Note to Self on
How to Live
by Paul VanRaden,
2023
You (Paul) wrote a poem in 1997 stating the goal of your life, a goal you hoped could become everyone’s:
Your goal is easy to remember but not very specific, and few people take poems seriously. You need to define the goal better and then help lift the world’s total happiness including your own by deriving a more exact theory of how to live. Now is the time to do the math and develop the methods that will maximize global happiness. To increase total happiness, your main steps are: 1) better understand how the world works and what is possible, 2) define how best to measure the goal of increasing global happiness, 3) monitor the current status of the world, 4) list the possible actions you could take, 5) choose the option each day expected to result in the most future happiness, 6) teach others how to think, and 7) keep living until your expected contribution to future happiness falls below some minimum.
1. Understand the world
A deeper understanding of how any action causes any effect allows better predicting how each decision might affect your own and others’ future happiness. Predictions should include the direct intended effects plus any other effects not intended or not known. Formal education gives you a basic understanding of science, math, biology, history, culture, language, and religion to help you sort fact from fiction. Parental training and other human interactions help you know and judge what actions seem right or wrong. Natural human instinct makes your ability to predict equal to or better than any other animal. Practical experience lets you better predict what can or cannot be done and how others will react. Accurate predictions require an accurate model of the world, the people, and how they interact.
2. Define the goal
A goal to simply maximize your own income or happiness is a reasonable goal, but not optimal. In a free market, that goal causes you to do only the work that is most rewarding and buy the things that give you the most happiness per unit of currency (Adam Smith, 1776). You should go beyond Adam Smith and simple cash flow analysis: Do some good for goodness’ sake rather than for profit. But direct benefits to yourself are easier to predict than changes in other people’s happiness, and present benefits are easier to predict and measure than potential future effects. Discounts can be applied to future or indirect effects compared to current, direct effects, but remember that lasting joy for many should count more than a quick smile for one.
A guaranteed small benefit may be a poorer goal than choosing a small probability of a big benefit. Happiness is a nonlinear function of wealth. Having $2 million in the bank does not make you twice as happy as $1 million, and becoming a billionaire does not make you 1000 times happier than becoming a millionaire. Having no resources makes you focus more like an animal on just staying alive another day because dying of starvation or exposure will reduce your future happiness to 0. Money and resources are very important, but many nice things in life such as ideas, advice, or love do not have a market price. Charity and doing volunteer work can create happiness for others but often at a cost to the giver.
An efficient economy can use copyrights, patents, or intellectual property as rewards for investing in ideas rather than products and can use penalties to reduce external costs such as pollution. Patents and intellectual property often give the full benefit for decades to the first discoverer even if another would have invented the same thing a little later. Your math should consider if and when someone else will do that good deed if you choose not to. You should only take credit for the happy people-years that your actions cause minus the happy people-years that would have resulted later if those people had to wait for a second nice person to come along. For example, Thomas Edison got credit for inventing the light bulb in 1880, but we would have just as much light today if the light bulb had been invented by someone else a few years later.
The contributions of your actions to global happiness should be predicted and summed across time and across all those you might affect as:
∑time ∑people Δhap – ∑time ∑people Δhap_2nd ,
where Δhap measures the increase in your own and other people’s happiness from your actions and Δhap_2nd is the change in happiness that would have resulted if people had to wait for someone else to do the nice things that you did.
3. Monitor the status
Your actions should consider what is happening in the world right now or is predicted to happen. That includes a) monitoring your own health and learning how to improve it, b) living in a place likely to provide a nice environment now and in the future, c) getting accurate news about current and expected future events that might improve or destroy personal, local, or global lives and livelihoods such as weather, economics, entertainment, disease, crime, or war. Predictions are most accurate with up-to-date information about your own health and ability, what else is happening locally and globally, or new products and technologies that may help you, your neighbors, and everyone improve their happiness.
4. List the options
The easiest option is often to continue doing things you have been doing if those things work. You could also think about changing your job, location, habits, or getting married, or having kids. In daily life you can change your direction, timing, effort, leisure, recreation, or sleep to be happier. You can do what others request, or you can explore what other choices might be available. You should not spend forever listing all potential options but instead focus on those most likely to succeed or those with the biggest benefits. For example, chess players or chess computers may consider many future moves, but they focus mainly on those that lead to winning, not losing. In chess, each move has only a limited number of choices whereas life can have nearly unlimited choices and is therefore more interesting and harder to optimize. Like chess, life can be more fun if you decide within a reasonable time limit instead of thinking too long about each possible next move.
5. Choose the best option
The best choice of what to do may depend on your age. When you were very young your main jobs were simply eating, resting, growing, and playing. When in school another main job was learning. During much of life, earning a living is your main job and often takes 40 hours out of each week. Sometimes, even more important choices arrive with discrete, long-term effects such as finding a spouse, having a child or another child, retiring, or doing something illegal. Some such decisions are not easily reversible and deserve more planning and thought because those decisions can have large, direct effects on your and others’ happiness.
Some of your actions and investments can have exponential benefits such as becoming very specialized and talented at a particular skill. Becoming a top businessperson, professional athlete, or movie star can lead to larger total benefits than becoming a ‘jack of all trades.’ However, many daily decisions about what food to eat, how much to exercise, what to watch, where to go, or other continuous variables have fairly flat optima, meaning that many different choices provide nearly equal benefits, and such daily decisions may be easy to reverse the next day if desired. You should not spend too much time trying to optimize decisions with flat optima. On the other hand, being patient is often a good strategy. If you predict that you will be happier on the other side of the street, you should still look twice before crossing so that you are not run over by a truck, and that you eventually do get to the happiness that you predict.
Your life began about 9 months before birth, you have lived many years already, and you have more years to live. Since you (Paul) are now 63 and a male you can expect to live about 20 more years on average based on official U.S. social security estimates:
Actuarial Life Table (ssa.gov)
People live longer in some other well-developed countries but much shorter in some poorer countries:
https://wonderingmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/life_expectancy.png
Malthus predicted in 1798 that our life expectancy and happiness will always be reduced by overpopulation unless birth rates are decreased to better balance the demands and supplies of the things you need to live. Since then, lower birth rates and better methods to grow food, build houses, reduce disease, and prevent war now allow many more people to live long, happy lives. The optimum number of new babies to arrive each year depends on how much future progress and how many future goods we expect the earth and the people of earth will provide across their lifetimes. Progress itself can increase as more babies become more adults. Those future adults may learn and teach others how to get more happiness per unit of resources consumed or how to find more resources or produce better goods than we or Malthus predicted. But because natural or manmade disasters happen often, living too close to perfectly balancing supply and demand for resources can sometimes require rapid reductions of population. That can cause short, unhappy lives as Malthus predicted.
People across many regions of earth still are more crowded, have fewer local resources, and are less happy than they could be. Total happiness is near maximum if you maximize the ratio of happiness that you create to resources that you consume. Your parents invested years of time raising you and your teachers helped you understand the world to better predict causes and effects of each decision. Your community paid taxes to provide services to enhance your life and help you in emergencies. You should find ways to be happy, use resources efficiently, help others become happier, work to create even more resources, raise your children and the next generation well, and share with or teach others about useful new products and ideas. Try to make everybody happier, including you.
7. Die happily
You did not ask to be born, and in many states or countries you have no legal option to choose how long to live. During your 9 months of gestation, you had no happiness because human embryos and fetuses are just like embryos and fetuses of all other species. During late pregnancy and labor, mothers forego some happiness and have increased health risks. Newborn human babies are less developed than many other species and add little own happiness to the total during early ages. For mammals, birds, and some other species, parents devote much time and many resources to raising the next generation. Sometimes they even help raise the grandkids instead of finding other happy things to do.
Investing in the next generation pays off if the resulting children mature to reach their happier years. The annual support they require gradually declines as the babies become adults and support themselves. Human physical ability often reaches a peak earlier than mental ability, and your prime years may depend on your job and the training needed to succeed. Later, most adults become elderly and then may require much more support again to remain healthy and happy. Human growth and aging may be like building a house or a car, where the up-front investment creates a new product that can last for years. Eventually the repair bills exceed the future benefits that a new house or new car could provide.
The future support needed to keep you alive may at some point exceed the future happiness that you expect (Figure 1). The support to extend your old age could be better invested in raising a new child with more future happiness expected. Expensive support can be discontinued legally in many states and countries when no further happiness is expected. You could also choose when to end your life peacefully, but fewer governments allow that. You might need to travel to such a place to die peacefully with dignity. Ideally, each child born could expect many years of happy life and each adult eventually could die peacefully knowing that your life added to global happiness.
And when you die, your happiness can continue or even increase with “one child born in this world to carry on, to carry on.” So wrote a 17-year-old Laura Nyro whose words became famous in a song by Peter, Paul, and Mary in 1966 and by Blood, Sweat, and Tears in 1969. You can be happy and make others happy almost every day of your life.
Figure 1. Net happiness by age including that you create minus the care you receive from others.
Example contributors to
happiness
Most humans are happier than most animals because we have tools, ideas, and choices that animals do not have. Every year, humans can develop new tools, think of better ideas, and create more opportunities than we had last year. We can quickly share our progress with other humans using mass production, communication, and transportation. Some tools, ideas, and opportunities are useful to all humans. Examples of past products or ideas now used by most humans are in Table 1.
Table 1. Inventions, inventors, and their contributions to global happiness per person.
|
Idea or tool |
Inventor |
Year of invention |
Year >50% used or accepted |
Increase in happiness (%) |
|
Democracy |
Cleisthenes |
507 BC |
Still <50% |
100% |
|
Earth
revolves around sun |
Aristarchus, Copernicus |
250 BC, 1543 |
~1750 |
1% |
|
Laws of motion |
Newton |
1687 |
~1800 |
5% |
|
Life
and people evolved |
Darwin |
1859 |
~2000 |
2% |
|
Genetic inheritance |
Mendel |
1866 |
~1970 |
10% |
|
Telephone |
Bell |
1876 |
~2000 |
10% |
|
Light bulb |
Edison |
1879 |
~1970 |
20% |
Potential contributions to
happiness
Most humans spend most of their time earning a living and living their life. Most also feel better if their work helps others to live better lives. Many give to charity or volunteer for good causes. Some also develop new ideas or tools even if they may not benefit directly from those advances. Deciding which projects to work on is difficult. Measuring success requires a target year of when the benefits may arrive, how many people already favor the idea or could benefit, and how much happier people will be. Example projects and ideas to work on are in Table 2. Some projects such as food production also can increase population, not just happiness per person, for a large total benefit.
Table 2. Inventions, inventors, and their contributions to
global happiness per person.
|
Idea or tool |
Target year |
Currently favor (%) |
Current Prob (>50% use or acceptance) |
Increase in happiness (%) |
|
Improve world government |
2039 |
60 |
10 |
50 |
|
Migrate freely across earth |
2050 |
60 |
1 |
20 |
|
Believe universe is infinite |
2050 |
20 |
5 |
2 |
|
Believe in no god |
2050 |
20 |
5 |
10 |
|
Allow safe, early abortions |
2050 |
60 |
80 |
10 |
|
Improve human genetics |
2050 |
1 |
0.01 |
30 |
|
Improve agricultural genetics |
2050 |
90 |
95 |
20 |
|
Eat cheap, nutritious food |
2050 |
30 |
1 |
10 |
|
Improve music theory |
2050 |
20 |
10 |
1 |
|
Revise piano keyboard |
2050 |
10 |
2 |
0.1 |
|
Revise Roman calendar |
2100 |
10 |
1 |
0.01 |