Thanks for posting. That’s great food for thought.
The article makes an assumption that when you engage in a competitive activity with an objective measure of success the subjective level of satisfaction is fully defined by your standing on the virtual ladder. If you spend ten years of your life trying to climb the ladder and don’t even get to the median, you “fail”. You’ve chosen poorly.
In practice, your level of satisfaction, your happiness, is a more complex function. Whichever activity you engage in, you may get a certain amount of happiness or suffering simply from doing it: some people like playing guitar and doing muscle ups, others hate every second of it. You also get happiness points from the absolute level of your progress: all else being equal, knowing that you can do 5 muscle ups makes you happier than knowing you can do only 3. Then there is happiness from making progress. And finally, you can get kicks from comparing yourself to others.
How all these different values are combined to produce a single value of happiness is different for each individual. The article makes perfect sense for a person for whom the last component, comparison to others, is not only dominant, but also skewed. If winning in a zero-sum game gives you +1 happiness while losing gives you −10, you should avoid any activity that has a well-known objective metric of success.
Thanks for posting. That’s great food for thought.
The article makes an assumption that when you engage in a competitive activity with an objective measure of success the subjective level of satisfaction is fully defined by your standing on the virtual ladder. If you spend ten years of your life trying to climb the ladder and don’t even get to the median, you “fail”. You’ve chosen poorly.
In practice, your level of satisfaction, your happiness, is a more complex function. Whichever activity you engage in, you may get a certain amount of happiness or suffering simply from doing it: some people like playing guitar and doing muscle ups, others hate every second of it. You also get happiness points from the absolute level of your progress: all else being equal, knowing that you can do 5 muscle ups makes you happier than knowing you can do only 3. Then there is happiness from making progress. And finally, you can get kicks from comparing yourself to others.
How all these different values are combined to produce a single value of happiness is different for each individual. The article makes perfect sense for a person for whom the last component, comparison to others, is not only dominant, but also skewed. If winning in a zero-sum game gives you +1 happiness while losing gives you −10, you should avoid any activity that has a well-known objective metric of success.