Happiness round 3

More than one correspondent has asked me, in the last few days, about happiness in life, and particularly in career.

I'm going to restate what I've said before, and then add a little.

1. Happiness is at least 2-faceted. Happiness right now, and happiness remembered. Biggest single insight on happiness anywhere, anywhen. Never forget that you are both experiencing and building memories, and that the memories won't match the experience.
2. In-the-now happiness has ALMOST nothing to do with circumstances, unless it's death of a family member or divorce.
3. In-the-now happiness is ~50% set-point, though research seems to indicate that the set-point is SLOWLY malleable. Meditation practice, in particular, can move it substantially if you meditate a lot over 30 years. Compassion meditations seem to work best for raising net happiness.
4. In-the-now happiness is massively impacted (40%) by some simple choices (applicable to WEIRDos, anyhow).
1. Do you get enough physical activity?
2. Do you get enough sex?
3. Do you get enough sun?
4. Do you maintain an attitude of gratitude?
5. Do you get enough sleep?
6. Do you commute too much?
7. Do you have enough autonomy?
8. Do you have a partner?
9. Do you have friends?
10. Do you have a community?
11. Do you experience FLOW often enough?
12. Do you respect yourself (Self-evaluation, often moral)?
13. Are you respected (Community-evaluation, moral + status)?
5. In-memory happiness has a lot to do with how you evaluate your life, looking back. This seems to be massively under-studied in the modern lit, with Aristotle having one of the best takes on this side of the divide.
6. In-memory-happiness, according to most reports from older folks, is massively about the closest relationships in your life: Spouse, Parents, Children, Close Friends....and less so about the less close relationships in your life.
7. In-memory-happiness is also about accomplishment/pride. What have you done that you are proud of...for real?
8. Given that for most of us, a HUGE portion (15-25%) of our lives are spent on our work, I personally believe that one's daily work is also a massive determinant of happiness. The Aretae line on what makes work good:
1. Meaningful -- Does your work matter to you?
2. Helpful -- Does it make someone else's life better (preferably directly/visibly)?
3. Challenging -- Is it in the sweet spot of hard enough, but not impossible?
4. Creative -- Does it engage your artistry as well? Not just a mechanical activity?
5. High Status -- Do (some/many) folks look up to you for doing it?
6. Autonomous -- Do you choose what you do next, or does someone else?
7. Income -- Does it pay enough...specifically NOT does it pay well.

Overall, then, what makes life good?

Family, Friends, Community, Outdoor Physical Activity, Gratitude, Good Work.

For my teen, and for my friends...find something you love to do...and spend the 10,000 hours to get good at it. Creative and/or helping professions rock. Creative, helping professions that are high status, autonomous, and which pay well rock even better. Grit your teeth through the hard part when you don't like it. If you've got enough money or time, go apprentice with someone who does what you want....and learn it without thinking of it as a paycheck.

Preliminary Book Report

Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense.

Must-read book. I've only read the first half on my Kindle, while I'm moving in...but wow.

It echoes a big chunk of what I already thought, but...here's a bit more detail from the first 3 chapters:

1. 10,000 hours. They talk about it from a 10 years, 4 hours a day format, but it's there. I don't care what your natural talent looks like. Until you've put in your 10,000 hours, you don't have a very good idea of HOW good you can be in an area. And almost anyone who's put in the requisite 10K hours (of deliberate practice) is better than almost everyone with only 1000 hours of practice. Of course, after 10K hours, natural ability takes over...but since that's a tiny portion (0.01% or less), no big deal. Even the godly Manute Bol (7'7" Sudanese sheep-herder who killed a lion with a spear then became an NBA star) wasn't able to overcome the insufficient practice hurdle.

2. IQ is in the range of top-predictors (along with conscientiousness, etc.) ...but people who believe that IQ/innate ability strongly predicts success do less well than folks who believe that effort is the big deal. There's the killer anti-HBD position. HBD is partly true (correlation coefficient between .4-.5), but belief in HBD is harmful to actual performance in real life. The other 75-84% of performance is negatively impacted by the belief that the ability part (16-25%) is particularly important.

3. Complex skill proficiency cannot be predicted very well before the 10,000 hour mark. "Very well" is a weasel-phrase, and I'm fully aware of that, but regardless...the very top performers in a field are not necessarily identifiable from early work. Some tiny number of geniuses excepted.

Numbers

In the last 200 years, Westerners' average wealth has increased, depending on your historical estimates, by between 15-25x. As a comparison....that's a difference between an average income of $2000 a year and $50,000/year...inflation adjusted.

In other words...90% of the difference between the US living standard and the Haitian living standard is economic growth.

The reason I'm as fond of Paul Romer as I am, and the eventual cause for his Nobel Prize will be his work demonstrating that innovation is roughly all of growth (new Growth Theory). Read Matt Ridley to see to a 3-way discussion on innovation as teh winnah. Also, John Pepples points us to a WSJ article arguing (correctly) that capitalism, and specifically innovation, is what saved the chilean miners.

Elsewhere, in a related topic, Ridley also argues (as I do) that the inability to escape from bad law (Ancient China) is the reason that Europe prevailed...thus supporting the aretaevian theory of history, where exit is a sine-qua-non feature.

Karma

Arnold Kling sends us to a WSJ article by Jon Haidt (still my favorite psychologist) suggesting that The Tea Party can be explained by 1 word: Karma. Specifically, the tea party is the line that the government should get out of the business of violating Karma. Also in Haidt's article, he discusses the (quite variant) moral positions of Libertarians, Conservatives, and Liberals.

One of the better (fairer) explanations of conservatives that I've ever read from a liberal. Worth reading.

Taboo

If any of y'all missed the text (pdf) of Pinker's speech on Taboo in the last few days, it's required reading. It also calls out huge thoughts for me.

Among other things, it highlights one difficulty that I've been worrying at for a few years. Pinker argues that the following questions:

Darling, I know that you always have been faithful and always will be faithful, but just hypothetically, if you were going to have an affair, which of my friends would it be with? Or try this: In a dinner party, ideally one of mixed ethnicity and religion, ask the question, well, of course none of us here are prejudiced, but if we were, if you were bigoted, which ethnic group would you be prejudiced against, just hypothetically?

has only one correct answer:

The answer to these questions is not to deliberate and then say, well, no, I wouldn’t want to sleep with any of your friends, or now that I think of it, there isn’t any ethnic group that I’m prejudiced against. One must reject them instantly. Just allowing them to percolate in your brain is considered morally corrosive.

Unfortunately, both me and most of the folks I hang out with consider and then answer the question when posed. Which leads to my question? Why are smart folks considered subversive? In short because most of them are socially retarded in that they don't have the ability to turn off the brain and accept the standard answer, once a question has been highlighted. And if you're actually considering a question, there's real good odds you won't reach the "correct" conclusion. Therefore smart folks are almost always correctly considered dangerous to the social fabric.

Anyhow, Pinker's a short must-read. Go visit. Ties in nicely to Devin's recent post as well, but at a more meta- level.

Why Happytown

Alrenous, in the comments, asks:

To what do you attribute the greater tolerance and good-naturedness?

Mark Horning answers thusly:

the tolerance and good-naturedness is due to it being a smallish college town. Lots of beer and cannabis is probably involved as well.

Rather unsurprisingly, I disagree.

Not only did I attend school here with Mark, but I also grew up in town, and have spent a lot of time here. People here are shockingly friendly/nice.

My understanding of the happiness research suggests that there are a few super-moves for increasing a person's happiness, given the well known thought that 50% is semi-genetic, and 10% is circumstantial, the other 40% is in play.

1. Gratitude focus.

2. Meditation

3. Physical Activity

4. Health, separate from physical activity

5. Sunshine

6. High Autonomy

7. Community (Religion?)

Why happy?

My home town, now known to all as San Luis Obispo, CA has:

A. 360 day a year perfect weather. There is a full 10-degree difference in the average overnight low in January vs. July, though July's average daytime high is 15 degrees above that of January. Furthermore, it's in the California coastal desert, and there is no rain to speak of. I remember one year it rained every day in February, but none in January or March...and that was a flood-year. So, great temperatures and always sunny.

Shorts, sandals, light jacket will get you about 350 days a year of clothing, 365 if you add a raincoat, and don't mind 35 degrees on your bare legs in the morning.

Always sunny hits point 5, and stable, warm temperatures means that it's convenient to go outside and exercise all year long. And people do. And it's built into the culture here.

B. It's a town in the middle of nowhere with no jobs. My buddy Wally Conger, who lives a little south of me, has suggested that the amount of self-employedness helps as well, and suggests that the number of self-employed folks here is astronomical. Honestly, I don't think I know anyone in this little town who defines themselves by their job unless they work at the power plant or in the schools (2 colleges, with net population almost equivalent to the town). So what happens is that folks are either highly unmaterialistic, or self-employed, or independently wealthy. Regardless, the amount of personal autonomy is huge.

C. To mollify Foseti, I have to say that we also have obscenely high house prices as befits a California-coastal town, and which prevents anyone poor from moving in...though there are a metric boat-load of homeless folks. This also results in ZERO crime. I mean, news here involves cows blocking roads.

D. No Commutes. By a huge margin, the least happy part of anyone's day, as confirmed by countless experiments, is the dentist, followed immediately by the daily commute. I can bicycle from one end of town to the other in 20 minutes...and that's only because I'm slow these days. The longest commute in the county is 45 minutes...and there's only 3 people who do that (of ~250K? people). No one commutes.

E. No public transport. People become complete assholes when they have to catch trains. In Chicago, if you miss a train, you might have to wait another hour to get home/get to work. Which means people push, fight, yell, and get mad about 10 second delays. In SLO...no such thing. Wanna get somewhere? Bicycle. Frequent enough, uncrowded trains can mitigate this...but those never happen.

F. Beauty. My goodness. If you haven't been here you're missing something.

G. Health. Town of 40,000 people. 3 Farmer's markets a week(Thursday night, Saturday morning, Sunday midday), where you can buy just-off the tree fruit/just-off-the-vine veggies. My mom has a full half-dozen fruit trees growing in her yard as well (Pomegranate, Lemon, Plum, Apple x2, Orange) besides assorted veggies and flowers.

H. General hippy-ness. Meditation/yoga: good. Stress: bad. It's part of the culture.

I. Small-town-ness. Everyone knows everyone. You get to know the folks at the grocer, at the farmers markets, etc. I ran into a teacher I used to teach with back in '93 at Starbucks yesterday.

That's much of my list. Not sure what I've missed yet.

Happytown

A recent article in Parade magazine calls out some of the undiscussed reasons I chose to move back to my hometown. Bill Morem follows up with further discussion. Summary line:

A jawalker crosses the street, causing a driver to chirp to a stop; instead of giving the jaywalker the horn or finger, the driver smiles and waves to the jaywalker

Probability of this happening in Chicago? ZERO.

Probability in my hometown? 50%. Indeed, I'm back in one of the happiest places on earth.

Probability of sun? ~95%. Doesn't matter the month.

Probability of warm days? 80%. Goes down in January/Feb.

Probability of cool evenings? 80%. Goes down a little in August/September.

In Chicago, I felt a little chunky, but I wasn't outsized. Here...I feel fat. SO many bicycles, joggers, walkers...I swear I see more recumbent bicycles on an average day here than I saw normal bicycles in Chicagoland on an average day in the summer.

1 week in, I have NO regrets moving. This was a smart move. Kids happier, Wife happier, me happier.

Huge homeless population here as well...duh...you can sleep outside comfortably 90+% of the year. But the homeless folks are polite. We ran into a homeless guy who volunteered to give the 14yo basketball lessons regularly after playing with the kid for an hour. Didn't ask for money/etc. Just likes the game. Aggressive Chicago-style panhandling is non-existent. No violent crime. Interesting world.

Food

I just moved from Chicago back to California. I am thrilled.

While Chicago has a rather impressive ethnic food supply, and some pretty serious american food (Pizza, Italian Beef, etc.) I have on the whole been very unhappy with my food options in Chicago.

No real mexican food, No BBQ to speak of, and the only seafood that was good was expensive.

Now I'm back on the Central coast of California. I've had burritos at what I think is the best burrito bar on the planet...and I'm back to thinking that Chipotle is a form of toxic waste packaged into a burrito form, because I can now eat the real thing. While I can't suggest that we've got decent BBQ here, we do have good, cheap seafood, what with being on the ocean...and we also have a phenomenal, heavily non-paleo selection of excellent sandwich shops, and the local, high-quality versions of both wraps and California Pizza Kitchen.

Sure, my Indian/Greek/Ethiopian food options have been massively curtailed, but what this place is good at it's great at. Happy to be home.

2410 Miles, 2.5 days

2100 of them on the same road.

Left Chicagoland a little after 3 on Friday afternoon.

Arrived at my new home on the Central Coast of CA at 11:45pm Sunday night.

Teaching an online class in an hour, at a hotel because the internet at the new place isn't fast enough yet.