisfies basic material needs. It’s a means and an end. It’s a way to keep score, win security, exercise generosity, and earn recognition. It can foster mastery or dilettantism. It symbolizes status and success.
It buys time—which can be spent on aimless drifting or purposeful action. It creates power in relationships and in the world. It often stands for the things that we feel are lacking: if only we had the money, we’d be adventurous or thin or cultured or respected or generous.

Before I could figure out my resolutions for the month, I had to clarify my thinking about money. I was skeptical of much of what I read. In particular, I kept seeing the argument “Money can’t buy happiness,” but it certainly seemed that people appear fairly well convinced about the significance of money to their happiness. Money is not without its benefits, and the opposite case, though frequently made, has never proved widely persuasive. And in fact, studies show that people in wealthier countries
do
report being happier than people in poorer countries, and within a particular country, people with more money
do
tend to be happier than those with less. Also, as countries become richer, their citizens become less focused on physical and economic security and more concerned with goals such as happiness and self-realization. Prosperity allows us to turn our attention to more transcendent matters—to yearn for lives not just of material comfort but of meaning, balance, and joy.

Within the United States, according to a 2006 Pew Research Center study, 49 percent of people with an annual family income of more than $100,000 said they were “very happy,” in contrast to 24 percent of those with an annual family income of less than $30,000. And the percentages of reported happiness increased as income rose: 24 percent for those earning under $30,000; 33 percent for $30,000 to under $75,000; 38 percent for $75,000 to under $100,000; and 49 percent for more than $100,000. (Now, it’s also true that there may be some reverse correlation: happy people become rich faster because they’re more appealing to other people and their happiness helps them succeed.)

Also, it turns out that while the
absolute level
of wealth matters,
relative ranking
matters as well. One important way that people evaluate their circumstances is to compare themselves with the people around them and with their own previous experiences. For instance, people measure them
selves against their age peers, and making more money than others in their age group tends to make people happier. Along the same lines, research shows that people who live in a neighborhood with richer people tend to be less happy than those in a neighborhood where their neighbors make about as much money as they do. A study of workers in various industries showed that their job satisfaction was less tied to their salaries than to how their salaries compared to their coworkers’ salaries. People understand the significance of this principle: in one study, a majority of people chose to earn $50,000 where others earned $25,000, rather than earn $100,000 where others earned $250,000. My mother grew up feeling quite well-to-do in my parents’ little hometown of North Platte, Nebraska, because her father had a highly coveted union job as an engineer on the Union Pacific Railroad. By contrast, a friend told me that he had felt poor growing up in New York City because he lived on Fifth Avenue above 96th Street—the less fashionable section of a very fashionable street.

The proponents of the “Money can’t buy happiness” argument point to studies showing that people in the United States don’t rate their quality of life much more highly than do people living in poverty in Calcutta—even though, of course, they live in vastly more comfortable circumstances. Most people, the world over, rate themselves as mildly happy.

It’s admirable that people can find happiness in circumstances of poverty as well as in circumstances of plenty. That’s the resilience of the human spirit. But I don’t think that a particular individual would be indifferent to the disparities between the streets of Calcutta and the ranch houses of Atlanta. The fact is, people aren’t made deliriously happy by the luxuries of salt and cinnamon (once so precious) or electricity or air-conditioning or cell phones or the Internet, because they come to accept these once-luxury goods as part of ordinary existence. That doesn’t mean, however, that because people have learned to take clean water for granted, it no longer matters to their quality of life. Indeed, if that were true, would it mean it would be pointless to bother to try to improve the material circumstances of those folks in Calcutta?

But as I went deeper into the mystery of money, I was pulled toward research and analysis suitable for an entirely different book, away from my most pressing interest. Sure, I wanted to “Go off the path” to a point, and maybe one day I would devote an entire book to the topic, but for the moment, I didn’t have to solve the enigma of money. I just needed to figure out how happiness and money fit together.

So was I arguing that “Money
can
buy happiness”? The answer: no. That was clear. Money alone can’t buy happiness.

But, as a follow-up, I asked myself, “Can money
help
buy happiness?” The answer: yes, used wisely, it can. Whether rich or poor, people make choices about how they spend money, and those choices can boost happiness or undermine it. It’s a mistake to assume that money will affect everyone the same way. No statistical average could say how a particular
individual
would be affected by money—depending on that individual’s circumstances and temperament. After a lot of thinking, I identified three factors that shape the significance of money to individuals:

Developing and applying a three-factor test brought back pleasant memories of being a law student, and it was a helpful framework, but it was complex. I wanted a more cogent way to convey the relationship between money and happiness.

As I was mulling this over, one afternoon I picked up Eleanor the wrong way as I leaned over her crib, and the next morning, I woke up with agonizing back pain. For almost a month, I couldn’t sit for long, I found it hard to type, I had trouble sleeping, and of course I couldn’t stop picking up Eleanor, so I kept reaggravating the injury.

“You should go see my physical therapist,” urged my father-in-law, who had suffered from back problems for years. “There’s a lot they can do.”

“I’m sure it will get better on its own,” I kept insisting.

One night as I struggled to turn over in bed, I thought, “Ask for help! Bob says that physical therapy works; why am I resisting?”

I called Bob at work, got the information, made an appointment at the physical therapist’s office, and two visits later, I was 100 percent better. It felt like a miracle. And one day after my pain was gone, I took my health for granted once again—and I had the Epiphany of the Back Spasm.
Money
doesn’t buy happiness the way
good health
doesn’t buy happiness.

When money or health is a problem, you think of little else; when it’s not a problem, you don’t think much about it. Both money and health contribute to happiness mostly in the negative; the lack of them brings much more unhappiness than possessing them brings happiness.

Being healthy doesn’t guarantee happiness. Lots of healthy people are very unhappy. Many of them squander their health or take it for granted. In fact, some people might even be better off with some physical limitation that would prevent them from making destructive choices. (I once went on vacation with a group that included the most wild and reckless
guy I’d ever met, and I was quite relieved when he broke his foot during an early escapade, because the mishap prevented him from getting up to much more mischief.) Ditto, money. But the fact that good health doesn’t
guarantee
happiness doesn’t mean that good health doesn’t
matter
to happiness. Similarly, money. Used wisely, each can contribute greatly to happiness.

The First Splendid Truth holds that to think about happiness, we should think about
feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth
. Money is most important for happiness in the “feeling bad” category. People’s biggest worries include financial anxiety, health concerns, job insecurity, and having to do tiring and boring chores. Spent correctly, money can go a long way to solving these problems. I was extremely fortunate to be in a position where money wasn’t a source of
feeling bad.
We had plenty of money to do what we wanted—even enough to feel secure, the toughest and most precious thing for money to buy. I resolved to do a better job of spending money in ways that could boost my happiness by supporting the other three elements of happiness.