Make Good PlacesThis is the third part of a four-part series on how to live well in the age of overconsumption. Read the first article about how the things we own impact our wellbeing here and the second article about the dangers of too much stuff here.
What makes us happy and healthy? The Sustainable Development Solutions Network publishes The World Happiness Report based on data collected by Gallup World Poll Data. The report focuses on identifying what drives human happiness and wellbeing by country, providing rankings, insights, and data on how to cultivate happy citizens. The 2022 World Happiness Report concludes that “the ethos of a country matters – are people trustworthy, generous, and mutually supportive? The institutions also matter – are people free to make important life decisions? And the material conditions of life matter – both income and health.” Institutional and community trust, freedom, and income recur as components of happiness come up time and time again in many areas of happiness and wellbeing research.
The World Happiness research also identified benevolence as a key component of happiness. Findings showed a “globe-spanning surge of benevolence in 2020 and especially 2021. Data for 2022 show that prosocial acts are still about one-quarter more frequent than before the pandemic.”
Helping one another helps us feel good. In many ways, our current economic and social systems of living in this country have made us forget that we are an innately cooperative and community-driven species, and that we are stewards and caretakers by design.
In one of the longest and most well-known studies on happiness published by the Harvard Study of Adult Development, researchers found strong connections between social bonds and happiness; cultivating meaningful connections with others and finding a community contributes to improved health and wellbeing. At our core, we are social creatures that crave and depend upon community for survival. Our human need for social connection has strong evolutionary roots, and much of the happiness and wellbeing research echoes this Harvard finding.
Psychologists and scholars Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom explore happiness as an evolutionary mechanism in their respective works. Pinker suggests that happiness must be viewed as the output of an ancient biological feedback system. According to him, we are happier when we are healthy, comfortable, safe, provisioned, socially connected, sexual, and loved. In terms of evolution, the function of happiness is to goad us into seeking the keys to fitness. In this line of thinking, we cannot simply choose to be happy; it is a product of many physical, emotional, and environmental factors. Happiness comes when our needs are met. Social connections, for example, were critical for early humans to survive. Therefore, community makes us happy.
A phrase that changed my understanding of the relationship between people, happiness, and their stuff is Paul Bloom’s “pleasure is deep.” Bloom, in his text, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, posits, “first, that everyday pleasure is deep and transcendent, and, second, that everyday pleasure reflects our evolved human nature” and–even more importantly— “that they really matter.” Bloom’s research gives us all permission to pay attention to what gives us pleasure. Bloom argues that pleasure exists as an evolutionary mechanism underlying the objects and activities that make us human: “sports, art, music, drama, literature, play, and religion.”
The crux of Bloom’s argument is that people are essentialists and we derive pleasure from more than just sensory experiences or the utilitarian function of objects. Instead, every object offers us both its sensory experience that is colored and shaped by our beliefs about what we think that thing is.
“The enjoyment we get from something derives from what we think that thing is. This is true for intellectual pleasures, such as the appreciation of paintings and stories, and also for pleasures that seem simpler, such as the satisfaction of hunger and lust. For a painting, it matters who the artist was; for a story, it matters whether it is truth or fiction; for a steak, we care about what sort of animal it came from; for sex, we are strongly affected by who we think our sexual partner really is.”
Bloom’s work is important in understanding the human-stuff-wellness paradigm because he fully elucidates the layers of meaning our objects hold. If people believe origins matter and that everyone and everything has a unique essence that cannot be replicated, our objects have more than just their utilitarian values. As Bloom puts it, “Substances can be duplicated; history cannot.” He looks to phenomena like the Endowment Effect (the longer a person oan an object, the more valuable it becomes) and the power of contact (where a famous or influential person owning or touching an object increases its value) as evidence of people deriving pleasure from the origins, essences, and hidden natures of things. The essentialist argument explains why people have superstitions like wearing the same socks every game, treasuring family heirlooms beyond their economic value, and refusing to give away what they used or owned in moments of personal significance or growth. People are also uniquely essentialists; we are the only species to have complex belief systems that shape our values and choices.
It’s easy for “stuff” to become synonymous with money, particularly in conversations about the health and happiness of countries and their citizens. It would be impossible to write about stuff and its impact on our wellbeing without acknowledging the connection researchers have long drawn between a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and the happiness of its citizens. We’ve heard the same narrative for decades: more stuff = more wealth = more happiness.
However, authors of the 2012 World Happiness Report noted a strange finding in their research. The United States, despite significant increases in wealth in recent decades, was not experiencing significant gains in happiness. According to their data, “the world’s economic superpower, the United States, has achieved striking economic and technological progress over the past half century without gains in the self-reported happiness of the citizenry. Instead, uncertainties and anxieties are high, social and economic inequalities have widened considerably, social trust is in decline, and confidence in government is at an all-time low. Perhaps for these reasons, life satisfaction has remained nearly constant during decades of rising Gross National Product (GNP) per capita.” Clearly, there’s more to happiness than wealth and, by extension, stuff.
Economist Jason Hinkel explores the relationship between GDP and happiness in his book, Less Is More; How Degrowth Will Save The World. Experts have long touted strong GDPs as drivers in a country’s health and happiness; Hinkel argues that it’s a bit more complex than that:
“It turns out that the relationship between growth and human progress isn’t quite as obvious as we once thought. It’s not growth itself that matters—what matters is what we are producing, whether people have access to essential goods and services, and how income is distributed. And past a certain point, more GDP isn’t necessary for improving human welfare at all.”
Money matters to some degree when it comes to human health and happiness. According to Bloom, money buys freedom, which is very good for happiness and wellbeing. Wealth creates security, freedom, and the opportunity to focus more on the factors of life that matter more when it comes to happiness: social connections, hobbies and passions, benevolence, ensuring good mental and physical health through exercise, nutritious food, and safe living environments.
In Hinkel’s view, it is the unequal income distribution of wealth, or inequality, that “creates a sense of unfairness; it erodes social trust, cohesion, and solidarity.” While he acknowledges it is true that nations with higher income often have higher life expectancies than countries with lower income, he cites robust public goods and fair wages as drivers of improved human welfare. Hinkel’s research reveals education and learning and high-quality universal healthcare and education systems as drivers of human happiness. This includes things like unemployment insurance, paid holiday and sick leave, affordable and secure housing, strong minimum wages, and pensions.
Interestingly, Hinkel repeats the dangers of the hedonic treadmill laid out by Chancellor and Sonja Lyumbomirsky in the HAP model in his discussion about unequal income distribution:
“Inequality makes people feel that the material goods they have are inadequate. We constantly want more, not because we need it but because we want to keep up with the Joneses. The more our friends and neighbors have, the more we feel that we need to match them just to feel like we’re doing OK. The data on this is clear: people who live in highly unequal societies are more likely to shop for luxury brands than people who live in more equal societies. We keep buying more stuff in order to feel better about ourselves, but it never works because the benchmark against which we measure the good life is pushed perpetually out of reach by the rich (and, these days, by social media influencers). We find ourselves spinning in place on an exhausting treadmill of needless over-consumption.”
This is particularly compelling when considered in relation to the findings in the 2012 World Happiness Report. Our context drives today’s consumption, and our context in the United States is one in which many are poor, a select few are very wealthy, and many are slipping along a massive sliding scale somewhere in between. Our wildly unequal income distribution exacerbates the treadmill effect and drives more disastrous consumption across multiple socioeconomic levels. Goldmark also notes that our desires are shaped by our perception of what our peers do. While we cannot control our political climate, evidence shows that our happiness and wellbeing are inextricably linked to our American stuff problem.
