Happiness and Economics

Christmas and Year End give us some days for reflection. Most people tend to do a year balance and plans for next year: have I achieved by goals, am I prepared for next year? No surprise this is the time of the year when more people start new collections, join health club and other futile, short term initiatives than soon dilute in the day to day activity.

However, thinking about happiness is a good exercise, one that can be done these days or at any other moment though. Reading the article from Economist Happiness and Economics one thinks in the traditional but difficult terms of being vs having, or experiences vs commodities as the article puts it. Just by coincidence I'm reading the book "Success built to last" which touches some of the same deep aspects of success and happiness. And there's one quote that captures well the basic idea behind it: "you can never get enough of what you don't really need to make you happy".

As usual, the concept of happiness is frequently perceived as a relative one: Doing well is not enough: we also want to do better than our peers. Somehow I see this as a natural tool to protect ourselves. Passion, they say, is needed to excel at your job and enjoy it. And normally there is a defence angle to this: "you've got to love what you're doing or you can be sure there will be someone else who will".

In reality, how many people truly enjoy and are passionate about what they do, and how many are simply trading time for salary? In other words is work not just a way to pay the rent?. The lasting reference here continues to be the flow: "the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile"

I tend to think that this topic is elusive because there's no universal answer: some individuals will be just fine with a mediocre satisfaction level at work because the level of demand is tolerable. For some others though, exigent jobs are not a problem as long as they provide the internal or external level of applause and satisfaction they are aiming at. Also, I find that many times it is dependent on your position in the economic ladder: why is it easier to focus on what you really want, once economic independence is achieved? Why is it so hard to find the joy in your job being a waiter at a fast food restaurant?