Tag: consumerism

Posted on

Back to Reality

karsts, limestone karsts, limestone karst, Ha Long, Ha Long Bay, Ha Long Bay Vietnam
Karsts in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

I'm back from vacation - a month in South East Asia. People who know me know that I travel there often. Bangkok is the site of my research, but since my intellectual attention has turned (about 50% of it, at least) to happiness in the US, I didn't go to gather data.

Instead, I caught up with old friends, and did some actual touristing, something anthropologists are pretty ambivalent about.

It also gave me the chance to think about the meaning of travel in our culture, and how we make sense of the world when it doesn't feel like our own.

I took the picture above at dawn in Ha Long Bay, in northern Vietnam - this was a place I'd never heard of until it came time to plan the trip, but found otherworldly, and interesting in a bunch of ways.

I've been thinking about the nature of time lately, and how it relates to our ideas about happiness. I've posted an article on the difference between being in the moment and being in the present in Ha Long Bay. As always, I hope you find it interesting.

Posted on

Is Mindfulness Bad for the Workplace, or is the Workplace Bad for Mindfulness?

The relationship between happiness and work came up again this week - and some new research gives is a particular slant: mindfulness and work, they say, don't go together.

There's a new editorial in the New York Times about mindfulness in the workplace. When employees meditation, apparently, it's not actually good for business. "Meditation was correlated with reduced thoughts about the future and greater feelings of calm and serenity — states seemingly not conducive to wanting to tackle a work project," researchers Katherine Vohs and Andrew Hafenbrack explain in their essay, "Hey, Boss, You Don't Want Your Employees to Meditate."

Authors often have no say over the titles their articles are given, and this one sends a message that might be a little too clear: the article itself (here – you can read the abstract before you smack into the paywall) is a whole lot more ambiguous in its conclusions.

In it, they argue that meditation reduces people's motivation to engage in tedious and meaningless tasks. People didn't perform any worse, though, possibly because they weren't distracted by other thoughts or worries.
Happiness in the workplace in the US is a serious issue, and one that's gotten a good deal of thought.

What I'd Like to Ask These Business Experts

The research itself, with its appropriate level of nuance, doesn't bother me – but some of the assumptions the authors make about work do., The quote up there in the second paragraph should raise some big questions about the ways businesses think about their work environments.

1. All things being equal – and since mindfulness didn't effect productivity – why wouldn't businesses want employees experiencing "greater feelings of calm and serenity?"

2. In the research article, the authors explain, "While not tested here, it is possible that being in a mindful state made people realize how unimportant the experimental tasks were to them." They seem to be suggesting that this applies to the workplace as well as the lab. Why is the focus here on getting workers motivated to do things they don't care about, rather than finding ways to engage them?

The take-away from this seems to be that an anxious, un-self-actualized employee is, in some ways, better than one who's living life with a comfortable, mindful fullness. There was a time when employee satisfaction was taken as an important goal by many corporations. That time is, quite obviously, no longer here. There's been a subtle trade. Americans have exchanged satisfaction with life at work for the  money to buy satisfaction outside of work. (And then gave up the a lot of the money, too.)

So: is the problem with the mindful worker, or with the job she finds herself in?

Posted on

I’ve got a new bathroom

At least, parts of it are new. And it’s much, much better than the one I had before.

That got me thinking about a classic happiness problem: Why do we like the things we like?

Thinkers like the philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno argue it’s because we associate nice things with being “classy” in a very literal sense – because the things we own tell us who we are, and that comes with a social class label.

For several hundred years, people have been pursuing the American dream – and conspicuous consumption has been a part of that. Why? One argument explains it by saying that consumption tells other people – and ourselves as well – what we’re worth.

The modern minimalism movement rebels against that: you don’t need good things to convince yourself that you’re a good person. (Or, rather, if you do then you’ve got bigger problems to deal with than storing your shoe collection.) In this, they’re following after Adorno – but there’s a difference.

People in the 21st century still succumb to the desire to keep up with the Jonses, but it’s easier to get yourself out of that head-space because there are more points of view you can look at our culture from, if you’re willing to seek them out.

I’ve got this new bathroom, and I’m trying to figure out what, from Adorno’s point of view, it’s saying about me.

And I’m not sure that it matters. I explore this question in greater depth in an essay I’ll post soon.

Owning nice things can feel good in a lot of different ways. Are some ways better than others? Let me know what you think.

Posted on

It’s still not about the stuff.

I came across a classic 2012 editorial from the New York Times this afternoon called “Don’t Indulge. Be Happy.” It makes the same point that so many Times editorials, and advice columns and research summaries do: that having more stuff doesn’t make most people that much happier. Having more interesting experiences and being more generous both have that result. While material goods can provide a certain amount of comfort, experiences and relationships are also vital if you’re going to lead a fulfilling life. And while there’s no really practical limit to interesting things you can do or meaningful relationships you can create, most of us have satisfied our quota of stuff. (You really don’t need that much.)

This probably isn’t going to surprise anyone. What I find more curious, though, is why writers continue to feel the need to point this out.

Consumerism and materialism – these are tied deeply to Americans’ instincts about what will make us happy. They’re connected so deeply, it seems, that we need to be reminded over and over that there’s more to life than just owning things.

The fact that these articles keep coming out, each as though it were for the first time, seems to suggest that we have a collective amnesia about the other sources of happiness. Or maybe we’re so preoccupied with work that those other goals just fade from view.

I have some ideas about the historical foundations of this preoccupation, which I’ve posted in a column here. Let me know what you think.