willpower

Are you happy? Like most of us in the developed world, you’re probably doing OK. But somewhere in the back of your mind, you know life could be a whole lot better.

As shown below, rich world happiness keeps stagnating despite continued technological progress. This trend actually goes back much further, with the percentage of Americans seeing themselves as “very happy” declining from 35% in the 1970s to 31% in the 2010s.

What’s going on? In this article, I’ll answer this burning question with an interesting new understanding of happiness and suffering, inspired by a painful recent experience.

Let’s start with the short version:

Willpower is a limited resource

We’ve all been frustrated by this fundamental fact of life. Willpower gives us direct control over our bodies and minds, but when it runs out, we become passengers as our primitive instincts take over.

It can be spent …

Most of us spend our entire supply of willpower on keeping our lives together in an increasingly overwhelming world filled with temptations designed to lead us down the wrong path.

… or invested

The better solution is to invest our limited willpower to design environments and habits that permanently increase willpower supply and plug daily willpower drains.

Happiness is the gap between willpower supply and demand

Wise investments continuously increase the surplus willpower at our disposal. This growing “willpower gap” provides the tools to craft a truly meaningful life and opens the mental space to genuinely enjoy it.

Suffering happens when willpower demands exceed supply

Situations that demand more willpower than we have available suck all the meaning out of life. In this situation, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place: neglect prized areas of life and let them unravel or buy temporary willpower through self-destructive instant-pleasure consumption.

The moral of the story: Maintain the gap

Living at or beyond the willpower edge is not a sign of strength. It’s a sign of ignorance. Just like you’ll never be wealthy if you keep spending all the money you earn, you’ll never be happy if you keep spending all the willpower you have.

To put all this in context, here’s the story of the last time I’ll ever exceed my willpower bounds.

The (Research) Proposal

People view their work in one of three ways: job, career, or calling. I’m one of the lucky ones able to say my research work is my calling in life.

Well, most of it at least.

Indeed, there’s one part of the job I have no love for whatsoever: the huge amount of time, effort, and compromise required to get funding.

The struggle for research funding brings three major problems: It takes a big bite out of the limited time available for productive research, it creates a soul-killing multi-year gap between having an exciting idea and winning the right to explore it, and it often demands that this beautiful idea is distorted almost beyond recognition to make it fit a funding opportunity.

The story of my final encounter with this terrible trio starts in June 2020 when I joined a 3-month proposal-writing effort on one simple condition: we would keep things clean and simple.

In hindsight, I should have foreseen what would happen next. Like it always does, one thing led to another and, before we knew it, we had a huge consortium and an overcomplicated proposal, all in an ultimately futile attempt to better fit the funding opportunity. By the time I realized this, the sunk costs were already too high to pull out, so I ended up exchanging three months of my hard-earned creative freedom for precisely the kind of work I so desperately wanted to avoid.

Then, about three weeks before the submission deadline, my usually pristine personal health habits cracked. In a blatant violation of my core principles, I fell into the typical pattern of suffering through a hateful 9–5 job and turning to empty calories and empty media in the afternoons and weekends to make up for this suffering.

The rest of this article is a researcher’s attempt to make sense of this unfortunate outcome and ensure that it never happens again.

Uncovering the Root of the Problem

How could this happen? No matter what I did, my mind flatly refused to do anything unless I marinate it in instant pleasure. And, like so many other people, I got that from gorging on junk food in front of the TV. It was excruciating to betray my principles in this way, but for those three weeks, it genuinely felt like I had no other choice.

So, after plenty of thought and analysis, I finally have a solid theory. Let’s take a closer look.

We all have a limited supply of willpower

The supply is not fixed — for example, those with excellent health, inspiring careers, and a good support network can have much more — but it is limited. We can use this limited willpower supply to exercise direct control over our bodies and minds. But once it runs out, our primitive instincts take over, and we start chasing instant pleasure and comfort with no regard for the future.

Our modern world contains far too many willpower drains

A huge amount of this precious resource gets wasted on things like trying to lose weight, struggling through uninspiring 9–5 jobs, and maintaining bad relationships. Such an existence beyond the willpower edge forces us to sacrifice important areas of life every time our willpower comes up short.

I believe this is a core reason behind the slowly declining happiness trends observed in most developed nations. Our world is always getting more complex, increasing the strain on our limited willpower reserves. Hence, we’re faced with a chronic shortage of the willpower we need to keep our lives in order, leading to the state of suffering illustrated below.

We need to boost our willpower supply and decrease demand

Intelligent micro-environment design is the most valuable life philosophy I know. It helped me shape my world so that health, financial freedom, and productivity happen automatically, shrinking demands on my willpower.

This creates many interesting opportunities for willpower investment. For a research-obsessed scientist like me, the best investment is the launch of exciting but intimidating new ideas. As the development of these ideas makes life ever-more interesting, willpower supply expands, building a larger “willpower gap.” To me, this gap is happiness.

Soul-killing work shrinks our willpower supply

So, if I had such a large willpower surplus, why couldn’t I just ramp up my willpower consumption and endure a few months of reduced happiness to finish this proposal? Well, that’s exactly what happened over the first two months of the process — it certainly wasn’t fun, but I did make good contributions while maintaining excellent health habits.

It was only during those last three weeks that I folded. Over the preceding two months, the proposal had been gradually chipping away at my willpower supplies. And then, when we entered the hectic final stretch of the proposal process, I was beyond maxed out.

Temporary willpower can be bought at a huge cost

Even though I had no willpower reserves left, the proposal still had to get done. More willpower had to come from somewhere. So I turned to the usual solution: paying the Instant Pleasure Industry a big chunk of my long-term health in exchange for some temporary willpower.

Despite all the chocolates, ice cream, and movies, this was a terrible time I never want to repeat. Sadly, millions of people worldwide regularly find themselves in this situation. Let’s see what we can do about it.

Recommendation

Based on the simple graphs above, the key to a good life is to increase the gap between willpower supply and demand. This gap is happiness.

Grow the gap

The single best use of willpower is to build environments that permanently increase your willpower reserves and decrease your willpower demands. Willpower reserves swell in an inspiring environment. Willpower demands shrink in environments where virtues like healthy living, financial responsibility, and high productivity run on autopilot. Such environments make you a true native of the modern world — someone whose natural behavior leads to progress instead of self-destruction.

Willpower investment instead of spending

Money and wealth are much like willpower and happiness. If you keep spending all the money you earn, you’ll never be wealthy. Likewise, you’ll never be happy if you keep spending all your willpower.

Each of us must figure out ways to set aside some willpower for building our willpower gaps. To give the simplest example, don’t waste willpower on attempts to follow a painful and self-depriving diet. Instead, invest it in designing your own zero-compromise diet that makes it a joy to eat a wide range of whole foods every day.

Proactively avoid situations requiring artificial willpower

As my story above illustrates, forced excursions beyond the willpower threshold are as unhealthy as they are painful. That’s why I’d even go as far as saying that we should proactively avoid getting into situations that could push us even close to our willpower thresholds. I’ve learned the hard way that this is much more stupid than it is brave.

Will this philosophy of “minding your willpower gap” cause you to miss out on some seemingly attractive near-term opportunities? Yes, it will. Will this be worth it in the long run? Totally! It’s finally becoming accepted that we’re most productive and creative when we’re happy. Patiently and intelligently expanding your willpower gap will pay off handsomely in the long run.

The key takeaway

If you find yourself constantly at or beyond your willpower’s edge, stop. That’s no way to live life. It’s painful, self-destructive, harmful to relationships, and, ultimately, considerably less productive.

In contrast, consistent willpower investment can be even more beneficial than its financial counterpart.

Become a willpower investor. Get rich on happiness.