Want to Be Happy? Buy More Takeout and Hire a Maid, Study Suggests
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1. I have long been inspired by Gandhi's having cleaned toilets in his ashram and he seems to have accomplished a fair amount of meaningful things. Monks garden and clean things in part to increase self-awareness and inner tranquility. The structure adds to my life, not detracts.
2. Happiness isn't "out there." It's "in here." Same with freedom. I suppose I could be happy and feel free either way -- doing my chores or outsourcing them, but doing them seems simpler.
3. Actually, the amount of garbage takeout creates is unconscionable to me. I couldn't live with myself filling landfills at that rate.
4. My home cooked food tastes better, is more convenient, costs less, is healthier, and is better in every way for me than takeout. The problem that takeout solves isn't time. It's ignorance of how to source fresh fruits and vegetables and to prepare them. Solving that problem improved my life more than take out ever could.
5. I incorporate cleaning my apartment into my workout routine, sweeping and mopping between sets. It doesn't cost extra time.
I feel the article misses the point of what creates happiness and freedom, but to each his or her own.
What sort of black beans are those? The ones I know aren't edible when raw.
But anyway, the are great fiber. Much more comfortable than grain fiber. But one must rinse them carefully after cooking, to reduce gassiness.
It's like driving. Sure some people love the feel of the road or whatever. But I Uber everywhere and it's fantastic.
But caring about their working condition is a different problem on its own. (Still valid)
The data on this is pretty clear, economics has studied this for a long time.
And these people are poor because of several reasons among which is bad government, but not exclusively! The current "world order" (for lack of a better term) in regards to the economy ensures disadvantaged people remain disadvantaged, keeps people who are poor in poverty for the foreseeable future. We can't excuse that just because we like cheap shiny stuff to buy and because the richest among us want a few billions more, as if they don't have enough power on us already. And I'm getting off topic so I'll just stop here.
2. ???
3. Cocoa farmers make more money.
Most people use buy chocolate based on price and quality. That how it is in the real world, and that gone stay that way. Even fair trade chocolate can only give farmers a tiny bit more money and the economics of fair trade basically shows that it does not make a large difference and it makes no difference in the long run.
You can claim it is not ethical, fine, you don't have to participate and you can buy 'fair trade' products if it makes you feel better but in the real world this will never actual solve the problem of poverty. Poverty will be solved when poor people/nations evolve institutions that facilitate growth.
> The current "world order" (for lack of a better term) in regards to the economy ensures disadvantaged people remain disadvantaged
No it does not. A country that manages to establish effective government can turn itself into a middle to high income country within 30 years. Look at Vietnam, China, Botswana, Chile and so on.
In fact its the exact opposite. Never has it been so easy for a country to go from poverty to wealth. Most of the tech is already invented, you can simple jump over many generation of technical evolution. You can use your competitive advantage effectively because you have a huge market to sell to.
I mean, that's demonstrably false. When I lived in Bangladesh as a young child, GDP per capita was $250 per year in current dollars. Today it's about $1,500 per year. In my lifetime it's gone from about 6% of US GDP per capita to 10%.
I absolutely agree with the other poster that the "world order" does not keep countries poor. With a lot of exceptions, it's bad governments and bad value systems that keep people poor. In 1969, Korea's GDP per capita was also about $250 per year (about 5% of that of the US at the time). Today, it's $27,000 per year, or about half of that of the US. Nothing happened to Korea in 1969. Instead, they started getting their government in order (though it was something of an autocracy at first), implemented market reforms, and prosperity followed.
Note that it took Korea just 25 years to go from having 5% of US GDP per capita to having 33% of US GDP per capita. Meanwhile, in ~35 years Bangladesh has only gone from 5% to 10% of US GDP. Nobody is doing anything to Bangladesh to cause it to grow slower than Korea. It's not a victim of some proxy war like some countries. It's all about the quality of the government and the moral virtue of the people.
And it didn’t matter if they were rich or poor: People benefited from buying time regardless of where they fell on the income spectrum. (The authors note, though, that may not hold true for the poorest of the poor.)
Neither the NYTimes article or the research paper addresses debt. Nor does it address if punching yourself in the face increases or deceases happiness, nor if the lesser savings of someone who spends on a maid makes them miserable in 50 years time when they retire.
Even the best takeout food is low quality. You can't trust the ingredients.
Most people just don't like doing the shopping, cooking, and cleaning involved with daily meal preparation. Most people also don't like cleaning in general, and hate their commutes. Thinking of these as therapeutic tasks is as much a luxury of white collar life as unlimited access to maids and food delivery services is.
And the idea that you'd save time or money with proper knowledge of how to source and prep your own fruits and vegetables, or that time spent cleaning disappears because you consider it exercise, all seems like magical thinking to me.
As soon as you place a realistic dollar figure on the value of your time, for most of us, all of those calculations break down dramatically in favor of outsourcing most tasks related to food, cleaning, and transportation, not only as a matter of comfort, but also as a matter of economics.
It makes sense that it would work out this way, too. A single Uber driver with a single car can satisfy the transportation needs of a dozen people. An Instacart shopper can gather everything 3 families need in a single pass through the store. The driver can get those groceries to 3 homes in a single round trip instead of 3 separate round trips.
Outsourcing can seem wasteful and opulent, but in doing so you're often participating in a sharing economy or benefiting from economies of scale and division of labor that actually serve to reduce waste and inefficiency.
While say playing video games seems more enjoyable than taking out the trash that's a subjective assessment. And you can alter your subjective perceptions.
If you like cooking or cleaning or taking out the trash then by all means you should do those things. But, if you don't like doing those things then the threshold for when it makes sense to pay someone else to do them is lower than most would think.
A different take on their data is: Not doing things is becoming ignorant and in the short term ignorance of the negatives in life is bliss. In the longterm, not knowing how to do the things that are happening so you can survive is a larger stress for people. Consequently, people are happy when they are choosing to outsource, but it does not last and they choose to cycle back. The noveau rich outsource willingly and the other rich outsource more reluctantly as they are more familiar with the eventual costs of short term stress reduction.
However a big part of this is simply how much space your keeping up. An efficiency can be kept clean though habitat, a 1,000 acre estate takes a staff.
PS: That's not to say having groceries delivered is a bad idea, just maximum productivity is simply a wasteful goal.
I still try to take public transit when I travel (Chicago is pretty good and Portland is OK when it goes close to where you want. Bay Area doesn't have enough tendrils to get you within a few miles of where you want to go unless you're in SF proper, and half my friends refuse to ride Muni even though it's totally fine compared to SMART busses in Detroit) but it's hard to convince most people that the train or the bus could ever be not disgusting and filled with people who exist to make your life miserable.
Uber style services is a market response to the problem of transportation, because public transit options have not grown form the market because the government is slow and outlaw most private public transportation.
I think these should be also included in the comparison.
2. I spend zero time at gas stations, washing the car, servicing it, warming it up, changing to winter tires, or cleaning the windshield off. I also spend zero time doing driveway snow removal in the winter.
3. I have to find parking with my own car.
4. I am more likely to use my feet as my primary mode of transportation. This means I am less likely to need to schedule separate exercise time. And I can still listen to music, news, or an audiobook.
5. Because it saves money, budgeting is a little easier (especially if you are poor) because you aren't as tight.
Does it really create more overall? At first it would seem obvious that it would, because there is now packaging for transporting the prepared food from the restaurant to my home. If I prepared the same meal at home that packaging would not be needed.
But, on the other hand, the restaurant does much more volume than I do. They will buy ingredients in bulk, whereas I'll buy them in much smaller packages. For a given total amount of an ingredient the restaurant will probably generate less garbage per serving than I do at home.
So the question then is does the savings in garbage per serving from the restaurant operating at high volume outweigh the garbage from packaging individual meals for take out?
My guess is that it might depend on what kind of food is being taken out. Food that is taken out in styrofoam containers probably has more impact than food taken out in paper bags.
Buy your produce in re-usable or recyclable containers, or grow it yourself? We pick up produce from a local farm, they bring it to the pick up site in re-usable plastic bins, we pick it up using re-usable cloth bags. Eggs are in recyclable containers.
I don't know where you can buy Franks Red Hot in a re-usable package, but when you find out you'll let me know, right?
Yes my pasta comes wrapped in plastic and my vinegar in a plastic bottle like everyone else - but it doesn't compare to the waste of takeout and frozen dinners.
Can you buy a pocket full of rice? No, but why would you? Buy a huge bag at Costco and see how long that lasts. That is how you reduce waste per meal.
Even letting slide that moved goalpost, some things requiring packaging doesn't merit disparaging the idea of reducing packaging.
In my case, I stopped buying pasta and mostly replaced it with legumes, which I buy from the bulk food store with bags I bring with me, so I've achieved the same effect. As best I can tell, the legumes are healthier and taste delicious in my stews. Plus I've learned to make more foods in the process.
Yes, much more, in my case. My transition from a standard American diet took a couple years, but is one of the biggest improvements I've made.
I get most of my fruits and vegetables through a CSA or the farmers market, which use much less packaging than any store or restaurant I've seen. The farms are within a couple hours' drive.
I get most of the rest -- mostly dry legumes, nuts, and spices -- from a bulk food store a couple blocks away, filling containers I bring with me. I also avoid packaged food, as I document in this blog post: http://joshuaspodek.com/avoiding-food-packaging, which has improved the deliciousness, freshness, savings, convenience, and healthiness of my diet.
I compost and recycle so my landfill garbage gets emptied about twice a year, as shown in this video: http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-environment-podcast-5.
One takeout meal produces months worth of garbage so in my case the difference is orders of magnitude.
And my homemade food is more delicious, convenient, cheaper, healthier, etc.
In London, restaurants all pile down to Smithfields, Spitalfields and Billingsgate markets at the crack of dawn for their day's ingredients - they don't go down to their local supermarket and walk around with a basket.
They fill up their crates with the stuff they buy and head back to their kitchens.
I get everything else you are saying, but how is homemade more convenient?
Convenience is the most important reason (for me) to do take out. Normally its picked up when already out on the way home, no time spent preparing/cooking, no time spent cleaning up (except the extremely bad part of throwing it all in trash)
Also, when meeting people, I have them over for lunch or dinner more than before learning to prepare food from scratch, business and personal, so meeting gets easier. And cheaper -- I save money cooking them and me dinner compared to eating out and just paying for me, though they usually bring something with them.
Plus it deepens the relationship faster to cook at home and share, so there's a convenience in shortening the get-to-know-each-other part of a relationship.
The picking it up takeout on the way home part is an inconvenience. As is dealing with paying for it. I pick up my CSA delivery once a week, but it's one of the highlights of the week. Seeing all the fresh fruits and vegetables, the anticipation, the creative challenge of figuring out how I'll combine and prepare them... I'd choose it over going to art galleries, movies, or many social things. In fact, I bring people with me to pick them up as a social event.
In summary, food becoming an enriching part of my life replaces a lot of time wasters. Healthier food means less exercise time and cost for the same fitness, etc.
Thanks for the reply. Do you by chance have a recipe list on your website somewhere for the meals you normally cook for the week?
This video -- http://joshuaspodek.com/20-minute-vegetable-stew -- shows how I do it. The video isn't supposed to be entertaining or glamorous, just showing how I make a half-dozen meals in about 20 minutes' preparation time.
People give the stews rave reviews. The same technique as in the video with different vegetables gives very different stews. Following the same process as different vegetables come in and out of season... I've never tasted the same result twice, but they're always delicious.
I hope it helps.
1. Phone for delivery, and they will say "45 minutes" (it will probably be here in 35).
2. Phone an order for me to pick up, and they will say "half an hour", and I'll go and get it, and it will probably take me 10 minutes to get there and back, again 35 minutes.
3. Take a small detour, and spend 10 minutes sitting at the food vendor (as in your example). How convenient this is depends on how big the detour is. If you are on foot, even a small detour can add quite a bit of time. If you are driving, parking up and walking between car and vendor is an oft-ignored time sink.
4. Spend 20 minutes preparing and cooking, then eat. Put the leftovers in the fridge or freezer.
5. Get something I made earlier in the week out of the fridge or freezer, put it in the microwave for 3-5 minutes, eat it. (Granted, the same is true if you over-order your takeout)
Options 1, 2, and 3 all rely on the vendor being open and not too busy at the time I decide I want the food.
If you only ever eat out or takeout, hire a cleaner, and have someone do all your laundry, you might be able to get away without doing any grocery shopping. In which case, adding such shopping to your weekly routine might add an extra hour. However, if you do already have to do that shopping, then spending an extra 20-30 minutes each week in the supermarket choosing vegetables is likely to be more convenient than stopping off at a food vendor each day.
Depending on the variety of food vendors available on your route home, and the size of their menus, you may be stuck eating pretty much the same thing every night, or having to take larger detours, or make special trips to get something different (negating the convenience). If you cook at home, then there may be a few dishes requiring exotic fresh ingredients that you can't have, but beyond that, the world is your oyster. You can get a lot of variety from basically the same stuff put together in different proportions.
Note that this system is already how many catering services work. Except that in those cases, the caterer will also take away the containers themselves. (Personal catering—i.e. "an arrangement with someone who cooks to prepare meals for you and stock your fridge with them"—is a commonly-consumed service among both the upper class and the physically disabled. But oddly, outside of those two contexts, you just never hear about it.)
For example, in many cases it is more environmentally friendly to use disposable paper coffee cups compared to ceramic cups, once the energy usage to produce and wash them is taken into account. See http://sustainability.tufts.edu/wp-content/uploads/Comparati...
I've just checked by washing my teacup.
I used 0.25 litre of water at 53 C. Incoming water temperature here is about 10 C so that means:
0.25 kg * 4200 J.K-1.kg-1 * (53 - 10) K
= 45 kJ = 0.045 MJ
This is off by a factor of several. For example coal fired power stations are maybe 45% efficient. Then you have to mine the coal, transport it to the power station etc etc.
> Hocking assumed a new, commercial dishwasher running on Canadian electricity, requiring about 0.18 MJ/cup-wash.
Nowhere in the article does it say, or even imply as far as i can see, that the energy cost included cost of mining and transporting coal (or oil or gas or solar energy) to the generator.
If that was the intention then it should have been made much clearer because it dramatically affects the results. Where I live (98% hydro) the total energy cost of the energy I use from the grid will be lower than, say the UK (mix of oil, gas, nuclear) simply because the raw material cost is eliminated.
If these details are omitted from the article then the information cannot be effectively used except in that one location in the world where it was written making it rather difficult to draw useful conclusions for or against the use of disposable cups.
The footnote at the bottom says that 1 MJ will raise 3 quarts of water to boiling and that is clearly the energy delivered not the energy consumed in the total process.
So perhaps the only conclusion to be drawn here is that ILEA Leaf carries some rather sloppy articles.
Apart from Karma-based approach in Gita, you can also look towards the Service-based approach in Sikhism or the Non-Detachment in Buddhism. In Sikhism, service is an integral part of religion and every Sikh is expected to give at least some time to do voluntary service in Gurudwaras(Sikh Temples). This is mostly in the form of chores like cooking food, washing utensils, polishing the shoes of visitors etc. In India, you can find some of the richest Sikhs doing these chores in Gurudwaras.
Similarly in Buddhism, detachment of the self is an important aspect of living a life which involves restraining oneself, cultivating discipline and practicing mindfulness and meditation.
None of them have any details about pursuing happiness specifically.
I think it is true- but specifically when we limit happiness to very low forms of it (cheesecake, casual sex, meaningless gratifications, etc.)
That's not a small point - it's very true when we're talking about that, and I believe it is the type of happiness that is pursued with the most energy, most of the time.
However - if we re-frame happiness to some other definition, say the happiness one finds in keeping a home sanitary, or helping a friend, or building something useful, then I think it has the opposite effect. e.g. the happiness that comes from learning something new that improves the lives of you and those around you, is not the same as that which comes from getting drunk. Pursuing the first will not lead to sadness, but pursuing the latter will.
1. I joined a CSA with a rule for myself not to let anything go to waste. That forced me to figure out how to prepare local, in-season fresh vegetables and fruit. The first year I did it, I had to steam a lot of vegetables and eat them with salt and pepper since I didn't know what I was doing. So, healthy but not delicious. The next year I knew what I was doing and learned to make things delicious. Now I can go to farmers markets and get local, in-season produce, which is cheapest, healthiest, and most flavorful. I barely ever go to markets any more.
2. I gave myself a rule to buy no packaged food for a week (no bags, boxes, bottles, rubber bands, stickers, etc). The challenge seemed hard at first, but I made it 2.5 weeks and by the end of it, my views on food changed. Packaged food became far less appetizing and more weird in a way I can't explain but you have to experience. Anyway, it forced me to buy almost exclusively fruits and vegetables.
Oh, third: I found a store near me that sells bulk foods, so legumes, nuts, oats, and a few other things I get there.
The short answer: force yourself to buy only fresh vegetables and fruits and you'll figure it out! You're not going to die. You'll only face a challenging transition.
The clickbait title is designed to appeal to a set of people that are frustrated with life at this time. Either they have the money and are able to do these things or they don't and see it as something to strive for even though their toil might be for nothing .
The title has the opposite effect for people who don't believe that these actions will help them. I am not sure if this is intentional or not but it helps it to go viral. The article is so polarizing that people would want to repost it on their Facebook / Twitter or whatever and criticize it. Of course this has the side effect of spreading it to more people and thats the point.
I feel somewhat masochistic even uttering this, but I really enjoy pulling weeds by hand.
Please, let me explain why!
I just bought my first house this past year with a lawn that the previous owners left in considerable disrepair.
Weeds... weeds... creeping clovers of all types... and more weeds.
But there was a good 75% grass cover, so it felt wrong to rip it all up and replace it with sod.
We have a dog, and our previous one passed of bladder cancer, so roundup or any other herbicides were completely out of the question.
So I sat on a milk crate, and started digging at the dandelions at first with a garden tool.
That worked well enough.
But I was ripping up a lot of the grass with each punch of the garden tool, so I tried to start ripping them out by hand... and by George by worked!
I was weeding my lawn twice as fast now because I was just grabbing and ripping with my bare hands instead of an awkward tool.
Smiling every time I got the root, and grimacing every time I did not!
I was losing less grass.
But my back hurt.
Sitting on that milk crate and hunching over really did not sit well with my back.
So I tried bending over.
And my back felt great!
A few days later, I noticed a strange pain in my hamstrings.
Lactic acid was building.
But I hadn't been running or cycling or doing any kind of workout recently... or had I?
Bending over and placing your hands to the ground is actually a great stretch that I always considered myself somewhat incapable of doing. And I never did it regularly.
Yet there I was, stretching for an hour a day, out in the open sun and breeze. Hanging out with my dog.
Admiring my progress as the pile of weeds I picked grew, and the ground I stood foot on looked more like a real lawn... I was in heaven.
I now find myself weeding my lawn first thing every morning, before even eating breakfast sometimes.
I'm absolutely loving it.
And I hated doing "yardwork" when I was younger.
Not really, if you consider the time and effort needed to prepare a meal at home. Starting from shopping at a kitchen market, transporting the goods to home, cutting, prepping, the cooking and finally cleaning up afterwards...
Unless you have several hours of free time each day, preparing ones own meal is not something everyone looks forward to...
That leaves us wondering why economies of scale haven't beaten out your costs? A place like McDonalds should be able to buy food considerably cheaper than you can, hire people at a fraction of the cost of your time to prep for yourself, etc. While I understand why you may not want to eat McDonalds food constantly, from a price perspective you shouldn't be able to compete.
Have you forgotten some of your costs? It's easy to ignore the opportunity cost of owning the means of production, for instance, despite being a substantial cost, especially in high-cost cities. I have calculated in the past that simply having land allocated for the averaged-sized kitchen in SF costs about the same as a meal out at a nice restaurant 365 days a year, every year. That's even before getting into the cost of building the kitchen structure, furnishing it will the tools needed to prepare food, etc.
If you still believe that your methods are cheaper than a restaurant, what prevents it from working at scale to allow restaurants to offer food just as cheaply?
> I don't always have the time
This is an interesting statement. "I don't have time" means that you value doing one activity over another. If cooking isn't your top choice when faced with options, then perhaps you have undervalued your time spent in the kitchen when calculating your costs?
My setup costs are pretty much next to none, I pay a rent for fully furnished apartment with kitchen, pots and pans, tableware and everything included. Actually it would be a shame not to use them, those would be wasted expenses.
My cooking habits are opportunistic, if I'm at home, with no plans, I'll cook a meal and enjoy the process of doing so. A lot of the times I'm simply not home, so I don't even have the opportunity to cook.
Having explored some investment opportunities in the restaurant industry in the past, I don't see the markups being that large. Competition is fierce enough that there isn't a lot of room to go overboard with the margins. Even McDonalds makes the vast majority of their profits from being in the real-estate business[1], rather than the food business.
> Actually it would be a shame not to use them, those would be wasted expenses.
That I agree with, but the cost of the kitchen is still baked into your rent/utilities. You cannot simply ignore the cost because you happen to already be paying it. It is a very real cost that affects how much it costs to cook at home.
> A lot of the times I'm simply not home
Which, I would argue, is also a cost that should be considered as part of cooking at home. Time to get home, cost of travel to get home, giving up the opportunity of whatever else you may be doing, are all costs involved in cooking at home when you are away from home. And it seems that you have found eating out to be the cheaper option under these circumstances.
[1] http://blog.wallstreetsurvivor.com/2015/10/08/mcdonalds-beyo...
Maybe a lot of the traditional home cooking stuff isn't as good as what you'd get from takeout. A subtle form of inflation. For really cheap stuff the early blog posts of Jack Monroe are a good read; https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/oct/02/jack-mo...
Home cooking benefits from amortisation. Cooking more servings is often only a little more labour, up to the size of your kitchen. You don't need to shop daily either.
I do my own cooking and it rarely takes more than half an hour of actual work, plus up to half an hour (longer for weekend roasts) of semi-unattended cooking time.
Do people really need to spend several hours a day cooking? I don't think so. Simpler meals, simpler prep, putting something in the oven and setting a timer. Totally doable in much less "active" time. Maybe people are just not spending enough time at home.
In a world that epitomizes heinous men like Columbus or Alexander, it comes as no surprise that a racist, kinky pervert like MK Gandhi is hailed as peacemaker...
His `ahimsa` nonsense benefited the British raaj more than the Indian subcontinent. Because of his stubborn refusal to support forceful eviction of the imperial forces, independence had been delayed by a decade. Thousands of young men had been killed. Their blood is on Gandhis hands. Not to mention, during WW2 he sent Indian forces to reinforce the ailing British army.
During the 1899 2nd Anglo-Boer war, Gandhi volunteered for the British army. He preached independence, except for Black people. He expressed his disdain for Black Africans, by frequently referring to them as "Kafirs".
In 1930, he raised Rs 1.32 Crores - a humongous sum in those days (even in present day India that's a substantial amount of money) for the Dalits of India. No records yet exist that a single penny of that fortune had been spent for the betterment of the people. Not very surprising for a failed lawyer, who tried his luck abroad and decided to work as legal counsel for a wealthy Muslim smuggler in South Africa charging hefty fees.
People extol his vow to celibacy... and forget to mention, that he would separate married women from their husbands, and lie with them naked. He'd advise the husbands to take a cold shower whenever they felt aroused, while he was lying naked with their nude wives in the same room. He'd even lie naked with nude teen/pre-teen girls. When in Bengal, used the Bengali Muslims as an excuse to sleep naked with his 18 yr old grand-niece. He was 77 then, arguing that muslims may kill them, they should remain in the state of purity in case death comes. So he forced his grand-niece to sleep naked with him.
Though there's no account of Gandhi ever having sexual relationship with any of these women. Lying naked with nude women was his way to demonstrate his resolve... the "vow of celibacy"... Of course, it should be easy to refrain from heterosexual romp with all the nude girls and ladies lying with him in the same room... someone who was decades later found to be a closet homosexual...
Imagine if Mahatma Gandhi was alive today, and indulged in the weird activities that he did...
For example, I really relax when I fill or empty the dishwasher - but I hate cleaning my flat - it's like wasted time for me - really thinking now about hiring a maid to clean it once a week.
I used to incorporate cleaning into my home workout routine as well. I knew I couldn't be the only one! A "rest" for me was sweeping the floor. Now I go to the gym because bodyweight isn't enough any more but I haven't found a good way to keep my floors clean because I hate doing that too.
More time for doing non-boring stuff makes you happy. Who'da thunk it?
On a related note, the Norwegian central statistics bureau released today a study on free time and happiness, and in particular how happy various demographics are with the part of their free time when they can do whatever they like. "Me-time".
What stuck out very strongly to me is that they found a very strong correlation with age: couples over 45 were 30 percentage points more happy with their "me-time" than couples under 45, but this was completely independent of whether they had kids or not. Couples without kids vs. with kids were within 1 percentage point of each other in both age groups. I strongly expected to see couples without kids more happy with their "me-time", but apparently they're not.
Eventually, you have everything you need and you have to break out of that "keep everything" mentality because it's no longer appropriate.
Edit: link: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/brief-parenting-happiness/
Not all research findings fit with each other.
> particular how happy various demographics are with the part of their free time when they can do whatever they like
It wouldn't seem all that surprising if parents wished they'd have more of that, and is something totally different than "couples with kids are less happy".
This is why people perform experiments instead of concluding things solely from personal experience.
I think the only other way to get around this problem is to have a much smaller living space with less stuff. The less stuff you have the easier it is to manage.
It relates to larger ideas of ownership being composed of use approaching limits, maintenance of standards, and defense of boundaries. Maintaining the standards of cleanliness of a living space is part of owning the living space - along with approaching (and expanding) the the living space's limits for use & utility, and defending the boundaries of the living space.
So, that's probably not everyone's situation or experience, but it just reiterated that having control and simplicity is nice. Simplicity for some might be not having to clean, but for others it might mean not having to depend on someone else. I can't be my own Verizon or Uber of course, but some things I'm in a good position to provide for myself...
It is amazing to me that the same person who will be self-righteous in refusing to hire a maid will have no problem at all ordering an item on Amazon (where countless faceless staff do 'potentially unpleasant logistics labor' to get that package to your doorstep).
Paying to have my home cleaned feels uncomfortable because it's something I could do myself, so it makes it very obvious that my time is being valued more by society than the cleaner's.
I generally find people who work for cash, and we negotiate fair prices.
I don't think that works as an explanation. I have no compunction about buying hot food even though I can cook myself, and I'm sure I could easily have learned to repair a couple of things I paid to have repaired for me.
In most service industries, you have people serving many different customers at once in a way that's usually more efficient than every individual doing the work. But if I pay for a cleaner, I'm paying someone to spend time doing almost exactly what I would do otherwise. They're probably slightly faster than I would be, but otherwise there are no economies of scale obscuring the inequality, and that's what makes a lot of people uncomfortable with it.
We've all had terrible experiences that made us miserable while we were doing it, but were made less miserable because we got to bitch about it later on. For example, I once went camping with my friends and everything went wrong. We forgot to bring tools to help us cook food. It was raining and one of our tents didn't have a rainfly, so we all had to cram into the other relatively small tent. I ended up sleeping on a pile of jagged rocks, head-to-foot with one of my friends, and at the feet of my other four friends, with my head in a puddle. On top of that, other another campsite close to us was setting off fireworks for hours (it was the 4th of July), which kept waking us up at irregular intervals throughout the night. That night sucked really hard, but it's one of my favorite stories to tell, so I don't really reflect on it negatively.
It takes me perhaps half a week to do laundry. I load up all my laundry in one load in the washer, with a ColorCatcher to avoid dye bleeding. Once it's done I move it all to a dedicated spot in my closet, where I take all the things that need to be hanged and hang them, and leave the rest for the next day.
Over the next few days I'll extract the other outerwear, then the underwear, until I'm left with socks. All of my socks are inside-out, so one day I'll turn them right-side-out and the next I'll fold them and put them up.
Works because it's just me.
Like how if you commute the same way every day, the memory of each one seems to merge and disappear. Sure, you lose that time, but it becomes a completely neutral experience.
[1] L.L. Bean sell "wrinkle free" cotton shirts that you just hang up when they come out of the drier. They stay pretty wrinkle free even in a suitcase.
The better question is: is cooking just not as enjoyable as I think it is, or do the times when I don't feel like cooking offset the enjoyment from the times I do? Is there some maximal happiness from part-cooking/part-takeout?
I also have a quick-and-dirty burrito I like to make: dice onions and optionally hot peppers, tomatoes, etc., sautee for a few minutes, add a can of canned beans and mix for a few more minutes, put into a tortilla with sour cream, done. It's not carnitas from a good taqueria, but I live in the UK, so the bar for outdoing a takeaway burrito is not that high. ;-)
A nice side dish, or a main dish for some people, are "greens" of various kinds (turnip, collard, dandelion, etc., can also use kale). Just put in a pot with a small amount of water, put on the lid, and steam until they're soft (shouldn't take more than 15 mins). Add olive oil, vinegar, and salt. Can make it into a more hearty main dish by adding in some chopped ham or bacon (with bacon, add it first and cook a few minutes to make sure it's fully cooked).
There's also "all-day breakfast", if you want to follow the current restaurant trend. ;-) Frying up eggs & bacon & toast takes almost no time at all!
I've found a few simple cookbooks with small ingredient lists (4 - 10 things) and very simple instructions. Initially it felt like a rip off, but you know what? Everything was super tasty.
paying others to do tasks one dreads could lead to more happiness
So if you don't dread cooking, it would seem it doesn't apply.
People in here complaining that they like to clean or cook so the study is wrong. Focusing on the wrong part of the study. Which tasks you'd outsource is up to you. If you like cooking, then obviously don't outsource cooking!
But if there's something you dislike doing, outsource it! You'll be happier than if you spent the money on junk.
A better said title might be : want to be happy - you should be wealthy enough to afford to pay somebody to do the stuff you don't like.
A garbageman are constantly taking care of other peoples garbage. Does that mean they too can't be happy?
What's the implication, living in the wild by yourself? Because you don't want to be in a position to pay poor people?
Just because the maid comes to your house, and the people would build computers live in china does not change the basic economics. It only changes how it engages your sensible values.
You do understand most of the lowest level jobs are taken by people as matter of survival not because it's their life dream.
There is no implication. Just continuing the line of thought from the article. If you want to be happier you have to value your time more over money. What is missing in the article though is you fist need to be wealthy enough to be able to make such a choice. Many people can't make this choice they are forced to sell their time for survival money.
So clearly you don't boycott all products that include labor from poor people, as you are typing this on some sort of computer I presume.
So again. Explain to me what the MORAL difference is between using somebodies labors by buying products, or coming to your house.
So.. everything uses others peoples labour. True. It's about how this labour is valued. The reason maid makes you happier is something like that: You make let's say 50$/hour, the maid charges let's say 25$/hour. So you work 1h, and you can pay the maid to clean your house for 2h. This makes sense, as you have one hour time left to do something else which makes you happy. Would you do it if the maid charges 50$/hour? Probably not, because this way you have to work 2h to pay for 2h of maids cleaning (and we don't even count taxes here).
It implies nothing on the sort. Maids are not sad slaves, but regular employees. They can have happy lives too (even if with a less wealthy lifestyle than people who use their services).
Which while in theory might sounds sensible in reality is complete nonsense ;)
Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has been fairly popular in my circles, where throwing out lots of things you never use seems to give you more room to hang out with friends and family. (And if you're short on time, the manga adaptation The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up was just recently released in North America in English.)
Because you spend more time finding a good cleaner than the average cleaner will clean your house.
Smothered sweet pork burrito at a chain - $9. Mine come in under $2. Much of it can be frozen in portions for another day.
Smoked pulled pork sandwich at home? $1.50 and again, it is easy to deal and freeze for another day. Add the cost of the smoker and I have to use it quite a bit to "pay it off" with savings.
I need a maid. Meals included.
Having a "maid", although I don't particularly like the term, doesn't equate exploiting other human beings, that's slavery.
Actually I even literally conducted a one-year self-studied on take-out. I was saying to myself: so yeah, burgers contain all those vitamins and proteins. If you combine them with a water instead of soda, can't be that bad, right? I didn't only eat burgers, but I ate a lot. Apart from that I was often a "normal" restaurants. After a year I felt really unhealthy, for the only time in my life my belly gained a noticeable volume - friends told me.
And yeah, about the maid thing.. I value my privacy, also I wonder how people manage to take more than 15 minutes to thoroughly clean their bath room or pile up stuff in their kitchen. (Ok, been there myself when I was 22 or so - but it's really no deep science.)
Even for someone who rarely cooks, it's hard to appreciate how much time you spend dealing with food until you no longer have to do it anymore. I don't let a diet get in the way of my social life or prevent me from eating good stuff when I have the opportunity, but I fill in all those meals where I used to run to Chick-fil-A or Popeye's with something healthy I can just grab out of the fridge, chug, and get back to work.
I've done it for a few months, and it saves me ~$300 and ~60 hours per month. I've also lost weight, and I make a weak effort to stick to keto now because I've noticed I feel better when I do.
My barber does not cut his own hair.
The same way a mason does not build his own house /s
2) Some people are pretty tidy naturally (in the sense that everything is usually in the right place) but just can't stand cleaning.
3) It depends on the size of the place to be cleaned.
It's messed up, really: they do a study to determine that we could be happier if we offload our crap onto other people who, nearly by definition, can't do the same. Then, they explore further to try to determine why people who are able don't engage in crap-offloading more; the implication being that it would be the reasonable thing to do.
How about a study that explores the unreasonableness of structuring a society in such a way that so many are relegated to less-fulfilling, less-happy lives?
If there were better Takeout options where I live, I would probably do more of it. What I do instead is home delivery of shopping, I don't mind cooking. I can do it exactly as I like.
Evidently so. I wonder what Andrew Gelman will make out of it.
[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/18/1706541114.full
Self-reported happiness is a dumb 'metric' and everyone knows it. Not much meat in this article, but it does raise an interesting point. But it doesn't ever get into if people paid for tasks they disliked, or cheapest tasks, etc. I don't like cleaning the house, but if I paid someone to grocery shop while I cleaned the house I'd save $40 compared to doing the opposite despite them taking the same amount of time.
Bit of a rant, but I came from South America to Canada 10 years ago, and was super impressed by how independent people my age were. They cooked for themselves, they moved around using public transit, they had part-time jobs, etc. People in my HS just lived luxurious lives while they prepared for luxurious jobs.
I couldn't wait to see Peru, where most wealthy families have one or multiple live-in servants, drivers, and maids, develop along those lines. I was hearing stories that the availability of good jobs meant that young "high society" families were finding it super hard to find people to clean their toilets and rear their children for them.
Little did I know that shortly thereafter the "sharing economy" would start to boom in North America, and wealthy white-collar workers everywhere would start to gush about cheap cabs, an ability to hire maids and people to do their laundry and cooks, people renting their houses out to them, etc.
It feels like a total regression to me. I once heard Silicon Valley described "an assisted-living community for people in their 20s funded by venture capital", and it felt quite apt. I hope the craze ends sooner rather than later.
Every time I've heard this sentiment or something related expressed by a friend, it's been from someone whose use of their leisure activities are utterly boring. When they open up a new chunk of regular free time, they don't pick up a new instrument or sport or online course, they just do their leisure activities a bit more often: go to the same bars a bit more, watch a bit (or a lot) more TV, go to brunch a bit more often. (To be clear, I enjoy all these things and don't think they're inherently boring, but think that there's obvious a point at which marginal returns are diminishing)
By contrast, I and many people I know aren't already in a surplus of leisure time. I've been debating re-orienting my career to reliably require less than 40 hours per week because I simply have a dozen other interests I want to pursue. I enjoy my job, but 40 hours dedicated to _one_ of these pursuits to the detriment of the others is a disproportionately huge amount, especially given that it's 40 daylight hours. Given the long list of time-consuming things that I already find rewarding, I can't relate to the concept that being a slave to the drudgery of menial tasks is somehow something that would be _missing_ from my life if I managed to remove it.
To reiterate, I do think that a shift in the economy that leads to increasing outsourcing of menial tasks to an underclass is an issue worth thinking about in terms of what it says about the way our economy is structured and why said underclass is in that position. I just don't buy the self-flagellating claim that doing X hours of penance a week on things you'd rather not do is somehow a moral good.
If you use your time saved on laundry to learn how to paint or chart stars or build a house or a car, that's respectable.
But how many of the new upper crust are using their saved time that way?
I assume you feel the same way about hunting/growing your food, disposing of your human waste, constructing your own shelter, etc? No? There's something more-than-slightly pathetic about an adult who thinks that their point in history is somehow a special one, where all of the customs happen to be the "correct" ones in an ahistorical sense.
> If you use your time saved on laundry to learn how to paint or chart stars or build a house or a car, that's respectable. But how many of the new upper crust are using their saved time that way?
Right...this is exactly what my point was. RodericDay's assumption that this is a bad thing relies on being a certain type of person who already doesn't know what to do with the free time they have. For those of whose who don't have that issue, the idea that it's a moral failing to free up time for things you find less interesting is entirely unsupported.
It's weird to see so many super wealthy people dedicating so much time to super luxurious forms of meditation with gurus, wearing white spandex or whatever, when one can achieve a pretty solid trance-like state and think about their day while doing rote mechanical chores like cleaning and cooking. You also learn to try to avoid messes, since you're the one cleaning them up (gratuitous, "someone else will take care of it" messes are one of the things I miss the least about Peru). You also feel a bit humbled, which is good, especially when everyone around you is an obsequious yes-person.
I guess I'd do something I rarely do, and borrow an old-fashioned baby-boomer phrase, and say that maybe it "builds character"? Self-sufficient people were a breath of fresh air.
> There's a concept called the "hedonistic treadmill", where increasingly expensive and intense thrills are never enough for the people who can afford them. I would argue some people I know are stuck on that. If you can go to the beach you can't go to the nice northern beach, if you can do that you can't do Miami, Miami leads to Thailand, and so on.
You're mixing up two completely different concepts. I know people who are at full-speed on the hedonic treadmill who don't fit what I'm talking about, and plenty of people who fit what I am talking about who have nothing to do with the hedonic treadmill.
I probably fit the concept I'm describing more than anyone I know, and here are a list of some of the cheapest things taking up my time these days, along with the weekly cost:
1) playing and writing music - less than $2/wk[1] 2) learning another language - free 3) reading all kinds of reference/nonfiction/fiction books - free/extremely cheap (library + used books + exchanging with friends) 4) Playing sports, weightlifting, running in the park or along the water - free + $15/wk gym membership + free 5) Hiking - free if you have a car, or $70/hike
I don't intend this in an insulting way, but is it possible that you're falling prey to the typical-mind fallacy and assuming that things are universal when they're really just facets of your personality (and perhaps your circles)?
> It's weird to see so many super wealthy people dedicating so much time to super luxurious forms of meditation with gurus, wearing white spandex or whatever, when one can achieve a pretty solid trance-like state and think about their day while doing rote mechanical chores like cleaning and cooking.
Seriously, it sounds like you get your perception of people who pay for menial services from cartoons and Gawker blogs. I like cooking, but I don't find any other menial tasks to be enjoyable: I pay to have my laundry done and for my house to be cleaned, and Uber when I don't have time to take transit (even though I prefer the subway). I also have an 80% savings rate, most of my hobbies cost ~$0
[1] I have a $400 piano and a $300 guitar, both of which I've had for 7 years, so 700/(52*7.5)
You seem to have a problem with my observations because they make you feel bad and you feel alluded to. This isn't my problem, if you feel like it doesn't apply to you and your circles, you do you. I know people that fit those cartoonish stereotypes. It's not meant to be a statistical overview, just a possible trend Canadians could be sliding into.
I also do not understand at all that little hobby list you made. I could make a similar one, as a Japanese learner boxer who likes board games, reading, and hiking. I still find time to cook and clean.
I get my perception of people who pay for menial services from people I know who pay for menial services. So do many journalists, probably. If you feel this doesn't apply to you, just skip along.
It's not a personal reaction as much as the fact that you're overgeneralizing enough that it changes your fundamental point; upon that being pointed out, you basically changed the subject to multiple unrelated things.
> In my posts I've related what I've observed living in Peru and Canada.
I'm sorry, but this claim that you're only speaking of what you've observed where you are is bullshit.
In your last comment, you claim that Silicon Valley as "an assisted-living community for people in their 20s funded by venture capital" is an apt descriptor. This is exactly the kind of overgeneralizing I'm talking about, and suddenly hiding behind "no no I'm just talking about the people I've seen in my part of Canada" is in direct contradiction. You're just over-extrapolating your own personality and those of your acquaintances to a region a thousand miles away.
This isn't just pedantry; your point changes pretty substantially when you change from claiming that this reaction to increased leisure time is widespread vs a potential pitfall. Your assertion that you can't wait for this "craze" to end only further contradicts your newly-narrow claim that you're only observing a possible pitfall.
> I also do not understand at all that little hobby list you made. I could make a similar one, as a Japanese learner boxer who likes board games, reading, and hiking. I still find time to cook and clean.
If you're having this much trouble following the conversation, I don't see the point in continuing. The point of this (incomplete) list was to help you through your bizarre confusion between the entirely-unrelated concepts of the hedonic treadmill and having more leisure time (which is why I put the dollar costs next to each activity). It's great for you that you've reached the boundary of interesting things to do with your free time, but it's pretty odd to look down on those who have found more things that interest them. My list wasn't even close to complete; it just consisted of a sample of my cheapest hobbies since that's the point I was trying to make.
I used to think along these lines. I couldn't wait to get a car once I graduated from college and got my first real job, so that I could finally be one of those real adults who didn't need to beg/borrow/buy rides off of others. The thing I hated most about my suburban upbringing was my reliance on others to get around, and I reacted hard.
I slowly realized that following the cultural stigma (and my infatuation with a class of inanimate objects) was, in fact, the childish approach. The adult, pragmatic decision turned out to be a combination of public transit for daily commuting, Uber for leisure (when public transit is too annoying), and hourly rentals for cargo hauling and day trips away from the city.
This has nothing to do with outsourced motherhood or being an entitled baby, and everything to do with economics. Land has appreciated enough that a driver's labor as needed is less expensive than a parking space full time. I have dreams of owning my own car again, but as long as I live where parking is $275/mo, that will be the luxury option.
I could do a lot of things myself but I rather use a maid, a self driving car (once they exist) and home delivery for shopping.
Self sufficiency is the road to poverty.
The 'craze' will not stop, because most of the time doing things for yourself does not make sense unless you actually enjoy doing it.
No shit!?
I even cannot imagine that a survey would manage to convince 800 millionaires to participate, but this is another topic.
If you want to take away those two assumptions, I strongly believe you can be a lot happier spending your time how you want - not at work.
I wrote an ebook on exactly that called "Work Less to Live Your Dreams" - http://amzn.to/2vVzpbG
I spent two years driving from Alaska to Argentina and am now driving around Africa for two years. http://theroadchoseme.com
If you don't want to, don't buy it. There are thousands of informative posts on my website, tens of thousands of photos and now hours of videos on YT for free.
Also, http://wikioverland.org is completely free, and is stacked with the info you need to drive your own vehicle around the world. It's my side project, and my way of giving back to the overland community.
Ask me anything you want to know about what I do, and I'm more than happy to help you get out there to live your dreams too.
Whoa whoa whoa, if you don't want to send me money then just don't."