Overpaying for happiness?

How many people here put deliberate effort into tasting their food as they eat it?

Try this.

When you're eating (alone). Take some food on your fork. Take a bite. Put down your fork. Don't pick up your fork until you have finished chewing and swallowed EVERYTHING in your mouth.

Doing this is amazing to me in two respects. 1) The amount of flavor that you become aware of, when you make it your priority is astounding. The pure visceral enjoyment is easily doubled (as best as I can attribute to subjective and unincremented scale). 2) This is really hard. The habitual pressure to start gathering more food before you've finished what's in your mouth is enormous. I sometimes have to force myself to push on the plate with my fork to prevent the thoughtless action.

I am interested to see how others' impressions differ from mine.

To paraphrase some business guru: I know half of my happiness budget is wasted, but I don't know which half.

Others have written about the "hedonic treadmill" here.

1) People who live in developed Western countries usually make and spend much more money than people in poorer countries, but aren't that much happier. It feels like we're overpaying for happiness, spending too much money to get a single bit of enjoyment.

It's worth saying explicitly that we are, nevertheless, happier.

The efficiency goes down (hence that "happy planet index" linked to), but to my eyes this looks like nothing more than ordinary diminishing returns, which affect many things we might want to invest in. (Unfortunately that suggests there's no easy answer).

I think a lot of these effects are genuine: a $3000 dollar suit is only as much better than a $300 suit as a $300 suit is than a $30 suit, and sure some of that is signalling but I think most of it is that it takes a lot of skilled human labour to make the difference between a quite nice suit and a super nice suit.

Sooo... if you like eating, give yourself a break every once in a while? If you like comfort, maybe get a cold shower sometimes? Might be a good idea to make yourself the kind of person that can get happiness cheaply.

Maybe, but I'd like to see evidence before recommending this. My instinct is that it's possible to learn to appreciate an "ordinary" life, and that this would probably provide more overall pleasure than the boom-and-bust cycle you seem to be advocating. But it would be good to have some actual numbers.

You might be interested in the earlier retirement community, particularly the Mustachian branch. They spend a decent bit of time on the concept of the hedonic treadmill in general, with a particular focus on how it causes people to waste money.

Although Mustachianism is built on the idea of embracing hardship, it becomes so automatic that it is soon the only way you could imagine living. Because of this amazing tendency, it is often easier to live on 25% of a professional income (and save the other 75%) than it is to try to scrape by on 90% and save 10.

-Mr.Money Mustache

Might much of happiness comes from positional goods rather than absolute goods?

It seems that some activities are predicated on the belief in a later "payoff", while others are not.

It's easy to get confused about payoffs, and to find ourselves trapped (acting as if we are) chasing some payoff, when the supposed payoff can't plausible exist, or at least not in the size or form that we allow ourselves to believe.

For example, beating a video game doesn't provide a large pay-off, at least for me. But it's easy to catch myself acting as though a non-trivial emotional reward is waiting at the end, and to forget that the moment-by-moment experience is the valuable thing.

Bertrand Russell once made a comment about how giving up hope for certain knowledge played a role in overcoming his unhappiness. I wonder how many people here can relate to this. I've often felt an essentially unpleasant compulsion to fully refute some skeptical possibility or resolve some intractable philosophic problem. Realizing that the exact emotional feeling of resolution I was seeking was unobtainable was a tremendous relief to me.

Another class of problems involves taking a genuine payoff and exaggerating its size or extending its domain. It's perfectly reasonable to want to get rich or have success in a competitive career. But it's just not going to have more than a moderate impact on most areas of your emotional life, (relative to having a typical amount of money or success). A good romantic relationship is hugely rewarding, but you can't expect it to fix the whole litany of emotional problems you might have.

I'm listening to some recording of Alan Watts. No rationalist he! But he understands certain quirks in the psychology of people who are searching for spiritual insight: He argues that demanding spiritual practices function as reductio ad absurdumm to get people to accept that this whole "climb and mountain and unlock the door" model of enlightenment is wrong. Likewise, there's a small thread in most moral traditions that says "virtue is actually easier than non-virtue".

People who live in developed Western countries usually make and spend much more money than people in poorer countries, but aren't that much happier. It feels like we're overpaying for happiness, spending too much money to get a single bit of enjoyment.

Status competitions are mostly zero sum. To the extent that people get happiness from status (and it seems like a huge component of most people's psychological well-being and life satisfaction), you would expect that people in developed Western countries would have to spend much more than similar people in developing countries to get similar levels of status.

I do think it's very hard to measure the enjoyment derived from activities, and many people are probably not optimizing their spending well.

Great advice! I noticed something like this happening last time I tried to binge-read a webcomic. Initially I'm really engaged and frequently laughing, but a few hours later I end up clicking through strips in zombie mode.

You know, with regards to utilitarianism, I wonder if I could do more good helping first-world people to enjoy the things they have and to generally have more fulfilling lives. I imagine that this can be done at a much cheaper rate than, say, building wells in Africa (though of course the two approaches needn't be and shouldn't be mutually exclusive).

Does any one else have ideas for interventions (perhaps teachings) that would yield happier people?

very tangential...

3) People sometimes get unrealistic dreams and endlessly chase them, like trying to "make it big" in writing or sports, because they randomly got rewarded for it at an early age. I wrote a post about that.

You don't talk about random rewards in that post.

While the return is diminishing, the addiction potential is increasing. One possible solution is indeed to go stoic, go for hormesis: http://gettingstronger.org/hormesis/

But I wonder if just varying your enjoyments would work? Planning a different kind of fun for every evening. Today it is chocolate, tomorrow we get drunk, day after we go see a movie, day after we play tennis...

Do we have a good definition of happiness? Because otherwise, what are we paying for? It seems like peope are paying for some short- to medium-term gratification.

This also begs the question that, even if we don't know what happiness is, does achieving it means we have to pay? Certainly we must put some effort in, but it does not mean all effort is equally rewarding.

For example, last Monday I asked a girl out. I got a no and felt short-term disappointence and a lower amount of medium-term disappointance but looking back I feel quite happy I did that because I learned a few things about myself and I also tried something I've never done before. I felt a moment of "Ah, this wasn't in the books nor in the mouth-to-ear advice" and feel like the next time I do it I'll have a better chance. (Or so I think!)

From this, I conclude that my happiness is long-term satisfaction that my past efforts resulted in excellent or at least good returns. In contrast, unhappiness was long-term dissatisfaction that my effort resulted in either nil or very negative rewards for the effort put in. Also of particular note that short-, medium-, and long-term satisfaction is quite different in intensity. Short-term is quite high. Medium-term is when things start slowly to calm down, but you still feel the high of the short-term. Long term is when you look back, look at the result, and say "I did the right thing". Lastly, I belive that my successes can live on infinitely whereas if I pursue temporary happiness I will get basically nothing.

And, somewhat related to the title, I didn't pay a single penny. I think some people are going to be offended and I might possibly get some examples that will enrage me because they sound stupid but I say that money does not equal happiness and is not (and if you think otherwise should not) be on a high priority in things that lead to happiness. I'd certainly feel better with shelter, nutritious food, warm showers, and many other things that money has direct relations to. But I do not feel like I have to overpay for that. Some money absolutely has to be paid, but do not overestimate the amount that you need to.

http://100happydays.com/

Will anyone try this? For those of you who ignore this, instead, please leave a comment telling me why. Is that the rational thing to do?

Interesting hypothesis. Here are some others

• Richer countries are just richer and spend more money on most things.
• On the level of countries, income can go to consumption, investment, or exports. Developing countries have better growth opportunities than rich ones and expend proportionally more resources on investment. That leaves consumption and exports to absorb rich countries better value-creation abilities. Rich countries could keep their consumption levels low, say by donating large amounts of money to foreign charities, but they usually spend it on consumption.
• In the end, there's not much more that people want to do than be happy.

(I am not an economist and would appreciate terminology corrections)

For example if you like sweet food, you can get into a cycle of eating more and more food that's sweeter and sweeter. But the guy next door, who's eating much less and periodically fasting to keep the association fresh, is actually getting more pleasure from food than you!

The other guy is having more pleasure per unit of food, and maybe per second spent eating deliberately tasty food. But does he necessarily have more pleasure in total? How do you know?

I do agree with your conclusion, for a different reason. Today's affluent Western people have access to a huge range of fun activities, far more so than any previous human population. Enjoying any one activity has diminishing returns per unit time. So to maximize the total amount of enjoyment, we should sample many things instead of becoming experts in any one (fun-oriented) thing, even though becoming an expert can occasionally grant the highest possible momentary enjoyment of a masterpiece.

The difference from your formulation is that you wouldn't fast to reset the reward value of tasty food; you just consider the opportunity cost of buying and preparing especially tasty food, and then don't do it as much because you invest in other stuff instead. Some things, like sweetening the same food more and more, don't have marginal costs and so become superstimuli, but I think most people are already aware that these are dangerous, for reasons beyond maximizing pleasure.

Some of the things you listed are different: people chase some dreams not to maximize fun, but for success, prestige, money, and other values. These things follow different reward curves than fun; for instance money can be invested and has increasing marginal returns, not diminishing ones.

Overpaying for happiness?

Yes we are. Not only on an individual level but as societies too. See e.g. Happy Planet Index for some comparison of countries by the average amount of happiness per consumption.

People who live in developed Western countries usually make and spend much more money than people in poorer countries, but aren't that much happier.

Indeed. The index above shows not exactly the opposite but that there are poorer countries that are happier than lots of devloped nations.

I agree with your assessment and would even add that our 'progress' has caused lots of Unfriendly Natural Intelligence that doesn't really maximize our values.