The Happy Life
Meditations on how to live a happy life
One of the happiest moments of my life came in April 2010. I was in a car, driving back from a job interview at a digital advertising firm, roughly 2 blocks away from driving onto the state highway that would take me back to my college dorm. A man with a Dutch accent told me that he would be extending me an offer as a Jr. IT consultant. I thanked him profusely and had a giant grin plastered on my face for the entire 25 minute drive back to my dorm room.
I was let go from that job 7 months later, after the completion of a project for our main client at the time. But I still remember the absolute elation I had felt from that phone call. Everybody in my class was stressing about securing a job offer in hand prior to graduation. The only two thoughts I had were making sure I’d graduate and getting a job. Prior to my wedding day, that might have been the single happiest moment I had experienced in my life. Happiness that you can vividly remember years later is not a common phenomenon.
You might say that specific memory is a moment of euphoria, joy or some ridiculously heightened temporary emotion and stuff like that is not really what happiness is about. But that begs the question, assuming that happiness is an important to strive for in life, what does a happy life look like?
The Deathbed Confessional Revisited
“Nobody ever spent time on their deathbed wishing they had worked more than they did” crows the happiness uber alles crowd. They’re probably right, but what actually drives workaholics to work so damn much? I’ve encountered a few workaholics in my career, and they all had one thing in common: they were really good at their jobs. There’s an important lesson to be learned here here, and it just might be the key to understanding what happiness is.
We all know the stereotype. There’s the high powered executive, working 12 hours a day, looking at their phone during their off time, and barely giving a passing thought to anything that’s not work related. Even though they’ve made generational wealth without having to work another day in their life, they keep chugging along, reading reports, sending emails, and attending meetings, often at the expense of their family life. There’s missed recitals, plays, and even birthday parties. Very frequently this story ends in divorce, to nobody’s surprise. Why are they making the choices that they’re making? What’s their possible motivation?
In psychology, there is a concept known as locus of control, which describes a given individual’s belief in their power to shape their lives. A person with an internal locus of control believes that they are in control of their life, that any decisions they make will be decisive in determining what happens in any given situation. An external locus of control is the opposite, where the person believes that they have almost no influence on what happens in their life.
In reality, there are probably some things that everybody believes they have control/influence over (even if it’s something minor like what they’re going to wear on any given day), but other things that are more or less out of their hands (such as the outcome of a national election). But in general, those with an internal locus of control are generally less stressed and more satisfied with their lives than those with an external locus of control.
I suspect that the workaholic does have a near absolute internal locus of control - when they’re at work.
Choose Your Skinner Box
When I was in college, I knew a few guys who were really into World of Warcraft. I’m talking about playing 10+ hours per day into it. As you might have guessed, it had an incredibly negative effect on their grades. A couple of them failed out of school. From the outside looking in, it seemed catastrophic. So what compelled them to play that much WoW?
Game development is an incredibly large and complex endeavor. For a modern AAA title (the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster that costs hundreds of millions of dollars to produce), there will be hundreds if not thousands of people tasked with creating the game engine (the platform upon which the game is built), the media assets that the game needs, writing the plot and character dialog, composing the music, and most relevant to this essay, designing the core gameplay loops that are meant to keep the player of the game engaged and entertained.
That last part is often done in consultation with behavioral and organizational psychologists, who know a thing or two about keeping people engaged within any given system. These games are effectively some of the world’s most complicated operant conditioning chambers, also known as Skinner boxes. Push this lever and a reward pops out. Make sure the subjects, or players, know that certain behaviors will be rewarded and others will be punished, and then measure how they respond to the incentives that have been created within the Skinner box. Rinse and repeat, and keep making modifications to the box to optimize for user engagement.
That process has permeated every facet of our lives. All of our significant actions (anything involving the expenditure of money or time) is recorded, aggregated, analyzed, and then subject to experimentation by the designers of whichever Skinner box you’re currently in. Any time you buy something, go on social media, do something at work, visit a website, play a game, or drive to a location, you are in at least one box that’s being tracked, analyzed, and experimented upon.
Log in daily to receive daily rewards. Install the app to get freebies and discounts. Personalize your feed to receive only the stuff that matters to you. Buy one get one free. Play the game every day to keep your streak alive. Click to close this ad. Doing all of these things is providing the box with more information. Even if you do none of these things, you’re still providing the box with more information. Your every action and inaction is providing yet another data point for the box.
These modern day Skinner boxes are addictive to the subjects within them. Which makes sense, because they’re designed to be. But why are they addictive? What actually drives the people within these boxes to keep pressing the lever? Because of the exact same reason why the workaholic is spending all of their time at the office.
The High Risk Premium of Finance
In finance, there are 2 benchmark rates that effectively determine how every other asset’s price is calculated: the 1 and 10 year US Treasury rates. While there is no such thing as a guarantee in life, the closest you can get to one is US Treasury bonds. And the 1 and 10 year bonds represent the short term and long term risk free* rates, respectively.
The reason why all other asset prices are based off these rates is because of a simple question: if the US government is guaranteeing this rate, why should I buy into this other asset? All other assets are more risky than risk free, so in order to entice investors to pour their money into something other than Treasury bonds, they need to offer a better rate of return in exchange for shouldering the uncertainty that you may lose some or all of your initial investment.
At the time of this writing (10/7/24), the US 1 Year Treasury is yielding 4.235%, which is less than 10.5% that the S&P 500 has averaged since its introduction in 1957. 10.5% is more than double 4.235%, but the worst year for the S&P 500 was -38.49%. For investors who can stomach seeing their portfolio decrease by 2/5 in a single year, the stock market does seem to offer much higher return on investment than the safest investment in the world, but you might have to endure some eye popping losses at any given moment.
In other words, investors seeking their fortunes in the stock market ask for and receive a high risk premium for investing their capital in the stock market as opposed to the US Treasury bond market. That same concept can be applied to anything in life. In everything we do, we subconsciously calculate the risk to reward benefit of doing something, and we compare that risk to reward to the alternative.
The High Risk Premium of Life
When your friend texts you an invite to a concert in the park, immediately your brain thinks up of all the reasons to go or stay. It’s comfy inside. I don’t feel like walking. My friend is cool and I’d like to see them. The concert may be fun. We might encounter some other friends there. There could be an opportunity to meet new people. I have to do laundry. Mercury is in retrograde. Eventually, you come to a decision on whether to go to the concert.
We go through this same process every time we make a conscious decision. And many of our formative experiences and memories will revolve around dealing with the decisions we made and the consequences we experienced afterward.
There are a lot of hugely important decisions you make as a young adult. Do you go to college? Where do you go to college? What do you major in? Should you take out loans to go to a well regarded university or work part time and attend your local community college? If you forgo college, what do you do now?
There are so many ways to experience high anxiety over a decision you have to make. The classic example is asking someone out on a date. You have no idea if they’ll say yes. You have no idea if they’ll laugh in your face and then tell all their friends and have a laugh about it. There’s so much uncertainty that it can overwhelm a person into just… doing nothing. The person doesn’t get asked out. A potential lifelong romance never materializes.
If there were a way to guarantee that certain actions would produce positive results, we would leap at the chance. Give flowers to a girl, ask the girl out, and she says yes? How many guys wouldn’t try that if they sincerely believe it would work?
Guaranteed Good Stuff is Intoxicating
What makes these modern Skinner boxes so compelling is the guarantee of something good. You’re already in there by choice, and now they’re offering you a guaranteed positive result in exchange for relatively minor toil. Log in daily, get a reward. Play a game, get a reward. Install the app, get a discount. But there’s a progression as well. Keep playing and reach 100 games played? Get a cool character skin. Keep grinding in the game? Get more gold and experience to level up your character and buy better gear for it. And these things don’t go away. They’re permanent.
Positive permanent results are effectively guaranteed so long as you keep engaging within the box. There is no real life analog that operates like this, because real life is full of risk and uncertainty and the potential for loss. Despite what advertisements tell you, there’s no easy path to riches, the love of your life, or even something relatively mundane like weight loss. There’s just a daunting objective in front of you with no clear path for guaranteed progression and permanent progress.
Even when we reduce real life situations to the most extreme and logically simple process, such as resorting to anorexia to achieve weight loss, the damage you do to your body and mind outweighs the immediate objective of losing weight. But depending on how much importance you place on the immediate objective, you can trick your mind into justifying what is objectively a terrible tradeoff. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.
But for certain people, in certain situations, they find an actual real life Skinner box. And once they find it, they don’t want to get out of it.
Master of My Fate, Captain of My Soul
Let’s go back to the workaholic. Now we understand why they work so much at their job. They’re good at it. They have clear, measurable goals that they can work towards. When they put time and effort into work, they can visibly see the progress that’s being made, and others can as well. The workaholic is in a real life Skinner box.
Contrast the workaholic at work versus the workaholic in their family life. Their kids don’t listen to them or even do the opposite of what they say just to infuriate them. Their partner has different ideas and desires that conflict with their own. Even when the workaholic tries to do something different, there’s no guarantee that it works on their kids or their spouse. All that effort is rewarded with… nothing, or even a negative result.
At work, they can just tell their subordinates to do something and they’ll do it. Even if they make the wrong decision or take a bad choice, they have complete ownership of it. At work, there is a very clear and obvious relationship between effort put in and positive results coming out. Why would they ever leave such a virtuous cycle of effort and reward? Especially when the reward is often something universally desirable, like money or positive recognition and admiration among peers? At work, they are the master of their fate, the captain of their soul.
So even if their kids are little shits and their spouse is slowly detaching from the relationship, they’ll always have their work box, where they can put in time and effort and get rewarded with something that they desire. They should be so lucky. There’s plenty of people who never find that box in real life. If they find a box like that, it’s usually in an online virtual platform, with rewards that are far from universally desirable.
What Happiness is Really About
If I had to sum up what happiness is really about, at least when parents say they want their kids to be happy, it’s about having the mentality of a skinner box but outside of the box itself. So instead of just having a box that traps the person into one very specific activity, it’s a person who believes that their actions can affect their own outcomes in as many facets of life as possible.
Do you want to grow up to be an astronaut? Then find out the process of how astronauts are selected/made and then go through that process. Do you want to be a loving spouse and parent? Then be a person that other people want to be around, start dating, get into a relationship, and start popping those kids out. Do you want to be a guy who can bench 300 pounds? Time to hit the gym, buddy. All of these things take time and effort, but it’s something that’s achievable. Happiness is having goals and then figuring out the process on how to achieve them.
In other words, it’s not just about the destination. It’s not just about the journey. It’s everything that’s involved in it. And it starts with the belief in your own agency and potential. If everything is random and we’re all subject to irresistible forces outside of our control, nothing matters and it’s impossible to be happy, even when you happen to be on the good side of the draw. But the more we believe that we are the masters of our fates and the captains of our respective souls, the happier we are, because having that belief also comes with the incentive to do the things that we want to do and achieve the things we want to achieve.
This is not to say that we are solely or even mostly responsible for our fates. Who you’re born to, the time and place you’re born in, all of these things are out of our control and those things tend to be the largest factors that determine how any given individual’s life turns out. But even if factors outside your control determine the vast majority of what your life looks like, there’s still a small part that belongs to you and only you. The part that you can control and shape to your will. Believing that that small part will make the difference is what happiness is.