This is interesting, but in terms of making decisions about oneself, I would hope a person would have better information than studies which are attempts to describe a mythical "average" person.
Really? Every single person who made above $500k was "very happy" and "very satisfied"? Not even just fairly happy or somewhat satisfied? I'm almost wondering if they set 500k+ at 100% and scaled the others to that.
In case you didn't figure it out, I just looked at the figures, didn't read the text, so maybe that's explained somewhere in there.
Until the effects of economic inequality have really sunk in, it's probably hard to draw enough of a sample of people with that income that you get a very good break down.
I always feel like these are too generalized, or else I'm an outlier. Specifically, when I've got my living quarters decorated to my pleasure, it makes me so happy to hang out in them. The addition is going on four years old, and I love it. I love being back there, basking in it. It's so peaceful and great. Having houseplants makes me noticeably happier, too. (The kitchen and front half too, but those are newly enough completed that they don't substantiate my claim.)
But anyway, it's not "adjust and then become dissatisfied with the new normal", it's ongoing contentment with my living quarters, and it (subjectively) seems to make me ongoingly happy.
Clothes, to a lesser degree: I really like putting on the right outfit for the day. Like I was bitching the other day, I'm acutely aware of this when stuffed in these fucking maternity clothes.
Yeah, that's been my point about weather in California. Even after ten years, I noticed how great it was. Ditto my iPhone. Strangely, having had a dog, not having a dog has become an ongoing source of happiness. Conclusion: satisfied dickheads like to post at Unfogged.
How much happier would it make me to have a job that was meaningful and fulfilling? I have no idea! I've never had one, and at the age of 51, there's a very good chance I never will.
6: One of my few meager pleasures is proving Ogged to be wrong.
Conclusion: satisfied dickheads like to post at Unfogged.
This only works if you ignore all the presidential posts.
Having houseplants makes me noticeably happier, too.
There's a whole separate literature on this, with results showing things like people in hospital rooms with a view of trees do better than those with a view of a brick wall.
A lot of this grew out of E.O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis. I'm pretty sure what Wilson really wanted to prove is that everyone innately loves ants, but he knew that was a stretch.
Does it still work if the house plants died from neglect months ago and you still haven't removed their dried remains? Asking for a friend.
Yes, unless the remains are in a salad spinner.
This only works if you ignore all the presidential posts.
Those are comments, plebe.
Does it still work if the house plants died from neglect months ago and you still haven't removed their dried remains? Asking for a friend.
The secret to houseplants is that they are your bitches, and if they can't hang with you, their loss. Replace those dead plants until you find something hearty enough to weather your neglect. They weren't worth your time and love, anyway. Keep replacing. Replace replace replace.
14 makes me think hg is squirting a bunch of kids old school style on the assumption that not all are going to make it.
"Nobody puts baby in the salad spinner."
17: Yeah, this. In our case, there's been a vacations/redoing the kitchen tradeoff thing happening in my head. And while the kitchen really is a scandal (wobbly countertops, cabinets in which parts of the kids' old Thomas the Tank Engine wooden traintracks are essential structural elements), I've been cooking in it like that for fifteen years now, and I figure having it nice wouldn't actually make that much different.
To the OP: I have a one hour commute, and it's not that bad. Of course, it's not an hour of driving, so I can read or knit, and it's more reliable timing-wise than an hour of driving (I'm assuming. I figure any hour-long trip in a car most places is actually maybe 50 min, but maybe an hour and 40 min, depending on the day, which has to be terribly annoying. A fifty mile, no traffic commute would probably be not that bad.)
A fifty mile, no traffic commute would probably be not that bad.
I've done this. It still sucks.
22: But LB's probably imagining it in a Dodge Challenger.
You can get a whole new kitchen at IKEA for like $5,000, not counting appliances and installation and fittings and lights and the floor and lukefish storage.
Mine is a 30 minute, no traffic, countryside commute, and I generally don't mind it. It's often my only time to myself, and when I've got too much going on, I force myself to turn off the radio and try to chill out and relax, and it is kind of refreshing. Also pretty sunsets, etc.
Why can't I get a 40% raise and a job where I walk to work?
Or a 40% raise and a job where I walk for work, like I just wander around my fair city and environs. That would be nice.
I would also accept the bestowal of a large fortune.
They calculated that you would need a 40% raise to offset the added misery of a one-hour commute.
As opposed to zero commute? Or an additional hour on top of a current half-hour commute? Surely that matters??
Also, it seems like this tradeoff would necessarily be heavily dependent on both your current level of income and your current amount of leisure time.
27: What does parking enforcement pay?
You can get a whole new kitchen at IKEA for like $5,000
I'm not sure my marriage could survive assembling an entire kitchen from flat-packs.
You've probably got a coworker who has sexual fantasies about you. Try that.
30: I don't think we have any on foot but we have ones on bikes and they make like 19 bucks an hour plus benefits.
Nineteen bucks an hour for riding a bike around all day actually sounds pretty good.
34: Not a bad gig at all considering the cost of housing, hundreds of sunny days a year, and the city health insurance is way cheap. We're paying less than 50 a month for a family plan.
Nineteen bucks an hour for riding a bike around all day actually sounds pretty good.
Not quite sure that's enough considering you have to live with being one of the most hated people in the city.
You mean because of the cycling or the parking ticket writing?
My wife has recently been worrying that we're saving too much for retirement. Given all the scare stories thrown at you by, well, the retirement investment industry, I didn't think that was possible.
My wife has recently been worrying that we're saving too much for retirement.
Tell her about the power of compounding returns over long-term investment horizons.
Now that I don't drive much and own a house with a driveway, I really don't see what everybody has against parking enforcement.
I've never gotten a parking ticket (or any other kind) that I didn't deserve. In fact, quite the opposite; ive never had any beef with parking enforcement.
I've gotten two I deserved, two I didn't and two that technically were right but were total bullshit. The two I didn't deserve were quickly annulled. It's the bullshit ones that make people hate enforcers.
I think 3 out of my last 5 parking tickets have been bullshit. The worst is when they tow your car and its bullshit.
I feel like Heebie-Geebie and Ogged in 5 and 6: I get a lot of enduring happiness from stuff! My little house makes me happy every day -- when you have vivid memories of grad school apartments, and never really expected to live anywhere very different, owning a house *is* a pretty powerful experience.
On the other hand, the stuff about commuting to work reinforces my prejudices, which also makes me happy.
27-28: I'm holding out for my Endowed Chair in Puttering.
But I'm pretty sceptical of life satisfaction surveys based on self-reports anyway. It seems naive to assume that people stop being concerned with self-presentation, competition and status just because the context is an anonymous psych survey.
But I'm pretty sceptical of life satisfaction surveys based on self-reports anyway.
I'd be curious to know what measure you think would be better.
Reinforcing prejudices while commuting to work is why Rush is on the radio.
From The New Yorker Annals of Transport "There and Back Again: The soul of the commuter. by Nick Paumgarten April 16, 2007
"I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is," Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told me. (Putnam wrote the best-seller "Bowling Alone," about the disintegration of American civic life.) "There's a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness."
Three years ago, two economists at the University of Zurich, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, released a study called "Stress That Doesn't Pay: The Commuting Paradox." They found that, if your trip is an hour each way, you'd have to make forty per cent more in salary to be as "satisfied" with life as a noncommuter is. (Their data come from Germany ... ) The commuting paradox reflects the notion that many people, who are supposedly rational (according to classical economic theory, at least), commute even though it makes them miserable. They are not, in the final accounting, adequately compensated.
Robert Putnam explains why the people who live in the exurbs are assholes and says I should talk to strangers on the bus. Hooray.
urple - well, I don't have a better idea. What's being assessed is a person's reflective verdict on their quality of life, and there isn't going to be a way of getting at that that sidesteps how they want to think about, and present, themselves. But I do hope some fiendishly clever social scientist eventually figures out how to measure and deduct the bullshit/bluffing/stiff-upper-lip factor, because I worry that it could be huge, and much huger in some cultures than others, so that the international comparisons people base on these surveys are probably worthless.
Nah, the article was mostly about people with mega commutes, > 2 1/2 hours each way everyday. They're not coming from exurbs but from different time zones.
I have no idea where Peters Township is, so it could be in another timezone. I suppose I could look it up, but I don't want to accidentally learn that it isn't named after penises.
I'd imagine no commuters are pretty miserable what with sleeping on their desks.
57: Weren't there Republican Congressmen who did that during the week and flew home on weekends. They wanted to prove that they weren't becoming part of the Washington Establishment.
Or their wives figured they'd run straight to a prostitute on their first night away from home.
I thought a lot of these studies relied on the carry-a-beeper-and-sample-your-mood-over-the-course-of-a-day data. So, self-reported but less susceptible to biases of memory.
My little house makes me happy every day
I've totally been surfing house listings lately. My sister has had an assfull of the cost of living and traffic in So Cal and her husband's interviewing at a couple companies up here. Their tiny house was 510K before they fixed it up. She's losing her mind at how she could get a renovated turn of the century home near downtown well under 400.
Like this or this. And there's crazy old mansions for what she spent on a tiny corner lot house down there.
Eventually there will be a scandal where a megacommuting Congressman is entertaining hookers on the folding office cot under his desk. The optics are better if the hookers are flown in from the home district.
Re 60, I thought the beeper-type surveys were testing for affective experience rather than life satisfaction, and that was how they found out how far the two come apart. The article isn't clear, though. Anyway my worry isn't so much about memory as self-deception. It takes a special kind of person to admit that you're a lot less satisfied with your life then the average (whatever you guess the average is going to be, and who could help doing a *little* guessing and calibrating when asked?).
61: That last is built strikingly like our house, it seems, and it's weird to see one so "Westernized" on the inside since even our neighbors who did updates haven't put in wood paneling on the third floor or added saunas. Even with all the modernizing touches that house has and the original features ours does, there's no way it would ever sell for that much in a housing market with any connection to the current one, though neighbors who've done a lot of renovation are always hopeful.
Lee has an hour commute now and claims it's making her miserable, though the time change has made it better because now she drives in the light both ways. I keep trying convince her only having to make it three times a week should lift her spirits and next semester most weeks it will only be two, but apparently that much time in the car is just annoying. I know I'm not thrilled about how long I spend dropping the girls at school every morning, though that's better now that Selah doesn't cry every time the older ones get out of the car. I guess I'm on the side claiming it's the little things that make a difference, then.
61: You people must be made of money. For less than that, you could get old or new.
I have a car commute that takes anywhere from 30 to 60 to go about 12 miles and it's horrible.
65: Well, my house didn't cost what those do. My brother in law makes decent money (UX interaction design) but he also has some trust money they used to buy their house. Also, those links are pretty nice houses in the city proper and close to downtown. The last one in particular is just a few blocks from both an elementary and a middle school as well as the university. And your town has a lot more unemployment and a lot less sun and Rocky Mountains.
Anyway, those two houses I linked to were within a quick walk of downtown and the various sports stadia.
70: My sister has three small children. I think she's looking for sunny weather + quick access to the mountains more than the sports. And of course if never hurts to have family in town and a connection in the local police force.
Obviously home improvements only lead to lasting happiness if I design them. I'm surprised the study doesn't make this explicit.
I cannot take credit for CA weather.
"I cannot take credit for CA weather..." In writing
I understand that it is very popular and that all life on Earth depends upon it (go fuck yourself chemosynthetic microorganism), but I don't understand why the sun has to be so "there" all the time. Behind a nice veil of clouds is better.
Speaking of weather, I wish it would fucking snow already.
The students must have got bored waiting and either rented a snow machine or really modified a freezer. I was driving my campus this morning and they remains a two (very short) snow-covered sled runs were plain to see.
The forecast for tonight calls for a chance of freezing rain.
This is a nice starter house. That's a very quiet street. Also a very steep street. Not very good for bus commuting, but only 15 minutes by car to either campus or downtown. Near one nice and two very shitty bars.
80.cont'd: only one or two weird extra holes in the basement.
Around here you'd be lucky to find a crappy studio apartment in a building run by a neglectful management company for twice the estimated mortgage on that house.
In completely unrelated news, I've been reevaluating the long term prospects of me staying in the Bay Area. But I don't know where I'd go, what with my family being nearby (something I actually like).
Another nice, affordable place in the same area is this one. I do wonder if you can't hear too much road noise there. Maybe not as it is 100 feet or so above the road.
Although I guess if you were a couple you could get a decent one bedroom apartment for about twice that mortgage, assuming you each pay half.
81: That's not the basement-corpse price. It would probably be close to $200,000 if it had central air and a detached garage.
This one is just around the corner for the one in 80. It looks like somebody is trying to flip it. I think they went a little overboard on the tile given the area and the fact that is isn't brick.
Some of the rooms have nice, original wood, but I think this guy is kind of on the high side.
This one is a bit more expensive, but clearly worth it. It almost makes me wish I would have applied myself when I was younger.
I can deal with Greenfield's hilliness, but it's not a great commute given the busing routes and the walk to shopping is on the far side for most of the neighborhood. Too bad, as we saw some houses we liked there and they're mostly great deals.
You really need to look at the house in 89. Probably you'll recognize the exterior.
If sectional sofas didn't exist, that house would have invented them.
Three giant sectional sofas, two big screen TVs, and a tanning bed on story three.
People on Facebook keep talking about deer that their sons' have killed and I'm still too sick to go to a bar. In case anyone is wondering about all the real estate links. I'm bored, is why.
91: Wow. That's amazing. I haven't seen that before, since that's a well-hidden street and far above our price range. We did look at the house just next door to that one in 94--much more reasonable than that, except the parking in the back was shared with neighbors and it was at-grade with the living room with no separation.
The house's front is on a hidden street, but the back is easily visible from Beechwood.
Maybe it isn't that easy to see if you drive. It's on my jogging route.
Oh, yeah. Not sure how I missed that. Still doesn't stick out in my memory, which is bothersome as that's a weird house. I must not drive on that part of Beechwood much.
The price is dropping at 18% a year. All I need to do is wait and buy it sometime during the Hillary administration.
I should clearly move to Pittsburgh. Are prices similar in Philly?
Probably a bit higher, but still quite cheap compared to most other large cities.
I wouldn't know. For Pittsburgh, you need to keep in mind that renting isn't as cheap as owning and salaries aren't great.
Philadelphia freeways are terror-inducing horrors.
The deal with Philly is that it was once a very large city but it lost a lot of population during the white flight era and has only recently started to regain it, so there's tons of housing stock relative to the population and rents are quite low except in a few neighborhoods that have already gentrified and become trendy. (I don't know anything about the cost of buying rather than renting, but I suspect the dynamics are similar.) The rents my sister has paid there have made me envious, both when I was in NJ and now that I'm in AK.
I've never had any problems with the freeways, but there's good public transportation so you don't necessarily have to deal with them anyway.
New Jersey freeways could be worse. I don't think I have driven the worst of those.
NJ also has good public transportation, though.
108: You called my bluff. No one would ever say that.
I once drove to Atlantic City. I don't recall the freeway being bad. The beach was sort of tacky and way too humid.
The hotel room had a mirror on the ceiling over the bed, which is not something I have encountered before or since.
112: Didn't think so.
113: Aren't most beaches pretty humid?
I mean, there's an ocean right there.
The hotel room had a mirror on the ceiling over the bed, which is not something I have encountered before or since.
It is a rare luxury to be able to tie one's bow tie while still in bed.
The hotel room had a mirror on the ceiling over the bed, which is not something I have encountered before or since.
It is a rare luxury to be able to tie one's bow tie while still in bed.
117 et seq.: that is not the purpose to which the mirror is generally put, you know.
generally: aaaaah all you fuckers are reminding me that I live in the single most expensive city in the world, since I cannot afford to buy anything at all, and had to move out of my house that I adored and that made me happy every time I went into the bathroom, with its high slanting ceiling and the paintings of the national cathedral and key park I had hung there, everything white except one row of black tiles at the top, and my huge beautiful kitchen, and my own little pool with a teak deck and a hut of attap thatch and now I have moved to a condo in the suburbs--insofar as there are suburbs in a single city of five million people which there are not--and I pay 4200 narnian dollars a month in rent. and I have not hung my mirrors properly and I have not changed the curtains which I loathe and I have lived here for one year now. I am on a mission to fix things before I decorate for christmas. my stereo is also broken. and my business is going out of business and my indonesian property is in a terrifying legal limbo because my lawyer never took the seller's name off the deed and the company she founded for me is basically a shell too hollow to survive. also I have spent an unnerving amount of money on bullshit and am worried I have plunged my family into ruin with my general fuck-up ways. not my kids' college education because that's paid for, but, like, fuck.
I will see your Singapore and raise you London.
Phone froze up twice, deleted comment. Fuck it. Insomnia. Thought there was an earthquake. Probably dreamed it. Hating new OS on phone and new autocorrect which just thought I meant J&R instead of "it." Fuck J&R too I guess.
Third try on comment: my 35-minute walk/shuttle/walk commute was qualitatively much different from my 35-minute drive on highway/drive through ugly little town commute which actively diminishes the quality of my life.
Also I have nice things I would not trade for stupid yuppie adventure/experience fantasies. Keep your Himalayas.
Another thing I would prefer to climbing a mountain is a heater that doesn't clank around like Marley's ghost.
Aren't most beaches pretty humid?
I mean, there's an ocean right there.
No, most beaches are remarkably non-humid. I think the salt in the air acts as a desiccant. Or were you joking.
121: At least you can piss on elevators.
113. The horror of NJ interstates (parkways, turnpikes, etc.) is in direct proportion to their proximity to NYC, so getting to Atlantic City from PA takes you through the least bad ones.
The interior of 89 is exactly as I imagined it, only more so. Tremendous.
I'm thinking of going for a look. I'm just trying to decide if I want to see it badly enough to deal with 200 phone calls from a real estate person.
Would you ask a lot about the cost to knock it down and rebuild with cob?
Philistine. Some things you own to preserve for the next generation.
121: we're #1! we're #1! you guys are #2, then tokyo. but it's cheaper here than london in many ways because food is so much cheaper. like, incredibly good freshly prepared south indian food, better than I've ever had in madras, all you can eat (rice, but you have to pay extra for more naan or chapatti), for ND6.50. also our public transit system is cleaner and cheaper. including the taxis. it's just the real estate thing where we are spending I think half husband x's pay on rent.
re: 132
We spend significantly more than half my pay on rent, unfortunately.
It may be much, much cheaper for me here, but I can't buy booze in grocery stores. At least not in most of them.