I recently finished an interesting read entitled Happy Ever After. In it, Paul Dolan takes aim at several of the “social narratives” we’ve been conditioned to accept as gospel over the generations.

He digs up plenty of data to show how each of these well-accepted ideas of a good life has little or no effect on our happiness. Whatever little positive effect there may be, he argues, comes mainly from the acceptance we get when conforming to societal norms, even useless ones.

That’s big news. The social narratives covered in the book dictate the lives of billions of people worldwide. All these people spend huge amounts of time, energy, and resources in their efforts to follow the recipe.

This article will take a quick trip through the four most influential narratives from the book: education, income, marriage, and children.

Step 1: Get a Prestigious Degree

One of the ideas that Dolan emphasizes throughout the book is the “just enough” philosophy. In terms of education, it means we should know enough to function well in society, but there is little benefit to be gained from higher levels of education.

For example, someone who lacks basic literary and computer skills would obviously have a tough time in today’s world. However, the effect of education on wellbeing becomes insignificant beyond that level:

Higher education levels slightly reduce misery, but there is also a slight reduction in pleasure and purpose, especially for the most highly educated.

Initially, this surprised me. As a proud member of the right-most bar, I thought a Ph.D. should at least deliver a big boost in purpose. But then again, there are many ways to find purpose in life other than knowing all there is to know about a minuscule academic niche.

Ultimately, the pros and cons of higher education pretty much cancel out. Take away the status created by the social narrative, and higher education becomes the wrong choice for many people. Informal learning solutions and the good old “school of life” often present better alternatives.

Society certainly needs highly-educated people, but it doesn’t need an oversupply of deeply unhappy and debt-laden young adults who scraped through courses they have zero passion for.

If you have a thirst for knowledge and big ambitions, higher education could be the thing for you. For example, I would rate my purpose 6 out of 6 and my pleasure 5 out of 6 because I’m a born scientist. However, I’ve seen several students who suffered greatly during their Master’s and Ph.D. studies. We generally push them through due to the huge costs of failure, but it’s not a pleasant (or socially useful) process.

Please don’t let the narrative pressure you onto this path if it’s not for you.

Step 2: Make Big Money

Even though the “just enough” principle has been proven for income countless times, society remains obsessed with getting rich. This irrational money obsession gets drilled a little deeper into our skulls by each of the thousands of ads we see daily.

As shown above, the effect of income on pleasure and purpose is essentially insignificant in America. However, income does reduce misery up to about $50k per year, although the gain beyond $25k is small.

Let’s investigate this further by listing a few pros and cons of high income:

When it comes to money, the narrative itself accounts for much of the positive effect. Dolan cites numerous studies finding that we get a clear happiness boost if we feel richer than our peers. In a classic example, most people would rather live in a 3000 sq ft house in a neighborhood of 2000 sq ft houses than a 4000 sq ft house in a neighborhood of 6000 sq ft houses.

This drives lots of aspirational spending, forcing people to compromise their health, relationships, and passions to earn more money. Society rarely pays the big bucks for pleasant, low-stress work. No, high earners typically spend long hours on stressful and demanding tasks with little freedom to influence either timing or scope.

It’s tragicomic how much time, energy, and resources society wastes on this hamster wheel to nowhere. Please don’t be taken in by the consumerist culture behind this environmentally destructive social narrative.

Step 3: Find True Love

Much like the advertising industry drives the income narrative, the entertainment industry drives the marriage narrative. After all, without our deep desire to find “the one,” most music lyrics and movie plots would fall flat.

The data shows that settling down with your true love has a similarly unimpressive effect on wellbeing as the previous two narratives. On the positive side, finding out that your love wasn’t so true after all doesn’t seem to make much difference either.

Marriage does give a significant bump in purpose, though. It’s not large, but considering the tiny effects these narratives have on our happiness, it’s worth mentioning. However, when the marriage breaks down, that purpose bump is canceled by a similar bump in misery.

A few pros and cons of marriage are listed below. When looking through the list, it becomes clear that you need the perfect partner for marriage to deliver a clear happiness boost. And such perfection is rare indeed.

Most real-world marriages are like all the other narratives: a continuous compromise between pros and cons. Emotion-rich relationships tend to amplify both positive and negative experiences. However, this effect also diminishes with time as couples transition from the passionate love glorified in movies to the more mundane companionate love of real life.

The marriage narrative also gets support from most tax systems. However, these financial gains quickly evaporate if things turn sour. One funny statistic from the book is the correlation between how much you spend on your wedding and the likelihood of divorce. If you feel you need to pay that much to prove to the world how much you love each other, think again.

Finally, Dolan shows that marriage is a better deal for men than for women, especially health-wise. Still, despite getting a rather bad deal from marriage, women experience much greater social pressure to marry. They’re also stigmatized to a greater extent for being unfaithful in an empty marriage. All told, women should be particularly wary of this narrative.

Step 4: Build a Loving Family

Each of the previous narratives served society well in the past but have since outgrown their usefulness. But this fourth narrative takes it a step further. Raising children has become so complex and expensive in recent decades that Western governments need to shell out increasingly costly incentives to keep the birth rate from falling through the floor.

Despite these perks, children have a clear negative effect on the happiness of younger parents, with the association turning slightly positive in older age when children start leaving home.

Younger parents of younger kids have a tough time, and it’s easy to see why. The cons in the table below are all big factors today, and they’re only growing larger with time.

If you’re going to have kids, Dolan suggests having them later in life. Raising children in today’s world is a massive challenge, and you will need to reach a high level of development, both personally and financially, to make a success of it.

Even so, many younger people (especially women) experience great pressure to have kids. Much of this pressure comes from would-be grandmothers — the one group that gets a clear happiness boost from children.

Still, if you’re a natural-born parent, go for it. But if the social narrative is playing a role in your plans for procreation, please reconsider. In general, childless people spend their efforts to care for people already on the planet, whereas parents create new tiny people requiring (lots of) care. Our world already has more than enough people (and other life) to care for.

Wrapping Up

There’s nothing wrong with getting a degree, earning a high salary, getting married, and having children. If these social narratives genuinely enhance your quality of life, follow them with conviction.

However, there are also several common circumstances where these narrow lifestyle prescriptions should be bluntly rejected:

• When you consider going to university mainly because you want to make more money or please/impress other people.
• When you start doing increasingly stressful and unfulfilling work to earn the high salary you need to keep up with the Joneses.
• When you’re thinking of settling for a partner you’re not 100% sure about because you feel the clock ticking (especially if you’re a woman).
• When you experience pressure from family and friends to start a family before you feel ready, both personally and financially.

We can all get better at respecting each other’s choices, whether they align with these social narratives or not. Far too many people put themselves through hell by succumbing to social pressure and following narratives that are a terrible fit for them. Others flip completely to the opposite side, turning against the narratives and resenting those who choose to follow the standard degree-money-marriage-kids recipe.

So, let’s appreciate the rich possibilities of life outside these narratives and give each other the space to choose.