How to Be Happy Lesson #8: Had We But World Enough, and Time
Just a moment ago I had this thought: Wow, I seem to have a huge group of people following my lead and jumping on the well-being bandwagon, offering their own happistructions. I felt flattered — for an instant. I felt important — for an eye blink. I then came to my senses in about the same space of time. And that, ta-dum!, is the segue into today’s exploration of internal joy. Specifically, it is “Time for Happiness.” So sayeth Harvard Business Review author Ashley Whillans.
Ashley wants us to know “why the pursuit of money isn’t bringing you joy — and what will.” Here’s the unhappy news: “No matter what the outcome of our efforts, we all feel increasingly strapped for time, and often the things that we think will make us happy — the accomplishments we work so hard for — don’t.” Ashley cites a Gallup poll of 2.5 million Americans in which eighty percent of those surveyed felt they “did not have enough time to do all they wanted each day.” This feeling is known as “time poverty,” and those who feel “time-poor experience lower levels of happiness and higher levels of anxiety, depression, and stress.”
The concept of time poverty is not new. The reason I know this comes courtesy of Andrew Marvell, an English author and politician who lived in the mid-1600s. My title phrase here — ”Had We But World Enough, and Time” — is the opening of Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress.” In it, the narrator complains that his love object is not giving in to his amorances [amorous advances]. He tells her that he would love to spend “a hundred years” complimenting her eyes and her breasts (yes, he says this: “adore each breast”) and then devote thirty thousand years to praising the rest of her body (and, we hope, her mind and personality somewhere in there). The trouble is, he (we assume) tells us, “But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,/And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity.” This guy is trying to convince the Coy Mistress that “carpe dick,” if you’ll excuse my Norwegian, is the only way to live: “Though we cannot make our sun/stand still, yet we will make him run.” No word on if she bought any of this.
The concept of time poverty also offers us yet another example of the Enervation Enigma: Humans know what’s wrong with humans; they just don’t have a clue how to fix themselves and even if they did, the effort would take hard thinking, force them to be honest with themselves, and make them miss Dancing with the Stars. Inconceivable!
If we thought about it (and there’s the rub), fixing the time deficit is not all that difficult. Ashley, our HBR author, puts it simply:
Just like Adam [her example case], most of us fall into a trap of spending time to get money, because we believe money will make us happier in the long run. Our thinking is backward. In fact, research consistently shows that the happiest people use their money to buy time.
After breaking down why we tend to value money over time, Ashley tells us we should do the opposite because 1) time yields happiness, 2) time is social, and 3) a focus on time builds more-rewarding careers. Then (finally!) she offers what we, okay I, have been looking for throughout her long article: a how-to list. (I feel better just reading it — see Lesson #7.) Here is her prescription*:
- Personal Activities
- Plan your future time.
- Be more active.
- Spend more time eating (that is, take more time to eat).
- Meet new people and help others.
- Spend more time experiencing awe.
- Take more vacation time.
- Buying Time
- Outsource your chores.
- Choose wisely when outsourcing (keep the things you like to do)
- Do less comparison shopping (I’ve got this one down cold)
- Buy better time (use it doing things that make you happy)
- Work Activities
- Buy back your commute time.
- Ask for more time.
Hmmm. While I like to-do lists, I’m not particularly fond of long to-do lists. I think I will go with Andrew Marvell’s pithy suggestion instead. So, here’s How to Be Happy: Lesson #8: “Now let us sport while we may.” What could be easier than that?
*It goes without saying, although I’m saying it, that Ashley’s list will probably come across as presumptuous, tone-deaf twaddle for anyone who doesn’t live in a wealthier, first-world nation. The final advice to “Now let us sport while we may” I hope will be useful to everyone everywhere.
(Published originally on RatBlurt™, February 1, 2019.)
