The Myth of the Silver Spoon by Kristin Keffeler

Author:Kristin Keffeler [Keffeler, Kristin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119909729
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2022-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

Brooks distills a significant amount of psychological literature in his equations, and while they are simplistic, they are accurate and, I think, quite useful. Let's break them down:

Subjective well-being is the term social scientists have agreed upon to describe someone's overall level of life satisfaction. Genes, in this equation, refers to the hereditability of our level of happiness—our happiness set-point. Whether we like it or not, it turns out that our genes play a strong role in our baseline happiness (by one study, somewhere between 44% and 52%).5 Circumstances refers to the situations in our lives that impact our happiness. While there is no clear agreement on how much our life circumstances impact our subjective well-being, there is agreement that, in general, circumstances only sway our baseline happiness temporarily, not permanently. So according to Brooks’ first equation, since we can't change our genes and the transitory circumstances of life don't greatly impact our long-term happiness, what lever can we pull to increase our overall level of life satisfaction? Enter our habits. And as well see in the next paragraph, according to Brooks’ second equation, integrating work as one of our regular habits is part of the happiness equation. Brooks writes, “I am convinced that … enduring happiness comes from human relationships, productive work, and transcendental elements of life.”6

In Brooks’ second equation, we see this connection between work and overall life satisfaction as he lays out the fundamental components of our habits. First, faith refers to any structure (religious or philosophical) through which you can ponder the questions of life and “transcend a focus on your narrow self-interests to serve others.”7 Family has a broad definition including both the people we're related to and those we've picked to be in our lives. At the end of the day (and as we've seen in the previous chapter), social connection is deeply connected to happiness.8 Finally, there is work. One of the central findings in happiness literature is the importance of human productivity and creating a sense of purpose in one's life. As you may have guessed given that the title of this chapter is “Contribution Clutter,” the definition of work does not have to be as narrow as the Cambridge Dictionary defines it; it can be creating impact and achieving results without necessarily holding a corresponding job title or having to earn money to do it. According to Brooks, the key to making this component of the equation tip the scales toward greater well-being is that you have the sense that you are earning your success and serving others.

It can be as simple as a summer job. Remember Mitch and Kristy from Chapter 4? They were the parents who were trying to figure out how to help their almost-16-year-old daughter Taylor have ownership over her new car. Prior to purchasing the car, Taylor had decided to get a job at a little local market about two miles from their house as a way to earn each money toward her car. She rode

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