Are you resource-maximising when you should be living?
In his excellent book The Uncontrollability of the World, the German social theorist Hartmut Rosa makes a subtle but crucial point about the good life: we’re prone to thinking of it as a matter of maximising our resources, when really it isn’t that at all.
He’s not merely repeating the timeworn argument that money and possessions won’t make you happy. Rather, his point is that any attempt at a meaningful existence is undermined if your main focus is always on increasing your access to things – even if the “things” in question are wonderful experiences, deep relationships, and so forth, as opposed to sports cars and jewelry.
This helped me see what rubs me the wrong way about a whole crop of recent “happiness” books: they’re written as if a meaningful life consists in spending it expanding your circle of friends, improving your equanimity through meditation, learning the skills to become more creative, and so forth. Nope. A circle of friends, a stable mind and better creative skills are all very useful for a happy life!
But happiness consists in taking pleasure from time spent with those friends; from relishing the absence of anxiety that comes with a calmer mind; or from putting those creative skills to use – from cashing in the resources, you might almost say, rather than from acquiring them. Don’t spend so much of your life amassing the ingredients for enjoying it that you forget to enjoy it.
- From Oliver Burkeman's newsletter today
