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RomeoStevens comments on Be Happier - Less Wrong
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Happiness research makes me sad.
Really? How?
Humans pine for excess leisure but revealed preference shows that they find excess leisure stressful. People go stir crazy after 2-3 months. I can't say I wouldn't eventually find leisure boring, but I was unemployed for 8 months a couple years ago and it was unequivocally the greatest time in my life. The only lasting negative thoughts I had during that time were thoughts related to it ending. Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'm some wonderfully atypical snowflake, I suspect that many creative/intellectual types would love carte blanche to pursue random projects. But this proportion of the general populace is far smaller than the portion who profess to want it.
I guess you somehow still had enough money to fulfil the couple bottom layers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs without much trouble, didn't you?
Wouldn't most people have enough savings to last 8 months? I'm still in university and I have enough savings to live at my current standard (~$1000/month expenses not including tuition) to live for...hmm, almost 2 years if I'm not in school and paying tuition during that time.
Then again, I guess lifestyle expenses rise along with income after most people graduate, and they might rise faster.
I was under the impression most people in America are in massive debt and have very little savings.
WHYYYYY??????
Because credit card companies are financially disincentivized to send cards with instructions reading "How To Use Your Credit Card: Borrow our money for free by purchasing things you can afford and paying down your full balance on time, every time, leaving us to profit solely from merchant fees."
Among other causes.
We get to empirically test this assertion, because the new credit card regulations of the last few years have much more detail about the benefits of paying in full, on time.
If they're long, complicated, and/or in fine print, I don't think that's a test of my assertion.
Personally, because of student loans, mortgage (which doesn't really count), and trying to keep up an extravagant standard of living during lean years, justified in part by expectation of making insane amounts of money in the future.
At this point, I have no savings because I'm in debt. I don't have any expectation that I won't be able to come up with however much money I might have saved in the case of an emergency, so the best use of my excess now is to pay off the debt, since interest rates are not in the favor of savings.
I don't know if this was meant to be serious or funny, but I upvoted because it made my laugh. :D
I've heard the same, but I'm kind of skeptical -- I haven't actually researched it, but the factoid usually seems to come up when someone's trying to push a narrative, which tends to be a warning sign.
In particular, if mortgages and automotive debt are being counted, then most adults before retirement age might look pretty indebted on paper without that necessarily destroying their medium-term ability to stay solvent. On the other hand, standard financial advice seems to be to maintain six to twelve months' worth of savings, which suggests to me that most people don't.
I'd like to remind everyone here that “most people” make less than $851 a year.
Excellent point. Funny how brains tend to automatically edit that out, and claim "well, isn't it obvious I was talking about North America/Europe."
(I'm not completely sure most people -- or even most unemployed adults -- in North America/Europe have enough savings to last 8 months, either.)
A maslow interpretation of my behavior would indicate that I respond extremely poorly to a lack of fulfillment of the second level (much more so than the average person). ANY reminder or actions I need to take in order to maintain my current standard of living angers and depresses me. Having 8 months worth of living expenses in the bank gave me a temporary fulfillment of level 2 which was the main cause of my happiness.
I have experienced the same thing. I have apparently endless capacity for leisure, possibly because I have an endless number of interests and hobbies to pursue then drop then pick back up. I've never understood people who don't want this kind of life; do they really exist? Can people get bored with leisure?
I'd suspect most people feel both stress from unemployment, and guilt when they are dependent on someone else (or possibly fear of losing this support). I can't really imagine a lot of situations where a person has months to themselves without triggering one of those two, so I'd expect most people aren't very good at evaluating the situation to begin with...
Retirement, among people with retirement savings and no major health issues yet? I'm sure that's been studied. There's also a number of professions where hiatuses of a couple months at a time are normal -- teaching comes to mind, as do the more lucrative forms of seasonal employment.
There are also people with inherited money.
There's a category I call the petty rich. They have enough money that they don't need to work, so long as they maintain a middle class or lower lifestyle. I'm not sure how many there are, but I've met a few. I've never seen them discussed or studied-- they aren't exactly conspicuous.
Mmm. Possibly, but remember that "unemployment" has a fairly arbitrary definition in most cases -- it measures the number of "potential workers" (as in members of the "labour force", which is tough to pin down exactly) who've looked for work within a given time period (usually about four weeks) but haven't been able to find it. It doesn't capture: homemakers, full-time students, incarcerated people, disabled folks who want to work within their abilities but can't find a job, people who've become discouraged from looking for work, people who prefer not to, the self-employed, involuntary retirees, the underemployed, stay-at-home parents, children, elderly folks, most disabled people, and independent farmers. It's possible to be neither "employed" nor "unemployed" by this measure.
My point is, the stress probably isn't from lack-of-employment itself; that's probably a proximate cause, a triggering event that's playing on something else, like simple desperation.
That's a matter of culture, I daresay. The Protestant Work Ethic and the self-supporting individual memes are not generalizable to humanity the world over.
Which isn't to say it isn't a common reaction. Just that, as my ultimate point here goes, you should probably not conflate "an inability to meet one's own survival and psychological security needs that's recognizable within one's mental framework" with "leisure." I have lots of free time, in the sense that I'm unemployed and not carrying many obligations day-to-day, but it's hardly all leisure time, and there are things that need to be done in terms of practical upkeep even if that doesn't look like trading labor for biosurvival tickets.
That sort of reinforces my point - simply "not having a job" doesn't equate to an actual increase in leisure
("Humans pine for excess leisure but revealed preference shows that they find excess leisure stressful" and "I can't say I wouldn't eventually find leisure boring, but I was unemployed for 8 months a couple years ago and it was unequivocally the greatest time in my life. ")
Basically, I'm questioning whether the people studied actually had excess leisure, or just happened to meet certain standards like "not employed full-time in a standard corporation."
nod Downthread someone else mentioned some relevant ideas like "the petty rich" and other folks whose basic needs are met, but who aren't necessarily world-shakingly wealthy in their spending habits.
I guess some people can and other people can't, where by some I mean ‘a fraction most likely to be more than 5% and less than 95%’.
(As for me, if I have nothing to do for a while I tend to just waste most of my time sleeping or aimlessly browsing the Web and similar addictive-but-not-so-fulfilling stuff, whereas if I'm very busy I spend what little spare time I have on actually fulfilling hobbies and socialising. So I do get bored with leisure, but that's just a result of akrasia and I guess if the next time I get a few spare months I beeminded (say) reading books/watching films/listening to albums/doing things I've always wanted to read/watch/listen/do but never got around to reading/watching/listening/doing, I wouldn't.)
ETA: This guy did get bored with leisure, apparently.
Yeah, I find that very confusing too. But then, if pursuing random projects is in "leisure", then I don't really see the distinction between that and "not leisure". Maybe some people just sit around and watch paint dry, given the chance?
I was thinking of that; maybe some people equate leisure time with being directionless, and thus need externally-imposed goals?
Yes.
Define A as "the stuff I would spend my time doing if I got tenure". Define B as "the stuff I would spend my time doing if I became unemployed."
I've been wondering how close A and B are to being identical.
If you are unemployed, you are running out of money, and you know the time is running out (unless you manage to make something that brings a lot of money soon).
This anxiety can make a huge difference in how you will spent the time. Even if you made the same plans, I would expect more procrastination in situation B.