The Impossible Trinity

(For those who don’t know and do care, the impossible trinity, also known as the trilemma, is a concept in international economics that my brain managed to retain from college.)

EDIT: This guy claims to have solved the problem by creating the ultimate nutritional shake, which he dubs “Soylent.” Yeah, I find that a bit off-putting. I have trouble understanding how he saves time with this, given that he needs to weigh the ingredients with a gram scale every time he mixes the drink, but I guess that still takes less time than most cooked meals. If it could be made widely available with the proportions just right, it would be very convenient indeed.

Happiness Isn’t (Just) About Being Selfish

Despite what some would have you think.

An article in The Atlantic called “There’s More to Life than Being Happy” has been making the rounds among my Facebook friends. It discusses a recent study, soon to be published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, that seeks to distinguish a meaningful life from a simply happy one. Framing this discussion is the story of Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who developed an approach to psychotherapy that focuses on finding meaning in one’s life.

Though the article contains a lot of ideas that resonate with me, I didn’t re-post it on Facebook because something about it was bothering me. The article describes the differences between happiness and meaningfulness in a way that suggests the two concepts are not just distinct, but opposed. “The researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different,” the article reports. “Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a ‘taker’ while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a ‘giver.'”

This struck me as a bit simplistic and more than a bit judgmental. I suspected that the researchers had treated the concepts of “happiness” and “meaningfulness” with more nuance than the Atlantic article, and I was right.

“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham, http://www.phdcomics.com. The Atlantic article is actually pretty good compared to a lot of science reporting. Click to see full-size comic.

In their write-up of the study, the researchers state that happiness and meaningfulness “overlap substantially” (emphasis mine). They remind the reader multiple times that although they focus on the differences between happiness and meaningfulness, the two are closely related. People who report more meaningfulness generally also report more happiness, and vice versa. This is not the impression one gets from reading the Atlantic article.

Happiness and meaningfulness are different things, however. To tease them apart, the researchers controlled for meaningfulness when looking at happiness, and they controlled for happiness when looking at meaningfulness. If you take meaningfulness out of the equation, what is associated with greater happiness? And if you take happiness out of the equation, what is associated with more meaningfulness?

Don’t take the above diagram too seriously; it doesn’t precisely reflect the study (which was correlational, meaning we can’t conclude that any of those things cause happiness, only that they tend to go together), but it helps to illustrate a point. Suppose we ask: is helping others associated with happiness? According to the Atlantic article, people who help others report having more meaningful lives, but “happiness is all about giving the self what it wants.” The article quotes the researchers as saying,  “If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need.” What the article doesn’t fully articulate is that when the researchers say “pure happiness,” what they mean is happiness in the absence of meaning. In the diagram above, “helping others” is linked to happiness, but only through meaning. If you control for meaning —  that is, if you remove it as a factor — some paths to happiness are blocked, and the paths that remain open are the “selfish” ones.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what the researchers wrote (p. 10, emphasis mine):

More helping was strongly related to meaningfulness, but it had a nonsignificant trend in the opposite direction with happiness (as if helping others detracted from happiness). To be sure, in the simple (uncorrected) analyses, meaningfulness and happiness were both positively correlated with saying that one generally tries to help the needy, meaningfulness: r(390) = .24, p < .001; happiness: r(390) = .11, p < .05. But most of that appears to be due to the impact of meaningfulness. That is, helping others increases meaning, and that benefit carries over to increase happiness too — but with the increase in meaning controlled for, helping others has if anything a negative impact on happiness.

In line with conventional wisdom (and my own experience), giving to others increases meaningfulness, which in turn is associated with greater happiness. Happiness in general is not about being a “taker” (although getting things you want will also contribute to happiness).

To be sure, meaningful activities are not guaranteed to make us happy. The study offers a composite sketch of what a meaningful but unhappy life would look like. It would be “seriously involved in difficult undertakings” and “marked by ample worry, stress, argument, and anxiety.” It would involve “deep thinking,” reflecting on past challenges, and planning for future ones. The religious missionary and the political activist live highly meaningful lives, the authors write, but they may not be happy. (I would like to point out that while this is possible, it is also quite possible that they are very happy and fulfilled.) Such people may nevertheless make important contributions to society.

I’m learning about the meaningful but unhappy life in a class called “Trauma in Clinical Practice.” We’ve been reading about an experience that is variously known as “secondary traumatization,” “trauma exposure response,” and “compassion fatigue”: the exhaustion, or bitterness, or helplessness, that comes from doing very meaningful but very difficult work in the helping professions. It is not something to aspire to, nor is it a sign of being weak or ill-suited to one’s work. And while the researchers and the Atlantic author may find this life admirable, it is not sustainable; it hurts the helper’s work in addition to making him or her unhappy. People in this predicament may have to focus on happiness for a while if they want to continue their meaningful work.

Budgeting: When It’s Not Enough to Refrain from Getting Toys

I always thought budgeting meant looking at your income, crunching some numbers, and making sure you spend less than you earn, with some money left over for savings if at all possible. The thing is, in graduate school, it is literally impossible to spend less than you earn. Last semester I made around $400 a month at my federal work study job. Even if I could find a place in Chicago to rent at that price (it would be hours from school, and I’d probably get shot on my way to the train), well, there goes my ENTIRE INCOME to rent. Hungry? Too bad, asshole! You don’t have twenty bucks for a month’s supply of absolutely nutrition-free ramen noodles. If you had twenty bucks, you spent it on electricity so you wouldn’t have to study in the corner of Starbucks, praying no one would notice that you didn’t buy coffee. Oh, and I hope you weren’t planning to do laundry, ever.

You should never pay more than 33 cents for these. 24 cents if you can wait for a sale.

Fortunately, I’m a child of privilege. No, I don’t have a trust fund, but I guess you could say I’m a 529 plan baby. My parents put away a lot of money for my education, and thanks to my college’s generous financial aid, there’s just enough left to pay my rent until I’m out on internship. They cover my phone bill, too, bless them (though I don’t have a smartphone or a data plan).

You might think that $400 a month would be plenty for non-rent essentials. I thought so, anyway. It turns out there’s more to budgeting money than budgeting money: you’ve got to budget time, too. If you want to save money on food, you’ve got to allocate time for grocery shopping and cooking, time for preparing lunch to bring to school.  That’s all well and good at the beginning of the semester, when morale is high and work load is relatively low. When midterms hit, and you’re having enough trouble concentrating even when you’re just sitting and staring at your Word document, when you’re constantly tired and constantly anxious, the idea of stepping away from your work for an hour or two to cook and eat just feels impossible. To me, anyway. I know it can all be managed, because one of my classmates keeps posting pictures on Facebook of the meals she cooks for herself and her husband.

This is what she looks like.

On the other hand, there are the classmates who apparently go out to a restaurant once a week. Seriously, how the hell are you people doing it? I can only guess they’re using student loans, or maybe they’re just more privileged than I am in parental resources. Student loans for living expenses make budgeting weird. I cannot get my brain to accept that student loan money goes on the “income” side of the budget equation. It’s imaginary money! Like the spending limit on your credit card! It’s negative money. It’s ex money. It’s pining for the federal coffers.

If you don’t know why this is here, who are you and why are you reading my blog?

I joined Mint.com in an effort to manage my money better. It told me what I already knew: I overspend on food. It isn’t enough to refrain from buying the Apple products and caramel macchiatos that my non graduate school friends (and, inexplicably, some of my graduate school classmates) seems to enjoy. I need to get back to cooking. I was much better about cooking and packing lunch during my first semester. I also got much worse grades during my first semester. I think this is a more valid correlation than the boyfriend/grades correlation my dad keeps talking about, especially since the boyfriend is still around and I’m now getting As.