If you had asked me, when I was younger, what I wanted in life, I would have said, “A wife I love, children, work that is meaningful and helps me grow, time for my family and my hobbies, a nice house.”
If you ask me now what I have, I would say, “A wife I love, children, work that is meaningful and helps me grow, time for my family and my hobbies, a nice house.”
I already have everything I wanted.
But we keep running on the hedonic treadmill. How about a bigger house? How about a car? How about a job with a fancy title and higher pay? When we get them, we want even more.
I’m all for growth and ambition. I never want to retire from work I love. But sometimes we forget about the trade-offs. Bigger expenses mean more financial stress. Higher pay means more responsibilities and maybe less time with the family.
It’s worse if we get stuck in a loop, as Clayton Christensen described in How Will You Measure Your Life?:
[my classmates who inadvertently invested in lives of hollow happiness] prioritized things that gave them immediate returns—such as a promotion, a raise, or a bonus—rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children. And when those immediate returns were delivered, they used them to finance a high-flying lifestyle for themselves and their families: better cars, better houses, and better vacations. The problem is, lifestyle demands can quickly lock in place the personal resource allocation process. “I can’t devote less time to my job because I won’t get that promotion—and I need that promotion …”
I’m still working on getting my business off the ground. So it’s not like I’m in the perfect state right now. But if I look around, I have enough.
As 37signals co-owner DHH said, “If you are blessed with a partner that you love, some children that you adore, you’ve already won the greatest prize that most humans are able to achieve.”
And he argues that it’s delusional to think more money can complete us:
having an occupation and a pursuit that you enjoy, being able to carry burdens with a stiff upper lip and with again, a sense of meaning, is incredible. To have family, to have friends, to have hobbies, to have all these things that are actually available to most people around the world, that’s winning. And it doesn’t mean you have to discount your ambitions. It doesn’t mean you can’t reach for more, but it does mean it’s pretty dumb if you don’t realize that it’s not going to complete you in some hocus-pocus woo sense to make more. It really isn’t.
We already have everything we wanted.
P.S. Want to come back to this later? Keep it in your commonplace book.