I think health care matters, child survival matters, work opportunities matter, basic civil rights matters and to some degree education matters.
But cars, electricity, anything found in a shopping mall, more than basic housing-- these things don’t seem to make a huge difference. That says, if you are the ONLY person in town living in a shack and wearing rags, that would cause unhappiness. But if that was the norm, I don’t think it has a huge impact on basic happiness.
That said, it does impact other things and poverty definitely is a bad thing that I hope to see reduced.
I grew up in a small town and was considered poor by the government. So was everyone else. All us kids thought we were middle class, because we were, compared to each other. My mom made my clothes until about the fourth grade then we moved and my parents started making more money. We raised cows and grew vegetables on my grandpas’ farm. I would say half of our food some years came from the farm. I was a happy kid and so where the other kids I played with.
I have an ok job making ok money. I can pay the bills and still have fun money left over. I’m not married and I don’t have any kids so I am not responsible for anyone else. The last couple of years when I get I bored I get the feeling that I have it too good. It’s a weird feeling. Some nights I feel like I’m living in the future in a post-scarcity society. Some nights this makes me unhappy because everything is taken care of, and more, so what else is there to life?
I have this poem by Walt Whitman hanging up in my hallway and I walk by it everyday and when I get that weird feeling I read it and it helps.
O Me! O Life!
Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
NOTE: The poem is in the public domain so it should be fine.
So we can function in this society; the things in themselves do not make us happy (except the books), but they are necessary to function and be perceived as relatively normal.
I disagree. I think these things DO make us happy, for a short period of time when we first attain then. Go without them for a bit and see how much happiness they bring you to get them back.
even sven, did you not come home from Camaroon and luxuriate in the first hot steamy shower or bath you took? Make a special trip to your favorite restaurant or bakery for that one food from home you’d been missing? Spend an evening laying on an overstuffed couch watching mindless crap on television just because you could?
The longest time I spend “away” (by 45 minutes) from “civilization” (at a campground) is about a month. And while I enjoy it immensely, my modern bed feels aMAzing that first night home. It makes me happy. Very happy. So, so happy.
People want Stuff because it makes them happy at first. Whether it contributes to long term quality of life and happiness scores is another matter entirely. But that’s not because of the lack of worth of the things, it’s because humans are monkeys with an incredibly short gratitude span who are always frantically scrambling up Maslow’s Hierarchy.
Go gather wood by hand to build a fire to cook all your food for a week, and you’ll find out exactly how happy a wheelbarrow can make you. But the elation will wear off in a month, and you’ll wish you had a tractor.
Now THIS does jibe with my experience. My “highs” aren’t higher now than they were when I was a broke grad student. But I have more defenses against sadness at my disposal than I did back then. As a result, the central tendency of my overall emotional state is more positive.
So, it wouldn’t surprise me if the average quadriplegic suffers more intense and more frequent “lows” than a lottery winner does. This doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy the sunshine on their face or feel pride in their children–the same as a lottery winner. But it does mean that they have a harder life, overall.
Everyone seems to have their own ups and downs, I don’t think that’s what you mean.
With that said, No I do not believe everyone’s life is really hard. Life is actually pretty easy, it is us that tend to make it hard. Learning how life is easy takes, for many, a very painful process of self discovery - and that is perhaps the hardest time of all.
Some of the things I’ve come to accept which makes life easier:
Learn to love and embrace change, change is the only way life can get better. When something appears to come up to disrupt my plans, go with it.
When a door (in life) closes, do not wait for it to open, don’t force it open, look for the door that has opened.
Learn to let go of people if they leave, look for the new person in their life (pretty much the above)
Find out who you really are, not who you were molded to be (by parents primarily, but continued by bosses, siblings, etc.) - discover how much of you is you and how much of you is them.
Believe there is a path, a way for you, it involved growth and change, it is a good path. When one is on that proper path amazing things happen (things just fall into place to make it happen), when one is not on that path life gets difficult and barriers get in the way. Learn to recognize these signs.
Beware of people who, for lack of a better term, steal your energy. These are sometimes people you like to be around but feel worse after being with them. One tends to accredit the good feeling with them and the bad feeling with not being with them, but it is really them who are causing a overall bad feeling, just feeding you enough to feel good to make the association that they are the source of good feelings. These are often ‘popular’ people, the center and primary ‘controller’ of a group.
If I am so grateful that my kids have school that I let my son (in particular, my daughter to a lesser extent) not do his homework, that’s a different problem. Sure stressing out about it isn’t great, and that he has to be nagged makes me unhappy, but it isn’t a good place to do a comparative analysis of how good I’ve got it that he goes at all and then just leave it.
Same with exercise. If I thank God I don’t need to do physical labor to be able to get clean water, and am thankful in the direction of the couch, it might make me happier not to get on the treadmill and kick back in front of Game of Thrones, but it isn’t productive happiness.
There is something to the idea of productive stress or productive unhappiness.
I think that in any life a little rain falls. Some people seem to live in a thunderstorm - and it isn’t relative to people on the other side of the world (although global media makes it easy to compare yourself to the starving children in Africa the way a 1950s mother could only dream), but relative to the people near you in your class. And whether you are bitter or let it go is part of your personality. Comparative misery doesn’t do us a lot of good, because misery is an emotion, and emotions aren’t rational. My childhood of never making friends and moving from place to place was hard - less objectively hard than my friends who grew up with alcoholic or abusive parents. But not always subjectively harder - some of them were able to adapt to their circumstances and not let their lives scar - while some in my situation become dissatisfied their whole lives. (Mine childhood didn’t scar me - although I do have issues creating friendships - but I don’t find it emotionally scarring)
I was just thinking about this at lunch today with a good friend. She’s really smart, funny and we get along really well. She’s married to a cardiologist and has three kids. He’s the head of the department at this hospital and quite successful.
She works part time and has a full time nanny, so even though her kids are small, she’s not nearly as busy as many other mothers.
They just bought a condo and are in the process of reforming it.
Oh, and two weeks ago, she just found out that he had been cheating on her. She’s still in the middle of her world falling apart, and hasn’t decided if she’s going to stay and work things through or not.
Her husband is begging her to give him another chance, so it wasn’t like he had found a trophy wife.
What a mess. Just the pain on her face today was so hard to see. Everyone on the outside thinks she’s got a great thing going, and either way she decides, if she stays or if she goes, it’s not something which is going to be over in days, weeks or even months.
But things like electricity were incuded in then not really necessary camp. Electricity make an enormous difference to everyday life; in many cases, like with heating, it can mean the difference between life and death.
Washing machines, too, mean that you don’t have to be in pain (if you have arthritis or eczema or a bad back, none of which are rare) just to have clean clothes. Less pain is not a minor thing.
I agree that having the best washing machine or the best computer doesn’t really make you happier except in the very short term, but some “modern conveniences” have objective advantages that aren’t just about keeping up with the Joneses.
I don’t by any means think my views are universal, but in my experience, people adapt to life without electricity pretty easily.
I saw a lot of Peace Corps volunteers come in and out- some who had electricity and some who did not. Not having electricity was a novelty for a while, and people would find times to complain about it. And definitely it caused different patterns- less TV and more conversation, fewer late nights and more early mornings, fewer phone calls and more letters, fewer leftovers and more sharing meals.
But did it cause people to be less happy? No. Did the “no electricity” volunteers have more misery? No. You get used to it, you adjust, and you go back to worrying about the real meat of life-- relationships and work. Electricity is a detail, not a main story.
Not that these things are not nice to have. They are. But if you have a washing machine and you have a bad boss, your wife is cheating on you, and your kids are in jail, you are going to be miserable. It you don’t have a washing machine and you’ve got a great job, a loving spouse and happy kids, you are probably going to be pretty content.
(That said, if you rely on life-saving medical equipment, obviously electricity is important. And it is HUGELY important to industry, which means jobs, which increase happiness.)
But if you have a bad boss, your wife is cheating on you, and your kids are in jail, and you have to wash everything by hand despite it causing you pain, then that’ll be a bit worse.
Why do you bother with electrity if it’s not necessary? You’d save money.
I go without electricity (and running water) regularly - the family cottage in northern Quebec has neither. You pump water at the well, carry it to the cottage; at night, you use kerosene lamps. Heat comes from firewood.
You can live perfectly well like that, but what you soon discover is that everything you do to make yourself comfortable takes a shit-load of work. You want light? Then fill that lamp, check the mantle for carbon build-up, clean the wick, light the lamp, keep checking the mantle periodically - and you have light. Want water? Go outside to the well, make sure the pump is clean of leaves, prime the pump, pump up a bucket of water, carry it inside. Want heat? Well, for that you have to have prepared dry wood in the woodshed - then split it - then chop it up with an axe into small enough pieces - etc.
Want to wash your clothes? Well, for that you may need light, you certainly will need water- a lot - and heat.
Basically, you can add several hours to your day, just doing stuff you normally don’t even think about - you just push a button or turn a tap. But if you put in the work, you can be just as comfortable.
If you’re able-bodied, yeah, it’s just several hours extra a day, although that doesn’t sound so minor, really.
If you’re not able-bodied, it would be rather different, wouldn’t it? And that happens to almost all of us towards the end of life and to most of us, even temporarily, throughout our lives.
For example, you wouldn’t go up there with a broken leg and expect it to be the same, would you? You’d need, at least, someone else to help you, someone who was willing to use even more hours. And you wouldn’t recommend that lifestyle to someone with lung problems, or eczema, or a slipped disc, or… well, tons of things, really, unless they had someone to help them or could choose when to go there and rely on modern things like electricity and washing machines the rest of the time.
I’m not saying it is minor. Living like that, and you soon come to understand why people in the past would get up early and work all the time - and the value of having servants, if you were well-off, to do some of that stuff for you: namely, even the basics of comfort take a lot of continual work to achieve. This doesn’t even count actually doing anything to support yourself, like farming, logging, or a profession.
We have an old galvanized tin bath hanging on the wall in the woodshed: if you want a warm bath, it is a major undertaking - you have to carry the bath inro the house, carry many buckets of water, heat all that water, take the bath, then get all that water out of the bath again, wash the bath, return it to the woodshed …
Sure, life would be tough if you were by yourself and got old or sick - a lot easier if, as an insurance, you have your whole family with you, so that if any one person is sick, or too old, the others can do the work for them (which also helps explain why, if you could afford it, having big families was a good idea).