Turning Point

I recently reached a turning point in my life.

The turning point arose from the events of the past month where I accomplished a long term goal and made real progress on a few others, the (Requiem For A Dream) which led to me (Defining The Dream), and (Putting It All Together) where I took time to evaluate the direction that I want to go with my life.

I discovered that life is about maxmising utility. I will embody this new way of thinking in an audacious goal of living a 'happiness year' where I will devote a whole year to living happy.

I know how easy it is to forget about the importance of maximising utility. Even after writing these words I lost sight of what life is about while I was trading. To remember to never lose sight of this, it will form one of my life purposes.

As long as I am alive, as long as the sun keeps coming up every morning, I know I'll still be happy.

Putting It All Together

Isn't life just about maximising utility (relative satisfaction, or as I put it, the ratio of happy to sad faced days)? In so doing, living the dream?

Life is about doing what makes me happy and makes me feel good, loving God, myself, and others unconditionally (re: Self Worth / Who I Am). It is not about how happy I make others feel, least of all some random girl, or hating which doesn't do myself or others any good.

My happiness or utility is of utmost importance. It's all for this. One must be mindful that there are other important values in life too, happiness differs from one person to another, and that happiness refers to both the short term and the long term (one may be doing something that makes them unhappy in the short term if they expect it to provide longer term happiness). One must also understand that the ability to realise one's full potential, thereby offering wider scope of options to maximise utility, applies to people at the top level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. While I have been generally happy, I have spent too long living below my potential.

From experience, (What Makes Me Happy) has been pretty consistent over time and matches the findings in (Happiness). The Coke Happiness Ambassadors found that family and friends, music and dance, sports particularly football, and food are what makes people from around the world happy. Studies show that making love (+12.9 / 91), sport and exercise (+6.5 / 77), and music and dance (+6.2 / 73) [theatre and concerts, talking and conversation, playing, singing and performing and listening to music] make people happy (Mappiness app / Science magazine). While commuting (-2.0 / 62), home computer (61), working and studying (-1.9 / 59), care for adults (-4.0), unpleasant mind wandering, rest, waiting, queueing (-4.1 /48), and being sick in bed (-19.7) make people unhappy. Surveys also show that health is more important than income for happiness.

In terms of life satisfaction, the equivalent monetary benefit or loss per year of different contributors are: health (+$463,000), better social life (+$131,000), marriage (+$105,000), seeing friends and family regularly (+$97,000), divorce (-$34,000), unemployment (-$114,000), separation (-$255,000), death of a spouse (-$309,000). 6 of the 8 are solely about relationships.

Income (+0.18), education (+0.08), health (7.9/10) and marriage (+0.06 / 7.8/10) contribute to happiness [1], [2]. In terms of work, students (7.8/10) and the retired (7.8/10) are the most happy, voluntary part-time workers (+0.02) and the self-employed (+0.02) are happy, while the unemployed (-0.08) were most unhappy.

I don't want to fall into the trap of the U shape pattern of well-being where happiness declines from the early 20s to the early 50s then rebounding in older age. The midlife slump in satisfaction that people experience is equivalent in magnitude to the influence of a major life event like unemployment or marital separation. [1]

Life is a game of statistics. Improve your odds by practising and testing outcomes, learning from experiences, speaking to experts, and playing to your strengths. Evaluate each major decision with the aim of maximising short term and long term expected utility. Take a step back and think about the scenarios before you act while considering different points of view. Evaluate the best case, worst case, and 50th percentile scenarios while assessing benefits, costs and risk (re: No Regrets).