Economic Wisdom to Apply in Your Twenties

Chapter 87

Chapter 11 Section 3 Your own happiness must always be based on the pain of others
One day, the boss called you to the office, sent you a valuable red envelope, and told you that because of your outstanding work performance during this period, the company decided to give you a special reward.At the same time, the boss repeatedly warned: This is for you alone, so don't tell others.

Holding the heavy red envelope, a sense of accomplishment and happiness arises spontaneously.But soon you discovered that the boss not only sent red envelopes to other people, but some people’s red envelopes were bigger than yours, so the happiness of getting the red envelopes was too late to relish, and soon fell into a kind of loss and pain middle.

Has something similar happened in your life?In fact, whether a person is happy or not depends not only on how much utility the individual obtains to satisfy his own desires, but also on the comparison with others.By comparison, vested utility and initial desire will change.For example, your initial desire is to build a thatched house into a tiled one. It is said that when you replace the thatched house with a tiled one, you should feel happy. Then disappear.You want to build taller buildings than your neighbors.

Expansion of desire is the root of human unhappiness.And the expansion of desire comes from comparing with others.Decades ago, Henry Louis Menken, editor of the Baltimore Philosopher, said that wealth is when you earn $100 more than your wife's brother-in-law.Behavioral economists say that part of the reason we're getting richer and not happier is that we're constantly comparing ourselves to those who are materially better off.

Before the invention of the telephone, people could still live happily without a telephone, but now if there is no telephone, the scope of your communication with others will be limited, so people without a telephone want to have their own telephone.In the past, it was possible to travel without a car, but now, you have to squeeze the bus, have to struggle to buy train tickets, can't afford a private car, and at worst have to have a bicycle.From the perspective of education, in the past, it was not impossible to live without going to school, but now everyone is doing their best to go to a better school in order to obtain a better social pass and a stronger survival than others ability.The development of society has made our desires continue to grow, and it has also filled our hearts with anxiety.

Now that society as a whole has developed, even the poorest people live better than ordinary rich people in ancient times.Someone once made a comparison, saying that now most families use flush toilets, while the unrivaled king of the ancient Roman Empire could only squat in a latrine made of stone slabs.But despite this, modern people still pick up the bowl to eat meat, and put down their chopsticks to scold their mothers.

Sharpe said: "If you want to be happy, there is one very simple thing you can do, and that is to compare yourself with people who are not as good as you, who are poorer, have smaller houses, and have worse cars. The problem is, many people Always doing the opposite, they're always comparing themselves to people who are better than them, and that creates a lot of frustration and feeling like they're not happy."
Robert Frank, a professor at Cornell University, said that when asked, would you rather earn $11 for yourself and $20 for others, or would you rather earn $10 for yourself while others only earn $8.5? More Americans choose the latter. They would rather earn less than others, and would rather not earn more than others.

Those who find it difficult to climb to the top of the pyramid can only comfort themselves by saying "there is more than the top, but more than the bottom".If we compare, we will feel pain; if we compare, we will feel happy.And those below us suffer from being compared with us.In this sense, a person's happiness is based on the pain of others; and a person's pain is subordinate to the happiness of others.

Wisdom Trivia: "Catching Up to Your Neighbors" Affects Happiness
The Independent reports: Have you ever thought about moving to a nicer neighborhood in the city, where people are rich, drive fancy cars and go on vacation a lot?If you have this kind of thought, then you really have to think again, because according to the latest research results, living with rich people will cause disappointment, and you will feel jealous of your neighbors, and your mood will be worse than before you moved. Oops.

Not being able to "catch up with your neighbors" is a major cause of unhappiness than was previously thought.The findings, released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, show that wealthy neighbors can make hard-pressed residents more disappointed with their "housing, finances and leisure time."

Experts believe that the British have always had a tradition of being jealous of the rich, so the negative effects of being neighbors with the rich are even stronger."Our happiness is inversely proportional to how rich our neighbors are, so if you're surrounded by rich neighbors, you're going to be unhappy," said Elzo Lutmer, a professor of economics at Harvard University who was involved in the study.

(End of this chapter)