“We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.”
Audre Lorde
We live in a time where we feel deprived: don’t earn enough, don’t sleep enough, don’t have enough. The feeling of lack surrounds us, when at the same time, so many of us have more than ever before. Why can unhappiness coexist with levels of consumption higher than ever before? Maybe, the reason is that we are trying to solve a problem with the wrong tool.
One of the core models of our times used to explain and to try to improve human well-being is utility. That ever-increasing function in economics which depicts that the way to increase one’s satisfaction comes from the more goods a person consumes and less time a person works. The thing is, focusing on acquiring more things to feel better just doesn’t work, as many civilizations have found through time.
On the contrary, one of the core findings of Buddhism is that watering greed or attachment/clinging is one of the main causes of suffering, causes of an unsatisfactory life. Similarly, opposite to what a utility function assumes, empirical research finds that satisfying work is one of the cornerstones to happiness.
The fact that we may be surprised when finding that higher levels of consumption don’t imply happier people points to the need of an updated model to guide our understanding of the optimal way for a human to improve their well-being.