Standing Around at the Finish Line

Lately, I’ve been rambling on about sustainability and long-term thinking, alternate structures for society and all that. One of the things that’s come out of all this is the realization that we, in America and the rest of the first world at least, have crossed the finish line. The whole eternal Darwinian struggle for survival? Done. There’s still a bunch of nice-to-haves on the list, but all of the important stuff is covered: Food, clothing, shelter, medical care. Food might even be a bit too cheap and plentiful. As for clothing, when was the last time you actually had something wear out? It gets old, you get bored of it, and it sits in the back of the closet until you give it to Goodwill. Housing may still be kinda steep, but pretty much all of us have somewhere to live, and even the cheapest place has amenities no one could have dreamed of 200 years ago. Health care is expensive, but it has nearly doubled life expectancy in the last century. Modern medicine can keep you alive well past the point where it stops being fun. What more do we really need? But this hasn’t sunk into our culture yet. We’re still running on a lot of inherited beliefs and values, and they’ve become kinda dysfunctional.

If you know me, you know that I’m not about to launch into some hippie bullshit about quitting your job and going to live on the beach and hug turtles and meditate all day. I’m not some rejectionist eco-puritan. I don’t look to mystics and self-help gurus for guidance. I’m coming at this from a line of historical, economic, and psychological inquiry.

The long historical perspective points out just how huge and weird this prosperity is. The human race is really completely unprepared for it. In fact, it’s simply not a situation that any life form on the planet has had to deal with before. For the first few million years of human existence, we had a real struggle to survive. All of our genetic hardware is geared to that. It’s only in the last fraction of a percent of that time that we developed agriculture and significant food surpluses. Even then it wasn’t any too cushy for most folks. It’s only been in the last hundred years or less that most of us have been able to stop worrying about survival. That’s an eye-blink in terms of cultural evolution, let alone genetic. Our culture is still geared toward competing for our slice of limited resources; it’s all about relative comparisons. We have this enormous momentum behind the belief that not only is more always better, but that it’s never quite enough.

The other historical angle is that people a thousand years ago weren’t all miserable. They didn’t just sit around sulking and waiting for TV to be invented. They were living on the cusp of the future. Just like almost everyone before or since, their world was the best it had ever been, and it was only getting better. I don’t think any of us would choose to go back to that time, but it’s a useful perspective to keep in mind when you’re trying to figure out what’s really important to you. Pretty much my favorite form of entertainment is sitting around talking to friends over beers. We’ve been doing that for about four thousand years. It works pretty good.

There are a bunch of researchers in economics, sociology, psychology and neurobiology who are all grappling with the same elephant: What makes people happy? Instead of sitting around staring at their navels, they go out and do research. They set up experiments, ask people questions, watch what they do, hook them up to machines, compile statistics. At the end of it all, they come up with a lot of unintuitive findings: People don’t know what will make them happiest, they’re bad at predicting how happy they’ll be in a given situation, and having more choices doesn’t make them happier.

Dan Gilbert tells us that, in the long run, paraplegics are just as happy as lottery winners. People adapt. In fact, we adapt so well that we can’t quite believe it ourselves. We overestimate how miserable we’d be in a bad situation, and how happy we’d be in a good one. Barry Schwartz has found that more freedom of choice makes us less happy. More options means that it’s harder to figure out the best one; you expect the best one to be really great, just because you had so many other choices; and when it doesn’t live up to your expectations, you have only yourself to blame, because you had plenty of chances to pick the right one.

Economics is fundamentally about how we allocate resources - how we decide what to do with our time and money. One of the core principles is decreasing marginal utility, the fact that having twice as much of something isn’t twice as good. Working 80-hour weeks to double your salary probably isn’t worth it. A $40,000 car isn’t twice as useful as a $20,000 car; in rush hour, a Ferrari might as well be a Hyundai. We sort of know that intellectually, but we’re fighting our instincts. The proliferation of McMansions and BMW 7-series is a sign that a lot of people are losing that fight.

We’ve hit some inflection point where more isn’t better. All of the instincts and culture that made us a successful species over the last few million years are leading us astray now. So what does all of this research tell us to do about that? Focus on what is good enough, rather than trying to figure out what the absolute best choice is - what’s sufficient, rather than optimal. Once you’ve figured it out, stop researching; act. Don’t second-guess yourself. Once you’ve made a decision, accept it and move on.