Here’s a surprising truth it took me ages to grasp: by far the best way to spend more of your life doing meaningful, rewarding and difference-making things is to really feel the deep sense in which youdon’t need to do any of that stuff at all.
At public events, people sometimes ask what advice I’d give my fourteen, sixteen or eighteen-year-old self – which is a ticklish question, partly since I’m sure my teenage self would have scoffed at being lectured at by the late-forties version. And he might have been right to do so; I think you probably have to just go through a certain amount of experience, in order to learn about life, instead of having wisdom dispensed by your elders.
Still, the honest answer is that I’d say something like this: “You do realise you don’t absolutely have to do any of this, right – the good grades, the praiseworthy accomplishments, ‘fulfilling your potential’ and all the rest? It’s all great, and it matters, but do you understand that it doesn’t matter matter? That the sky won’t fall in if you chill out a bit, and that people who don’t always ‘do their best’ or ‘fulfill their potential’ are allowed to enjoy life, too?”
The spiritual teacher Michael Singer says somewhere that the basic stance most of us take toward the world is that we try to use life to make ourselves feel OK. And this is certainly true of the type psychologists label ‘insecure overachievers’, who often accomplish plenty of impressive things, but who do so, deep down, because we don’t believe we’d have earned the right to feel good about ourselves, or to relax into life, if we didn’t.
It’s a soul-crushing way to live, not least because it turns each success into a new source of oppression, since now that’s the minimum standard you feel obliged to meet next time. A hugely successful author once told me he knew something was amiss when the experience of reaching the upper echelons of the bestseller list, previously a cause of excited disbelief, instead brought only relief that he hadn’t failed to replicate his prior achievement.
Most productivity advice, I think, caters to people mired in this mindset. It promises ways to help you take so much action, so efficiently, that you might one day get to feel good about yourself at last. Which isn’t going to work – because the real problem isn’t that you haven’t yet done enough things, or got good enough at doing them. The real problem is the fact that for whatever combination of reasons in your childhood, culture or genes, your sense of self-worth and psychological safety got tethered to your productivity or accomplishments in the first place.
But there exists another, very different sort of productive action: the kind you take not because you feel you have to, in order to feel OK, but precisely because you understand that you don’t have to – because you already feel basically OK about yourself, so now of course you want to take action, because action is how you express your enjoyment in being alive, being good at a few things, and being able to use your talents to make some kind of difference in the world, alongside other people.
One of the most important consequences of all this, for me, has been the realisation that when you begin to outgrow action-from-insecurity, you don’t have to give up on being ambitious. On the contrary: you get to be much more effectively and enjoyably ambitious, if that’s the way you’re inclined.
I’ve long been allergic to the notion, prevalent in self-help circles, that if you truly managed to liberate yourself from your issues, you’d ideally spend your days just sort of passively floating around, smiling at everyone, maybe attending the occasional yoga retreat, but not much more. “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become” is a phrase I’ve encountered multiple times online in recent months. And yes, sure, if your ambition was only ever a function of anxiety, becoming less ambitious would be an excellent development. Then again, the desire to create remarkable outcomes in your creative work, relationships or community – or even just in your bank balance – might just be an authentic part of who you are, once the clouds of insecurity begin to clear.
So you don’t need to choose between peace of mind and the thrill of pursuing ambitious goals. You just need to understand those goals less as vehicles to get you to a future place of sanity and good feeling, and more as things that unfold from an existing place of sanity and good feeling. (Besides, I’ve got to believe that ambition pursued in this spirit is far likelier to make a positive difference in the world.)
Obviously, if you’re deeply stuck on insecure-overachiever mode, merely reading about the alternative in a newsletter isn’t going to solve everything. Nor do I mean to suggest that every task becomes an undiluted joy when you re-frame action in this way – or that there aren’t plenty of things you “need to do” for reasons other than feeling OK about yourself, such as keeping food on the table.
But it can be strikingly liberating just to begin, however gingerly, to experiment with the idea that, actually, you could just do the minimum. You really could. You could not try to impress, or be extraordinary, or do your best, or fulfill your potential (whatever that even means). And you would still be fully entitled to a relaxed and enjoyable life.
I went into my conversations with college career executives expecting to hear about AI replacing work. What I heard instead is that AI is transforming everything around work. The transition from college to the workforce is fully drenched in artificial intelligence. AI is automating homework, obliterating the meaning of much testing, disrupting the labor-market signal of college achievement and grades, distorting the job hunt by normalizing 500+ annual applications per person, turning first-round interviews into creepy surveillance experiences or straight-up conversations with robots, and, oh, after all that, maybe kinda beginning to saw off the bottom of the corporate ladder by automating some entry-level jobs during a period of economic uncertainty. This really is a hard time to be a young person.
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Even if Trump’s tactics improbably succeed in changing Jerome Powell’s mind, they would change only one vote out of 12 on the Federal Open Market Committee. The FOMC’s decision at its June 18 meeting to leave the Fed funds rate unchanged was unanimous. Furthermore, seven of the 19 officials who are eligible for the 12 voting positions predicted there will be no rate cuts for the remainder of 2025, up from four in March.
Imagine reading a story titled “The Relentless Pursuit of Booze.” You would likely expect a depressing story about a person in a downward alcoholic spiral. Now imagine instead reading a story titled “The Relentless Pursuit of Success.” That would be an inspiring story, wouldn’t it? Maybe—but maybe not. It might well be the story of someone whose never-ending quest for more and more success leaves them perpetually unsatisfied and incapable of happiness.
Though it isn’t a conventional medical addiction, for many people success has addictive properties. To a certain extent, I mean that literally—praise stimulates the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is implicated in all addictive behaviors. success also resembles addiction in its effect on human relationships. People sacrifice their links with others for their true love, success. They travel for business on anniversaries; they miss Little League games and recitals while working long hours. Some forgo marriage for their careers.
People willingly sacrifice their own well-being through overwork to keep getting hits of success. I know a thing or two about this: As I once found myself confessing to a close friend, “I would prefer to be special than happy.” He asked why. “Anyone can do the things it takes to be happy; going on vacation with family, relaxing with friends … but not everyone can accomplish great things.” My friend scoffed at this, but I started asking other people in my circles and found that I wasn’t unusual. Many of them had made the success addict’s choice of specialness over happiness. They (and sometimes I) would put off ordinary delights of relaxation and time with loved ones until after this project, or that promotion, when finally, it would be time to rest. But, of course, that day never seemed to arrive.
We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind. And success makes us attractive to others (that is, until we ruin our marriages).
Unfortunately, success is Sisyphean (to mix my Greek myths). The goal can’t be satisfied; most people never feel “successful enough.” The high only lasts a day or two, and then it’s on to the next goal. Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill, in which satisfaction wears off almost immediately and we must run on to the next reward to avoid the feeling of falling behind. This is why so many studies show that successful people are almost invariably jealous of people who are more successful.
They should get off the treadmill. But quitting isn’t easy for addicts. For people hooked on substances, withdrawal can be an agonizing experience, both physically and psychologically. Anxiety and depression are very common after one quits alcoholic drinking. Success addicts giving up their habit experience a kind of withdrawal as well. Research finds that depression and anxiety are common among elite athletes after their careers end.
American culture valorizes overwork, which makes it easy to slip into a mindset that can breed success addiction. What can you do to retrain yourself to chase happiness instead of success, no matter where you are in your life’s journey?
Admit that as successful as you are, were, or hope to be in your life and work, you are not going to find true happiness on the hedonic treadmill of your professional life. You’ll find it in things that are deeply ordinary: enjoying a walk or a conversation with a loved one, instead of working that extra hour. This is extremely difficult for many people. It feels almost like an admission of defeat for those who have spent their lives worshipping hard work and striving to outperform others. Social comparison is a big part of how people measure worldly success, but the research is clear that it strips us of life satisfaction.
Start showing up and being present for relationships you’ve compromised in the pursuit of success.
Find the right metrics of success. If you only measure yourself by the worldly rewards of money, power, and prestige, you’ll spend your life running on the hedonic treadmill and comparing yourself to others. Better metrics include faith, family, and friendship. I also include work—but not work for the sake of outward achievement. Rather, it should be work that serves others and gives you a sense of personal meaning.
I stopped buying active investments (individual stocks, etc.) a few years ago. I’ve gone through different justifications for why too. Originally, I stopped buying active investments because of the performance argument. If 85% of active stock managers can’t beat the market over 10 years, what makes you think you can? It’s also too hard to know if you’re actually good. Because there is so much luck involved (especially over shorter time periods), you are better off not wasting your time trying to figure it out.
But there’s an even better argument: I don’t make active investments now because you can’t put a price on mental freedom. What I’ve realized about myself (and many others I’ve spoken to) is that when you buy an active investment like an individual stock, that investment consumes a lot of your attention.
1. 1960-2000: Robert Putnam sees associations and club membership plummeting, writes “Bowling Alone”
2. 2000 – 2020s: Face to face socializing falls another 25%, as coupling rates plunge
3. Now this…
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Forbes surveyed more than 217,000 employees working at companies within the U.S. that employ more than 1,000 people. The organizations were stratified so that companies with 1,000 to 5,000 employees were deemed midsize, while companies with more than 5,000 employees were considered large employers.
Survey respondents (who remained anonymous so they could answer freely) were asked if they would recommend their employer to others and to rate it based on a range of criteria, including salary, work environment, training programs and opportunities to advance. Participants were also asked if they would recommend their previous employers (within the past two years) and the employers they knew through their industry experience or through friends or family who worked there.
Happiness, it turns out, is more Rorschach than road map. Is it found in the ultraluxe wellness center or the austere monastery? Does it come from getting what you want or wanting less?
By the early 20th century, utility maximization — happiness writ small — emerged as a linchpin of economic analysis. Public happiness, in turn, became a matter of optimizing the sum of individual welfare. The mathematics could be complex, but the premise was simple: Getting what you want in life — that’s happiness, bro.
The notion of happiness as choice-making swiftly migrated from economic models into the marrow of the broader culture. What was once a lifelong project shrank into a sequence of transactions. As the midcentury economy boomed, it didn’t just build wealth; it reconstructed desire. The good life, formerly the province of philosophers, was now a mainstay of the marketers: happiness packaged as the perfect lawn, the gleaming automobile, the immaculate kitchen with its humming refrigerator. We became, almost without noticing, what we bought.
And if you still felt empty? That’s where the therapy culture of the 1970s and 1980s came in — not as a remedy for consumerism but as an extension of it. The older vocabulary of life-defining commitments and meaning-making projects continued to wither while a new lexicon took hold: self-acceptance, self-esteem, self-love.
By the 1990s, happiness had acquired a personal brand. Oprah Winfrey presided over a daytime academy of self-care, empowerment and curated aspiration. Then came the next wave: the life-hacking, self-quantifying, habit-stacking era of optimization gurus like Tim Ferriss, whose first book, published in 2007, was “The 4-Hour Workweek” — “a toolkit,” in his words, “for maximizing per-hour output.”
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase,” Ferriss wrote. “It is the cure-all.” Amid the excitement, the happiness concept kept getting miniaturized. With the rise of the algorithms, decision-making became a series of bite-size transactions. If you liked this, you’ll like that. Every swipe, click and purchase was an act of preference revelation, the digital cookie crumbs of personal identity.
In today’s social media ecosystem, happiness even threatens to become a ring-lighted aesthetic: matcha lattes, artisanal candles, sage-smudging, captioned reminders to just breathe. Once again, happiness is work — but now the work of packaging moods and moments for validation, with a tiny dopamine hit for each “like.”
“So long as you’re happy,” parents tell their kids. In reality, they want to see their children engaged in something worthwhile, contributing to something beyond their own fleeting satisfactions.
If you’ll indulge the philosophers’ habit of conjuring characters to illustrate their abstractions, imagine a young person — let’s call her Julia — who left community college after a semester and has bounced between gigs ever since: dog-walking, cafe shifts, warehouse nights. Her life is messy, but she has learned how to show up for people. When her neighbor’s mother gets sick, Julia brings groceries. When her cousin gets out of rehab, she’s the one who texts every day. She doesn’t have a wellness routine or a five-year plan. But people trust her. She holds lives together in small, invisible ways.
Or imagine a middle-aged man named Daniel, a product manager with a smart fridge and an Optimal Morning Routine. For years, he has chased happiness through upgrades — to his apps, his appliances, himself. But lately, the returns feel thin. When his niece’s soccer team needs a coach, he volunteers, awkwardly at first, then with growing investment. Daniel has started showing up at town meetings, fighting to save the field from developers. Now his calendar includes something he cares deeply about that doesn’t come with a progress bar.
Daniel still wears a Whoop band. Julia hasn’t found her “calling.” But they’re living into a broader idea of happiness — less about what they have, more about what they give, who they’re with, what they’re part of.
Is it possible that happiness stayed big, and it’s only our way of talking about it that got small? Surely the old understanding, in which the pursuit of happiness is inseparable from shared commitments, hasn’t gone anywhere. On some level, we still know the difference between feeling good and flourishing, between the hedonic and the eudaemonic, between the algorithm’s next suggestion and the difficult and uncertain path toward a meaningful existence. Yes, we often speak as if feelings are all that count, but maybe that’s because the language of the “good life” has been hollowed out.
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Inversion is a mental model that flips the script on traditional problem-solving. Rather than look at a problem in a linear, forward, logical manner, you think about it in reverse. Well, there is one complex, foundational problem that is truly universal: How do you live a good life? Using inversion to address it: Here are some ways to live a miserable life…
Allow idleness to dominate your life – Stress and anxiety feed on idleness. They take hold while you sit and scroll on your phone, while you overthink your situation, while you compare yourself to others, while you try to create the perfect plan. When you take action, you starve them of the oxygen they need to survive.
Allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial – Ambitious people have a bad tendency to think like this: “I don’t have an hour to work out, so I just won’t go. I don’t have two hours for deep work, so I’ll do email instead. I don’t have 30 minutes to call my mom, so I won’t call at all.” When you allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial, you ignore the most powerful principle in life: Anything above zero compounds. A little bit is always better than nothing. Tiny wins stack over long periods of time. Small things become big things.
Obsess over speed – Life is about direction, not speed. It’s much better to climb slowly up the right mountain than to climb fast up the wrong one.
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More police officers kill themselves every year than are killed by suspects. At least 184 public-safety officers die by suicide each year, while an average of about 57 officers are killed by suspects. Law-enforcement officers are 54 percent more likely to die by suicide than the average American worker.
A survey of 1,000 managers across America revealed the reasons that 8 in 10 managers said newly hired college graduates did not work out during their first year on the job:
78%: Excessive use of cell phones – the top pet peeve of managers
61%: Entitled or easily offended
57%: Unprepared for the workplace
54%: Lack of a work ethic
47%: Poor communication skills
27%: Lack of technical skills
Other concerns managers had about the graduates included lateness, failure to turn in assignments on time, unprofessional behavior, and inappropriate dress and language.
Where the number of homes for sale is growing. Fast.
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The Russell 1000 is a stock market index that represents the 1,000 largest companies in the U.S. by market value (also called market capitalization). The graph below shows the number of stocks within that 1,000 that fall by a certain percentage over a 1, 3 and 5-year time frame. While over time most major indices like The Russell 1000 go up, the odds are very high that any individual stock is going to fall by a lot.
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Lead characters were far more likely to die in the 1960s and 1970s than they are today. Across the 1970s, almost one in three protagonists died by the end of the film. That rate has steadily declined since. The drop has been particularly sharp since 2010. In the last five years, the share of lead characters who die has averaged just 17%. This is one of the lowest rates in almost a century of film history.
The average age of the global population is up from 26.5 years in 1980 to 33.6 years in 2025. Meanwhile, the average growth rate of the global population has also halved, from 1.8% in 1980 to 0.9% in 2025. The growth rate is expected to hit zero by 2084, and the world’s population is expected to begin declining by 2085, with the average age rising to 42. At the end of the 21st century, the average age is projected to be 43 years.
The “disease of more” was a phrase coined by National Basketball Association (NBA) coach Pat Riley to describe how, following a successful season, players can become entitled and want more of everything, including money, playing time, and media attention, which starts the onset of the team’s demise.
Needless to say, it’s not just NBA players that are affected by wanting more. Everyone wants more of everything, more so than ever before. Never in human history has there been such an overwhelming abundance of food, clothing, and material goods. Beyond necessities, consumer goods of all kinds—electronics, furniture, and household items are more accessible and affordable than ever, filling stores and warehouses to the brim.
In addition to the explosion of physical goods, the world now overflows with the non-physical. The digital age has brought an endless supply of information, entertainment and convenience.
Suppose you invented an incredible new passenger plane that reduced aviation fuel consumption by 50%, and every airliner worldwide adopted your aircraft. In that scenario, it’s a natural assumption to think that aviation fuel across the globe would reduce dramatically and be good for the environment. However, the opposite is true, and fuel consumption would increase because flying has become more efficient, which means more flights, lower prices and more demand for flying. This is known as the Jevons paradox.
Instead of digital communication making our lives easier with how we communicate with friends and family in a similar way to the workplace, the reduction of friction has made us do more of it than ever before to the point where it has become all-consuming. As things become easier — we just do more of it, and in spades. It’s been an evolution of deliberate and reflective communication to text speak, forwarding cat videos and memes.
News has become like a drug. We hear what is going on instantly all of the time. It becomes impossible to avoid. Every hour on the hour, the radio stations give us our fix. Social media was originally meant for discovering what your friends and family were doing, and now it’s just another news outlet keeping us transfixed.
In a roundabout way, we all fall into the chronic busyness category. Even if we’re not running around with packed diaries and overflowing work schedules, we’re all swamped with communication, news, things to buy, pings, breaking news alerts, and vibrations. We’re overloading our nervous system, which means we don’t have time to think, reflect, and consider. Being bored is invaluable thinking time to ponder what to do or change about your life.
I love the title of a book by a financial market analyst named Walter Deemer: “When the Time Comes to Buy, You Won’t Want To.” The negative developments that make for the greatest price declines are terrifying, and they discourage buying. But, when unfavorable developments are raining down, that’s often the best time to step up.
I think the thing that doesn’t get talked about is that no one wants to admit they’re a short-term thinker. We fool ourselves into believing we’re committed to something for the long haul, but we’ve been trained since childhood to be tactical, to chase the short-term win, to have a short attention span.
We emphasize who just scored a goal in soccer instead of asking, Does this kid have perseverance? Do they have good sportsmanship? Those qualities are much more useful for who they will become. But instead, we reward the kid who cheated or played dirty to score a goal. And that sticks with us.
I don’t judge people based on job interviews. That’s a false proxy — unless I’m hiring a talk show host, being good at a job interview doesn’t matter. Shielding ourselves from false proxies is really hard. Some people just can’t do it. They need immediate feedback, they need to know what’s happening right now.
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Despite the existence of an arsenal of medications that target the neurotransmitters in the brain thought to be responsible for mood disorders, about 30% of individuals with major depressive disorder remain treatment-resistant. This points to other possible factors that may contribute to the condition.
Research to date has implicated impaired energy metabolism as a potential culprit, as the brain requires enormous amounts of energy to function normally. This, in turn, would suggest that interventions known to boost cellular energy production might offer some relief for those suffering from depression, and attention has turned to one such supplement in particular: creatine. Well known for its role in muscular energetics, might creatine have additional benefits in the treatment of depression?
America Has Never Been Wealthier. Why Doesn’t Feel That Way? A 10 percent boost to the middle and especially higher incomes is money that feels real, like you can do something with it. For someone making $100,000, that means a $10,000 raise. But a 10 percent increase at the bottom, perhaps to an hourly wage of $16.50 from $15, means you’re still living hand-to-mouth. If we define someone as living paycheck to paycheck if they either say they do not have three months of emergency savings or say they cannot afford a $2,000 emergency expense, then 59 percent of American adults are “living paycheck to paycheck.
In happiness research, the British-American tradition is to think of happiness as the ultimate goal in life. Being healthy, having harmonious relationships, finding meaning in life and work, etc. are considered to be steps on the way to achieving maximum happiness (see left hand sketch in the chart below).
In other cultures, in particular in Asian and African cultures, happiness is considered to be one part of well-being but not the ultimate goal in life. Rather, happiness interacts with other factors such as meaning or spiritually to create a much more diverse assessment of well-being (or what people like to call ‘the good life’) as shown on the right-hand side of the chart below.
If you look at happiness in this broader context, then achieving maximum happiness will not be your goal in life. This in turn increases life satisfaction and well-being because other factors such as spirituality or living in harmony with nature and other people are much easier to control than happiness itself. Happiness is simply too fragile and vulnerable to external shocks.
Analysing the responses of tens of thousands of people worldwide, here is an overview chart of the optimal level of happiness that people in different countries aim for. Note how in general people in Western Europe try to achieve very high to extreme levels of happiness while people in Asia and Africa are content with more moderate levels of happiness.
What do we learn from this? Maybe trying to cheer my readers up by bringing them a week of good news isn’t really increasing their happiness. Rather, we all should look for a content life where happiness is in harmony with spirituality, nature, our friends, and family. Get off the hedonic treadmill and stop thinking about how to maximise returns for a moment. Take a step back and ask yourself what true well-being looks like for you. Because if you increase well-being, you will be able to better deal with the inevitable bad news that bombards us all the time and will continue to do so forever.
Financial Freedom – Build stability first. This doesn’t mean getting rich—just having enough to live without constant financial stress, and having saved enough to be able to look forward to next steps.
Time Freedom – Use financial stability to create time autonomy. Maybe that means working remotely, taking sabbaticals, or designing a more flexible life.
Freedom of Purpose – With financial and time security in place, focus on what gives life meaning.
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U.S. home price gains or losses over the last 75 years below. What stands out to me is that we all remember the run from 1997 through 2005, but the 1974 to 1981 run was just as spectacular. Those gains came at a time when the 10-year treasury yield rose from 7% to 16% (mortgage rates are historically 2 to 3% above the 10-year treasury rate). The other standout to me was how insane 2021 was for price gains relative to any other year in history coming off an already blistering second half of 2020.
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Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line) turns his lens to an unlikely cast of upstarts who transformed the investment landscape in the documentary Tune Out the Noise. The film chronicles a group of academics at the University of Chicago in the 1960s whose groundbreaking research challenged Wall Street’s status quo and was used by firms to disrupt traditional methods of investing, ultimately reshaping the way the world views markets.
Denmark’s social rule of janteloven – the idea that “you’re no better than anyone else” – keeps everyone grounded. Its education system is rooted in equality, with children calling teachers by their first names and collaboration prioritised over competition. There’s a flat hierarchical structure and high taxes help redistribute wealth – not a terrible plan since more equal societies are happier and healthier.
Danes trust their neighbours, institutions and even strangers, with 74% believing “most people can be trusted”. So, babies are left to nap outside in their prams, children roam freely and people sell secondhand clothes from “trust stands” outside their homes.
The Danes are masters of the work-life balance, with a 37-hour work week as standard and OECD figures showing that the average Dane puts in only 33 hours a week. The result? Lower stress and higher productivity.
Friluftsliv, or “open-air life”, is deeply ingrained in Nordic culture and spending time in nature has been shown to reduce stress.
One of the greatest gifts from our Danish years is the habit of eating together. This is non-negotiable – TV off, phones away and everyone at the table for a home-cooked meal, proven to improve mental and physical health as well as our relationships. Thanks to a short working week, a daily family dinner is entirely possible in Denmark and tends to be eaten early, something our metabolism and gut health apparently thank us for.
Nearly half of Danes volunteer, contributing to their communities through clubs, events and schools. If Denmark taught me anything, it’s that small acts of service build stronger communities.
The Danish art of cosines meant slowing down, switching off and sharing quality time in relaxed surroundings (accepting that the best evenings don’t involve wifi). Danes priorities daily moments of joy.
Vikings are allowed to take risks, learn from mistakes and develop independence early on. From two-year-olds dressing themselves to eight-year-olds cycling to school alone, there’s a collective confidence in giving children freedom in Denmark, which helps them flourish. A phrase beloved by my children’s teachers was that adults should “sit on their hands” – ie do nothing and let children work things out for themselves.
Danish minimalism goes beyond design; it’s a way of life. From clothes to home decor, the approach taught me the beauty of having fewer things, of higher quality.
The country ranking itself stems from the the “life evaluation” metric: “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”
Considering this, the most prominent factor that determines whether citizens are “happy” might have more to do with how satisfied they are with their immediate surroundings, rather than how they’re feeling.
While the World Happiness Report takes into account life satisfaction, it lacks one crucial joy-determining factor: emotions. The 2024 Gallup Global Emotions Report focused on respondents’ positive and negative emotion; including how often people laugh, smile, or learn something new, as well as how often they feel pain, stress, or anger (the “Positive Emotions Ranking” column below):
Finland ranked in 25th place overall for feeling positive emotions specifically, and until recently, had one of the highest suicide rates in the world. What the happiness ranking could speak to, then, is the Finnish custom of “sisu,” or inner strength, which means people rarely complain about their problems… or, for that matter, place themselves low on the life ladder.
Another factor contributing to life satisfaction that the report highlighted was meal sharing. The growing number of people eating alone in the United States — in 2023, about 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all their meals alone the day before, up 53% from two decades prior — was said to have contributed to a decline in national well-being, as the US ranked 24th overall in the report, the lowest position it’s ever held.
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American women have never been this resigned to staying single and they’re giving up on marriage. They are responding to major demographic shifts, including huge and growing gender gaps in economic and educational attainment, political affiliation and beliefs about what a family should look like. More women than men are attending college, buying houses and focusing on their friendships and careers over dating and marriage.
Women throughout history rarely questioned whether finding and securing a romantic partner should be a primary goal of adulthood. This seems to be changing. Over half of single women say they believe they are happier than their married counterparts. A rise in earning power and a decline in the social stigma for being single has allowed more women to be choosy. They would rather be alone than with a man who holds them back. The focus has shifted toward self-improvement, friendship and the ability to find happiness on their own.
48% of women say that being married is not too or not at all important for a fulfilling life, up from 31% in 2019. Marriage rates for both men and women are in decline, in part owing to less pressure to pair off and higher expectations for a would-be match. Dating apps make people feel like there might always be a better option. They view looking for a marriage partner the same way that you view looking for a job candidate.
The challenges of finding a romantic partner have been made more complicated by a growing divide in education and career prospects between men and women. 47% of American women ages 25-34 have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 37% of men. A bachelor’s degree increases net lifetime earnings by an estimated $1 million. Women are doing comparatively well when it comes to education and their early years in the labor force, and men are doing comparatively badly. That creates a mismatch, because people prefer to date in terms of comparable education or income.
Men’s economic struggles seem to be having the biggest effect on women without a college degree, whose marriage rates by age 45 have plummeted from 79% to 52% for those born between 1930 and 1980. Young men without a degree are struggling so much as a group that there simply aren’t enough with steady jobs and earnings for non-college women to date.
What were some of your most popular articles at the Journal? “Anything with a list, anything that mentioned my kids, and anything on the topic of money and happiness. “
What’s changed since those days? “Go back to the late 1980s and through the 1990s, all the focus was on investing, how to build a portfolio, what’s the expected return, yada yada yada. Since then, people have realized that there’s a limit to how much we can optimize a portfolio. Instead, there’s a lot of focus on other issues, like helping people buy the right-size home, making sure they have all their estate-planning documents, making sure they have the right insurance policies, making sure they claim Social Security at the right age, and so on. There has been more focus on the psychological aspects of managing money. And finally, there’s now a focus on helping people figure out what money means to them.”
Do you remember your final article at the Journal? “When I left in 2008, I wrote a piece about three ways that money can help happiness. One, money can give you a sense of financial security. Two, it can allow you to spend your days doing what you love. And three, it can allow you to have special times with friends and family. I believe that those are the three ingredients for not only a happy financial life, but also a happy life—period. It’s certainly the three things that I’m focused on.”
Has your thinking changed about anything since your diagnosis? “In the last couple of years, I’ve become better about giving money to my kids and funding my grandchildren’s 529 plans. In retrospect, I think I should have started earlier and could have been more generous, because it’s clear to me that I’d never have been able to spend all this money I’ve accumulated, even if I did live to a ripe old age. If you’re pretty sure that your kids have good financial habits, and you’re not going to undermine their ambitions or send them on some wayward path, by all means give them money now. Why have them live with unnecessary financial anxiety? Why not make them feel a little more financially secure? I really believe that’s one of the greatest gifts that we can give to family members, this sense of financial security.”
In your writing, you’ve shared that you aren’t feeling negative emotions about your diagnosis. In fact, you wrote that your first reaction was, “I’m okay with this.” Can you say more about that? “I feel like I’ve been very fortunate. It’s not that bad things haven’t happened in my life. They have. But I’ve been able to spend my life doing what I love. I have a close-knit family, and I’ve largely been free of financial worry. All in all, I feel like I’ve managed to get a whole lot out of my life.”
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Michael Easter (author of The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain) interviewed Brett McKay who has an extremely popular podcast called the “Art Of Manliness” that I’ve been listening to for many years. Brett is one of the best at interviewing authors about their new books, helping me decide if I want to read them. It was strange to hear someone asking Brett the questions.Some random thoughts from their conversation.
What’s the dumbest health trend you’ve noticed recently? Blue-light-blocking glasses. They’re useless—the research doesn’t support significant circadian disruption from blue light.
You’ve experimented extensively with health trends. What’s something you’ve changed your mind about? Low-carb diets. I got into low-carb in early days. And then I learned, wait, there’s nothing magic about low carb. You just eat fewer calories typically when you’re on low carb. But you can do that with any diet.
You’ve talked to a ton of parenting experts on podcasts. What’s your best parenting advice? Parent like a video game. In video games, if you mess up you just start from the beginning—it’s not a big deal. So if your kid makes a mistake, treat it like restarting a game—tell them not to do that again and move on. No big deal. Also, something I appreciate more and more is that kids are their own people. You can guide them, create a supportive environment, but you can’t control their personalities or outcomes. You see families where all the kids are parented the same way, but they all end up different. Why’s that? Because people are different. So do your best, love them, and let them be themselves.
The U.S. is making progress against one of its most devastating public-health threats: drug overdoses.The decline is at least in part due to a drop in opioid use. A 2022 report found that opioid-use disorder increased from 2010 to 2014, then stabilized and slightly declined each year thereafter. Another reason is because the most vulnerable people have died and others have adapted. Many fentanyl users are now smoking the drug instead of injecting it, and some research shows that smoking fentanyl could come with lower risk of overdose, infections and other complications.
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Market timing is hard because, even if you get out at an opportune time, you have to nail the landing and get back in. Few people can do both. In fact, getting the first leg of the parlay right often makes it even harder to get back in because you become so attached to the loving arms of cash. The psychology of market timing becomes even more challenging when you add politics to the mix.
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A popular investment strategy being sold to investors today is the idea of getting limited upside annually on your stocks in exchange for limiting the downside. AQR discussed these in their recent article: Rebuffed: A Closer Look At Options-Based Strategies.
At the heart of the strategies examined are put options. The way puts work is straightforward: the investor pays some amount (the option premium) to protect themselves from a specific decline in a specific asset’s price over a specific period. There’s one wrinkle though: when it comes to buying puts, the price of admission is generally higher than the benefit.
let’s say an investor is less concerned with long-term returns, and more concerned with shorter-term drawdowns. Surely options-based strategies should at least help there, since a put option is literally tailor-made for this task.
Nope.
Puts are designed for very specific outcomes – they protect against a specific price level for a specific length of time. If the duration of the draw-down doesn’t align with the maturity of the option, the hoped-for protection won’t be there. This is why a strategy that buys 5% out-of-the-money puts every month can have a drawdown that’s worse than 5% – markets might fall by 4% in one month, and by another 4% the next so the options you paid for never pay you. And this is a reason 81% of the funds in Exhibit 3 weren’t able to deliver on the seemingly easy goal of downside protection (again, compared to an applicable mix of equities plus T-bills).
Daniel Kahneman spent his life studying behavioral economics, cognitive biases and learning why people make irrational decisions. He won the Nobel prize for his research and wrote the most influential book ever on the topic titled “Thinking, Fast & Slow.” At age 90, his closest friends and family were shocked and upset when they received an email from him saying that he would be ending his life through assisted suicide, even though he was still in relatively good health. From his email:
“I am still active, enjoying many things in life (except the daily news) and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am ninety years old. It is time to go.
Not surprisingly, some of those who love me would have preferred for me to wait until it is obvious that my life is not worth extending. But I made my decision precisely because I wanted to avoid that state, so it had to appear premature. I am grateful to the few with whom I shared early, who all reluctantly came round to support me.
I discovered after making the decision that I am not afraid of not existing, and that I think of death as going to sleep and not waking up. The last period has truly not been hard, except for witnessing the pain I caused others. So if you were inclined to be sorry for me, don’t be.“
One reason why the younger generation doesn’t like to drink is because every moment of their lives is either being filmed or only seconds away from the next picture that will be shared online. “I think that a lot of times we’re so consumed with how other people are looking at us that we don’t even want to risk being considered messy,” said Sofie Ruiz, a sophomore at Texas Christian University. This fear of being perceived as “messy” is fueled by the popularity of the “clean girl” aesthetic. A “clean girl” is often associated with healthy habits like yoga, pilates, green smoothies, and journaling—definitely not heavy drinking. The epitome of the popular girl is now one who projects an image of a balanced, healthy, and often sober lifestyle. This ideal is heavily promoted on social media, influencing what is seen as desirable and aspirational. College campuses also have school-specific social media apps, such as Yik Yak, wherea drunken night out can get posted by peers with lasting and embarrassing consequences, said Ruiz. With social media comes permanent and wide-reaching evidence, and students are choosing not to be seen in a certain way in perpetuity.
The reputation repercussions can run deep. Ruiz has a friend who attends a university with its own dedicated Instagram account. Students can send in anything, and it will likely be posted. A female student was kicked out of her sorority for being drunkenly featured on the page. “We grew up a lot hearing the concerns of a digital footprint. People don’t want to risk their future on stuff like that,” said Ruiz. “Guys don’t have as much to be scared about, I think. Because even if they do something embarrassing and it gets posted, they, by history, most likely will not get the same repercussions as a girl might. As a girl, you don’t want to be hungover, you don’t want to feel sick, which also goes into the clean girl aesthetic thing.” “I think that if social media wasn’t a component, it would definitely be a lot different,” she said. The opposite is true with marijuana. Ruiz said that cannabis’s popularity may stem from its perceived social acceptability: “You’re kind of at less of a risk to embarrass yourself because if you’re high, you’re normally just going to chill out. Whereas when you’re drunk, you don’t really have control over your actions.”
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Are there financial determinants of great-power decline and fall? “Ferguson’s Law,” which states that any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defense risks ceasing to be a great power. The paper identifies the “Ferguson limit,” or the point at which interest payments exceed defense spending, as the tipping point after which the centripetal forces of the aggregate debt burden tend to pull apart the geopolitical grip of a great power.
This is because the debt burden draws scarce resources towards itself, reducing the amount available for national security, and leaving the power increasingly vulnerable to military challenge. Looking at historical case studies that are analogous to the situation of the modern United States as the dominant global power, it is very rare but not unprecedented for a great power to return to the right side of the Ferguson limit. The United States began violating Ferguson’s Law for the first time in nearly a century in 2024.
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Don’t let your kids get on motorcycles, if possible.
For the last couple of months, I have had this strange experience: Person after person — from artificial intelligence labs, from government — has been coming to me saying: It’s really about to happen. We’re about to get to artificial general intelligence. What they mean is that they have believed, for a long time, that we are on a path to creating transformational artificial intelligence capable of doing basically anything a human being could do behind a computer — but better. They thought it would take somewhere from five to 15 years to develop. But now they believe it’s coming in two to three years.
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Seth Godin: “Once you have enough for beans and rice and taking care of your family and a few other things, money is a story. You can tell yourself any story you want about money. And it’s better to tell yourself a story about money that you can happily live with. So if you want more money, you need to understand you’re always going to have to trade something for it, and you need to be very clear with yourself what you’re willing to trade.”
The Atlantic magazine in 1920: “The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the 1880s.” Some things never change.
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Savoring has been defined as “the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in one’s life.” This can mean focusing on a current, future, or past experience with particular attention to the positive parts. Savoring has been shown in research to stimulate the brain’s striatum, a region involved in processing reward, and is effective in lowering symptoms of depression. The result, correspondingly, is a higher level of reported happiness.
Savoring positive experiences in the moment also leads to happier memories later on. Researchers found when they instructed people to savor these experiences more fully as they recorded them, their subsequent memories were more vivid, and in effect they enjoyed the experiences more. Easier said than done, unfortunately: We are evolved less to savor the good things in life than to take note of what we dislike and harbor resentments. Humans typically exhibit a “negativity bias,” meaning that adverse events arrest our attention more than positive ones.
You want your parents to have health insurance so that medical needs don’t bankrupt them, right? You want them to have car insurance so that if they get in an accident, they don’t need to pay out of pocket to replace an entire car or in case someone sues them for $100,000, right? These are examples of potential economic devastation wrought by a couple different risks. Getting scammed is a risk that can be just as disruptive and economically devastating.
What advice can I give me parents to protect them from scam calls that is extremely easy and simple to execute that won’t require any judgement in the moment?” I settled on advising them to say this everytime a financial institution calls: “Where are you calling from? Thank you. I’m going to hang up and call back.”
John Gardner worked as a director of Shell Oil, American Airlines, New York Telephone and Time Inc, in the nonprofit world as a foundation president, in federal government as a cabinet officer, in the military as a Marine Corps officer and member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Air Force. The paragraphs below are clips from a speech he gave at age 79 :
“When you reach middle age, when your energies aren’t what they used to be, then you’ll begin to wonder what it all added up to; you’ll begin to look for the figure in the carpet of your life. I have some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Look ahead. Someone said that “Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” And above all don’t imagine that the story is over. Life has a lot of chapters.
It isn’t a bad idea to pause occasionally for an inward look. By midlife, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves. The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You leant not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions, if you have any, which you do. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character.
You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing. Those are things that are hard to learn early in life, As a rule you have to have picked up some mileage and some dents in your fenders before you understand. As Norman Douglas said “There are some things you can’t learn from others. You have to pass through the fire.’
So you scramble and sweat and climb to reach what you thought was the goal. When you get to the top you stand up and look around and chances are you feel a little empty. Maybe more than a little empty. You wonder whether you climbed the wrong mountain. But life isn’t a mountain that has a summit, Nor is it — as some suppose — a riddle that has an answer. Nor a game that has a final score.
Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn’t handed out free any more — not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what you’ve committed yourself to. It may just mean doing a better job at whatever you’re doing. There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are –and that too is a kind of commitment. They have the gift of kindness or courage or loyalty or integrity. It matters very little whether they’re behind the wheel of a truck or running a country store or bringing up a family.”
Our egos are hardwired to fall into the trap of confounding luck and skill. Suppose you decide to drive drunk and you make it home safely. That was a bad decision with a good outcome. One week later, after a good night of drinking Zinfandel, you ask a designated driver to drive you home. The driver gets into an accident. That was a good decision with a bad outcome. (Setting aside that you drank Zinfandel, which clearly is a horrible decision.)
Because of randomness, outcomes are often silent on the quality of decisions. Worse, they can mislead. In a world in which we can’t predict much of the future, good decisions can lead to bad outcomes, and bad decisions can lead to good outcomes. In the business of investment management, we say there’s “randomness.”
This problem is acute in the investment world. You can make money, at least for a while, by making bad decisions like holding a concentrated portfolio or investing in fads. If you don’t examine your process and the quality of your decisions, in other words, if you only focus on outcomes, you may think you’re an absolute genius. But you’re unlikely to be a successful investor in the long run.
Annie Duke’s excellent book, Thinking in Bets, has become required reading in the investment world. Duke is a business consultant and ex-professional poker player. She explains that we instinctively associate good results with good decisions and bad results with bad decisions. She calls this instinct “resulting.” But in poker and many aspects of life, “winning and losing are only loose signals of decision quality.”
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Nostalgia for terrible things may sound absurd, but many people experience it, for reasons that speak to the way people make meaning of their lives. The central reason for this phenomenon, according to researchers who study nostalgia, is that humans look to our past selves to make sense of our present. Reflecting on the challenging times we’ve endured provides significance and edification to a life that can otherwise seem pointlessly difficult. The past was tough, we think, but we survived it, so we must be tough too.
It used to be assumed that the financial memory should last, at a maximum, no more than 20 years. This is normally the time it takes for the recollection of one disaster to be erased and for some variant on previous dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to enter the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own innovative genius.
Tuna Thoughts 