There are two particularly inefficient roads to happiness that we humans are strongly drawn to:

1. Money (the ability to try and buy happiness)
2. Accomplishment (the promise of happiness after reaching a certain goal)

Today’s post will do a little analysis of the good, the bad and the ugly of these primitive driving forces.

The good

These two motivators, as false as they may be, must take credit for a huge chunk of the extraordinary human progress we’ve seen since the industrial revolution. 

There’s a name for this type of motivation: Capitalism.

Think about it what you may, but the numbers are indisputable: Capitalism has given longer and more interesting lives to more people than our forefathers could ever have imagined.

And this enormous force for progress is still lifting millions out of poverty today. Take a look at these charts to see how far we’ve come and how many trends are still going in the right direction. 

All this amazing progress simply would not have been possible without the genius of capitalism: that people can act in their own material self interest to create huge value for society. 

The bad

What is also clear is that the happiness we expect from money and accomplishment very rarely materializes. 

There’s a name for that too: The hedonic treadmill.

We’re driven by strong expectations of happiness if we could just achieve a certain level of material success. But if we eventually reach our goals, the mind quickly returns to its base level of happiness.

All the effort required to drive this treadmill takes its toll. As the next level of progress continues to become exponentially more complex, people are getting more stressed and overwhelmed today than ever before.

We must be objective though. Since about 80% of the global population still live in conditions of material lack, the amazing progress of capitalism continues to improve hundreds of millions of lives.

Today, it’s only for us lucky richest 20% that the bad often outweighs the good. 

The ugly

And then we get to the three genuinely ugly aspects of this type of motivation:

1. Environmental destruction

The threats from environmental degradation and climate change are well documented. Up to now, humans have behaved much like a mindless bacterial culture in a Petri dish, consuming its limited store of resources and excreting wastes with no thought for tomorrow.

If pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere is free, capitalism simply does not care about climate change. This tragedy of the commons is one of the biggest challenges facing society today.  

We must acknowledge some encouraging signs of progress though. The question is just whether we can change quickly enough. 

2. Social injustice

The massively unequal distribution of the spoils of capitalism is also well documented. As much as we’d like to believe in self-determination, the stats say that the single biggest predictor of your material success is the social class into which you are born. 

Objectively speaking, the poor are also benefiting greatly from capitalism. But they see the wealth of the upper classes (largely gained through the lottery of birth) all around them, naturally causing great unhappiness. 

There is also a deeply disturbing injustice related to environmental destruction: those who are least to blame will suffer the worst consequences. 

3. Self-destructive behavior

Lastly, humanity’s incredibly rapid rise from a simple animal to god-species means that our evolved instincts are poorly suited to our modern world.

This has resulted in a wide range of serious physical and psychological ailments closely related to a wide range of irrational self-destructive behaviors.

The search for solutions

My dedication to sustainable development is nothing more than an attempt to mitigate the bad and the ugly, while the good continues to lift billions of people to decent living standards. 

For us fortunate 20%, the good has become essentially useless. Further increases in material success will bring no greater life satisfaction.

This leaves only the bad and the ugly, creating a clear need for us to break our deep bond to these primitive motivations that have driven human progress for centuries. 

Tomorrow’s post will discuss how this can be done. See you then!