Somewhere along the way we choose, either literally or at a more subconscious level, to equate happiness to financial success. Prosperity and our desire to Have, now overshadow our quest for Happiness and ability to simply Be. I believe that this is a result of many factors but among them are governmental financial policy, intensely persuasive and omnipresent marketing and education.
I appreciated Adam’s reference to Bhutan’s measurement of Gross Domestic Happiness as a national effort to both recognize the value of a happy populace but also the very fact that what is measured is afforded our attention. It raises my vehement frustration with GDP as a measure of nations’ prosperity; in a world of increased and well noted inequality of wealth distribution, growth of GDP necessarily flows predominantly to the top. Modern Monetary Policy is underpinned on the idea of perpetual growth, allowing us to borrow today against the increased prosperity of tomorrow. The governmental spending around the world through Coronavirus has bet trillions of dollars in today’s aid packages against the assumption that we will not simply hit “normal” once we best the virus but that our worldwide economy will keep growing to cover the debts incurred. The system has no escape hatch built in. If we were to instead pursue a smaller and more sustainable economy as the new norm, the whole thing would fall apart. Taxation is also part of the problem in that the need and desire for growth means that governments around the world effectively compete for the big corporations and industries, offering tax concessions to the very groups that needs them least. If taxation was more evenly applied and enforced, the resulting wealth distribution would allow governments to continue to offer services the the broad population with less need for perpetual growth. The final pillar of government, in a democracy, should be regulation; curtailing corporate interests and industries intent on profit before people and the environment. Yet agin, the use of GDP and expectations of growth undermine the determination of governments to stand in the way of market-world and the lobbies of short-term profit. In the financial system we’ve created, Happiness represents more cost and inhibitor than a viable reality.
As players within the broad financial system, economics might suggest that, “individuals are utility seeking and operate rationally to fulfill their needs” as per Adam’s section titled The Death of Homo Economicus. The idea of individuals acting rationally seems like it would be common sense; until we actually look at what we deem “needs” that we strive to fulfill. Human need has been carefully curated to include so much more than the basics of food, shelter, warmth and clothing. The efforts of marketing has created the world where many believe that need also includes myriad of consumer goods; shiny electronics, stuffed wardrobes, fad sports gear, and heaps of personal improvement consumables - all of which are nearly immediately out of date, out of fashion or forgotten as the next offering grabs our confused attention. 24/7 media, the ubiquitous social network and the connected world are constantly collecting our data to better persuade us that happiness is only one purchase away. And yet the goal posts keep moving, by market-design and the idea of “keeping up with the Jones” has become a quest to fulfill ourselves that turns personal happiness into a commodity. Consumer competition and the quest for status might seem very real but the question of who is responsible for perpetuating the problem, the obedient consumers or the persuasive marketers is up for debate. Even concerned individuals, cognizant of the impact of a consumeristic world on the environment, are offered “green” alternatives by market-world; drive an electric Tesla to forgo the gas-guzzling automobile or buy organic instead of GMO produce. The option of non-consumption or recognizing what we can actually do without doesn’t even seem on the table. So how do we stop the cycle of consumerism in the face of the marketing machine and the noise of created human need?
Education, both formal schooling and our familiar upbringing seem the only possible spot to help individuals recognize alternative pathways. Catch children early enough and teach them to appreciate the world, to choose quality over quantity, to see less as more, to appreciate the silence of solitude over the racket of the media machine and to value the natural world. But who will teach them these traits? What can motivate the change if not profit or threat of immediate peril? If our current generation of teachers and parents are all participants in the system, what is needed to get them to reject the prescribed market pathway and to choose a different route? Perhaps it starts with a recognition of what Happiness is not and a journey of discovery, for both individuals and collective society, to find rediscover where Happiness is.
Thanks to Adam for these articles that help us ponder the important questions.
There’s a need for a Common Good Capitalism that seeks to understand that people do not serve the market on the contrary that markets served the good of the people. Some of these thoughts have recently started to be resurfaced through Peter Block and separately the senator from Florida, Marco Rubio.
Appreciate this and the additional context Adam provided. And completely agree - met recently with John Fullerton and am excited about the work he is doing with Regenerative Capitalism. He supported Kate Raworth to complete _Donut Economics_ as a book project, and has investments now in sustainable cradle to cradle aquaculture using fortified grass pellets to feed the fish. Some background here: https://www.propagate.org/research/2017/4/25/regenerative-capitalism
I am particularly impressed with Juliet Schor's insights regarding our need (right now) for a collective movement towards correcting our societal values regarding the consumption of public goods that should be available to everyone equally, such as education, health care, arts and culture, mass transportation, recreation/parks and leisure time activities (to recall a few of her points). Our current consumerism models take money out of the system so that funding for public goods and services goes chronically underfunded. That could be solved with a societal resolution to make everyone pay their fair share of taxes. Until there is a complete reform of taxation so that all individuals and corporations accept their responsibilities to pay their fair share of taxes, the underfunding of public goods and services will continue to suffer.
The monkey study is interesting but I prefer studies of human behavior. In the neurobiology of coaching class I'm taking (just winding up) the study that blew my mind this week was Fredrickson and Losada 2005, Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing. We had been studying limbic resonance, and synchrony as it develops between any two or more humans. For instance, musicians' left brains are more in synch with each other's left brains when playing music together than their own right brains are with their left brains. Their heart rate, breathing rate, and even blink rate can begin to synch up. Limbic resonance is otherwise known as the concept of emotional contagion - emotions are catching.
In the Study, Fredrickson and Losada studied months worth of emails by high performing, medium performing, and low performing teams. What they found each set of teams had in common was the ratio of positive to negative emotional tenor to their communications, so they began to count the number of occurrances of those in every email. What they found was that for those lowest performing teams, they were in a never-ending death spiral of negativity, territorialism, defensiveness, and because that was all everyone reflected back to each other, there was no way out. For the medium performing teams, they averaged up to 3:1 positive to negative aspects of their communications. The tipping point is anything over 3:1 - then you get high performing teams, where the mutual reinforcement is positive, mutually respectful, fulfilling, creative and fun.
This underscores the radical responsibility we all have to what our mood is in any given moment, and how we are choosing to project that into the field between us and any of our teams. This is especially true for leaders, to whom others are looking for emotional cues on how things are going, what threats and opportunities there may be. The study changed my commitment to how I will be operating for the rest of my life, and also will be something I will bring into coaching frequently to help illustrate to people the incredible potential impact even one person can have in breaking out of the death-spiral and increasing the ratio of positive to negative messaging.
Along those lines, we need to recognize that a huge contributor to our current situation is that billions of dollars are spent every year on the most advanced and sophisticated (and ever more micro-targeted) advertising and marketing to us of a way of being (consumerism) which is fundamentaly premised on the assertion that we are not enough. That our lives are missing not just one thing, but many many things without which we cannot be happy or fulfilled. We can never be enough, unless we buy what they are selling, and in ever increasing amounts (the latest software rev, the latest phone). Imagine if that international marketing budget were halved and the other half went to messaging that we are enough, and helping us link our attention to what truly feeds us. Creativity, family, the outdoors, exercise, shared humanity and reciprocity. Bhutan has it right!
Really enjoyed your share and the example of the human study by Frederickson and Losada. On reflection, the impact of the positive or negative messaging on the teams was in the group's ability to amplify commonalities. The 3:1 positive messaging teams were well on their way to high performance however, the low performing teams were stuck in the feedback loop where the negativity was amplified, breeding more negativity. Amazing the need for individuals within a group to conform and fit in - even when conformity reinforces the negative. When you talked about how this lesson reminded you that even one person providing positive messages might break the cycle, the word Leadership came to mind.
Advertising and Marketing is the corporate worlds way of offering up Leadership to the masses. Disguised as Social Networks, Think Tanks, Educational centers and the constant noise of media, the "most advanced and sophisticated" messaging we're all receiving is marketing us into ecological disaster and eroding societal values of empathy, fraternity and altruism. In the absence of positive Leadership, manufactured, curated "leadership" in the form of advertising is unfortunately amplified by the broader society.
I have often riffed with Adam that we need to use market-world to fight market-world. He laughed when I suggested a Socially Minded Tik Tok style site but having three teenaged kids myself, I see that we need to be able to speak in a manner than they might actually hear. The question of how to scale the impact, in my mind, needs to be generational but your reminder that even the loudest, most amplified messages have to begin with the voice of one person.
Many thanks in turn, Noah. I both resonate and agree with your above. Such a site or set of sites are needed for all ages, to advance, promote, and disseminate what would fulfill the evolutionary potential of both humanity and through it, our expressions of those values and virtues you named in our communities, online and in real life.
I just finished a book that chronicles ground breaking research of two psychologists into the irrational decisions of humans and how that upended economic theory and research.
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (2016 nonfiction Michael Lewis). It explores the close partnership of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose work on heuristics in judgment and decision-making demonstrated common errors of the human psyche. The book revisits Lewis' interest in market inefficiencies, previously explored in his books Moneyball (2003), The Big Short (2010), and Flash Boys (2014).
It shows how your reference point and comparisons to others or other outcomes affects how you make decisions. It was super interesting and ties into the behaviours of ourselves compared to others. If you want to see this in action, go spend time in a high school and see how peer pressure, stays seeking and a desire to conform are predominant. It is extremely hard to combat that. But you show that the overarching goal of society needs to change which will take many individuals and years to achieve. In this time of political division and the potential regression on issues such as right to choose and racial equality, we will need a plan, patience and perseverance to get there.
Somewhere along the way we choose, either literally or at a more subconscious level, to equate happiness to financial success. Prosperity and our desire to Have, now overshadow our quest for Happiness and ability to simply Be. I believe that this is a result of many factors but among them are governmental financial policy, intensely persuasive and omnipresent marketing and education.
I appreciated Adam’s reference to Bhutan’s measurement of Gross Domestic Happiness as a national effort to both recognize the value of a happy populace but also the very fact that what is measured is afforded our attention. It raises my vehement frustration with GDP as a measure of nations’ prosperity; in a world of increased and well noted inequality of wealth distribution, growth of GDP necessarily flows predominantly to the top. Modern Monetary Policy is underpinned on the idea of perpetual growth, allowing us to borrow today against the increased prosperity of tomorrow. The governmental spending around the world through Coronavirus has bet trillions of dollars in today’s aid packages against the assumption that we will not simply hit “normal” once we best the virus but that our worldwide economy will keep growing to cover the debts incurred. The system has no escape hatch built in. If we were to instead pursue a smaller and more sustainable economy as the new norm, the whole thing would fall apart. Taxation is also part of the problem in that the need and desire for growth means that governments around the world effectively compete for the big corporations and industries, offering tax concessions to the very groups that needs them least. If taxation was more evenly applied and enforced, the resulting wealth distribution would allow governments to continue to offer services the the broad population with less need for perpetual growth. The final pillar of government, in a democracy, should be regulation; curtailing corporate interests and industries intent on profit before people and the environment. Yet agin, the use of GDP and expectations of growth undermine the determination of governments to stand in the way of market-world and the lobbies of short-term profit. In the financial system we’ve created, Happiness represents more cost and inhibitor than a viable reality.
As players within the broad financial system, economics might suggest that, “individuals are utility seeking and operate rationally to fulfill their needs” as per Adam’s section titled The Death of Homo Economicus. The idea of individuals acting rationally seems like it would be common sense; until we actually look at what we deem “needs” that we strive to fulfill. Human need has been carefully curated to include so much more than the basics of food, shelter, warmth and clothing. The efforts of marketing has created the world where many believe that need also includes myriad of consumer goods; shiny electronics, stuffed wardrobes, fad sports gear, and heaps of personal improvement consumables - all of which are nearly immediately out of date, out of fashion or forgotten as the next offering grabs our confused attention. 24/7 media, the ubiquitous social network and the connected world are constantly collecting our data to better persuade us that happiness is only one purchase away. And yet the goal posts keep moving, by market-design and the idea of “keeping up with the Jones” has become a quest to fulfill ourselves that turns personal happiness into a commodity. Consumer competition and the quest for status might seem very real but the question of who is responsible for perpetuating the problem, the obedient consumers or the persuasive marketers is up for debate. Even concerned individuals, cognizant of the impact of a consumeristic world on the environment, are offered “green” alternatives by market-world; drive an electric Tesla to forgo the gas-guzzling automobile or buy organic instead of GMO produce. The option of non-consumption or recognizing what we can actually do without doesn’t even seem on the table. So how do we stop the cycle of consumerism in the face of the marketing machine and the noise of created human need?
Education, both formal schooling and our familiar upbringing seem the only possible spot to help individuals recognize alternative pathways. Catch children early enough and teach them to appreciate the world, to choose quality over quantity, to see less as more, to appreciate the silence of solitude over the racket of the media machine and to value the natural world. But who will teach them these traits? What can motivate the change if not profit or threat of immediate peril? If our current generation of teachers and parents are all participants in the system, what is needed to get them to reject the prescribed market pathway and to choose a different route? Perhaps it starts with a recognition of what Happiness is not and a journey of discovery, for both individuals and collective society, to find rediscover where Happiness is.
Thanks to Adam for these articles that help us ponder the important questions.
There’s a need for a Common Good Capitalism that seeks to understand that people do not serve the market on the contrary that markets served the good of the people. Some of these thoughts have recently started to be resurfaced through Peter Block and separately the senator from Florida, Marco Rubio.
Appreciate this and the additional context Adam provided. And completely agree - met recently with John Fullerton and am excited about the work he is doing with Regenerative Capitalism. He supported Kate Raworth to complete _Donut Economics_ as a book project, and has investments now in sustainable cradle to cradle aquaculture using fortified grass pellets to feed the fish. Some background here: https://www.propagate.org/research/2017/4/25/regenerative-capitalism
I am particularly impressed with Juliet Schor's insights regarding our need (right now) for a collective movement towards correcting our societal values regarding the consumption of public goods that should be available to everyone equally, such as education, health care, arts and culture, mass transportation, recreation/parks and leisure time activities (to recall a few of her points). Our current consumerism models take money out of the system so that funding for public goods and services goes chronically underfunded. That could be solved with a societal resolution to make everyone pay their fair share of taxes. Until there is a complete reform of taxation so that all individuals and corporations accept their responsibilities to pay their fair share of taxes, the underfunding of public goods and services will continue to suffer.
The monkey study is interesting but I prefer studies of human behavior. In the neurobiology of coaching class I'm taking (just winding up) the study that blew my mind this week was Fredrickson and Losada 2005, Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing. We had been studying limbic resonance, and synchrony as it develops between any two or more humans. For instance, musicians' left brains are more in synch with each other's left brains when playing music together than their own right brains are with their left brains. Their heart rate, breathing rate, and even blink rate can begin to synch up. Limbic resonance is otherwise known as the concept of emotional contagion - emotions are catching.
In the Study, Fredrickson and Losada studied months worth of emails by high performing, medium performing, and low performing teams. What they found each set of teams had in common was the ratio of positive to negative emotional tenor to their communications, so they began to count the number of occurrances of those in every email. What they found was that for those lowest performing teams, they were in a never-ending death spiral of negativity, territorialism, defensiveness, and because that was all everyone reflected back to each other, there was no way out. For the medium performing teams, they averaged up to 3:1 positive to negative aspects of their communications. The tipping point is anything over 3:1 - then you get high performing teams, where the mutual reinforcement is positive, mutually respectful, fulfilling, creative and fun.
This underscores the radical responsibility we all have to what our mood is in any given moment, and how we are choosing to project that into the field between us and any of our teams. This is especially true for leaders, to whom others are looking for emotional cues on how things are going, what threats and opportunities there may be. The study changed my commitment to how I will be operating for the rest of my life, and also will be something I will bring into coaching frequently to help illustrate to people the incredible potential impact even one person can have in breaking out of the death-spiral and increasing the ratio of positive to negative messaging.
Along those lines, we need to recognize that a huge contributor to our current situation is that billions of dollars are spent every year on the most advanced and sophisticated (and ever more micro-targeted) advertising and marketing to us of a way of being (consumerism) which is fundamentaly premised on the assertion that we are not enough. That our lives are missing not just one thing, but many many things without which we cannot be happy or fulfilled. We can never be enough, unless we buy what they are selling, and in ever increasing amounts (the latest software rev, the latest phone). Imagine if that international marketing budget were halved and the other half went to messaging that we are enough, and helping us link our attention to what truly feeds us. Creativity, family, the outdoors, exercise, shared humanity and reciprocity. Bhutan has it right!
Hi Peter,
Really enjoyed your share and the example of the human study by Frederickson and Losada. On reflection, the impact of the positive or negative messaging on the teams was in the group's ability to amplify commonalities. The 3:1 positive messaging teams were well on their way to high performance however, the low performing teams were stuck in the feedback loop where the negativity was amplified, breeding more negativity. Amazing the need for individuals within a group to conform and fit in - even when conformity reinforces the negative. When you talked about how this lesson reminded you that even one person providing positive messages might break the cycle, the word Leadership came to mind.
Advertising and Marketing is the corporate worlds way of offering up Leadership to the masses. Disguised as Social Networks, Think Tanks, Educational centers and the constant noise of media, the "most advanced and sophisticated" messaging we're all receiving is marketing us into ecological disaster and eroding societal values of empathy, fraternity and altruism. In the absence of positive Leadership, manufactured, curated "leadership" in the form of advertising is unfortunately amplified by the broader society.
I have often riffed with Adam that we need to use market-world to fight market-world. He laughed when I suggested a Socially Minded Tik Tok style site but having three teenaged kids myself, I see that we need to be able to speak in a manner than they might actually hear. The question of how to scale the impact, in my mind, needs to be generational but your reminder that even the loudest, most amplified messages have to begin with the voice of one person.
Many thanks in turn, Noah. I both resonate and agree with your above. Such a site or set of sites are needed for all ages, to advance, promote, and disseminate what would fulfill the evolutionary potential of both humanity and through it, our expressions of those values and virtues you named in our communities, online and in real life.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3126111/
I just finished a book that chronicles ground breaking research of two psychologists into the irrational decisions of humans and how that upended economic theory and research.
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (2016 nonfiction Michael Lewis). It explores the close partnership of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose work on heuristics in judgment and decision-making demonstrated common errors of the human psyche. The book revisits Lewis' interest in market inefficiencies, previously explored in his books Moneyball (2003), The Big Short (2010), and Flash Boys (2014).
It shows how your reference point and comparisons to others or other outcomes affects how you make decisions. It was super interesting and ties into the behaviours of ourselves compared to others. If you want to see this in action, go spend time in a high school and see how peer pressure, stays seeking and a desire to conform are predominant. It is extremely hard to combat that. But you show that the overarching goal of society needs to change which will take many individuals and years to achieve. In this time of political division and the potential regression on issues such as right to choose and racial equality, we will need a plan, patience and perseverance to get there.
I am a huge fan of The Undoing Project too, Monique. Thanks for the thoughtful comment. More thoughts to come in the reflections issue next weekend.