“It’s not the money, it’s just all the stuff.” – The Jerk
If I use deodorant instead of mouthwash, when I talk will I have a weird Axe® scent?
I once had a boss that said to me, “John, what gets measured, gets managed.” His point was that if we have details on what’s going on, that drives attention. His corollary was, “So, be careful what you measure.” The idea behind that was that if you spent your time focusing on the wrong things, you’d never achieve what you were really trying to do, sort of like an airline company hiring pilots based on diversity rather than on, well how good of a pilot they are.
Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.
Anyway, if you read the news, the main things that we measure are economic:
- GDP Growth
- Price of Eggs
- Stock Market Level
These are mainly material things. The nice thing about them is that they are very easy to measure.
Fun fact: if you take the population of North Korea and cut them in half, they’ll die.
Does that mean that growth in GDP means we’re winning?
I’ll answer that question with another question: Were people in the United States happier when our GDP was half, in real terms, what it is today?
I think that question is easy to answer: we were happier then.
Let’s look at what constituted a normal life back then. Did we have a society based on greater trust? Yes, yes we did. Kids were free-range, and long summer afternoons blurred into nighttime without ever stepping inside the house until Mom yelled “dinnertime” or when the porch light came on (that was my signal).
Doors were unlocked. Cars were unlocked. The words “porch” and “pirate” had never yet been combined.
There was also a greater presence. People were where they were, mostly. Sure, I’d be reading The Return of the King on the school bus as it winded down Wilder Mountain, but when I was doing something, I was doing it, not marking time until I checked my Snapchat™ feed. People at dinner talked to each other, or if they weren’t talking to each other, there was a reason, not merely that they were distracted.
If I have a birthday party I’m going to have the Beacons of Gondor as a theme. It’ll be lit.
And, yeah, there was a greater depth and complexity of thought that was driven by the input. A book takes patience, it takes time, and it takes investment. A Xeet™? It takes 20 seconds, and that includes thinking about it.
We also thought differently. When I have a problem now where I’m missing information, almost always the answer is just a few clicks away. Back then, we really had to spend time trying to figure things out, and that created a greater depth of understanding about the problem. It was also frustrating and took a lot of time, but it trained me on how to think through to find a solution.
There’s a tip you won’t find on YouTube™.
There was also a greater patience. The first album I ever ordered was promised to arrive in . . . “4 to 6 weeks”. Yes. That’s right. A month and a half. There was no next-day Prime™ delivery. I’d listen to Super Hits by Ronco™ when it showed up, and not a minute sooner. The crush of the immediate didn’t exist, and gratification cycles were likewise adjusted.
Oh, sure, there were negatives, too. I think that medicine is probably a bit better, especially if you base it on cost alone. I’m pretty sure that polio sucked. Lifespan is longer today (though I bet that’s 90% coming from kicking cigarettes). And, with only the mainstream media, there was certainly a lot of Truth that could be hidden. MKUltra, anyone?
And air conditioning. I really like that.
But, outside of air conditioning, I don’t think being wealthier has made us even a little bit happier.
Pavlov rang a bell every time a he felt a breeze. He called it air conditioning.
It hasn’t brought us together. Although we’ve always had that, it wasn’t so visible because most people in Atlanta didn’t care what went on in the Puget Sound, and vice versa. The shrinking of our horizons has magnified the visibility of our divide.
It hasn’t made us stronger. As a whole, I think we are nationally as emotionally weak as we ever have been. Part of that is the wealth. If a person has lived their entire life in a mansion, any step down a cracked iPhone™ screen is a tragedy. A person who lives in a box? They shrug at a thunderstorm.
Is a flock of sheep falling downhill at lambslide?
Adversity breeds strength, and, collectively, the nation has been pampered to the point that they are brittle. I think that is not true of my readers, because I’m guessing everyone here has seen some stuff. I sense the character that adversity reveals in the replies.
So, if all I focus on is the GDP and growth and the price of eggs, then my life will be hollow and filled with an unquenchable thirst, because when it comes to money, there is never enough.
My advice? Be careful what measures you value, because that’s what you’ll become. You might even find that you’ve gained the whole world, yet lost yourself.