Category Archives: Happiness

The Sadness of Stay-at-Home Moms

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Gallup:

Stay-at-home moms fare worse than employed moms at every income level in terms of sadness, anger, and depression. On the other items Gallup measures — laughter, enjoyment, happiness, worry, stress, learning something interesting, and having a high life evaluation rating — middle- and high-income stay-at-home moms for the most part do as well as employed moms.

However, low-income stay-at-home moms do worse on all of these items than their employed counterparts. These moms — with annual household incomes of less than $36,000 — are less likely than employed moms at this income level to say they smiled or laughed a lot or experienced happiness or enjoyment “yesterday.” They are also slightly less likely to say they learned something interesting.

via Stay-at-Home Moms Report More Depression, Sadness, Anger.

The Value of Savings

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Riffing off my response to Chait, Free Exchange’s Washington-based blogger writes:

Suppose you made a million dollars and you put all but $50,000 of it in a shoebox. Now suppose that you never lose the box, never spend it, and leave it all to the dog when you die. What good did the $950,000 do you? If one derives pleasure from imagining consumption possibilities but never actually consumes anything, does that count as value derived from consumption? What if the wealth is public knowledge, and it generates an attitude of deference among those who respect the wealthy or hope to profit from association with them? What about the value of security? Does the presence of a large, cash barrier between you and financial disaster count as a gain derived from consumption (given that the barrier represents the ability to consume post-disaster)?

I don’t mean this as any kind of criticism of Mr Wilkinson, I’m just wondering to what extent it is true. How much do people enjoy having money just because they enjoy having money?

I’ve been thinking about this a good deal. One way to look at savings, as Free Exchange suggests, is to see it as just another kind of consumption. This would help make sense of misers who compulsively hoard. When you get a dollar, you can exchange it for something else to consume or keep it and consume the utility of having a dollar over and over and over. I suppose one might say that differences in savings at the same level of income reveals a difference in time preference or risk aversion or estimates of lifetime income or money fetishism or a mix of these. (How hard is it to tell which it is?)

I think all this makes sense, but it’s not very helpful. You can’t eat dollars, live in them, get an education or much entertainment from them, etc. I think the insurance value of savings is really significant. How do we estimate it? Measure the difference in concentration of stress hormones at different savings levels? I also thing that the status value of savings can be significant, too. But this seems likely to be lower than the status value of effectively signaling wealth, which is just as likely to correspond to huge debt.

I’d guess there’s a great deal of variety in peoples’ attitudes toward savings and debt. Both sides of the ledger are morally valenced for many people. I’m a weirdo who reads too much economics, so I see my accumulated human capital as serving much of the insurance function of money savings. So, despite the fact that I remain a net debtor in money terms (student loans!), I feel well in the black. Some people are ashamed of debt, because it’s debt, and hasten to wipe it out. Others act like credit is free money and run up debt until it explodes in their face. Then they go bankrupt. And then, later, they do it again. Some Spockish types will make minimum payments on debt indefinitely, as long as the interest rate on the debt is lower than the interest rate on investment or the value of present consumption. Some people require a cushion of savings for minimal peace of mind. Others are happy as long as their checking account doesn’t dip below zero before the next paycheck. Etc. So I think it’s probably hard to draw a really useful generalization about the intrinsic utility and disutility of savings and debt.

Since it remains that most savings is intended to finance future consumption (my account with the largest positive balance is a 401K retirement savings account, and I’d bet that’s pretty typical), it seems best to keep the concepts of savings and consumption separate for analytical purposes — even if some of the value flows of savings seems a bit like the value of consumption; even if some forms of consumption have, in addition to the direct value of consumption to the consumer, savings-like value. Here I’m thinking of money spent improving a skill that is fun but pays, or money spent on capital goods that are also a source of enjoyment, like my computer here, or money spent on assembling a meaningful collection that appreciates in real market value. It’s complicated! I think it’s enough to say that the value of consumption isn’t the only source of value in life, and that the value of consumption isn’t even the only source of economic value in life. Nevertheless, real lifetime consumption remains far and away the best proxy for lifetime economic welfare.

The Poor but Unusually Chipper and Long-Lived Index

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The Happy Planet Index is an ideologically rigged ranking released each year by the New Economics Foundation as part of their fight against the evils of economic growth. As far as I can tell, the whole thing is based on the false assumption that it is physically impossible for the entire population of Earth to achieve OECD-levels of material wealth. I suspect NEF sort of hopes media outlets will misunderstand what their index is an index of, as they’ve chosen a rather misleading name for a ranking of countries according to this formula:

Nevertheless, here are some of the headlines:

Australia Not Home to the Good Life – Sydney Morning Herald
Costa Rica: World’s happiest place – Xinhua
Happy Costa Ricans top global list for the good life – Financial Times
Costa Rica tops list of ‘happiest’ nations – CNN

I do like the quotes around CNN’s ‘happiest’. So, anyway, what is the Happy Planet Index and index of?! Who can say!? Not journalists, who can be counted on to read no further than the press release. If one takes a moment to poke around the website for the Index, they do get around to saying: “The Index doesn’t reveal the ‘happiest’ country in the world,” which is a help. But they should put this up front, or change the name of the damn thing.

Anyway, so what’s this “ecological footprint”?

The ecological footprint of an individual is a measure of the amount of land required to provide for all their resource requirements plus the amount of vegetated land required to sequester (absorb) all their CO2 emissions and the CO2 emissions embodied in the products they consume. This figure is expressed in units of ‘global hectares’. The advantage of this approach is that it is possible to estimate the total amount of productive hectares available on the planet. Dividing this by the world’s total population, we can calculate a global per capita figure on the basis that everyone is entitled to the same amount of the planet’s natural resources. Using the latest footprint methodology, resulting in the data in the Global Footprint Network’s Ecological Footprint Atlas, the figure is 2.1 global hectares. This implies that a person using up to 2.1 global hectares is, in these terms at least, using their fair share of the world’s resources – one-planet living.

Don’t ask me why they think this makes sense. (Artifical trees!) In short it seems to mean that countries get docked for containing lots of people wealthy enough to buy lots of things.

Let’s move on to alpha and beta. What do they mean? NEF doesn’t tell you on the website. But if you diligently hunt around the pdf of the report, it is possible to discover Appendix 2, where it is finally revealed what the Happy Planet Index is an index of:

… a constant (α) is added to the ecological footprint to ensure that its coefficient of variance across the entire dataset matches the coefficient of variance for HLY across the dataset. In effect, this serves to dampen variation in the footprint. Once this is done, HLY can be divided by the adjusted footprint to produce an efficiency measure. This is then multiplied by a second constant (β) such that a country achieving a maximum life satisfaction score of 10, and life expectancy of 85, whilst living within its global fair share of resources (one-planet living), would score 100.

They apparently want to dampen the effect of the footprint to avoid the embarrassment of miserably impoverished countries “winning” simply due to the fact that they’ve got antibiotics but are too poor to buy coal.

It is well known in the happiness biz that Latin American countries tend to do better in terms of self-reported life satisfaction than their economic and political fundamentals would predict–in much the same way East Asian countries do worse. Given that the index strongly penalizes wealth, it’s not much of a surprise that the winner would be a poor-but-unusually-chipper Latin American country that also has a suprisingly good average lifespan.

Here is an article on Costa Rican longevity.

Here is my annoyed response to the 2006 index.

What do you make of this claim, just thrown out there in NEF’s explanation of its notion of ecological footprint: “[E]veryone is entitled to the same amount of the planet’s natural resources”?

The Happiness Gender Gap Again

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Stevenson and Wolfers’ paper, “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” covered in the Times back in 2007, has just been released as an NBER paper, giving it a second wind. Ross Douthat in his column today argues that it means that we need to do a better job stigmatizing single motherhood. That’s one way we could go. In my 2007 Free Exchange post on the subject, I suggested destigmatizing female indifference to familial responsibility.

[We should] strongly and repeatedly reinforce the point that women should not have to do so much of the unpleasant domestic and child- and parent-care work. It seems to me our culture remains awash in quasi-Victorian super-sentimenal romanticism about the mother-child bond, which makes women feel guilty if they approach childrearing with the same sort of genial detachment of even attentive, involved, and loving dads. Surely many men ought to do more of this work. But I think men doing more is less important than women doing less. Neither women nor men ought not be made to feel guilty if they outsource this work to daycare, nannies, or assisted-living facilities.

The happiness studies show that men now spend less time unpleasantly occupied than they used to. That’s good! Our focus should not be on the equitible distribution of unpleasantness, but on an overall reduction. The best path is cultural change that lowers to women the cost of opting out of unfair social expectations—expectations that lead them to spend too much of their time devoted to unpleasant acts of altruism.

There’s no logically logical reason why Ross’s restigmatization campaign can’t go hand in hand with my destigmatization campaign. Ladies: don’t be a single mother, because that would be bad for you, and if you are a mother, ignore your kids more, because that would be good for you! But I’m afraid there’s a kind of deep cultural logic that rules out this sort of arrangement.

Happiness and Income Inequality

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Yglesias writes:

I think the links between taxation, spending, and inequality are the most plausible explanation of the fact that the highest-taxed countries are the happiest. It can’t be that paying taxes makes Danes happy. But plausibly, living in a relatively egalitarian society makes people happy.

I wrote a paper about this! At the time, the studies showed no notable systematic relationship between income inequality and happiness. (I know Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers are looking at the question again with the bigger, better Gallup survey, so maybe they’ll offer a somewhat differnet, more accurate picture.) Danes say they’re really happy and have the lowest inequality. But Americans are nearly as happy and have high inequality for an OECD country. Mexicans are a quite upbeat lot, but have really, really high income inequality. So there’s not much of a clear pattern in the data. The effect of inequality on happiness appears to be pretty strongly ideologically mediated. Unsurprisingly, high inequality tends to be disquieting to egalitarians. But it doesn’t so much bother meritocrats. Additionally, the causes of high inequality are various. Economic predation by political elites (lots of Latin America and Africa) is pretty likely to create a sense of victimization and injustice. But high levels of wealth creation in more or less fair institutions but with relatively little fiscal redistribution (the U.S.) doesn’t bother people as long as they think the system is more or less fair. So the national income inequality variable itself tends to have little or no independent effect. The effect it does have depends on other things people believe and care about and the specific causes of inequality in different places. Anyway, why would you expect nation-level income inequality to figure much into an individual’s assessment of life satisfaction? People don’t experience national Gini coefficients. They worry about their neighbor’s car.

The Complexity of Happiness

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Joshua Wolf Stenk’s Atlantic essay on George Vaillant and the Harvard Study of Adult Development is terrific. There’s lots to say about it (e.g., Why don’t we have more longitudinal studies like this? How representative are a bunch of Greatest Generation Harvardian men, really? etc.) But I just wanted to highlight this bit on Valliant’s take on current happiness research.

Last October, I watched him give a lecture to [positive psychology guru Martin] Seligman’s graduate students on the power of positive emotions—awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust (or faith). “The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’—which is perfectly true,” he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

[...]

When Vaillant told me he was going to speak to Seligman’s class, he said his message would be from William Blake: “Joy and woe are woven fine.” Earlier in his career, he would use such occasions to demonstrate, with stories and data, the bright side of pain—how adaptations can allow us to turn dross into gold. Now he articulates the dark side of pleasure and connection—or, at least, the way that our most profound yearnings can arise from our most basic fears.

There’s a lot of good stuff on happiness research in the ellipsis, but I just wanted to draw out this main point. The essay is full of fascinating illustrations of the point from the lives of the men the Harvard study has followed.

Also extremely important:

“It is social aptitude,” [Vaillant] writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

What I liked so much about this essay, and about Vaillant, is the recognition that the complexity of human psychology, the complexity of coping and adapting to the challenges life throws up, makes relationships or “social aptitude” no simple thing. Vaillant points out that even the most “mature” strategies for adapting to disappointment, injury, or failure can strain our most intimate, sustaining relationships. And the reality of relationships over time tends to call for defenses that can threaten relationships. A positive, outgoing person may love freely and easily, but then become shattered by betrayal. Then what do you do? Steel yourself for the possibility of future pain by keeping some part of yourself private and out of the way? But then what have you done to your capacity to be nourished by intimacy and love? A lifetime of  rich relationships is not easy and therefore neither is the best kind of life.

Reasons to Have Zero Kids

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The first one hits marital satisfaction hard. 

An eight-year study of 218 couples found 90 percent experienced a decrease in marital satisfaction once the first child was born.

“Couples who do not have children also show diminished marital quality over time,” says Scott Stanley, research professor of psychology at University of Denver. “However, having a baby accelerates the deterioration, especially seen during periods of adjustment right after the birth of a child.”

Parents are more likely to be depressed than non-parents.

A new study shows that raising [children] is a lifelong challenge to your mental health.

Not only do parents have significantly higher levels of depression than adults who do not have children, the problem gets worse when the kids move out.

“Parents have more to worry about than other people do—that’s the bottom line,” said Florida State University professor Robin Simon. “And that worry does not diminish over time. Parents worry about their kids’ emotional, social, physical and economic well-being. We worry about how they’re getting along in the world.”

[...]

“People should really think about whether they want to do this or not,” Simon said of parenting.

Neither study summary mentions the effect of having two children compared to one, or three compared to two, etc. It may be that once you’ve taken that big first step toward depression and marital dissatisfaction, the extra kid doesn’t make things any worse. But if I were Bryan I’d be sure to track down this data and check it out. 

[NB: I still want kids!]

The Meaning Dodge

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E.D. Kain on the fact that kids don’t tend to make us measurably happier:

The happiness we experience from our children is lasting, constant, omnipresent, and far deeper than any material gain.  It is also hard, and frustrating, and the most tiring experience of my life, which makes it all that much more meaningful. 

[...] 

Fact is, you can’t break this sort of thing down into a nice, scientific study.  It’s not so simply quantified.

It is not simply quantified. But perhaps it is quantifiable. So we should try to quantify it. Fact is, one can blather about meaning any time one’s preferences or prejudices come under pressure from science. But in the end it’s mostly irrelevant whether something is quantifiable or not. There are some things some people are going to do no matter what. So that’s what I think those people should say: “I am going to do this no matter what.”

As I wrote in the ill-fated Culture11:

Appeals to meaning are nice, but they just push the lump in the rug. What’s so great about meaning, anyway? For that matter, what is it? How does one validate that x is in fact meaningful, or more meaningful than y? If meaning is going to carry a justificatory load in weighty personal and political deliberation, we can’t just wave our hands about it. Intellectual virtue requires care. We need to get started on measuring meaning. There are many questions. How much is meaning worth to us in terms of happiness? How much is happiness worth in terms of meaning? There are no doubt many and varied sources of meaning. With science on our side, we are sure to discover that some of them are corrosive to other of our cherished values while some enhance them. Then we’ll be well-situated to say goodbye to toxic meaningfulness. Goodbye national identity? Goodbye God? Who knows what we might find? Science is a source of excitement as well as wonder.

I don’t anticipate the new field of “meaning research” will be warmly received by those with a refined taste for meaning. Many of these fine folks say that the very attempt to measure happiness scientifically — not to mention the effort to put meaning itself under the microscope — saps life of… meaning. But how do you know? Anybody can say this. You can say it while waving a copy of The Closing of the American Mind. You can say it smoking a pipe. But it doesn’t help. 

I am going to continue making this point no matter what.

United States of Happiness

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Here’s something I’ve been waiting for a long time: a comparison of self-reported happiness by state.

Utah, the wholesome Beehive State, takes the prize. But that den of sin Nevada is nipping at its heels! [Mortifying map-reading lapse!] West Virginia, home of the Robert C. Byrd memorial everything, trails the field. Iowa? As we like to say, “Could be worse.” (Proximity to Missouri is a problem.)

Having worked two summers as a tour guide at Mormon historic sites teeming with families from Provo and Logan, I’ll vouch for the fact that Utahns are exceptionally chipper. Though perhaps it should be noted that some Mormons are almost ideological about the idea that they ought to be happy. (Google around for Mormon mommy blogs and enjoy all the “I’m sure glad I studied physics at BYU, but gosh nothing could POSSIBLY be more satisying than reading the same dang story to my sixth precious, precious baby for the ninety billionth time because each and every one of my perfect babies is such a blessing and there is nothing more fulfilling to me as a woman. Ted [who's so cute I let him cheat off me in physics!] is such a good provider, and sometimes he even cooks! Most days I smile so hard it hurts because Heavenly Father has truly blessed me with the best life possible.”) So I suspect a skoche of culture-driven upward inflation. 

As one would expect, there is a positive correlation between money and happiness. This general pattern is by now so well confirmed that maybe we’ll stop hearing that there is no correlation between money and happiness in a couple decades of so.

If You're Not Outraged, You've Internalized a System-Justifying Ideology

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“I just don’t believe this,” is as close as Hedgemaster General Tyler Cowen ever gets to “this is total bullshit.” Well, that’s his response to Jamie Napier and John Jost’s argument [pdf] that conservatives report higher levels of happiness than do liberals largely because of their failure to be pained by high levels of economic inequality. Well, I just don’t believe it either, and neither does the University of Virginia’s Jonathan Haidt, who took apart Napier and Jost’s argument at an AEI panel on happiness last spring. Here’s the video. Jump ahead to about the 35:00 minute mark to catch Haidt’s ten-minute takedown.  

The thrust of Haidt’s critique is that Jost and Napier attribute conservatives’ edge in happiness to their ability to” rationalize away inequality.” So how do they measure that? By looking at responses to a single item in World Values Survey thought to track attitudes toward meritocracy.  The respondant is asked to identify where he or she stands on a ten point scale that runs from ”Hard work generally doesn’t bring success–it’s more a matter of luck” to “In the long run, hard work usually brings a better life.” Conservatism is of course strongly correlated with an answer toward the “hard work pays” end of the scale. But, as Haidt puts it in his talk:

This isn’t some weird belief that shows that you’re explaining away inequality. This is the basic ideological fact — or rather, the basic ideological difference.  It’s not legitimate to take a core aspect of conservative belief and say that it’s not really what it seems, but is really an unconscious mechanism to deal with something uncomfortable.

It would be legitimate were that the best explanation. But Napier and Jost’s story is really hard to credit, both for reasons Tyler mentions and for deeper methodological reasons. For one, it’s not clear what the “meritocracy” question has to do with inequality. If one wants to see a meritocratic bent as a common cause of conservative leanings and higher happiness, here’s a less tendentious explanation. (1) Those with a greater sense of the efficacy of their behavior — with a greater sense of being in control — will tend to (a) think hard work brings a better life, (b) be happier, (c) see policies that seem to penalize hard work as unjust. (2) People likely to see high taxes as an unjust penalty on hard work tend to identify as “conservative.”

So here you’ve got a way of getting from a meritocratic attitude both to happiness and conservatism without bringing in anything to do with inequality. This is conjecture, of course, but I think it suggests that Napier and Jost’s conclusion has all the benefit of theft over honest toil. How did they get from a question apparently about whether work pays to the ability to reconcile one’s sense of justice with abstract macroeconomic variables? The fact that they evidently find it intuitive, rather than bizarre, that the state affairs captured by a nation-level Gini coefficient would have “negative hedonic effects” pretty much gives away the game. It makes exactly as much sense as thinking that certain people must have found some way to harden their consciences against the otherwise intolerable pain of high levels of government spending as a percentage of GDP. Huh? 

Anyway, doesn’t the WVS meritocracy question seems ill-formed to you? What’s the point of opposing “success” and “a better life.” If one interprets “success” in terms of social comparison and “a better life” in terms of self-comparison over time, then there’s no problem in agreeing strongly with both ends of the alleged opposition.

I strongly agree that success, understood as a significant upward move on a valued status dimension, is largely a matter of luck. But I also strongly agree that hard work (in a society with decent institutions) usually brings a better life. It’s possible to work hard and achieve a better life without ever winning anything you’d count as success. So I haven’t a clue how I’d answer this question. Do I believe in meritocracy or not?Maybe my agreement with both statements would sort of average out and push me toward the middle?Or maybe I decide that it’s pointlessly self-defeating to see fortune as overriding agency, even if deep-down I suspect it does (I probably won’t write the Great American Novel, but I definitely won’t if I admit that to myself), and so I’ll just go ahead and agree whole hog with the “work pays” side. Maybe optimistic self-deception, which is good for self-reported happiness, predicts pro-agency answers on the meritocracy question. What does that have to do with inequality?  

Look at it from another angle. Suppose you do know how you’d answer it. You incline heavily toward the “meritocratic” end of the (bunk) spectrum due to your firm faith in the power of hard work and your sense that it is pointlessly demoralizing to think success a hostage to fate. It remains possible to understand that (a) people start in radically different positions due to fortune, (b) hard work doesn’t usually improve each person’s life equally (indeed, people starting with disadvantages may have to work very hard to move up only a little), and therefore (c) inequality can rise even if every hardworking person manages to thereby bring him or herself a better life. In this case, your “meritocratic” belief hasn’t done anything to help you “rationalize away” inequality. You can strongly believe that effort usually pays without thinking that differences in pay reflect differences in effort. In fact, you ought to believe this.    

My guess is that Napier and Jost are not very interested in psychology and so have simply assumed that a preference for explaining lives in terms of agency rather than fortune is pretty much the same thing as thinking people deserve whatever they get.

Catching Happiness

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Maybe you’ve heard about the BMJ study that says that happiness wends its way through social networks? Justin Wolfers says:

The study, by James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, concludes that happiness is contagious within social networks.

According to the authors, your happiness depends on the happiness of your friends, and their friends, and their friends. It’s a fascinating finding, and it was duly reported by hundreds of newspapers. Indeed, according to Fowler, “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

Unfortunately, it’s probably not true.

Find out why not!

Why Are American Atheists Less Happy and Cooperative?

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Outstanding stuff from Yale psychologist Paul Bloom in Slate:

In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don’t go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don’t believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they’re nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.

Denmark and Sweden aren’t exceptions. A 2005 study by Gregory Paul looking at 18 democracies found that the more atheist societies tended to have relatively low murder and suicide rates and relatively low incidence of abortion and teen pregnancy.

So, this is a puzzle. If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well—better, in many ways, than devout ones.

[...]

The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens … find them immoral and unpatriotic.

America becomes no worse as it becomes more secular. And American atheists would be both happier and more cooperative if we were less marginalized by our culture.  

Also, the fact that non-religious Americans (who don’t lie about it) are basically disqualified from high public office ensures that many of the most rational and intellectually accomplished people in our society cannot participate in electoral politics. For all I know, this is good. It may keep many of our best and brightest focused on productive endeavors, instead of squandering their abilities in wasteful games of political conflict. But it might also lead to a selection effect where political power is left to those with exceptional powers of self-deception, or to those who are willing to simply lie about things that are profoundly important to the people they are supposed to represent. That might not be good. 

I made an argument similar to Bloom’s, here.  

 

Freestyle Jazz Conservatizing

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Oh my. Helen Rittelmeyer:

For the record, I think the Tocqueville point is mostly valid: “well-meaning matieralism” does yield a world “which will not corrupt the soul but noiselessly unbend its springs of action.” But that’s not why I think it’s important to have a theological understanding of suffering floating around our political vocabulary. There’s really only one defensible reason why I care (“the will to badass” being an indefensible reason), which is that I think the redemptive power of suffering is a fact about the world; it’s just true.

I don’t want to be mean to Ms. Rittelmeyer, because I don’t want her to like it. But the standards for determining what’s just true here are… elusive. The Tocqueville point is provably false. Wealthier, happier people are more creative and productive. Springs of action are unbent by depression and the demoralization of poverty. I know, I know. Booooring. But it is, as they say, just true. However, there is no second guessing the redemptive power of making things up.

Let's Measure Meaning!

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That’s the upshot of my short piece today at Culture 11.

Here’s a crazy bit that introduced a few too many issues, so I left it out. Enjoy!

“I don’t know why we are here,” Ludwig Wittgenstein, the grimly mystical Austrian logician, once confessed, “but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”  I’m pretty sure Wittgenstein is correct. Evolution by natural selection–the only credible non-fiction story about “why we are here”–tells us that we exist “in order to” make copies of our genes. In the typical case, we enjoy genetic recombination a lot, but to enjoy ourselves is not what we are for. To enjoy ourselves is not why we are here. 

But knowing why we are here, or what we are for, turns out to be terrifically useless in guiding our choices or framing our lives. It doesn’t matter why we are here. Should I learn that I had been designed by bioengineering performance artists from Alpha Centauri to savagely exterminate kittens, it would not validate my taste for ripping the heads off tiny whimpering calicos. Knowing my function would not tell me what it is for my life to go best, from my point of view. Were I to fight my instincts and lovingly cuddle kittens instead of wantonly destroying them, that would be my otherworldly creators’ failure, not mine. Should I find a hollowness, a gnawing absence of kitten corpses at the center of my life, I might be right to think that my life would, in some sense, mean more to me were I to give in to my biological imperatives. But I would be wrong to think that a more meaningful life, in that sense, would be better. The value of meaning would remain an open question.