‘Thou shalt not envy thy neighbor’s income or the size of their banana.’
There’s a notorious study from 2010 entitled
“Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction”
Pretty self-explanatory. These are the kinds of studies I like to chat about with our kids. Because when adults can’t make sense of things, children are pretty good at it.
Simply living is a paradox; consider this: on the one hand, we live a linear existence in terms of chronology. We get older, one day follows another, childhood slowly and inexorably turns into adulthood.
But…on the other hand, one of the fascinating things about childhood, to me, is the non-linear quantum nature of existence. You can live in both the present and the future and the past, simultaneously. You connect ideas and questions and thoughts without the filters of logic or reason or social awareness that cloud the learning abilities of adults.
And, I would argue, there are periods of childhood and adolescence that are filled with far more wisdom, clarity, and compassion than the periods of either early childhood or adulthood.
Here’s a sample of my thoughts on this:
Our two youngest have been squabbling about many things lately. Some of it’s funny, and a lot of it is exhausting, as we want them to develop traits of empathy, compassion, and mutually-supportive problem-solving methods. The types of squabbles are varied in topic, catalyst, and intensity, but there’s recurring patterns, one of which has to do with awareness of what the other is doing.
One can be perfectly happy, playing away, or reading away, or eating away, or doing whatever. This child, whichever one it is (in this case, 2 or 4) is content with what they have or what they are doing. Until…
…until they realize what the other is doing. Or what the other has. A child can be happy with their orange slices before them, until they count them up and realize that the other has one more; in frequent cases a forensic analysis of underlying facts such as one of them already having eaten one, therefore providing them with a quantity one less than the other, is irrelevant.
The point is, that the child is happy with what they have. Until they become paralyzed with the idea that somebody close to them might have more.
The longitudinal study from The University of Warwick’s Department of Psychology was studying why people from rich countries hadn’t gotten happier over the years, even though income and quality of life across multiple metrics had a half-century uptrend. My summary of one of their primary conclusions was that:
People are not satisfied with simply having more. They thought themselves happiest when they had more than their neighbors or peers.
This is deeply, deeply troubling, saddening, concerning, and…something that we can face head-on!
Our daughter right now is 14, and honestly, I want to be careful about sounding too smug and proud and braggy, but she is just incredible. Not incredible in the sense of being an easy child to raise, or in the sense of being malleable or compliant or any other stereotypes of ‘the perfect child.’ Nah. She is headstrong, high will-powered, independent, and has the mental acuity and wit to go toe-to-toe with me. Frequently. We disagree, we battle, we argue.
But I am so incredibly proud of who she is because I know she is driven by something internal. She is driven to succeed at what she does because of an internal compass, a beating heart that drives her independent spirit, and that independent spirit is not always an easy one to have when what you want sometimes, as a parent, is simply compliance, control, and final draconian authority.
What that means in some tangible terms is that we know when something is important to her, and I can trust that when something is important to her, it’s important because of something internal and independent. Of course we’re influence by our peers and those we respect. It’s a sad aspect of human motivation that all of us, just a little bit at least, want to be better than someone else. I think that’s okay, to be competitive enough to continually grow in the areas important to you, as long as your first competitor is yourself and your motivation is honest growth and sincere success, not crushing someone else just for the sake of feeling better about yourself.
So our daughter, 14, in the hinterlands between 4 years old and 45 years old, manages to do better what either of the extremes do:
Be the driver of her happiness and contentment.
Some ideas you learn and decide I’m gonna do, and that’s it. You commit to integrating them into your life, and that’s what you do.
Other ideas are ones you just keep coming back to because they’re so hard to do. It’s so hard to be happy for other people sometimes. It’s so hard to be happy for others’ success, for others’ accomplishments, for others’ financial growth, for others’ (apparent) easy and happy lives.
This idea is in the latter category. I keep coming back to it because I fail at it, again and again. But I keep trying. I’m really working at it, and I hope our 2- and 4-year old will model themselves after their 11- and 14-year old siblings and the beautiful examples they’ve set for them and for their parents in finding contentment, happiness, and success at an internal level.
