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By Root 539 0

though the United States is one of the world’s richest economies by per capita income, it ranks only around seventeenth in reported life satisfaction. It is superseded not only by the likely candidates of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which all rank above the United States (as we saw in chapter 2) but also by less likely candidates such as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, one might surmise that it is health and longevity rather than income that give the biggest boost to reported life satisfaction. Since good health and longevity can be achieved at per capita income levels well below those of the United States, so too can life satisfaction. One marketing expert put it this way, with only slight exaggeration:

Basic survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.3

For affluent societies, therefore, our personal happiness depends not so much on our income as on our attitude toward income and how we use it, both as individuals and collectively. If our material desires are modest and realistic and our consumption behavior is attentive to our deeper needs, our happiness is raised. Yet, as we saw in the preceding chapter, we are only partly aware of our own cravings and desires. With patience and training, individuals can overcome their blind cravings and addictions and achieve long-term satisfaction. The challenge of beating these addictions, however, is greater than in the past. Not only must we control our inherent cravings, we must also resist the round-the-clock coaxing by advertisers and hucksters whose job is to promote still more temptations and desires.

There are three general approaches to restoring mindfulness of self in our confused and noisy times. The first can be called cognitive: we need to study the sources of our own happiness and that of others. When we do, we learn that income plays a much less important role than we might imagine. We learn to enrich our lives far more by the quality of our personal and work relations and our generosity to others. Giving up some income through taxation in order to achieve shared social objectives, for example, makes ample sense when the limited role of personal wealth in happiness is kept in perspective. Through cognitive training, we can also cultivate the sense of a lifelong plan, one that depends on moderation in our consumer habits and consistency in saving for the future. Financial advisers and planning tools can help us balance consumption and saving over the life cycle, to ensure enough to support our children through school and ourselves into retirement years.

Research psychologists are also offering interesting cognitive guidance for those with adequate incomes but not adequate personal well-being. A recent “how-to-spend-it” guide by the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues suggests eight specific principles to derive more happiness from income.4 First, buy experiences instead of things, since experiences (vacations, trips to the museum, concerts, dining out) offer long memories to savor. Second, and crucially, use our incomes to help others instead of ourselves, because as hypersocial animals, “almost anything we do to improve our connections with others tends to improve our happiness as well.”5 Third, buy many small pleasures instead of a few big ones, in essence slowing down to smell the roses. Fourth, buy less overpriced insurance (such as product warranties), because we adjust much better to adverse shocks than we suppose. Fifth, pay now and consume later, rather than buying now on the credit card and paying later. The anticipation of a future purchase will give us anticipatory joy, which the authors call a source of “free” happiness. Impatient purchases, on the other hand, give us fleeting benefits and long-term debt. Sixth, be attentive to the details of a purchase, since they may disproportionately affect the happiness of the experience. Seventh, beware of too much comparison shopping, since it can focus our attention on