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May. 16th, 2012 10:08 pmSomething that has been bopping around my head: you will always be the oldest you have ever been. If you don't grow a new source of happiness at least as fast as your "youth" (for whatever value of youth is meaningful to you) is shrinking, you will be less happy every year. And since human happiness is based more on the delta of your circumstances and hope for the future than the actual circumstances, you will get to miserable even faster than simple math would suggest.
My nominee for thing to grow is emotional maturity. Sometimes I see middle aged people lamenting that they're kept out of certain clubs due to age limits, and whine that they get along so much better with 25 year olds than people their own age. I don't know whether to cry or punch them, because to me that sounds like failing as a human being. I'm going to give a little wiggle room for the possibility that many middle aged people have failed to grow, and what these people want is to be back with people who still feel they have unlimited possibilities. But then I'm going to take that wiggle room back, because while college students have way more possibilities than I do, and there are individual college students I might like quite a lot, you couldn't pay me to put up with that crap again.* You could also build social capital, or get the hell out of bad situations.
But those are difficult, and hard to do on a schedule. What if you want an easier way, ideally something that can be proven with math? Economics has already done a lot of this for me, in the form of the Permanent Income Hypothesis. In a nutshell, this is the idea that people have something of a sense of their lifetime earnings, and will smooth out consumption with credit or excess savings, and only alter consumption after an enduring shock to their income. E.g. you don't (shouldn't) cut down much after losing your job if your field is doing well, but you (should) cut down on spending if your field is going south, even if you are currently employed. This theory has occasionally been misapplied by students getting degrees they believe will assure them high earnings to argue that they should finance a lot of luxuries on credit cards because they'll be earning so much later.
You can kind of see the argument for this at the edges- why save money now, when it will hurt less to save later? But this is failing to account of the intangible benefits of youth. If you could translate the intangible benefits of youth into monetary terms, that would shift the equation to saving more, however much money it ended up being worth. Bonus: by giving yourself a lower baseline, you make it easier to experience increases in utility, which will also make you happier.
*Exaggeration. For sufficient amounts of money and short periods of time, I would totally tolerate the prolonged who-IMed-who-first game again.
My nominee for thing to grow is emotional maturity. Sometimes I see middle aged people lamenting that they're kept out of certain clubs due to age limits, and whine that they get along so much better with 25 year olds than people their own age. I don't know whether to cry or punch them, because to me that sounds like failing as a human being. I'm going to give a little wiggle room for the possibility that many middle aged people have failed to grow, and what these people want is to be back with people who still feel they have unlimited possibilities. But then I'm going to take that wiggle room back, because while college students have way more possibilities than I do, and there are individual college students I might like quite a lot, you couldn't pay me to put up with that crap again.* You could also build social capital, or get the hell out of bad situations.
But those are difficult, and hard to do on a schedule. What if you want an easier way, ideally something that can be proven with math? Economics has already done a lot of this for me, in the form of the Permanent Income Hypothesis. In a nutshell, this is the idea that people have something of a sense of their lifetime earnings, and will smooth out consumption with credit or excess savings, and only alter consumption after an enduring shock to their income. E.g. you don't (shouldn't) cut down much after losing your job if your field is doing well, but you (should) cut down on spending if your field is going south, even if you are currently employed. This theory has occasionally been misapplied by students getting degrees they believe will assure them high earnings to argue that they should finance a lot of luxuries on credit cards because they'll be earning so much later.
You can kind of see the argument for this at the edges- why save money now, when it will hurt less to save later? But this is failing to account of the intangible benefits of youth. If you could translate the intangible benefits of youth into monetary terms, that would shift the equation to saving more, however much money it ended up being worth. Bonus: by giving yourself a lower baseline, you make it easier to experience increases in utility, which will also make you happier.
*Exaggeration. For sufficient amounts of money and short periods of time, I would totally tolerate the prolonged who-IMed-who-first game again.
