Notice that this changes right around the age of puberty. Having grown up quite poor, my hypothesis is straightforward.
Before you are a teenager, the things that make you happy and that you value are largely disconnected from money. Happiness is more about the environment not being pathological more than it is about having material goods. Children invent their own happiness.
As a teenager, it becomes about the mating ritual. In that context, relative material deprivation can have a significant adverse impact on the ability to attract a quality mate. I would expect that in countries where it is relatively easy to change your material position in society would have happier adults than one where there was less opportunity because it gives the person more ability to improve their outcomes on the mate selection front.
My anecdotal experience as a suburban American completely supports this explanation. I attended public schools with a variety of income levels represented. I didn't notice I was poor until I was about 13 years old and realized that I couldn't afford fashionable clothes. I would buy the brand that kids were wearing, but I only had two or three outfits. I was astonished that some of my peers would wear the 'cool' brand, but have different clothes everyday.
If it's not clothes, it'll be watches, shoes, smartphones, underwear, hats, notebooks, whatever. Uniforms aren't going to stop teenagers in the midst of puberty from competing with each other for status.
That's a kinda blunt equivalence. What school children wear is so rarely about expressing ideas that the censorship potential of such a policy is tiny. Besides, censorship in the classroom is hardly new, nor is it controversial.
> As a teenager, it becomes about the mating ritual.
That is an interesting observation.
The mating ritual is about differentiation and perhaps the easiest way to express that is through the application of money (which takes the place of effort). Although I would dispute the assumption of a 'quality' mate. Such judgements are difficult if not impossible during one's teen years given a lack of experience both of one's self and of one's self in the context of another. The entire concept of "cool" is, at its heart, this sort of mating ritual.
That said, I observed that there were many different groups at my high school, each with their standards of 'cool' and thus various ranking systems. Atheletes, band members, socialites, all had their 'most' and 'least' cool members. For athletes (as an example) their physical prowess had little to do with their financial standing[1].
I continue to think that it is important to "catch" emergent materialism in children and to hold it up to the light and show them what it is, nothing. Talk to them about whether or not having the latest phone changes who they are, or changes the way other people are. This is exactly when people start developing a sense of how to measure themselves in the world and if you let them believe that they are measured by what they own, they will have a very hard time ever measuring up.
[1] Or their success fitness as some succeeded in later years and some didn't.
"Quality" refers to the mater's metric (health genes, access to resources), which might not be accurate in our modern post-evolutuonary-pressure human society.
But betting on a rich mate is a pretty good bet that teens make.
> But betting on a rich mate is a pretty good bet that teens make.
I would be interested to hear how you reason to that conclusion. I ask because there are a number of ways where my experience differs (and granted this comes from going to USC in Los Angeles for my BS degree, and that school has a reputation for having a lot of 'rich teens') My experience there was that the more money a person had the less 'functional' they seemed to be. At the time I attributed it to their having so many things done for them that they didn't have to develop the skills to do things on their own. But it wasn't a scientific study at all, just the experience of growing up with a cohort of similarly aged people over 5 years.
Of course it might depend on the definition of fitness. It was certainly true that the wealthier teens had more opportunities to create offspring than I did :-) By the measure of their gene pool was more likely to continue I could agree.
>Of course it might depend on the definition of fitness. It was certainly true that
>the wealthier teens had more opportunities to create offspring than I did
As far as mating fitness, that's actually all that matters. The weight of millions of years of biology are behind that drive. The fact that modern society has abstracted "success" to so many other things is a recent novelty.
I think you're coming from a place of a young adult. Anybody with kids will see it quite differently - there's a lot more to it than mate selection :)
As for kids being happy - they just have near infinite energy to spare. As your responsibilities increase and your infinite energy begins to whither, it's a different dynamic.
Could you expand on your point? I'm a kindergarten teacher and I'm currently doing a developmental psychology course. While there is a lot more to it than mate selection that is very, very important. Erikson said the main task or crisis of the adolescent phase is identity versus identity confusion but developing one's own identity is a necessity for all facets of adult life, mate selection included. The hollowness of most adolescent experience; Go to school, learn what we tell you to, do as you're told, the general high school experience means that socialising is where most adolescent's mental energy goes. Since this is a zero sum game and a very large part of it is mate acquisition I don't see that there's that much more to it than mate acquisition.
It might also be a false prejudice. I remember a guy who had not much, and could attract girls even without speaking the native tongue. He didn't care and would reach for them anyway, better than other more 'suited' guys.
I still find your pre/post teenage hood split interesting, a lot of things change in one's mind, things get stiffer and more extreme (IMO people are less religious and communautarian), less creative and free.
However, the material deprivation seems to catch up eventually. If you compare the relative rankings of children’s reported happiness with their grown-up counterparts (pdf), the results change significantly.
Woah... what a leap. You really couldn't think of anything else that might affect an adults happiness other than materialism?
Edit: Just checked the PDF.. it's the World Happiness Report. It does not say what the article says.
I agree. I think this is one of those "correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation" articles. I'm sure some of it has to do with material items, but I can't help after reading some of the comments here (markyc's comment on Romania, for instance) that there are far more things at play: Cultural values, adulthood stresses, etc. Not every culture places a strong emphasis on material goods, and not every culture that is strongly materialistic is made happy by material assets.
Out of curiosity, I had a look at some of the metrics on Wikipedia for comparison. Colombia ranks 4th according to the adult "happiness index" (after Germany) but 80th on the inequality-adjusted human development index and 98th on the standard HDI--compared to Norway which ranks 1st in both metrics. I can't say I know what this means, but from what I understand, I'd imagine that countries higher on the HDI index therefore have more equal access to services adults find important (like healthcare) and more equal income (and therefore purchasing power) and "should" be happier. Likewise, these countries ought to have greater access to material goods. (But, there's also the issue of who they interviewed, their income levels, etc.)
I could be completely wrong, but I just can't imagine that owning a plethora of things necessarily equates to increased happiness.
Could it be that children are just happier than adults, regardless of their material assets. Adults have responsibilities and stresses that children do not - and that is probably more of a causation than their material assets.
It could also be that happiness is strongly dependent upon where you stand relative to the people around you. Children don't compare themselves to much other than the immediate family, village, or neighborhood; they just don't have the life experience to know how people in different cities throughout the rest of the world live. Adults have had time to absorb cultural messages of inferiority: these are all the things that your counterparts in America do that you're missing out on. (Never mind that the Hollywood messages broadcast around the globe tend to cherry-pick the most glamorous, outrageous lifestyles and display them as normal.)
It takes a lot of deliberate mental practice to learn not to care about what others have or what they might think of you, and few people bother.
Social status affects one's well-being, health and longevity more than anything else — a number of studies have already come to this conclusion.
Status is the lynchpin of many of our afflictions, from wars to suicides to intergroup and interpersonal conflicts. Alas, we rarely acknowledge this facet of humanity as it also underlies the "good" parts (love, belonging, trust), and instead opt to adopt ideologies and fight the same battle all in the name of "doing good"[1].
Also, for young adults in particular puberty leads to the onset of a tumultuous period of having to compete against the grain of what you phrased as "cultural messages of inferiority." School bullying is a wretched example of this dynamic, that doesn't necessarily arise from some culture out there (it starts from inside the school building). Adults are not particularly wiser either; somebody here mentioned "mate selection" being a common theme of young adults; however I wonder if they looked into "mate retention" (jealousy, envy, possessiveness, separation anxiety) which is a common theme among senior adults as well.
Even better is "See all those commercials in TV? They're all created by people trying to tell you what to do. You don't like being told what to do, right? So why let a stranger who just wants to make money off you tell you what to do?"
My parents gave me that speech when I was 5, before I was allowed to watch any non-PBS TV. It was remarkably effective; I just tuned out all the commercials, because I knew they were people trying to sell me things that I didn't actually want before I saw the commercial. It got so extreme, at one point, that my mom had to go the other way and say "Y'know, it's okay to spend money once in a while."
I will take your advice to the heart. It really speaks for the quality of the community here, to speak about marketing and advertising and its deplorable influence on the young developing mind.
And I say that because I have been there. I have been anxious, unhappy because of material posessions, wanting everything that is displayed vividly in glamorous ads.
And it is a bad place to be. I'm 22 years old and now I'm cured. It's been quite a journey to regain independent thought.
My middle school taught a class/game about detecting propaganda techniques. It was like a blind person being taught how to see the invisible. A superpower.
I have a hard time believing this applies generally. I've learned from 20+ years of the public getting on the internet that desire is so strong that it leads people to believe they deserve to have every desire fulfilled. You might just have exceptional children.
I mean I got in a little discussion on this very site where people insisted advertising is equivalent to force. That's clearly wrong, but it is also fairly illuminating.
I didn't care about things when I was a kid which I do care about now. The difference is that I learnt that some things are "better" than others. And I only care about those things from a place of fear of being deprived of things which people with those things can seemingly get more easily. Some of it boils down to worrying and fretting about things which I don't, or maybe even can't, change. This has no root in rationality or pragmatism, so the usual arguments of having to care about such things because of adult responsibilities and problem fixing don't apply.
Another facet is that this caring is only a projection of what you think you will feel in the having, or not-having, of those things. But many people have experienced that being one of the richest people in the world (the Western middle class and higher) isn't necessarily the most fulfilling existence that there is. Comfortable, perhaps, but not necessarily more than that.
The only time I was happier than when I was at school was right after I was finished with school, unemployed and living at home. I could do what I wanted, when I wanted to do it. At school I could learn, as much as I could get my hands on.
I was much happier at school than I am now that I have to work. I almost hit it when I take a day off for no reason.
My (small) kids love school. School is very bad in USA and many other places, due to a bizarre set of constraints such as far too few teachers in budget.
I actually find responsibility to be a great source of joy and happiness, and remember my adolescence as unhappy because I didn't have thing that I had enough control over for them to be rewarding
"Happiness" and "Confidence" are two of the most dangerous words in American Culture. I really wonder who benefits from this.
On Culture
Until the age of 19, I was in Western Africa. In our language there is no direct substitute for the question "Are you happy?" I can ask "are you sick, hungry, lost, fast, slow, smart, bad, good, angry,etc..," but I have no easy straight way of asking "Are you happy?"
That is not to say people are happy, that is just to say the words/questions shape the culture.
On Material Deprivation
On the other hand I noticed the difference between my status and my friends. I had friends I would not bring to my home as a kid; these kids would spend on clothes what was our family's monthly income. Material deprivation is entirely subjective nevertheless. I also had cousins, family friends, who found our home the best place to be during their holidays. They would usually live in more remotes part of the country or in the suburbs, not the main city.
On Material Deprivation
"Appearance starts where performance ends." I notice the times one finds hope or purpose bigger than themselves (even if temporarily) they do not care so much about appearance. Take the average startup entrepreneur. They could live in a shack and be content if they were confident they had the next Facebook in hand. On the other hand they could land a job at Google for $250k yearly and be miserable because their goal was to build a unicorn. To this end whenever I worry about appearances, I know internally something is lacking. Something deeper. It happens on and off, I realize it.
"Ignorance is really bliss"
I have noticed something: philosophers and analytical minds seem unhappy, religious minds seem just accepting, and those who "do not appear" very intelligent are having a freaking good time in life.
> I have noticed something: philosophers and analytical minds seem unhappy, religious minds seem just accepting, and those who "do not appear" very intelligent are having a freaking good time in life.
Which begs the question: who really are the smart ones? :-)
Smarter people might have a tendency, more than others, to brood and worry over existential questions and matters that happen to be depressing. But worrying about things that are out of their small hands isn't exactly productive, or smart.
But worrying about things that are out of their small hands isn't exactly productive
Or it may seem, but I believe the reason we make advances in almost every field is due to philosophy. "Philosophy proposes and Science creates a framework for discovering answers."
But I agree, it begs the question "who is really smart?"
There is a difference between philosophy in general and thinking and pondering over nihilistic thoughts about existence itself that make you depressed. "There is no point to life, and that makes me deeply sad. I can't do anything about it since I am just an infinitesimal speck of dust in a vast universe, but I intend to take this train of thought to the point of alcoholism and despair nonetheless". That kind of thing.
Well I can definitely count as being happy as a children, and quite often depressed as an adult. But material deprivation doesn't explain that, at all. As a child/teenager I could be happy just playing around (outside/legos/video games). Now I'm just like "what's the point?" or generally getting bored really fast about pretty much anything and just wondering about the meaninglessness of life.
My view is that kids are exploring and loving the world. Adults are support mechanisms for kids (and elderly). But we have been stripped of community and if you happen to not have kids, you can be even more isolated. Being around (free) kids is a great way to feel meaning in life.
Adults are driven by our evolution to be useful to the community. Games are designed to allow humans (particularly kids) to master skills. Adults ideally should have already mastered much of the needed skills. Hence games cease to be interesting the more one gets older (in general -- there are always plenty of exceptions).
I can definitely imagine that if I had been a farmer in middle-age I could have been happier, because I wouldn't have time to get bored, and I would be doing something useful.
In our modern world however, really useful stuff is done by robots or a tiny part of the population. Thus you have to find meaning on your own and that can be quite difficult.
In my opinion, there are plenty of useful things to do as a programmer. There are many non-profit organizations doing important work that would love to have a volunteer programmer. You could also teach math or programming to high school kids, etc. Paid programming work can sometimes seem far removed from "useful" work, but I think that's partly because of the complexity of society and all the abstractions that we have built. If you'd like to do something that feels more direct, I would suggest volunteering somewhere. But I do agree with your sentiment that finding meaning on your own can be quite difficult.
I said around children, not having children. The two are completely disjoint. I know lots of people who have children but are not actually around them and are miserable. Conversely, I know people without children who are surrounded by the happy little critters and have a deep sense of fulfillment.
Being around children teaches you a compassion for others and yourself, something your comment points towards a desperate need for.
ummm... you might want to try re-reading your reply and reflect on the OP's observation... your overly sensitive read of their post and vicious reply of your own suggests to me that you are not happy... and thus, presuming you don't have kids, supports OP's point.
If you can find some people to do stuff with that you like, it's quite fun. A lot more fun frankly - as a child, you can only do so much. As an adult with a career in IT, you can do a looooot more. Plus you get to have sex, aw ye!
If you're bored, you haven't found the right people and it likely means you have trouble getting along with them to begin with, so work on that.
Thanks, you might be right. I don't have trouble getting along though, I have trouble approaching and connecting. I can work on the approaching, but the connecting is problematic because of the whole getting bored of anything stuff. Hard to make any meaningful relationships when you don't give a ;;; about pretty much anything.
Approaching what? Oh these pick-up ideas that poison the minds of the young and impressionable!
You can't work on the approaching because that's not the root of the problem.
It's like this - some people form groups based on chit chat and hanging together. It usually involves alcohol and hooking up, that's kinda the point of it all. And what keeps it going is the never-ending gossip surrounding who did what with whom. That's late highshcool, college/uni and a few years afterwards for some folks.
People who are more intellectually inclined tend to not be a part of those groups because they're 'boring' - which's another way of saying you can't relate to them and they can't relate to you. You're not 'connecting'.
Here's the crucial element - smart people relate based on doing things that take skill, average folks relate based on liking same music, same clothes, etc.
Once you're good at something average people want to be good at - they'll put up with your inability to relate to them based on 'boring' things. You'll be this 'Steve Jobs'-like weird-o they'll come to appreciate. In turn, when they like you, you'll get to have sex with them and stuff like that, and YOU will learn that the stuff you couldn't relate to them about, is not so bad after all. It just wasn't intuitive for you. Once you're good at making women (or men if you're a woman) happy, you all of a sudden have this superpower that everybody wants.
So it's this self perpetuating cycle but you gotta get good at something that is going to give you social points, so that you can catch up on what being 'cool' is all about.
Some of those things are being in a good band, dancing, comedy, sports etc. Nobody cares that you know how to install Linux, but if you can get up and sing at Karaoke night and get a standing ovation, all of a sudden you're a little rockstar.
Isn't this (connecting with average people) what adults throughout the world are doing already? The same adults who, according to this report, are unhappy compared to children? What's the solution to all of this if such a popular lifestyle advice fails to deliver the results? Should smart people rinse and repeat the popular advice that is known to fail anyway? Why doesn't anyone question why personal well-being has to be dependent on validation from other souls in the first place?
Try travel, especially weirder types like long distance cycle-touring or sailing. This way you get new society, new people, new environment, and exercise and a sense of adventure to boot... and these often appeal to nerdier types because of the system / self-reliance element and the freedom to escape annoying environments.
Since the last part of the brain to mature is the prefrontal cortex which involves planning; perhaps adolescents simply can't imagine long enough into the future to under stand why they might want so much money and stuff, whereas an adult would be considering retirement and worrying about longterm stability.
I've long wondered about whether adults really aren't wiser than children. Smarter, yes, but the wisdom might be largely a blob of limiting and pessimistic beliefs. And a very fragmented wisdom: adults argue and wage wars over the right ways to live. And if we aren't condemning others for their lifestyles and views on life, it might be because we are too busy trying to find our own purpose and path.
Does it really take a lifetime to gain wisdom about life? Or is it adults that unlearn the wisdom of childhood, and forever after that struggle to find wisdom in an adult paradigm which is fundamentally flawed?
Sounds like you're asking abstract questions instead of concrete ones. The concrete questions will have concrete answers and you can go from there.
With abstract questions, you can sit around wondering for eternity. Unless you come to recognize that you're not getting anywhere (life will remind you soon enough) and do something concrete instead :)
If you replace wisdom with 'competence' it becomes much more down to earth. When somebody else is feeding, clothing, scheduling, teaching etc and all you have to do is use your base instincts, it's easy to be competent, you don't need to do anything.
When you have to feed, clothe, schedule, teach etc yourself AND others AND then some, it can be quite a challenge.
Children are not competent at much of anything, so there you go :)
Abstract questions are great when you don't quite know what to hone in on, so that you don't get prematurely bogged down in specifics. Specifics which might be superflouous to your question, or maybe even misleading. They are also great when you want to have a general conversation with a general crowd, where more broad and general questions and topics can facilitate more discussion with several people, whereas more concrete, opinionated and assumptious questions would only attract a few others if anyone. As for myself, my own suspicions and enquires are a bit more focused and opinionated than you might get the impression of here.
As for asking more concrete questions in this place, I see little point. At least as far as your benefit is concerned since you know everything on this topic already.
Other people are joyous, like on the feast of the ox,
Like on the way up to the terrace in the spring.
I alone am inert, giving no sign,
*Like a newborn baby who has not learned to smile.*
I am wearied, as if I lacked a home to go to.
Other people have more than they need,
I alone seem wanting.
I have the mind of a fool,
Understanding nothing.
Before you are a teenager, the things that make you happy and that you value are largely disconnected from money. Happiness is more about the environment not being pathological more than it is about having material goods. Children invent their own happiness.
As a teenager, it becomes about the mating ritual. In that context, relative material deprivation can have a significant adverse impact on the ability to attract a quality mate. I would expect that in countries where it is relatively easy to change your material position in society would have happier adults than one where there was less opportunity because it gives the person more ability to improve their outcomes on the mate selection front.