02: You Can’t Be Indifferent to Happiness, The Princess Mommy, Strategic Spending

In today’s newsletter…

• You can’t be indifferent to happiness
• The princess mommy
• Strategic spending
• A few links I enjoyed from around the web

You can’t be indifferent to happiness

❓ What is the primary and ultimate motivator of all human action? I’d argue with a 17th century French philosopher that it is the pursuit of happiness:

“All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end … The will never takes the least step but to this object.”

Blaise Pascal

I can try to fool myself and pretend that I’m after something more virtuous sounding, but I know myself too well, and it is a deep and lasting happiness that really drives me. I know to some ears this may sound selfish, but is the alternative really any better? Imagine the following scenario:

I plan a surprise getaway for my wife including plenty of activities that I know we will both enjoy. We have a wonderful time— fun memories, good food, and lots of great conversation. At the end of the trip, my wife asks me why I did it? Why did I go through all the effort to plan this trip?

If my own happiness meant nothing to me, I might say something like… “Well, Mollie, it’s my duty as a husband. I didn’t want to do it, of course, but I sacrificed my own happiness so that you could have a trip you enjoyed.”

😞 She would be rightfully surprised and disappointed in my answer.

But, if my happiness was part of the equation, I might say something like this… “Well, Mollie, nothing in the world makes me happier than being with you. And sharing these great experiences together makes them all the sweeter. You are a delight.”

Sounds much better, right? But if you look, everything I said was framed in terms of my own happiness. What’s going on?

❓ Obviously, I’m in deep waters here, and these are questions worth giving serious thought to. But what if the fact that we are wired for happiness is a feature and not a flaw of our design? 

🤔 Going all the way back to the 4th century Roman empire, the great philosopher Augustine was arguing from Christian scripture that the truest definition of virtue was to have your loves rightly ordered. In other words, to see beauty & find delight in that which is truly beautiful & delightful is an act of virtue. Becoming more virtuous is simply the process of training your affections to love and enjoy that which is supremely good.

For a husband to enjoy spending time with his wife is experienced as an honor because it signals to the wife that she is a pleasure to be around. It is good and fitting that a husband would be motivated to find his happiness in his wife, and vice versa.

We were made for happiness… don’t short change yourself for a lesser good when a greater good is within your reach.

The princess mommy

👸 The other day I was mowing when out of the corner of my eye I saw our 5-year-old daughter dashing from our neighbor’s yard into our own. She was barefoot, wearing a fancy floor-length princess dress, and holding a baby doll tightly in her arm. 

If there’s a more perfect picture of the innocence and wonder of childhood, I can’t imagine it.

📹 I remember sitting on the mower in that moment wishing I could somehow stop time and replay the scene a few times in slow motion. 

But that’s the strange thing I’ve noticed about beauty, it’s so fleeting… even if I could rewatch that scene again and again, the feeling I would be recalling would not be the spark of joy from the beauty itself, but something more like a wistful remembering of the beauty (nostalgia) or a hopeful longing that I would experience it again.

It reminds me of a quote from CS Lewis that I think really captures the feeling well:

“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

C.S. Lewis

I can’t help but feel that these fleeting moments of joy, which at the moment are too much for my 5 senses to manage, are just the overflow of some perfect source that I’m still waiting to drink from.

Strategic spending

💰 –> 😊 ? Can you buy happiness? I think so, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.

If the idea of buying happiness raises your eyebrow, what exactly are you hoping to achieve with your annual vacation? Surely that trip is not free, and surely you hope to be happier for having anticipated and enjoyed the time in a new setting, right?

When you look closely at the definition of those two words (“buy” and “happiness”), it seems almost self-evident that happiness can be bought:

📚 Buy – to obtain a good or service in exchange for payment.

📚 Happiness – the state of feeling pleasure or contentment. 

So, to buy happiness, all you need to do is to pay someone for a good or service that results in you feeling more pleasure or contentment. Sounds easy enough, right? 

Well, not exactly. Once you start measuring happiness over a broader period of time and weighing all sides of the equation, you realize how tricky it really is. There are a number of traps and dead ends you’ll need to navigate:

1. What’s new becomes normal. Many purchases provide an initial “hit” of pleasure, but that experience diminishes quickly over time without additional stimuli. Think of the way a new car stops being exciting after a year or two.
2. Raising the bar too high. The more you turn to certain types of pleasure, the higher you will raise the bar for future enjoyment. Take fine dining, for example: if you start eating at great restaurants on a regular basis, you may find that the Olive Gardens and Red Robins of the world no longer cut it for you.
3. Collateral damage. So maybe you decide you’ll keep your pleasures “low brow” to avoid raising expectations too high. You start to eat frequently at fast food chains. The pleasure you get is consistent and doesn’t reduce your enjoyment of an occasional “nice” meal. The problem with this approach, of course, is that you might be trading your current happiness for future health problems (which will certainly diminish happiness).
4. Lifestyle creep. Many purchases (a house, for example) lock you into a certain level of on-going or maintenance costs that will to some degree limit your future options. You might want to switch to a job that you would enjoy more with a shorter commute, but that might be hard to do with your current level of expenses.
5. Distracting yourself to death. Most of what we spend our money on takes time to both enjoy and to maintain. That is time and attention that could be used in any number of ways to pursue happiness. There’s a real danger in trading too much of your time on simpler pleasures, and missing out on richer ones.

You can probably see why income levels above a certain threshold have been shown to have very little impact on day-to-day happiness. After your basic needs are met, it gets really hard to spend your money in ways that doesn’t accidentally lead to less happiness down the road. 

Maybe the problem is that we’re not strategic enough with our spending. Below is an outline of a few areas where I think my spending has the greatest chance to facilitate the kind of happiness I’m seeking. I’ll add the (hopefully obvious) caveat that happiness of this sort is a good thing, but hardly the whole picture of what it means to live a flourishing, meaningful life. 

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Prosocial spending:

• Donating to an organization whose cause I believe in and want to further
• Taking friends out for dinner, or hosting a dinner party
• Investing in the beauty of the public realm (flowers, lawn care, home maintenance)
• Buying unexpected gifts for the people I love

🌴 Experiences:

• A memorable vacation with friends or family
• “Dates” with my wife or children
• Formal education, books, or other learning experiences

⏰ Buying time:

• Paying for certain services that I could potentially do myself (basic plumbing, auto repair) to allow myself time for more social activities
• Choosing a lower paying job that offers more lifestyle flexibility, a shorter commute, more positive interactions with coworkers, or a greater sense of purpose.
• Investing in some form of physical activity that I enjoy

A few links I enjoyed from around the web:

🌅 A Once-in-a-Lifetime Chance to Start Over

“Many years ago, I met a woman who had had the kind of experience you ordinarily only find in fiction. As a young adult, she was in a serious car accident, resulting in a head injury. She suffered a period of total amnesia, followed by months of convalescence. When she recovered, she was never the same.”

🌻 A Neighborly Witness

“They have no idea that the way they were living in their yard was making an impact on a stranger like me walking by. The very essence of their vibe encouraged me to try to make my outdoor life a welcoming, hospitable, and a joyful one.”

❓ To Get the Right Answer, You Must Ask the Right Question

“You walk up to a door and put the wrong key in the lock. It doesn’t turn. Do you then keep trying that same key over and over again? Of course not. Yet we do something very similar when we’re seeking to gain access to important insights in life.”

⛽ The World’s Most Beautiful Gas Stations

“I pulled some of my favorite images of gas stations from the following sources: Get Pumped: 8 Filling Stations Fueled By Great Design, It’s a Gas!: The Allure of the Gas Station, Gas Station Design — The World’s 10 Best Filling Stations for 2017, It’s Weird, But We’re Super Inspired by Gas Station Design, and Sometimes, Gas Stations Are Beautiful.”