Do you know the answer? What is the number one thing that parents want for their children?
Is it wealth, fame, power, great relationships, good luck, or what?
More than anything else, one answer dwarfs all the rest of the answers combined. It’s happiness.
We want our children to be happy above all else.
What it means to be happy and what it takes to be happy may be different from one respondent to another, but the common answer reveals our own projection about what we want for ourselves.
We want to feel happy.
Psychologists have been trying to study happiness for quite a few years now. It’s a slippery subject, hard to pin down or even describe let alone study in a precise, measurable fashion.
People have studied all kinds of variables (like occupation, marital status, wealth, etc.) in an effort to find circumstances that correlate with happiness.
Very little has been learned from those studies with the exception of how small an effect such variables seem to have on happiness.
There are a few variables that seem to have a small effect on happiness, like marriage (in the positive direction) and a strong grounding sense of meaning based in spiritual beliefs.
Variables that you might expect to have a significant impact often do not.
For example, financial wealth seems to have no impact on happiness once you get above the minimum amount needed to have food and shelter.
If you ask people what would make them happier, people earning $25,000 per year and people earning $250,000 say the same thing.
On average, their response comes out to “just 20% more income than I have now.” In follow-up studies where they track down the same research subjects years later, it has been discovered that those who really are making 20% more income give the exact same answer as they did before, “I would be happier if I could just make about 20% more than I am right now.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
Well, for one thing, most people fail to use money in ways that will actually increase their happiness. Freedom and autonomy (that is, the power to direct your own path) do increase happiness.
And having more money at your disposal should cause you to feel happier by increasing the freedom you have, right?
Right, but you can probably already guess what goes wrong. You know human nature well enough to guess what happens to a person’s expenses when their income goes up. They spend more, which makes a temporary positive ripple in their happiness, followed by habituation (getting used to it so it doesn’t have much effect anymore).
Instead of using the freedom of the increase in money to retire early or start a business they can run on their own (with more freedom) a person who gets a raise just buys a fancier car or eats out more often. Some kinds of positive changes (like freedom) have lasting effects, but buying more stuff tends to have only a temporary and limited impact on our feelings of wellbeing in the long run.
LifeModification.com is focused on the goal of increasing your power to bend life to your will. The point of this article is to show you one way to break away from the heard and get a better quality of life.
Think outside the box.
I’m talking about the box that our society is programmed by: your TV.
We receive constant messages about what money can buy and how we can have a better life with the new gizmo that we “deserve.”
We are gradually indoctrinated into an unconsciously held belief system that stuff equals happiness. Let me set your mind straight.
Freedom and a powerful sense of meaning and life direction leads to happiness.
When stuff gets in the way of that freedom or the all-out pursuit of meaningful goals, stuff is getting in the way of happiness.
Figure out what you truly want in life and make a concrete plan for building more of that into your life.
The next time you find yourself tempted by a “better” car, ask yourself if impressing strangers that drive by on the road is really worth trading your freedom and life energy.
Money represents your time, effort, sweat, and energy.
It’s a tangible form of your life energy that can be traded.
Start thinking of ways to leverage money to increase your freedom. Stop thinking of money as an end result that will make you happy.
To wrap up this article on happiness, let me offer one simple approach to increasing happiness.
There are many strategies we could go into, but this is just one that happens to work very well over the long term and short term.
Because we tend to habituate to just about anything, you can increase the level of work or effort you put in to building freedom without decreasing your happiness.
For example, if freedom to you means the ability to jog along a path in the jungles of South America, you need freedom in the form of physical fitness, money in the bank to spend on travel, and time available to get away for your adventures.
You can increase the intensity of your workouts, and because of habituation, you won’t have a decrease in happiness as you become more fit.
You can cut out $4.00 coffee drinks on your lunch break and, because of habituation, you will soon forget that you miss them.
Your bank account and your body will start to more accurately reflect your desires. Work on developing a business that runs efficiently enough to leave behind for two weeks at a time and you will sweat more at first, but you will feel happy putting in that extra effort because you are now aiming for something that truly inspires you with energy and positive expectations of fun.
What I’m suggesting is that you push yourself harder (incrementally) so that your life habits take you closer and closer to the kind of freedom you need to pursue the things that really matter to you.
As you stretch your mind, body, stress-tolerance, or whatever, you will be pleasantly surprised to find that you become more resilient to uncontrollable forms of stress that life throws your way (because you’ve been getting stronger by pushing yourself a little beyond your comfort zone).
What’s really weird (in a good way) about this stuff is that you even get habituated to the idea of pushing yourself outside your comfort zone on an intermittent basis.
The end result is a life that reflects an ever increasing sphere of influence and power with a simultaneous increase in your joy because of that freedom and power. It’s not how most people live. It’s better.
-Dr. Todd Snyder
