The Macro Economics of Happiness
Happiness is a subjective. “Happiness”, during the origin of the term was mostly seen in the perspective of Hedonism. Things have changed with evolution and the meaning of happiness has been largely skewed towards “Economic freedom” or “Ability to create wealth in order to be capable of pursuing pleasure, social status or materialistic fulfilment”. This is entirely a micro-economic view of Happiness. There is a Macro-economic view too that suggests a long-term view on the economic growth tied up with long term satisfaction and sense of fulfilment in individual lives. The macro view goes beyond immediate wealth and encompasses other avenues of fulfilment — Identity, Moral Obligations, Social Recognition, Relationship gains and personal achievements. The Macro-economics of happiness is complex, it is multidimensional and is convoluted in its meaning.
How to create and maintain a Macro-economic balance sheet of Happiness?
Differentiate between “Pleasure” and “Fulfilment”, Trade-off time accordingly
This is the most important step. There is nothing wrong with spending time for on pleasure. But the returns are very short lived. Leisure cannot be the purpose, it is to help achieve some purpose while rejuvenating. Use pleasure as a tool to effectively do stuff that are fulfilling. Choose activities that are pleasurable in short period of time, maximise them. Also, because pleasure costs money, the longer you spend time on a pleasure activity, the higher it costs. Learning time constraint over pleasure activities is very important, since by nature pleasure leads to addiction. Will power to restrain beyond a time limits brings a huge discipline toward having more time at hand for activities leading to fulfilment
Earning vs Savings view on wealth creation
The basic equation of wealth creation has 3 components — Earn More, spend lesser and Save More. We put all our energy on the 1st component. The more we earn, more we spend and less we save. Spending more serves the micro-economic of happiness and we become unhappy when we think of Macro-economic which is driven by savings. Save Something! One way of doing this is — every time you think you spend on something unexpected, save something in your deposits. Do not keep the savings as a waterfall, leftover calculation. It is a whole some equation, if you don’t save you must spend somewhere and vice versa
Fix small things for a big happy life
If you are happy at one thing, you will be happy at another, and another. Find out the sources of small happiness or create few. Don’t know how to make pancakes? Try one fine day, learn from someone, practice. How do you feel one day when you have a decent enough pan cake ready? Happy? Do this often, find our small things, tweak them to happiness and make this a practice, make happiness a practice. It is like optimising small parts of a process to have a sustained well- functioning macro process
It is not difficult to be happy, but it is not easy to conclude that you are happy, it is not easy to stay happy. It is about the way of thinking about life — as an asset or as a liability, choice is yours.
