Lone Gunman

When, after twenty years of mar­riage, Laura Munson’s hus­band told her “I don’t love you any­more. I’m not sure I ever did.”, she chose to not believe him. Not because it didn’t hurt or that she wasn’t tak­ing it per­son­ally, but because this wasn’t about her — it was about unmet expectations.

In yet another touch­ing Mod­ern Love col­umn (is there any other type?), Mun­son tells an enthralling story of mar­i­tal and famil­ial dis­quiet, but also man­ages to cut to the core of hap­pi­ness: that the source is not to be found through exter­nal val­i­da­tion.

I’d finally man­aged to exile the voices in my head that told me my per­sonal hap­pi­ness was only as good as my out­ward suc­cess, rooted in things that were often out­side my con­trol. I’d seen the insan­ity of that equa­tion and decided to take respon­si­bil­ity for my own hap­pi­ness. And I mean all of it.

My hus­band hadn’t yet come to this under­stand­ing with him­self. He had enjoyed many years of hard work, and its rewards had sup­ported our fam­ily of four all along. But his new endeavor hadn’t been going so well, and his abil­ity to be the bread­win­ner was in rapid decline. He’d been mis­er­able about this, felt use­less, was los­ing him­self emo­tion­ally and let­ting him­self go phys­i­cally. And now he wanted out of our mar­riage; to be done with our family. […]

I saw what had been miss­ing: pride. He’d lost pride in him­self. Maybe that’s what hap­pens when our egos take a hit in midlife and we real­ize we’re not as young and golden anymore.

When life’s knocked us around. And our child­hood myths reveal them­selves to be just that. The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us hap­pi­ness. Those achieve­ments, those rela­tion­ships, can enhance our hap­pi­ness, yes, but hap­pi­ness has to start from within. Rely­ing on any other equa­tion can be lethal.

My hus­band had become lost in the myth.

“We are hap­pier when busy but our instinct is for idle­ness”, says Christo­pher Hsee, a researcher at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago who has been study­ing the link between busy­ness and happiness.

What this means is that work con­ducted merely to keep us busy (so-called busy­work) can actu­ally increase our hap­pi­ness, despite what con­ven­tional wis­dom sug­gests (Hsee’s study: Idle­ness Aver­sion and the Need for Jus­ti­fi­able Busy­ness).

This ‘futile busy­ness’ is defined by Hsee as “busy­ness serv­ing no pur­pose other than to pre­vent idle­ness” and is dis­played per­fectly in a study Hsee dis­cov­ered show­ing this in action: at a Hous­ton air­port inun­dated with com­plaints, man­agers suc­cess­fully improved pas­sen­gers’ well-being by employ­ing a clever bit of reengineering:

A closer analy­sis of the prob­lem […] revealed that the wait­ing time until lug­gage deliv­ery con­sisted of two com­po­nents: a 1-minute walk­ing time from the air­craft to the lug­gage carousel and a 7-minute wait­ing time at the carousel […] As pas­sen­gers dis­em­barked from the air­craft and approached the carousel area, a cer­tain frac­tion of them (those with hand lug­gage) pro­ceeded directly to the taxi stand, boarded a taxi, and com­menced their work­ing day; those wait­ing at the carousel were afforded the oppor­tu­nity for seven min­utes of watch­ing pas­sen­gers who dis­em­barked after them start their busi­ness day before them […]

The solu­tion to this prob­lem was to delib­er­ately rein­sert delays in the sys­tem. The air­craft dis­em­bark­ing loca­tion was moved out­ward from the main ter­mi­nal, and the most dis­tant carousel was selected for deliv­ery of lug­gage, so the total walk time was increased from one to six min­utes. After this inser­tion of delay was suc­cess­fully com­pleted and the sys­tem was per­ceived to be more socially just, pas­sen­ger com­plaints dropped to nearly zero.

via The Browser

It is often sug­gested that hav­ing chil­dren has a neg­a­tive net effect on the hap­pi­ness of the par­ents. Econ­o­mist Bryan Caplan dis­agrees, sug­gest­ing that stud­ies have missed the evi­dence sug­gest­ing that par­ents sac­ri­fice more than they need to and over­es­ti­mate the long-term effects of par­ent­ing on a wide range of child out­comes (includ­ing edu­ca­tion, moral­ity, obe­sity, and gen­eral demeanour).

Caplan’s next book is the intrigu­ingly titled Self­ish Rea­sons to Have More Kids and in this essay for The Wall Street Jour­nal he out­lines his core argu­ment for why we should have chil­dren:

While the pop­u­lar and the aca­d­e­mic cases against kids have a ker­nel of truth, both lack per­spec­tive. By his­tor­i­cal stan­dards, mod­ern par­ents get a remark­ably good deal. […]

It’s also true that mod­ern par­ents are less happy than their child­less coun­ter­parts. But hap­pi­ness researchers rarely empha­size how small the hap­pi­ness gap is.[…]

If […] you’re inter­ested in kids, but scared of the sac­ri­fices, research has two big lessons. First, par­ents’ sac­ri­fice is much smaller than it looks, and child­less and sin­gle is far infe­rior to mar­ried with chil­dren. Sec­ond, par­ents’ sac­ri­fice is much larger than it has to be. Twin and adop­tion research shows that you don’t have to go the extra mile to pre­pare your kids for the future. Instead of try­ing to mold your chil­dren into per­fect adults, you can safely kick back, relax and enjoy your jour­ney together—and seri­ously con­sider adding another passenger.

Work com­plex­ity and auton­omy are the two largest fac­tors in decid­ing work­place sat­is­fac­tion, sug­gested find­ings reported in a 1985 arti­cle in The New York Times.

The find­ings came from research by Dr. Jey­lan T. Mor­timer and Dr. Melvin L. Kohn and seems to agree with a more recent dis­cus­sion on the three keys to pro­gram­mer work­place sat­is­fac­tion (auton­omy, mas­tery, purpose).

The most impor­tant deter­mi­nant of job sat­is­fac­tion is ‘work auton­omy,’ or the degree to which employ­ees feel they can make their own deci­sions and influ­ence what hap­pens on the job.

[The researcher] also found, in sharp con­trast to most pre­vi­ous research, that income had no sig­nif­i­cant inde­pen­dent effect on job sat­is­fac­tion. Peo­ple earn­ing high incomes typ­i­cally enjoy the most auton­omy on the job […] which tends to make them happy. But if one looks at indi­vid­u­als who have equally autonomous jobs […] then they appear equally happy with those jobs, regard­less of any income dis­par­i­ties among them.

Another inter­est­ing find­ing dis­cussed in this arti­cle is how “the social posi­tion and job con­di­tions” of your job influ­ence the value sys­tems of your children:

If the par­ents have jobs that allow self-direction […] then they and their chil­dren are likely to value such traits as depend­abilty, curios­ity and respon­si­bil­ity. But if the par­ents have a job that requires con­for­mity to super­vi­sion, he added, then they and their chil­dren tend to value such traits as obe­di­ence, neat­ness and cleanliness.

Update: The cur­rent (01 July 2010) most high­lighted pas­sage on the Ama­zon Kin­dle is this, from Mal­colm Gladwell’s Out­liers:

Three things—autonomy, com­plex­ity, and a con­nec­tion between effort and reward—are, most peo­ple agree, the three qual­i­ties that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

By fos­ter­ing hap­pi­ness in our cities, towns and vil­lages we are simul­ta­ne­ously cul­ti­vat­ing inhab­i­tants that will give more blood, donate more to char­ity, and gen­er­ally be bet­ter citizens.

That’s the con­clu­sion from a study look­ing at how happy peo­ple become bet­ter cit­i­zens as a result of being happy.

Hap­pier peo­ple trust oth­ers more, and impor­tantly, help cre­ate more social cap­i­tal. Specif­i­cally, they have a higher desire to vote, per­form more vol­un­teer work, and more fre­quently par­tic­i­pate in pub­lic activ­i­ties [i.e. com­mu­nity activ­i­ties, reli­gious events, cul­tural events and social gath­er­ings]. They also have a higher respect for law and order, hold more asso­ci­a­tion mem­ber­ships, are more attached to their neigh­bor­hood, and extend more help to others.

No doubt, there’s a pos­i­tive feed­back loop here (e.g. hap­pi­ness increases par­tic­i­pa­tion in social gath­er­ings, social gath­er­ings vastly increase one’s hap­pi­ness).

The researchers go to great lengths to show causal­ity from hap­pi­ness to social cap­i­tal and trust but I’m still not com­pletely won over. Check the paper and see what you think.

via Bark­ing Up the Wrong Tree