I'm too busy to be happy

We Americans work ourselves to death. We work over 1800 hours a year (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-03/americans-work-too-much-for-their-own-good-de-graaf-and-batker.html). That’s only amounts to 36 hours per week if you assume everyone gets a 2-week vacation. But, that’s 28% more time than our counterparts over in The Netherlands. That’s insane! Imagine if you got an extra 400 hours of time off a year. If I had that, I think my parents might not mind my living so far away.

Obligatory picture of a windmill that must accompany any mention of Holland.

So, why do we do this to ourselves? Well, it seems to have something to do with the American Dream. We, collectively, seem to be focused on improving on our individual situations for our kids. The weird thing is there are plenty of us where that doesn’t apply.

 Portland: where young people go to retire. It’s funny because it’s absurd. But, is it really?

The irony here is that the country’s direction is more present minded than ever before. The government is actively doing things that benefit the present at the expense of the future. As an example, we have no interest (politically) in actually fixing our nation’s infrastructure that is crumbling before our eyes. http://abnormalecon.blogspot.com/2012/11/investing-in-future-is-no-longer-part.html

Minnesota I-35W bridge collapse. One theory: all Michael Bay’s fault.

I think many of us kill ourselves for a career because we’ve never thought to do anything else. After all, financial success is life success. Or, so we’re told. How else are we expected to produce a better life for our kids, who can be expected to work themselves to death on their own?

Maybe we just need to chill out, and follow the sage advice of one Farris Beuller:

“Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once and a while, you could miss it”. –Ferris Beuller

My point here is the focus on financial success. Because it is the measure of success, we have optimized our lives around that metric. I don’t know many people who are truly satisfied with the result. Ask around and find someone who is perfectly content working as many hours as possible with no regard for their personal life.

Clearly, our measure of success isn’t really making us happy. Even worse, it seems that a focus on financial success causes unhappiness. This report (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/05/22/americans-are-the-wealthiest-but-not-the-happiest) shows that even though Americans are indeed the wealthiest on average, the Better Life Index shows that we’re in the middle of the pack when it comes to happiness.

Let’s be fair that finances play a part. It’s hard to feel like you have a good life if your main daily concern is getting enough food to live. Or less extreme, just making enough (from working all waking hours) to barely provide for yourself or your family. What I’m saying is that it’s just not the only metric that should be considered.

The Better Life Index is one alternative measure to financial success. But, what should we look at? Let’s assume that we can pick a new metric, but whatever we pick will be obsessed about to the point that we will give up any other goal in its pursuit. I think it’s a safe assumption; after all, that’s why we have the least amount of time off and are expected to work to almost 70 years old. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/opinion/sunday/our-ridiculous-approach-to-retirement.html?_r=0

I submit that we need to at least consider income disparity when measuring national success. We can claim the highest average income of all industrialized nations, but almost everyone is under that average. This is because those at the top can have a very strong pull on the average upward. We have one of the highest income inequalities in the industrialized world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States#International_comparisons). This means that we see more people per capita struggling at the bottom than many other countries. So, even though we have the absolute income crown, most of us don’t benefit from that. What’s worse, this measure is trending in the wrong direction.

Gini coelfficient of the US historically, a common metric for income inequality (higher is more inequality).

Ideally, we'd more directly measure happiness. Because, well, isn't that what we're ultimately after anyway? Money doesn't buy happiness, but happiness does. This is a tricky proposition, because it's ultimately subjective and much harder to see a direct cause and effect. But, at least it'd be a step toward paying attention to a metric that benefits everyone.