Happiness

To a poor man, more is better, and all humans throughout history were poor compared to the wealth we enjoy. Now that we have lived in the fossil-fuel window for longer than anyone can remember, we live in comfort our ancestors could not have imagined, yet we keep pursuing more.

Our cars are huge, our debts are huge, and even some of us are huge, yet we still believe that more is better. The entire religion of economics is devoted to this belief – a rapidly escalating economy is “robust,” not “out of control,” and as it slows down it is said to be “ailing,” not “stabilizing.”

But beyond a certain point, more is more of too much – with eating, drinking, or just about anything. A growing body of data shows that once our basic needs are met, money no longer makes us happy. After that, everyone – whether they make 20,000 euros a year or 200,000 – seems to think that they would be happy if only they made perhaps ten percent more.

In fact, even as our houses swell and possessions multiply, people’s happiness has been going down. Some sociologists have suggested that discontent is related to economic growth, as our new wealth is used to build homes further away from each other, buy more electronic devices that occupy our time but offer only short-term pleasure, and spend more time commuting and less time with loved ones. As author Bill McKibben puts it, “Do the experiment yourself. Would you rather have a new, bigger television, or a new friend?”

The globalised production of all this booming wealth has created severe consequences for the globe, as seen from space in the shrinking forests around the Earth’s middle, the shrinking whiteness at the poles and the spreading deserts. Our system of long-distance commuting and globalized production also erodes the infrastructure to do anything else – local farms, organizations, and jobs – and will make the Restoration more difficult.

We can and should try to shift the economy into arenas that destroy less of the world, but we can also remember that there is a world outside the global economy. Before we were consumers, we were citizens, less part of an economy than a community.

Rebuilding community can help defend our land against damage; for example, local food uses one-tenth the fossil-fuel energy of food shipped around the planet. But those same actions also have value-added effects in our lives — sociologists who followed shoppers also found that those in farmers’ markets had 10 times as many conversations as those in supermarkets. The actions that harm the natural world do not increase happiness, but the actions that restore the natural world also restore happiness.

Here’s more good news: a study by psychology professor Elizabeth Dunn has found that people are not happier when they have more income, but when they give more away. Those who responded as happiest to survey questions turned out to also be the ones who gave most to charity.

Most interestingly, this runs counter to what we all have been taught; when Dunn asked the subjects of her experiment what made them happy, almost all said they’d be happier spending money on themselves.

There is a lesson here: By and large, we are better people than we realize.