Ghost of Midnight

Joining a monthly group on par with doubling your income

David Brooks writes in yesterday’s New York Times that we should be pursuing happiness and well-being, not focus so single-mindedly on wealth…

… poor nations become happier as they become middle-class nations. But once the basic necessities have been achieved, future income is lightly connected to well-being… The United States is much richer than it was 50 years ago, but this has produced no measurable increase in overall happiness…

If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.

If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors. Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).

This is the business that Front Porch Forum is in… but our society doesn’t typically measure what FPF produces so well.  Again from Brooks…

…most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions. Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones.