I wasn’t disputing the importance of clothing (and a PUA was my guide for shopping in NYC), and I certainly wasn’t trying to argue that it would be better if people weren’t so judged as a reason not to wear better clothes!
I was disputing whether you need to spend at that level, buying from and heeding the very marketers lukeprog despises in 14. And the justification you gave, that “spending on lot in this area is different because it will really bring me happiness”, is not distinguishable from what people are thinking when they are consumerist.
At this point I think it might be productive to taboo “consumerist”; the connotations seem to be getting in the way.
What I’ve gotten out of the conversation so far is that (a) buying things based on an exaggerated estimate of their future value tends to make people less happy; (b) buying things based on an accurate estimation of their future value tends to make people happier, and (c) rationality techniques are helpful in deciding which is which. That seems entirely consistent to me, and using mass-market consumer guides to help estimate social capital while trying to ignore the actual marketing seems sane if a little risky.
I’d also be willing to entertain the possibility that a lot of people in the central LW demographic cluster are buying less than the optimum for their happiness. I’m almost certainly guilty of this; most of my net worth lies idle in my checking account, where it does no one any good.
Well, I’m not sure what concept—whatever the name—lukeprog is carving out when he warns about consumerism. His advice amounts to “don’t blow large amounts of money thinking that the stuff you buy will make you happy … unless I approve of it”. Whatever failure mode he was trying to encompass by talk of consumerism surely must cover buying straight out of a fashion magazine.
The fact that it “really works” is no defense—all acts of “blowing large amounts of money to be happy” seem like that!
Some people buy things just because they think buying things will make them happen, which is what the consumerism stuff is about. From your words I suspect you don’t quite grokk this, probably because it’s a very silly state to be in and you’re lucky enough not to be in it. (I’m having a bit of trouble with the concept myself, though it does happen to me too.)
The point about the clothing (“stuff he approves of”) would perhaps be more precisely expressed as “it’s a good idea to be dressed/accessorized/etc close to whatever silly thing society decides is ‘current fashion’ because this improves your interaction with other people”. The article expresses this as “buy fashionable clothing” because “buying” is the usual way of owning fashionable clothes. You can satisfy point 3 by making your own clothes or wearing (inconspicuously) cheap knock-offs or any other method; buying is not necessary, it’s just the usual method.
The apparent contradiction between 3 and 14 is a bit like the apparent contradiction in an (imaginary) article about digital photography that advises to pick a camera with at least 4 megapixels (i.e., worse than that is probably too low for good photos), but that you shouldn’t give in to the hype about megapixels (i.e., it’s not the only thing that’s important, and you hit diminishing returns way before whatever is “top of the line”).
The kind of consumerism I advise against is the kind of consumerism that seems to make people unhappy according to the specific research papers I cited.
Also, for men at least you don’t have to buy very many clothes at all. You just have to buy the right ones, and know how to wear them.
The kind of consumerism I advise against is the kind of consumerism that seems to make people unhappy according to the specific research papers I cited.
That’s not very helpful (and warpforge should not have been modded down for his/her reply if it was by one of the participants in this subthread—that would be kind of petty). I’m pretty sure the research papers don’t specifically carve out an exception for expensive clothes shown on models in high-class fashion magazines. Feel free to use your deep knowledge of these articles that you did read to prove me wrong though!
Alternatively, you could just admit that this is an exception to your general warning against consumerism—that buying expensive clothes shown in the glamorous magazines in the hopes that it will bring you happiness actually works.
Also, for men at least you don’t have to buy very many clothes at all.
Unless you’re planning on wearing the same $500 suit appearing in these magazines and can find hairstylists that make you look like them, yes, you do.
You just have to buy the right ones, and know how to wear them.
Yes, but that truth could have been discerned from a dictionary, without any empirical research.
This post was a whirlwind tour of happiness research. Those who are interested can follow what I’ve been provided to learn more. It sounds like you’re not interested enough to do so, which is fine. It took me more than 15 hours to research and write this post, and not everyone has that kind of time.
But I do plan on doing more posts in the future to elaborate on some of the topics and methods I rushed over in this post. Perhaps I’ll eventually do one specifically on consumerism, so you won’t have to read the papers yourself.
Luke, if you actually read the articles you’re relying on, it shouldn’t be that hard to explain the relevant parts in this context. If you don’t have an answer, all you have to say is:
“I’m sorry—I didn’t notice the dissonance before. I’m sure there’s a way to follow expensive fashion advice without falling into the trap of consumerism, but I really only read the abstracts so I can’t quite explain how to walk the line.”
That’s it! That’s all you have to say. It’s not hard, and it avoids the need to get snappy and shift blame to others.
Okay, in brief: what the research seems to indicate is that materialistic goals (ends) may lead to unhappiness, especially if they lead to ever-growing desires for material goods (which they often do). Also, those focused on financial success tend to derive less satisfaction from other aspects of life (the Nickerson paper).
So that is why I recommend (at least) two things: Get nice clothes because it helps your social life, but also beware the threat of consumerism. Beware the pursuit of material goods for their own sake. Material goods are often of value, but don’t let them run away with you. And certainly don’t make money the focus of your efforts and passion.
But what if, e.g. you personally assign a large preference to avoiding conforming to modern fashion standards. For example, I think it is bad to vote for modern fashion with dollars because it is an unsustainable industry. I don’t have enough dollars to buy “sustainable” clothing. And I also don’t value the social opinions of others if they are based largely upon the way I dress. It would feel painful for me to take steps to be fashionable. If you told me today that my future self would adjust to being fashionable, would have no moral qualms with that, and would feel somewhat happier as a result, this would make me currently feel deeply unhappy about the person I would become.
Also, where can we find more specific instruction about how to “find a more fulfilling job”? I spend many hours thinking about this, talking to the career counselors for my grad program, writing LW posts about it, talking with campus representatives, friends, family, etc. I also scour the internet for job listing, the BLS descriptions of jobs (which are essentially the same as O*Net), etc. I feel that 2+ years of doing all this effort on an almost daily basis has not taught me a single thing about what a “fulfilling” career would be like. I truly feel like the preferences I have that I like are arranged in such a way that there are no existing modern jobs that could remotely approach the ability to make me feel fulfilled. I think rapidly increasing technology plays a drastic role in this, much like the Reeks and Wrecks from Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano.
Also, I am a healthy, well-adjusted, reasonably social person. I have good speaking skills; I frequently go out to get a drink with groups of friends; I am very active and I exercise and play on a pick-up soccer team. Yet, I am also an INTJ and I actually enjoy being alone and very introverted. I am not “fluidly” extroverted, it’s more just that it’s really simple and easy to do extroverted behaviors while still feeling introverted inside the whole time, and I like this. But I am not very agreeable (I am a bit of a contrarian and I also believe this is justified). I am compassionate to an almost dopey degree. I have no symptoms of any mental illness other than that I am chronically unhappy. The only mental illness in my family is my dad’s PTSD.
At any rate, I basically feel like the advice you give does not actually explain anything. It’s a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. How do you find a more fulfilling job if you don’t even know how to begin to know how to start learning what ‘fulfilling’ means? I think I already outwardly exhibit almost all of the happiness indicator traits that you describe and I feel very miserable almost every day.
Also, I write research papers similar to this sort of thing. 15 hours is not a long time to tabulate this kind of paper. There’s no way someone could read and truly absorb the main points in 49 research articles, and then also write this post about it, in 15 hours. So either you had already read some of the posts and the total time was more than 15 hours, or else you did not read all of the 49 references. And even if someone could read and comprehend 49 research articles that quickly, I wouldn’t want them to. The paper that they write would suffer from being surface level, and while I really appreciate the fact that you’re willing to use your own time to write this post, I think it really is very surface level.
The reason this bothers me is that now, on other LessWrong posts, everyone just refers to this post whenever someone brings up a question about happiness. People seem to act like it’s ‘solved’ and just go read lukeprog’s post; it explains everything you have to do before you can ever query for more community advice. But it doesn’t. This post is potentially helpful to people just scratching the surface of even recognizing that they want to alter their own happiness. I think it’s targeted at the wrong community. I can see how some LWers might not make any effort to be social, but most of us are already thoughtful enough that the things in the post are the first things we tried and for any post about happiness to be helpful, it needs to dig much deeper on very narrow topics (like how to actually decide which career goals to set, and then practical steps to achieve them, and what to expect once they are achieved, etc.)
I’m sorry if this seems harsh; I don’t mean to say that you don’t know what you’re talking about. You clearly do. But I would rather see one post citing 4 references on the psychology of career factors, where in 15 hours you actually could make a deeply insightful synthesis of the 4 papers and include other web resources besides the trivial O*Net, for example. All these posts with 30+ references are too diffuse to be worthwhile. Focus on fewer references, but references that offer deeper insight and can be mapped into a practical set of instructions rather than vague notions that might govern the reader’s future search criteria.
“The time [sic] of consumerism I advise against is the kind of consumerism that seems to make people unhappy according to the specific research papers I cited.”
When writing an essay about achieving happiness, it’s not very helpful to define a term as inherently causing happiness or unhappiness, even if you can point to the literature for clarification. You end up with the tautology that “doing X—which is defined as causing happiness—makes you happy” or the inverse.
The rest of the essay is a rather nice survey of achieving happiness; I’ll be sure to point some friends at it.
Sorry if this was unclear. Nobody is defining consumerism as causing unhappiness. It’s an empirical claim that certain kinds of consumerism cause unhappiness, and those are the kinds of consumerism I’m advising against.
I wasn’t disputing the importance of clothing (and a PUA was my guide for shopping in NYC), and I certainly wasn’t trying to argue that it would be better if people weren’t so judged as a reason not to wear better clothes!
I was disputing whether you need to spend at that level, buying from and heeding the very marketers lukeprog despises in 14. And the justification you gave, that “spending on lot in this area is different because it will really bring me happiness”, is not distinguishable from what people are thinking when they are consumerist.
At this point I think it might be productive to taboo “consumerist”; the connotations seem to be getting in the way.
What I’ve gotten out of the conversation so far is that (a) buying things based on an exaggerated estimate of their future value tends to make people less happy; (b) buying things based on an accurate estimation of their future value tends to make people happier, and (c) rationality techniques are helpful in deciding which is which. That seems entirely consistent to me, and using mass-market consumer guides to help estimate social capital while trying to ignore the actual marketing seems sane if a little risky.
I’d also be willing to entertain the possibility that a lot of people in the central LW demographic cluster are buying less than the optimum for their happiness. I’m almost certainly guilty of this; most of my net worth lies idle in my checking account, where it does no one any good.
Well, I’m not sure what concept—whatever the name—lukeprog is carving out when he warns about consumerism. His advice amounts to “don’t blow large amounts of money thinking that the stuff you buy will make you happy … unless I approve of it”. Whatever failure mode he was trying to encompass by talk of consumerism surely must cover buying straight out of a fashion magazine.
The fact that it “really works” is no defense—all acts of “blowing large amounts of money to be happy” seem like that!
Some people buy things just because they think buying things will make them happen, which is what the consumerism stuff is about. From your words I suspect you don’t quite grokk this, probably because it’s a very silly state to be in and you’re lucky enough not to be in it. (I’m having a bit of trouble with the concept myself, though it does happen to me too.)
The point about the clothing (“stuff he approves of”) would perhaps be more precisely expressed as “it’s a good idea to be dressed/accessorized/etc close to whatever silly thing society decides is ‘current fashion’ because this improves your interaction with other people”. The article expresses this as “buy fashionable clothing” because “buying” is the usual way of owning fashionable clothes. You can satisfy point 3 by making your own clothes or wearing (inconspicuously) cheap knock-offs or any other method; buying is not necessary, it’s just the usual method.
The apparent contradiction between 3 and 14 is a bit like the apparent contradiction in an (imaginary) article about digital photography that advises to pick a camera with at least 4 megapixels (i.e., worse than that is probably too low for good photos), but that you shouldn’t give in to the hype about megapixels (i.e., it’s not the only thing that’s important, and you hit diminishing returns way before whatever is “top of the line”).
The kind of consumerism I advise against is the kind of consumerism that seems to make people unhappy according to the specific research papers I cited.
Also, for men at least you don’t have to buy very many clothes at all. You just have to buy the right ones, and know how to wear them.
That’s not very helpful (and warpforge should not have been modded down for his/her reply if it was by one of the participants in this subthread—that would be kind of petty). I’m pretty sure the research papers don’t specifically carve out an exception for expensive clothes shown on models in high-class fashion magazines. Feel free to use your deep knowledge of these articles that you did read to prove me wrong though!
Alternatively, you could just admit that this is an exception to your general warning against consumerism—that buying expensive clothes shown in the glamorous magazines in the hopes that it will bring you happiness actually works.
Unless you’re planning on wearing the same $500 suit appearing in these magazines and can find hairstylists that make you look like them, yes, you do.
Yes, but that truth could have been discerned from a dictionary, without any empirical research.
This post was a whirlwind tour of happiness research. Those who are interested can follow what I’ve been provided to learn more. It sounds like you’re not interested enough to do so, which is fine. It took me more than 15 hours to research and write this post, and not everyone has that kind of time.
But I do plan on doing more posts in the future to elaborate on some of the topics and methods I rushed over in this post. Perhaps I’ll eventually do one specifically on consumerism, so you won’t have to read the papers yourself.
Luke, if you actually read the articles you’re relying on, it shouldn’t be that hard to explain the relevant parts in this context. If you don’t have an answer, all you have to say is:
“I’m sorry—I didn’t notice the dissonance before. I’m sure there’s a way to follow expensive fashion advice without falling into the trap of consumerism, but I really only read the abstracts so I can’t quite explain how to walk the line.”
That’s it! That’s all you have to say. It’s not hard, and it avoids the need to get snappy and shift blame to others.
Okay, in brief: what the research seems to indicate is that materialistic goals (ends) may lead to unhappiness, especially if they lead to ever-growing desires for material goods (which they often do). Also, those focused on financial success tend to derive less satisfaction from other aspects of life (the Nickerson paper).
So that is why I recommend (at least) two things: Get nice clothes because it helps your social life, but also beware the threat of consumerism. Beware the pursuit of material goods for their own sake. Material goods are often of value, but don’t let them run away with you. And certainly don’t make money the focus of your efforts and passion.
But what if, e.g. you personally assign a large preference to avoiding conforming to modern fashion standards. For example, I think it is bad to vote for modern fashion with dollars because it is an unsustainable industry. I don’t have enough dollars to buy “sustainable” clothing. And I also don’t value the social opinions of others if they are based largely upon the way I dress. It would feel painful for me to take steps to be fashionable. If you told me today that my future self would adjust to being fashionable, would have no moral qualms with that, and would feel somewhat happier as a result, this would make me currently feel deeply unhappy about the person I would become.
Also, where can we find more specific instruction about how to “find a more fulfilling job”? I spend many hours thinking about this, talking to the career counselors for my grad program, writing LW posts about it, talking with campus representatives, friends, family, etc. I also scour the internet for job listing, the BLS descriptions of jobs (which are essentially the same as O*Net), etc. I feel that 2+ years of doing all this effort on an almost daily basis has not taught me a single thing about what a “fulfilling” career would be like. I truly feel like the preferences I have that I like are arranged in such a way that there are no existing modern jobs that could remotely approach the ability to make me feel fulfilled. I think rapidly increasing technology plays a drastic role in this, much like the Reeks and Wrecks from Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano.
Also, I am a healthy, well-adjusted, reasonably social person. I have good speaking skills; I frequently go out to get a drink with groups of friends; I am very active and I exercise and play on a pick-up soccer team. Yet, I am also an INTJ and I actually enjoy being alone and very introverted. I am not “fluidly” extroverted, it’s more just that it’s really simple and easy to do extroverted behaviors while still feeling introverted inside the whole time, and I like this. But I am not very agreeable (I am a bit of a contrarian and I also believe this is justified). I am compassionate to an almost dopey degree. I have no symptoms of any mental illness other than that I am chronically unhappy. The only mental illness in my family is my dad’s PTSD.
At any rate, I basically feel like the advice you give does not actually explain anything. It’s a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. How do you find a more fulfilling job if you don’t even know how to begin to know how to start learning what ‘fulfilling’ means? I think I already outwardly exhibit almost all of the happiness indicator traits that you describe and I feel very miserable almost every day.
Also, I write research papers similar to this sort of thing. 15 hours is not a long time to tabulate this kind of paper. There’s no way someone could read and truly absorb the main points in 49 research articles, and then also write this post about it, in 15 hours. So either you had already read some of the posts and the total time was more than 15 hours, or else you did not read all of the 49 references. And even if someone could read and comprehend 49 research articles that quickly, I wouldn’t want them to. The paper that they write would suffer from being surface level, and while I really appreciate the fact that you’re willing to use your own time to write this post, I think it really is very surface level.
The reason this bothers me is that now, on other LessWrong posts, everyone just refers to this post whenever someone brings up a question about happiness. People seem to act like it’s ‘solved’ and just go read lukeprog’s post; it explains everything you have to do before you can ever query for more community advice. But it doesn’t. This post is potentially helpful to people just scratching the surface of even recognizing that they want to alter their own happiness. I think it’s targeted at the wrong community. I can see how some LWers might not make any effort to be social, but most of us are already thoughtful enough that the things in the post are the first things we tried and for any post about happiness to be helpful, it needs to dig much deeper on very narrow topics (like how to actually decide which career goals to set, and then practical steps to achieve them, and what to expect once they are achieved, etc.)
I’m sorry if this seems harsh; I don’t mean to say that you don’t know what you’re talking about. You clearly do. But I would rather see one post citing 4 references on the psychology of career factors, where in 15 hours you actually could make a deeply insightful synthesis of the 4 papers and include other web resources besides the trivial O*Net, for example. All these posts with 30+ references are too diffuse to be worthwhile. Focus on fewer references, but references that offer deeper insight and can be mapped into a practical set of instructions rather than vague notions that might govern the reader’s future search criteria.
“The time [sic] of consumerism I advise against is the kind of consumerism that seems to make people unhappy according to the specific research papers I cited.”
When writing an essay about achieving happiness, it’s not very helpful to define a term as inherently causing happiness or unhappiness, even if you can point to the literature for clarification. You end up with the tautology that “doing X—which is defined as causing happiness—makes you happy” or the inverse.
The rest of the essay is a rather nice survey of achieving happiness; I’ll be sure to point some friends at it.
Sorry if this was unclear. Nobody is defining consumerism as causing unhappiness. It’s an empirical claim that certain kinds of consumerism cause unhappiness, and those are the kinds of consumerism I’m advising against.
I fixed the typo, thanks.