Cyberman №5 — Time will make you happier than money, success follows happiness, change your life story, an audio-visual performance by Richie Hawtin
Welcome fellow Cyber people.
Every week, this newsletter will bring you a few interesting articles about contemporary human beings, machines, and interactions between them.
It will be curated to bring different perspectives to these subjects, to ask important questions and maybe suggest a few possible answers.
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This issue is about happiness.
Time Can Make You Happier Than Money
Comparing the time-money trade-off to other well-established happiness factors, the researchers found that valuing time over money brought double the magnitude of happiness related to materialism in general and happiness known to accrue from high parental income.
“People who value time make decisions based on meaning versus money,” says study leader Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. “They choose to do things because they want to, not because they have to.”
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“Money can buy some happiness — but only up to a point, research has shown. In the United States, the threshold is about $95,000. People making up to that amount annually tend to report being happier than people who make less. “Once the threshold was reached, further increases in income tended to be associated with reduced life satisfaction and a lower level of well-being,” researchers stated last year in the journal Nature Human Behavior.”
Happiness doesn’t follow success: it’s the other way round
Work hard, become successful, then you’ll be happy. At least, that’s what many of us were taught by our parents, teachers, and peers. The problem is that the equation might be backward.
“People who frequently experience positive emotions tend to go above and beyond for their organizations; they’re also less likely to be absent from work or quit their jobs. People with better wellbeing also tend to earn bigger salaries than those with lower wellbeing.”
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“Positive emotions are also predictors of later achievement and earnings. In one study, happy 18-year-olds were more likely to be working in prestigious, satisfying jobs and to feel financially secure by age 26. In another, people who were more cheerful when starting college went on to have higher incomes.”
What old story about yourself are you still believing? Here’s how to find it and change it
Many of us hold deeply ingrained beliefs about ourselves that are simply not true. You can start to free yourself from them by editing your narrative.
“There are many things in our lives that we have little control over — the news, the weather, the traffic, the soup of the day at our local café. But among the things that we can control, there’s a big one: our story.
This narrative is not the one that contains the objective facts of our lives; instead, it’s “the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you are and how everything always plays out,” says psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor John Sharp.”
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“Some emotionally difficult scenes are way over-included — just think of all the things you can’t let go of — and other scenes are deleted, such as times when things did go well. The worst part about the false truth … is that it becomes our self-fulfilling prophecy, the basis of what we expect from ourselves in the future.”
For the end, listen to (and watch) CLOSE COMBINED, an audio-visual performance by Richie Hawtin:
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