Chasing Happiness, Or, Learning to Love the Process and Chill TF Out
The game is rigged by design
I view people as nodes and edges in the grand mash network of life with a paradoxical twist. People are nodes; relationships are edges; Two nodes form an edge. The edge between these two nodes is a byproduct of the nodes themselves. The nature of the edges is determined by the characteristics of the nodes. Altering the nodes in your network can have a profound effect.
The nodes that form your edges have a powerful property on your node. Since I’m rolling with the network theory analogy. A property is a characteristic of a node; a parameter is a variable that can be influenced, not a fixed property. If you view it as a parameter you give yourself more control, though for most, it remains a property…
This property is an aggregate of those nodes and their edges. A property in this analogy being something inherent to yourself. This property becomes a deep seated internalised belief. A great example is a person who states, "I am [insert trait] kind of person”, that belief becomes a compass for how they navigate life. How they measure themselves, their actions and others.
Think. What are societal dreams? Norms? Where has society told you that you should have this milestone, at that point? It’s a kind of brainwashing. Where does the brainwashing lay? At that point. Your property range has been set. The range in this case is your capacity for flex in those inherent properties we defined earlier.
Look around you, at your friends, your family, the lover laying by your side. Those people are all putting an input into your property. Parameterise the property. Seize back control. Set your own levers.
Nodes have this funny little function. Legacy code; On antiquated hardware; A comparison function. Making you take a second glance at everything around you and attach a value to it. Then comparing that with what you own (within your own network). An aggregate function with a property range and input parameters that are out of most people’s control. Understanding what’s going on helps you seize back control. This comparison function has many names but I’m going to scope it to money for discussion purposes but it can be extrapolated across pretty much any resource. For money It’s called the Easterlin paradox.
The Easterlin Paradox, formulated by economist Richard Easterlin in the 1970s, presents a counterintuitive finding regarding wealth and happiness. It suggests that while within a given country, people with higher incomes are typically more satisfied with their lives, over time, as a country grows wealthier, its population does not become happier. This paradox highlights a disconnect between economic growth and overall happiness.
Easterlin initially observed this phenomenon in the United States and Japan, where, despite significant increases in average income over decades, the average level of happiness did not show a corresponding rise. This paradox challenges the assumption that economic prosperity necessarily leads to greater overall well-being, prompting further research into the complex relationship between income, consumer behaviour, cultural values, and happiness.
As much as I would love to say I have evolved beyond this I have not. This is why I’m writing about this now. This is a piece as much to you as it is to myself. A reconciliation piece of sorts; grounding my own expectations and triaging their origins.
This paradox is one of those essential drives. It spurns people on. A “Great” orator and an idiot once said. “One day I woke up and I didn't have a Bugatti, that pissed me off, so I grinded till I got a Bugatti”. Oratory idiot made a valid point. They observed the network, and it made them upset; material wealth aside. That’s how people work. We are influenced by the network. We’re creatures of comparison. No matter the size of that network people can become almost obsessive over these comparisons.
Networks are powerful but we shouldn’t resign ourselves to the system. I’m closing this with a quote from Kurt Vonnegut that I think about quite regularly.
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history.
"And Joe said, 'I've got something he can never have.' And I (Kurt) said, 'What on earth could that be, Joe?' And Joe said, 'The knowledge that I've got enough.'"
You probably have enough.