Note to Self on

How to Live

by Paul VanRaden

2023, updated 2026

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) help prevent evil people or natural disasters from decreasing happiness, 6) choose the option each day expected to result in the most future happiness, 7) teach others how to think, 8) give to charity, and 9) 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. But with no wealth you might become more like an animal just trying to stay alive another day because dying of starvation or exposure would 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 or crime. 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 Δ_hap – ∑_time ∑_people Δ_{hap_2nd} ,

where Δ_hap measures the increase in your own and other people’s happiness from your actions and Δ_{hap_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 things that 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 can 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. Prevent evil and disasters

While you work to do good, a few other people are evil and try to harm individuals or the world. For example, many people were ruled or murdered by an evil madman during World War II. Many other people of “the greatest generation” risked or gave their lives to save their and future people’s ability to live free. To win, they could not simply create happiness. First, they had to stop the march of evil and destroy the resources that the madman used against them, including the people he controlled. To continue doing good you should avoid letting others do you harm. But sometimes, as in World War II, the best option may be to risk your life if that gives a better future to others. Jobs such as security, police, and military may prevent declines in happiness rather than directly increasing it. Too often, the most productive lives get cut short by evil or insane acts.

Natural disasters can also end even very well-planned lives. Learning how to avoid or reduce the effects of bad events might be as valuable as directly improving people’s lives. Jobs such as firefighting, emergency management, or ambulance care can reduce harm and save lives. Actions to reduce pollution or global warming also can stop harm rather than create a direct benefit to you. As a society, being ready for anything might be a good investment even if some bad events, like pandemics or large meteorites, do not come right away. Almost the same math applies to preventing harm as to doing good, and both require estimating who would do it if you did not.

6. 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. Avoiding doing illegal things also may require constant thought. Some choices have discrete, long-term effects and are even more important such as finding a spouse, having a child or another child, finding a better job, or retiring. 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, so that you eventually do get to the happiness that you predict.

7. Live happily

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 the 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.

Dependents are people who depend on you to provide the support they need and beneficiaries are those who will receive your remaining funds or property if you die. Life insurance can give beneficiaries the same income that your employment did after you are gone so they might have no financial incentive either way, but of course they would prefer to have you around instead of only your insurance payment. When you retire and stop earning pay, beneficiaries would be better off financially if they inherit your money right away rather than after you spend most of it. Annuities can reverse their incentive while providing you more total income if you live longer. If you save or give some of your annuity directly to beneficiaries instead of spending it all, their incentive will be to help you have a long, healthy, pleasant, frugal life.

8. Give to charity

Earth has many people and good causes who could convert your money into more happiness than you or your beneficiaries would. While you work and pay taxes, your government could and should find deserving people or programs and support them. If your government has fair taxes and good social programs, you can waste less time avoiding taxes or studying charities. But in 2025, the US government stopped helping earth’s poorest citizens by destroying USAID with no thought, began spending much more keeping poor people far away from our rich people, and reduced taxes on the richest people. The new US tax rules in 2026 now allow slightly more tax deductions for charity but will reduce tax by only $150 on the first $1,000 if you have few other expenses to itemize.

If rich governments and rich people are not helping the poor, each of us should then try to guess who needs help, how much, and how to deliver it. You can help to restore some of that flow of charity, try to convince others to again tax the rich and help the poor, and remind others that less charity will be needed after poor people move to better lands, like our ancestors did.

The best impact may be charities that deliver free ideas that everyone can use such as Wikipedia or high-quality news such as PBS. Their goals seem like the goals for this web site. Instead, billionaires like to buy news organizations or social media sites and send you ideas they want to sell. Honest history and honest news reports are worth supporting to prevent more people from becoming puppets of corporations or dictators. Giving physical goods to poor people is also important but with less impact if they remain poor for generations because our government stops them from improving their lives.

Adam Smith in his 1777 theory of moral sentiments, Part III, Chapter II said that “Man, according to the [ancient] stoics, ought to regard himself, not as something separated and detached, but as a citizen of the world, a member of the vast commonwealth of nature. To the interest of this great community, he ought at all times to be willing that his own little interest should be sacrificed. Whatever concerns himself, ought to affect him no more than whatever concerns any other equally important part of this immense system. We should view ourselves, not in the light in which our own selfish passions are apt to place us, but in the light in which any other citizen of the world would view us.” Smith’s Part I, Chapter IV (Of the social passions) and Part II, Section II, Chapter II (Of the sense of justice, of remorse, and of the consciousness of merit) also seem very useful now.

9. Die peacefully

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. How to make people happier.

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

The idea to maximize global happiness is not new. In his 1863 book Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill defined his Greatest Happiness Principle by stating on page 21 that the goal of human conduct should be “not the agent's own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether.” Today, modern communication lets us measure and more quickly increase global happiness.