Matt notices part of David Brooks’ stat-spewing on what affects happiness, a statistic that should actually give people pause.
The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting.
To this, Matt notes:
Brooks doesn’t pivot from this into any real policy specifics.
To which I say, of course he doesn’t. Because the lede in that story, and the subtle implication throughout, is that women having careers is bad for them, because they need to spend all their time at home catering to and probably monitoring their husbands to keep them from cheating. Because even a man who wears Nazi gear is the sort of catch you need to hang on to, lest you become a crazy old spinster. Picky ladies are lonely ladies, after all!
But while Brooks sees all happiness studies as a tool to bash independent women, Matt’s actually willing to think about policy implications. Since traffic not only makes global warming worse and eats up productivity, but it also makes people so unhappy, we should really work on reducing it through increased public transportation, telecommuting, and of course, congestion pricing. All great points, but to my mind, this unsurprising statistic about how traffic makes people so unhappy should be a reminder not to overrate the importance of happiness to people making decisions.
Focusing on what makes people happy is a big trend right now, and I generally applaud it because it has the potential to open people’s eyes and get them to look at mundane issues in new ways. But I don’t think it’s useful to assume that whatever increases people’s happiness is what they’re going to want. People often choose duty over joy, and with a lot of conservatives especially I’ve noticed a tendency to feel self-righteous because they don’t have as much happiness as others. People will marry people they don’t like, have children they don’t want, take jobs that make them hate their lives because they’re high status, or otherwise prioritize other desires over the desire to be happy. Many, many people choose living in fear over living with joy. I don’t think these people are stupid, and would necessarily prefer happiness if they were educated to the fact that it’s an option. Again, they may even see happiness as suspect, a sign you’re doing something wrong. (For example.)