This article explores one of our most important life trade-offs. We appreciate achieving work-life balance is important - but how do you do that? What does work-life balance mean and why is it different for different people or even change over time for the same person? To answer these questions, this article explores our nature as seekers and the trade-offs associated with seeking long-term happiness. Armed with this seeking knowledge, we explore what not to seek as a means to uncover healthy seeking. A seeking framework is provided for achieving and adapting our work-life balance. The article concludes with resources to aid in your seeking.
About the author: Jeff Hulett leads Personal Finance Reimagined, a decision-making and financial education platform. He teaches personal finance at James Madison University and provides personal finance seminars. Check out his book -- Making Choices, Making Money: Your Guide to Making Confident Financial Decisions.
Jeff is a career banker, data scientist, behavioral economist, and choice architect. Jeff has held banking and consulting leadership roles at Wells Fargo, Citibank, KPMG, and IBM.
Table of Contents
Introduction and work-life balance
We are insatiably seeking creatures
How much income should we seek to be happy?
Seeking by knowing what NOT to seek
Seeking and not seeking the road to happiness
Concluding with the seeking road
Notes and appendix
We start the seeking journey by defining work-life balance. This is personal and may mean different things to different people and likely evolves for the same person. Next are a couple of general characteristics defining how we feel about balancing work:
Independence. Many people consider independence an important part of our life. This is the autonomy to make different decisions and to make changes to follow our desires. Our perception of autonomy can be either enhanced or diminished by work, depending on the situation. Work feels more like work when it constrains how we choose to deploy our independence. Higher levels of autonomy make it easier to achieve a work-life balance.
Time control. Controlling our time is an important part of life. It does not mean we do not work, but the work occurs on our time vs. someone else’s time. Our perception of time control can be either enhanced or diminished by work, depending on the situation. Work feels more like work when it constrains how we choose to deploy our time. More time control makes it easier to achieve a work-life balance.
Gaining a level of control over our time and increasing our ability to make independent decisions is what changes the nature of our work. Put simply, enhancing our freedom to manage work leads to an improved relationship with work, whether it involves autonomy, time control, or similar concepts. Certainly, the increased work freedoms associated with the pandemic were an example of how work could change to improve our relationship with work. For many, the freedom to work from anywhere increases employee happiness and employer productivity. [i-a1] A win/win! Work will not feel as much like work if we achieve increased freedom. For example:
A small business owner. They have the independence to accept new clients and how to service their clients regarding time allocation. They still need to work, but they generally have more independence than a W2 employee. Work feels less like work when there is independence.
A parent of young children. They have the independence to decide how to raise their children. Of course, children do have time demands. However, parents have many options for how their children are raised that will impact parenting time. Work feels less like work when there is time control.
In both cases, parents and small business owners have the independence to make decisions and enough control of their available time to make decisions that best suit their situation. To be clear, this is no panacea. For example, a small business owner may hit a crunch time when they have many deadlines coinciding at once. However, the small business owner made the business decision, not some boss or corporate planning group. Additionally, small business owners and parents take on greater responsibility for their clients or children in return for having more control over their time and increased autonomy.
A "how work feels" personal example: I am a career banker. My banking career spans both sides of the 2008-09 financial crisis. Before the crisis, banking felt more fun. Bankers had greater freedom to act in the best interest of their customers. Personally, my teams brought the highest ethical expectation to do the right thing for our customers, employees, community, and shareholders. But a minority of bad actors did some bad things and made some bad loans contributing to the financial crisis. The regulators were caught flat-footed. Instead of strengthening banking supervision using existing regulations, legislators imposed a substantial number of highly prescriptive laws on the banking sector. The legislators essentially said: “Hey regulators and bankers, you lost our confidence. Therefore, we will write prescriptive legislation to tell you how to do your job.” The supreme challenge is that a) legislators lack the expertise to regulate or operate banks and b) the banking world is so dynamic that today’s prescriptions often become quickly outdated. Legislation is notoriously difficult to change.
By volume of words found in banking laws, regulatory oversight increased almost 20-fold when comparing laws on the books before the financial crisis to the banking legal corpus found 10 years after the financial crisis. [i-a2] Even more significantly, the prescriptive nature of the new laws gives very little flexibility to adapt to the ever-changing bank customer needs. The new legal environment forces banks to run their businesses to "check the box" with a mind-numbing volume of regulation. The pendulum has swung from the independence-to-do-the-right thing pendulum side to the mindless-bureaucracy, check-the-box pendulum side. Whether or not the increased regulation was justified, from within the industry, banking now feels much more like work than it once did. It is little surprise that many talented people have exited the banking system to start FinTechs and other nonbank financial services companies.
Work-life balance is more achievable with freedoms encouraging our happiness. However, a necessary foundation for our happiness is having enough income above some minimum threshold. Until our basic needs are satisfied, freedoms such as independence and time control hold little significance.
Therefore, achieving work-life balance involves a continuous pursuit of various features, including work, income, family, autonomy, time management, and personal growth -- all of which ultimately impact our happiness. In other words, achieving work-life balance requires ongoing seeking. Achieving work-life balance relates to how we seek and what we seek. Our seeking enables the ongoing balancing of trade-offs between these and other features.
Understanding our seeking starts with answering two fundamental questions:
Why do we seek? and
How much money should we seek to achieve happiness?
Section 2 explores why we seek. Section 3 addresses the money needed for happiness. Following these two foundational sections, we explore a seeking framework for what NOT to seek as the basis for our seeking path.
2. We are insatiably seeking creatures
Doing what the article title suggests - “Seeking what not to seek” - is very challenging. History, science, and religion teach a consistent message - people are hardwired to insatiably seek. [i-a3] We naturally want more because our genome is wired to seek more. Our evolutionary biology is geared toward resolving scarcity. Centuries ago, seeking was more likely triggered for resolving hunger and protecting our families. Your existence today is because your entire line of ancestors survived to have children. Their survival was the result of seeking. If just one of your direct descendent ancestors had not been good at seeking and resolving scarcity - the evolutionary chain would be broken. The successful seeking of ALL your ancestors and the seeking-related fine-tuning of your genome is why you exist!
Our powerful, evolution-based seeking presents in new and different ways due to today's modern, information-abundant world. [i-a4] However, today's seeking still relates to resolving scarcity. Modern examples include a desire for more social media engagement or ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ leading to more wealth or status. Modern laws and medicine have all but eliminated the existential threats responsible for fine-tuning our genome. However, because of the slow and lagging evolutionary process, our brains are still wired as if we could be chased by a lion and die tomorrow. Our seeking-enabled genome generally presents as comparative emotion. “Fear Of Missing Out” or “FOMO” is a typical feeling spurring our seeking.
For example, suppose the "Joneses" appear to have more than us. In that case, our genome-generated response is to a) compare ourselves to them and b) encourage us to match or exceed their accumulation level. Of course, appearances could be false, the Joneses could be like a pufferfish expanding their size to look bigger than they are. In today's "easy money" consumer finance world, almost anyone can puff up with debt. Just because someone has the trappings of wealth does not mean they are truly wealthy. Someone taking on massive debt to acquire the trappings of wealth almost certainly has little control over their time. For them, freedom is illusory and work will feel like work until they pay off all that debt. True wealth is hard to see. But our genome cannot tell the difference. So in the modern age, our natural, genome-directed seeking can be a challenge.
Our culture reinforces our seeking-enabled genome. America - like many developed and democratic countries - encourages an "achievement-seeking" culture. Our achievement-seeking nature is filtered through America's competitive governance culture - as reinforced by the Constitution, The Bill of Rights, plus our laws, institutions, and social standards. The American constitution's brilliance is because it aligns with our seeking nature as a means to provide for society. As stated in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, our governance and culture are guided to "...promote the general Welfare." Our society's competitive framework aims to achieve optimal resource allocation results across the population. [i-b] Many are taught at a young age about the virtues of achievement-seeking.
The cultural alignment with our achievement-seeking nature is part of our environment. However, our culture often does not separate healthy vs. unhealthy achievement-seeking. The "pursuit of happiness," as found in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, is left up to the individual to define. The article's thesis is that seeking is healthy in many cases - but not in all cases. In some cases - seeking works against us. This article helps differentiate between good and not-so-good seeking.
Time-tested world religions are broadly aligned on the potential negative impacts of seeking. [i-c] In religious texts, seeking tendencies are expressed by words like "Selfish," "Desire," "Lust," "Covet," and "Greed." Time-tested religious alignment on the impacts of seeking include Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, and others. For example:
"You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures."
- Christianity, Holy Bible, NIV, James 4:2-3
This article introduces a framework for how not to seek, aligned with teachings from science, our governance culture, and religion.
3. How much income should we seek to be happy?
Section 2 explored seeking as an evolution-based catalyst spurring action. Our genome guides our seeking to ensure we do not end up poor or dead. We worry about providing for our family or ourselves. Democracy encourages its citizens to seek. Religions warn us against the wrong kind of seeking.
In this section, income is considered as an outcome of seeking. Then, the operative questions connecting seeking, happiness, and income are - "How much income do we need to be happy?" and "Does seeking more income help increase our happiness?" The short answer is - "Less income is needed compared to default expectations generated from our genome." and "More income is not necessarily better for achieving happiness." This section explores the answers to the two questions.
Psychology and behavioral economics research by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and others suggest we should temper seeking not related to happiness once a basic level of income is achieved. Once we achieve some minimal level of wealth and prosperity, our happiness does not increase – or increases very marginally - as income increases. Kahneman summarizes his happiness research with a pithy observation:
"Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery."
Therefore, if we aim to optimize our happiness, pursuing income solely for the sake of income beyond a certain minimum level goes against this objective. [i-d]
The happiness income threshold
When do you have enough income?
The schema is from Ma and Zhang, 2014. The schema is synthesized based on several publications (Kahneman and Deaton 2010; Easterlin and Angelescu 2009; and Inglehart et al. 2008).
Notice the research suggests an absolute level of income as a happiness threshold. This is important because, as discussed in the last section, our genome is wired for comparison to others in our social group. Our innate emotional response is usually unable to grasp absolutes; it can only engage in comparisons. Thus, even though we only need approximately $60,000 in income to reach happiness, as long as our social set has more, our genome encourages us to accumulate more.
A note about the minimum threshold estimate: $60,000 is a threshold estimate based on Dr. Kahneman's empirical analysis. This is an average based on 2010 dollars. Every market and situation is different. Inflation has grown since 2010 and every market has a unique cost of living. The takeaways are that 1) there is some absolute threshold after which most people's happiness will diminish greatly. Also, 2) because we are prone to comparative seeking, the threshold level is probably lower than most people expect.
The minimum income threshold is supported by research from University of Chicago economist Sendhil Mullainathan. Dr. Mullainathan’s research suggests falling below the minimum income threshold creates cognitive tunneling that changes how we think. [i-e1]
“Scarcity in one walk of life means we have less attention, less mind, in the rest of life”
This tunneling causes us to be hyper-focused on that which is scarce. Importantly, tunneling causes us to crowd out other life attentions not found in the hyper-scarce tunnel. Some scarcity can be helpful. It focuses the mind on higher priorities. Like in business, annual stretch budgets create a scarcity or challenge to find ways to achieve some budget goal. "Budget scarcity" is a common business management tactic intended to focus employee's attention on essential business goals. However, experiencing hyper-scarcity, such as dropping below the minimum income level, alters our cognitive processes and capacity for thinking. It renders us incapable of assisting others as we are focused on securing our own survival.
Scarcity and tunneling
Graphic interpretation: People generally have the same cognitive capacity as shown by the size of the green boxes.
Falling below the income threshold leads to front-loading attention, decreasing the ability to plan, and crowding out the capacity to help others. This is shown by the short but wide red tunnel. Also, falling below the minimum income threshold creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Tunneling creates a black hole-like scarcity trap that feeds on itself.
Exceeding the minimum income threshold is what allows people to use that capacity to help others. While they have tunnels, those tunnels are narrow and longer - allowing them to plan for the future and help others. Also, each person's tunnel size may be different. For example, my wife and I have a traditional marriage where we separate duties between family and job. When our four children were younger, I worked outside our home, so my job tunnel was wider and my family tunnel was narrower. Conversely, my wife worked in the home, so her job tunnel was narrower and her family tunnel was wider. As a team, my wife and I had ample capacity to help others.
To summarize - reaching a minimal income threshold is necessary, but not sufficient, for leading a happy life. Also, upon passing that threshold, the marginal happiness return to income diminishes greatly. Contrary to our genomic-based intuition, this research finding suggests people are better served by not seeking to grow income past a certain point. As such, we are better off diverting our time to other happiness-deriving pursuits once we achieve some basic level of income. Seeking the minimum income threshold is considered necessarily self-serving to build a platform to help others. It is challenging to help others if your basic needs are not met. While different than the tunneling associated with hyper-scarcity, challenges to our happiness arise when we surpass the minimum income threshold. While higher incomes provide the freedom to choose not to be miserable, how we seek may lead to less happiness.
As a great paradox, through some people's efforts to help others, they are paid sums well above what is necessary for their minimum income threshold. Think of money as a voting mechanism. If you create some product or service providing great value, those receiving value will vote with their feet by paying for that which provides them value. Thus, not seeking for the sake of income may lead to what we are not seeking - more income.
Next, a framework is discussed for what NOT to seek. The article concludes by building on what not to seek as being 'out-of-bounds.' Then, the many important 'in-bounds' seeking decisions are introduced. The reader is provided resources for exploring the 'in-bounds' seeking decisions. Telling the difference between good and not-so-good seeking often comes down to our seeking motivation. Seeking to help others is certainly a good thing – on the other hand - the NOT framework describes how our seeking challenge initiates with our necessary but difficult-to-restrain self-focused motivations.
4. Seeking by knowing what NOT to seek
Proposing that we shift our focus to activities that bring joy is one matter, but implementing that suggestion is a completely different story. We may believe making money makes us happy. Or, we might think that the feeling of accomplishment we get from work, such as closing a deal or meeting budget targets, contributes to our overall happiness. But could the time it takes to make money or related work achievements be deployed in other activities better able to help other people and achieve more happiness? According to the research, the answer for many people is "Yes." However, the instinctual desire to seek often obscures the motivation associated with different alternatives available to seek. [i-e2]
Seeking to find enough: John Bogle, the Vanguard founder who passed away in 2019, once told a story about money that highlights our seeking struggle: At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.” [i-f]
While we are hardwired to seek more resources, our genome does not differentiate which resources bring us more happiness. For our genome, happiness is survival to pass on our DNA. Our genome does not care so much about how our genes get passed on, as long as they do. [i-g] Thus, how and what we seek is a choice. That choice may bring us more or less happiness. Neuroscience and long-standing religions share a remarkable similarity in this aspect. Our genetic makeup cannot distinguish between sources of happiness, so religions step in to provide cultural support.
Since it is difficult to determine what makes us happy, next is a framework for the five categories NOT to seek. This framework is generally grounded in behavioral economics, as well as, stoic and world religious teachings. This framework assumes your minimum wealth threshold is achievable. This framework channels our hardwired, natural genetic-seeking instincts as described by N.N. Taleb as 'via negativa.' [ii-a] To reach a goal, it is often more beneficial to begin by understanding what NOT to do, rather than immediately focusing on a specific end result. You have ample room to explore what brings you joy, but the five categories labeled as NOT can guide you on what to steer clear of as you refine your goals for happiness.
Deciding what makes you happy is surprisingly difficult. Instead - strive to avoid what leads to unhappiness. Then, over time, what remains will lead to your happiness.
Next is a description of each NOT to seek category:
1. Not seeking luxury. You have worked hard your whole life – why shouldn’t you seek some luxury? You deserve it! The challenge here is connecting luxury to hard work. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said, “Work is its own reward.” If so, why then do people chase luxury? The answer relates to the hard work making luxury possible. Luxury seeking substitutes one form of seeking (work) for another form of seeking (luxury). The money we receive for work is related to some value created for society. In comparison, luxury is how we choose to consume today. Assuming fixed budget constraints, luxury-seeking is more likely to crowd out other forms of resource utilization - including those resources benefiting others. Luxury consumption is a challenge because it is an inferior seeking substitute for work value creation. Our contentment with the things we have is synonymous with happiness. Plus, the more we can be content with what we have, the more capacity (time and money) is available to create value for others and save for our future. It is a virtuous cycle starting by diverting the seeking nature enabling you to achieve at work in the first place. Not seeking luxury is another form of expectations management. The more we have, the more we want and happiness is impacted negatively if we cannot achieve more. [ii-b] So being selective about your source of more - such as not chasing luxury - helps achieve happiness.
A ‘faux pro’ bike example: I was talking with a friend the other day. He and I both enjoy biking. We are not really in the same league. He goes longer and faster than I do. We bike some together, but he also has a bike group he rides in. His group rides every weekend – usually around ten bikers.
He just bought a new bike for $17,000. I was taken aback but attempted to conceal my surprise. I had no idea bikes could be that expensive. I asked him why he chose this bike instead of a less expensive model. He discussed the quality of the bike and how smooth it rides. He also said many in his bike group have very expensive bikes. People like my friend are called faux pro. Certainly, one could justify the business expense of an expensive bike if one is a professional and earns income from biking. But most of us are amateurs who bike for exercise and fun. But there is a surprisingly large group of people who are undoubtedly amateur but unnecessarily buy expensive bike equipment as if they are professionals. This is the faux pro. Via marketing, the biking industry develops the faux pro market segment as a large revenue source. This encourages amateurs to buy bike equipped like a faux pro.
I asked whether he could keep up with the group on his old bike. He said he could. I asked if his old bike was broken or unfixable – he said it was not. In fact, he kept his old bike as a backup. My friend works on the trading desk of a large financial institution, so I know he can easily afford the bike.
For a motivation limited to exercise and safety, he clearly could have bought a lower-level bike or not bought a new bike at all. But my friend’s motivation expanded to seeking luxury. His bike group is like “the Joneses” he is keeping up with. The FOMO is a kind of high-impact peer pressure. For my friend, assuming he retires in 30 years, the future value of the bike’s price is almost $350,000. My friend is trading a faux pro bike for $350,000 to take care of himself or others when he retires. It appears his luxury purchase is not motivated by selfless or practical utility, like exercise or safety. However, he can fulfill his difficult-to-satiate desire to keep up with the Joneses. At the end of this section, we explore how appearances can be difficult to interpret.
There is a dynamic between my friend's work as a trader and his desire for luxury. Traders generally exist in highly competitive and highly comparative work environments. Making profitable trades and comparisons to market indices is training for the 'keeping up with the Joneses' mindset. Separating work from not seeking luxury is difficult. In general, people are more likely to become like those with whom they associate. So choose your future self well!
Not seeking luxury is also an application of the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule. [i-d] Seek to achieve 80% of the value which usually costs 20% or less of what you could pay for the last 20% of value. The biking example is an extreme Pareto Principle case in point. If my friend did not seek luxury, he could have achieved almost all the value of biking for 1% or less of the long-term opportunity cost.
2. Not seeking vanity. Vanity and luxury-seeking are related in that one's vanity may manifest itself as luxury-seeking, but not always. Luxury-seeking is often easier to self-test than vanity. Continuing with the luxury example, bikes have a price tag. Determining whether we are spending more than the alternatives is available and comparable. Then the question becomes our motivation for spending more. Vanity tends to be more paradoxical. For some, their sense of value comes from being important. Important to our workplace, important to our friends, and/or important to those in the external world. Sure, you are important. However, importance is mostly a perception found in the importance-seeker's mind. [ii-c] We tend to overplay our own importance compared to the perception of others. Most individuals only consider their importance, rather than how others perceive them. Morgan Housel, the author of The Psychology of Money, describes the challenging-to-see paradox of our vanity:
"There is a paradox here: people tend to want wealth to signal to others that they should be liked and admired. But in reality, those other people often bypass admiring you, not because they don’t think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired."
We should seek to help others and to be happy in the presence of others. But this helpfulness and happiness should NOT be motivated by importance-seeking. Ultimately, demonstrating humility, kindness, and empathy will garner more respect than seeking self-importance. A common theme for not seeking vanity and decision challenges concerns decision readiness. Decisions concerning our future flourishing are super challenging. These are decisions like those for college or marriage. These self-referential decisions involve predicting how we will flourish in the mostly unknown future world. Determining readiness for making that flourish-impacting decision is the big challenge. Once you are ready, choosing which alternative is a more straightforward decision. When determining whether we are ready, it is our vanity that may lead us astray. Listening to your faith-informed heart and those you respect - like parents, a minister, or a wise community member - helps manage your vanity for properly determining your readiness. [ii-d]
A college example: Let's say you are in high school and deciding to go to college. How do you decide if you are ready? All your "smart" friends are going to a "great college." The "losers" are going to community college. But that is your vanity talking! Research shows college peer pressure is significant, often more impactful than parental guidance. [ii-e1] That peer pressure may lead to poor decisions. Questions of study skills and paying the proper amount for the college value received are essential. Community college and other non-traditional paths are a great avenue for achieving that college value. [ii-e2] Related to Housel's paradox, the danger is when your friends benchmark your college plans as a means to exalt themselves. This is a poor substitute for understanding how college helps you flourish.
3. Not seeking ignorance. Certainly, people do not actively pursue ignorance; however, it tends to come our way if we are not vigilant. The expression of regret - “It seemed like a good idea at the time” - often accompanies the realization we sought that which turned out to be ignorance. Ignorance comes from either a failure to update our beliefs with new information or a failure to attend to new information. [iii-a1] Let's start with belief updating. This involves the capacity to acquire new knowledge and adjust our beliefs based on the evolving circumstances around us. Philip Tetlock is a forecasting expert and a professor dedicated to helping people change their minds. He said: "Beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded." [iii-a2] But people find it challenging to test their beliefs, especially when those new data fail to confirm legacy beliefs. [iii-b] Avoiding ignorance is further achieved by dedicating our limited attention to the things that matter in our lives. Is gossiping about the latest political scandal interesting? Perhaps - like being entertained by a new movie. However, unless you are a policymaker, your limited attention is more useful for those things in our sphere of influence. Your "Thinking Globally" attention should be guided by your opportunity for "Acting Locally."
A deadly ignorance example: The January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol resulted in Americans being killed at American hands. The congressional investigation revealed media-reinforced false information as leading to those deaths:
“The Committee’s investigation has identified many individuals involved in January 6th who were provoked to act by false information about the 2020 election repeatedly reinforced by legacy and social media.” - 117th Congress Second Session House Report
The U.S. Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights allows for beliefs to be expressed via our rights. However, our beliefs, especially misinformed beliefs leading to tragic outcomes like those occurring at the U.S. Capitol, are subject to the constraints set forth in the same Bill of Rights and other laws of the land.
4. Not seeking immediate gratification. This is one of our more challenging “nots.” The availability bias strongly influences us to satisfy our desires immediately.. [iii-c] Our personal health and personal finances are two pillars of long-term health and happiness. It is our genome creating challenges to save, eat properly, and exercise. To our genome, saving for the future is like accepting a small loss today. At the end of the article, a link is provided with decision processes to help you manage our immediate gratification nature.
A personal finance example: As a behavioral economist and a personal finance professor, I focus on helping learners develop a consistent, repeatable decision process for a lifetime of great financial decisions. Routinizing the decision process is the essential success driver. We do this with habits like “set it and forget it” savings strategies and prioritizing “paying yourself first.” We regularly use the decision smartphone tool as a way to routinize those success habits. A free version of the app is included with my book.
5. Not seeking risk avoidance. There is a nuanced but critical difference between risk and ruin. [iii-d] Ruin should be avoided - but risk should be embraced. Especially those risks leading to long-term value. There are many examples, like most personal finance and personal health decisions. Next, is an employment example.
Managing employment risks example: Many people seek employment with large companies. Large companies provide a salary and a perception of employment stability. However, surveys show that employees are often unhappy. Company incentives, particularly in the professional services industries, have been demonstrated to encourage fixed weekly salaries while requiring employees to work well beyond the typical 40-hour week. This practice is commonly referred to as "Greedy work." [iii-e] Also, based on economic cycles, large commercial companies periodically lay off employees. Thus, the intention to avoid risk by working for a large company could both make you unhappy as well as lead to unforeseen risks. Proactive employment risk management likely increases happiness AND reduces risk. This can be done by a) thinking of your career as a portfolio of many jobs. Even better, b) becoming a small business and managing a portfolio of client jobs. This thinking empowers you to proactively change jobs as the environment evolves. Thinking about employment as a portfolio instead of putting all your eggs in one basket allows us to transition from being the “gamble” to being the “gambler” or, from being the “fish” to being the “house.” When times change and your happiness perspective evolves, having a portfolio of employment allows us to adapt and make the most of available opportunities more quickly. [iii-f]
Annie Duke is a world champion poker player and cognitive scientist. She said: “Contrary to popular belief, winners quit a lot. That’s how they win.” [iii-g] To be fair, I have friends in career government jobs. They seem happy and have good reasons to believe they do have lower employment risk. Certainly, if you can find happiness working for large organizations having lower employment risk, more power to you!
The framework suggests five categories NOT to seek. However, the challenge begs another question: “What about those people who do seek some or all of these NOT categories? How should we feel about them?" -- As long as they are not breaking any laws, we should be perfectly ok with them pursuing some or all of these NOT categories. In fact, Adam Smith defined the invisible hand as the mechanism by which peoples' moral sentiments converge to reconcile in a community of people or marketplace. Smith recognized that peoples’ motivations are born from a complex mix of selfish and selfless self-interests. Also, the invisible hand is an emergent phenomenon, because the world and individual situations are dynamic and ever-changing.
It is challenging for the observer to understand the observed's motivations. So, even if it appears someone is pursuing some or all of the NOT categories, the observer may have it wrong. Like in the employment example, your friend may be pleased working in a large, bureaucratic government organization. They have found a way to be happy. It just happens not to be for you. Maybe it would be good to ask your friend how they found happiness!? In the faux pro bike example, I may not fully understand his motivation. Appearances can be deceiving. Just because I cannot see the utility beyond a $500 bike, does not mean his motivation is only turned to self.
Diversity strengthens the market. By embracing our diversity, we enable the market to operate effectively. [iii-h] Ultimately, it is our judgment that causes pain. [iv-a] We are better off embracing differences, pursuing this framework, and not judging others. We all come to peace in different ways and at different times. Southern Baptist minister Billy Graham [iv-b] said it well:
"... God's job is to judge, and my job is to love."
Conversely, we should embrace friends actively avoiding the NOT categories. It is good to surround ourselves with those with aligned motivations which provide us with positive energy. But people are so adaptable that sometimes they may be more likely to pursue a NOT category than other times. Choosing your friends with these NOT categories in mind is a helpful and supportive filter.
My wife and I, both together and separately, do our best to accept our friends as they are, even when their seeking diverges with this framework. As our faith teaches - grace, acceptance, reconciliation, and forgiveness are essential for our long-term relationships. We also, imperfectly, compare our seeking to this framework. Our hunt is to identify and course-correct our fallacious seeking.
But there are situations - where letting go of a relationship and trusting our faith is the best answer. Letting go is never easy.
5. Seeking and not seeking the road to happiness
Our life is full of decisions we need to make. Many of them are more practical to help us be productive - like in the case of education and a career. Many practical decisions are necessary for getting the most out of our income derived from our productivity - like personal finance decisions. The most important decisions involve our contentment and flourishing - like deciding upon the best life partner or feeding our curiosity. Along that road, guides will keep us from straying out-of-bounds. The guides show us what should be avoided as we pursue life's big decisions.
The road to happiness
6. Concluding with the seeking road
We conclude this article with an invitation. The prior graphic lists the many common in-bounds-seeking decisions - for education, career, personal finance, and relationships. Please check out the tools and content to help you make those decisions by following the next link. While all these common decisions are different in the details, they all share a common decision framework. In today's data-abundant information era, maintaining a consistent, repeatable decision process is more important than ever.
7. Notes and appendix
Appendix - thoughts on seeking policy
If some people struggle with seeking, one may suggest that there should be a law or some government intervention to ensure people seek correctly. For example, today, the suggestion of "zero-growth economics" is getting attention, especially in Europe. The suggestion is to use "zero-growth" policy actions as a way to curb global environmental emissions. This is akin to using the law to enforce "proper" seeking. While reducing environmental emissions is undoubtedly crucial, attempting to achieve the environmental objective by regulating individual-seeking behavior is misguided. How someone seeks is intensely personal and subject to change. Therefore, government policy cannot effectively regulate "proper seeking" due to its variability. The incentives of central policymakers and policy administrators are misaligned with those impacted by the policy. This article intends to suggest a path for individuals to manage their seeking. While people are not always effective seekers, the government would be far worse at trying to administer a seeking-based policy. The better idea is for the government to enable people's choices regarding their seeking and maintain an environment enabling seeking that improves society. Think of "law as guardrails" not "law as Geppetto the puppeteer." By the way, I am all for reducing emissions. However, my Hayekian instincts suggest government-enforced "zero growth" policy will likely be counterproductive.
Notes
[i-a1] In a fascinating study by the San Francisco Federal Reserve, they show how industries with jobs lending themselves to mobile work are more productive, but that trend had already started before the pandemic. For example, a call center employee is "naturally mobile," whereas a construction worker is "naturally place-based." Perhaps the pandemic was more of an accelerator than an instigator of the move toward mobile work. What the Fed study does not show is whether those industries traditionally less likely to embrace mobile work are becoming more mobile-friendly since the pandemic. In the Fed study, the industry was a study control. The pandemic certainly accelerated the availability and quality of mobile productivity technology. That, along with higher worker expectations for mobile work, suggests one can expect more industries to embrace mobile work.
Fernald, Goode, Li, Meisenbacher, Does Working from Home Boost Productivity Growth?, FRBSF Economic Letter 2024-02, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
[i-a2] In summary, the word count of banking laws increased from tens of thousands of words before the financial crisis to several hundred thousand words after the crisis. This is based on an analysis of data from:
Ross, Major Regulations Following the 2008 Financial Crisis, Investopedia, accessed 2024
[i-a3] Hulett, Platform Life: How investors and consumers can survive and thrive in the platform economy, The Curiosity Vine, 2024
[i-a4] Hulett, The case for data after the big change: From data scarcity to data abundance, The Curiosity Vine, 2024
[i-b] Levin explores how competition is at the heart of America's constitution and federal governance structure.
[i-c] Wilson (editor), World Scripture, A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts, Section - The Human Condition, p. 293, 1991
[i-d] The functional shape of the happiness/income curve relates to the Pareto principle. Within this income/happiness framework, the Pareto principle suggests the income happiness threshold is about 20% of our total possible income. This threshold is where we achieve 80% of our total possible happiness. Going beyond the 80% income suboptimizes our benefit because of diminishing marginal happiness returns of that income. Thus, at this income threshold, we are better off substituting a happiness-generating alternative for income generation.
Hulett, Our Trade-off Life: How the 80/20 rule leads to a healthier, wealthier life, The Curiosity Vine, 2023
[i-e1] Mullainathan, Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, 2013
[i-e2] The challenges to decision-making and solutions to overcome those challenges are explored in the article:
Hulett, Solving the Decision-making Crisis: Making the most of our free will, The Curiosity Vine, 2023
[i-f] Housel, The Psychology of Money, 2020
[i-g] British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, and author Richard Dawkins makes the case for our genomes' singular motivation to pass on our genetic code.
Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976
To be fair, why individuals make the decisions that they do certainly goes beyond our DNA and genome. Our environment is a big factor in our DNA's opportunity to reproduce. Our environment certainly impacts our epigenetics - or how our genome gets expressed. However, it is fair to say, that regardless of the "how our hand is dealt" environment, our genome is predictably predisposed to reproduce itself. To explore the interaction between our genome and the environment, please see:
Hulett, The Gene Trade: Making the Market for Gene-altering Interventions and Medical Selection, The Curiosity Vine, 2022
[ii-a] Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines "Via Negativa" as, “The principle that we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction. Also, it is easier to know that something is wrong than to find the fix. Actions that remove are more robust than those that add because addition may have unseen, complicated feedback loops.”
Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, 2012
[ii-b] Baucells and Sarin cite the fundamental equation of well-being: happiness equals reality minus expectations.
Baucells, Sarin, Engineering Happiness: A New Approach for Building a Joyful Life, 2012
[ii-c] See the sympathy modulation framework for how helpers and the helped modulate. Emotion is tempered between individuals.
Hulett, Adam Smith and how choice architecture makes the invisible hand more visible, The Curiosity Vine, 2023
Our tendency to overplay our importance relates to a cognitive bias called self-serving bias.
"The self-serving bias refers to a tendency for people to take personal responsibility for their desirable outcomes yet externalize responsibility for their undesirable outcomes."
Shepperd, Malone, Sweeny, Exploring Causes of the Self-serving Bias, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(2), 895-908, 2008
[ii-d] Hulett, Our Trade-off Life: How the 80/20 rule leads to a healthier, wealthier life, The Curiosity Vine, Section 4d, 2023
[ii-e1] Kelly, PEERS OR PARENTS? STUDY SHOWS STRONG FRIENDSHIPS SET TEENS UP FOR SUCCESS LATER IN LIFE, UVAToday, 2021
Friend groups have a significant impact on teens. In fact, based on a University of Virginia study, friends are often more important than parents as a predictor of long-term outcomes. Separating helpful teen relationships from peer pressure leading to an inappropriate college decision is a difficult judgment. But, given the high number of students who begin college but do not finish college, this judgment frequently ends with college objectives not being met.
[ii-e2] Hulett, Be like Rudy: Community College as a smart, lower-cost path for Higher Ed, The Curiosity Vine, 2021
[iii-a1] Hulett, Achieving the known – how to implement the best information curation framework, The Curiosity Vine, 2023
See Section 3, the HRU framework - The unknown-known (Ignorance or fooling yourself)
[iii-a2] Tetlock, Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, 2015
[iii-b] For a brief tutorial on confirmation bias and reasoning errors, please see:
Hulett, January 6th, 2021, an ignorance example, The Curiosity Vine, 2024
[iii-c] Hulett, Great decision-making and how confidence changes the game, The Curiosity Vine, 2022
[iii-d] "Ergodicity" is the study of the difference between risk and ruin. This article provides a foundation:
Hulett, The Regenerative Life: How to be an ergodic pathfinder, The Curiosity Vine, 2023
[iii-e] Hartner, U.S. Employee Engagement Needs a Rebound in 2023, Gallup - workplace, 2023
Hulett, The "Greedy Work" syndrome: Helping the Professional Services Industry solve investment challenges, The Curiosity Vine, 2021
Hulett, How medical system incentives foster an impaired, health-diminished doctoring environment, The Curiosity Vine, 2023
[iii-f] Dellanna, Ergodicity: How irreversible outcomes affect long-term performance in work, investing, relationships, sport, and beyond, 2020
[iii-g] Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, 2022
[iii-h] Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759
To put a fine point on the "By embracing our diversity, we enable the market to operate effectively" comment. No market is perfect, especially given market participants are flawed human beings. However, as Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek suggests, a market embracing the diversity of its participants is more likely to effectively allocate resources as compared to alternative approaches.
Hulett, A Question Of Choice: Optimizing resource allocation and an HOA example, The Curiosity Vine, 2023
[iv-a] Aurelius, Meditations, 180 CE
[iv-b] Billy Graham was an American evangelist, ordained Southern Baptist minister, and civil rights advocate. He said: "It's the Holy Spirit's job to convict, God's job to judge, and my job to love."
A response Billy Graham made after a reporter asked why he attended a rally in support of President Bill Clinton after his sex scandal was made public.
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