The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?

The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?
theguardian.com

There is no job, no amount of money, no relationship, which will make you feel whole and happy and content and done. The opposite doesn't hold - there are jobs and relationships and financial strains which will certainly keep you from being happy.

The goal isn't for a job or a relationship to make you happy. It's to enable other things which are your goals, which may or may not be happiness related.

The hand-licking story that made the front page today illustrates this point perfectly. Approached rationally, the mom could not solve the problem, no amount of mental effort would yield a resolution or insight into the issue. When the mind expects an answer to a problem that it can't solve, it applies more and more 'force' until it breaks through. In this case, the force was destroying her family relationships. But this is what frustrated rationalism does. People don't or can't catch themselves before they create awful situations.

It is only when she applied an irrational approach to the problem, surrendering the need to control the situation, that she could finally understand what was going on.

I rail against excessive rationality on HN all the time, promoting a more cautious, traditional outlook on certain things like office politics. I expect coders to be exceptionally rational, I don't have any issue with it.

But Americans in general are succumbing to the trend of expecting to be able to answer every question they ever have in their lives and throwing away their emotional health on meaningless symbols and missing the true core nature of what it means to be happy and healthy and whole.

Perhaps the starkest example of this phenomenon is when atheists lament that there aren't any atheist churches. 50 years ago, if you were an atheist, you still went to church. They were still the pillars that communities revolved around, the very loom of the fabric of society.

Nowadays, we've thrown away every last bit of symbolism that brings people together and wonder why we're so lonely. If things aren't perfectly rational, people's minds rebel immediately and harshly, like it's my fault you don't understand a concept requiring depth of study to really grasp.

I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that the mind will create a myth if it doesn't already believe in one. Money, job, marriage is the American Dream myth. It stems ultimately from positivism and expecting to be able to understand everything.

It doesn't have to be this way. You might not be able to fix everybody else but you can fix yourself.

In my life I moved from both extremes, from a poverty level wage in a dead beat job with a friend and family support network, to a high stress, high earning job, and something in between.

In all those situations I had sources of happiness and sources of unhappiness. As you move in life you make tradeoff that think will make you better off, some work and others don't. Ironically my current high stress job makes me happier than the previous one, because I am able to learn, grow and do great things. I traded a bit of work life balance for something else and that's ok; it might work for me and not for others.

So by all means avoid the rat race and live a more relaxed life, but also don't be afraid to try different things and see what works best for you at each point in your life.