More thoughts on money and happiness [non-China]

There's an interesting post in The Atlantic about the fears and anxieties of the super-rich which adds some anecdotal weight to the argument I made in this post. I had made the analogy to a video game:

In a video game, when you're playing on easy, just beating the objectives soon becomes boring. You start asking yourself what the point of playing the game is...

The author of the Atlantic article puts it this way:

If anything, the rich stare into the abyss a bit more starkly than the rest of us. We can always indulge in the thought that a little more money would make our lives happier—and in many cases it’s true. But the truly wealthy know that appetites for material indulgence are rarely sated. No yacht is so super, nor any wine so expensive, that it can soothe the soul or guarantee one’s children won’t grow up to be creeps. When the rich man takes his last sip of Château d’Yquem 1959, he tips back the wineglass to find at its bottom an unforeseen melancholy. Like Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, he notes in horror, “I have drunk, and seen the spider.” It is as terrifying a realization in Saint-Tropez as it is anywhere else.

In addition to the article itself, "reticentb"'s comment is worth reading.

Edit: On the other hand, some kinds of experiences, such as described in this story, may be worse than anything I'll ever to go through.

Edit 2: An interesting suggestion from a fellow blogger is to use goal-setting to make life harder. To me it seems that this should work: if I had a lot of money I would continue to spend most of my time learning Chinese, merely using my financial resources for transportation and other things.

Edit 3: A powerful look at what it's like to be poor.

Life on "Easy Mode" [non-China]

I came across an interesting essay which makes the analogy between being a straight white male and playing a video game on the "Easy" setting. The metaphor is a good one, but I'm skeptical about the assumption that in life, playing on the "Easy" setting is necessarily the most desirable.

According to John Scalzi, the author of the essay,

In The Real World, you don’t unlock any rewards or receive any benefit for playing on higher difficulty settings. The game is just harder, and potentially a lot less fun.

But in a video game, playing on a harder setting is frequently more fun than playing on the easiest one. Why? Often, not because doing so unlocks any rewards, but because it's more of a challenge, and many of us like challenges. Is "The Real World" any different?

This gets boring fast

Scalzi writes,

Well, here’s the other thing about The Real World: You only get to play it once. So why make it more difficult than it has to be? Your goal is to win the game, not make it difficult.

Again, I think this isn't quite true, either for video games or for real life. People don't play video games for the sake of winning them; they play to have fun. Achieving the goals of the game is only a means to that end. The goals in The Real World are probably even less important, since we don't even know what they are! How do you win the game of life? By achieving wealth? Sex? Power? Love? Wisdom? People have been arguing about that question for a long time, and don't seem likely to reach a consensus any time soon.

Perhaps the only thing most of us can agree on is that we want something called "happiness", which ISN'T any particular objective in the game, but is rather a BYPRODUCT of playing the game. Just as video game players don't really care about "beating the game" so much as they do about enjoying playing it, people playing The Real World aren't really looking for wealth, sexual satisfaction, power, love, or wisdom, but for the happiness they believe will come as a byproduct of achieving those things.

So what difficulty setting is most conducive to producing enjoyment/happiness? In the case of video games, I'd say that playing on a medium difficulty setting is the most fun. Too easy, and the game is boring. Too hard, and the game is no fun at all.

Frustrating

The latter part of the metaphor definitely applies in the case of life: There's nothing fun about playing on the "impossible" setting, whether you're starving, clinically depressed, or living with abusive parents. But what about the other extreme? Is it possible to play The Real World on too easy of a setting? In a video game, when you're playing on easy, just beating the objectives soon becomes boring. You start asking yourself what the point of playing the game is, and looking for other reasons to keep on playing. And if you don't find any, you stop playing the game.

In the game of life, some very smart and very gifted people have gone through the same process and ended up running out of reasons. For them, playing the game on easy was no fun. Are the rest of us privileged people in fact better players? Have we actually succeeded in figuring out how to obtain happiness from this minimally challenging game? Or are we just better at distracting ourselves?

Are they the lucky ones?

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Some questions for discussion [thanks to Ruth Feldman] (2012/11/21):
1) Are video games more or less fun if you realize that you don't care about the game itself? Is life?
2) Are philosophical questions about happiness relevant to persons experiencing racism or other real-world deprivations? [thanks to Aleph, below]
3) Is it possible to completely achieve the superficial goals of life? If so, would attaining them make one happy?