Happiness is Logarithmic
Go from zero to burrito with perspective and pleasure
Feeling grateful is challenging to the point we often miss the point of our lives. Distracted by sex, money, and power — or their perceived lack — we are trained since birth to focus on things extraneous to what actually makes us happy, most notably love, purpose, and validation. Prioritizing the negative has had survival benefit, but we’re killing ourselves to live.
Yet happiness, like most things in life, depends on our perspective. We acknowledge Anthony Bourdain committed suicide while anonymous billions in relatively dire straights keep their cool, suggesting the good life might be more elusive, and accessible, than imagined. Most of us are likely trying too hard, or not enough. Sometimes all it takes is a clever life hack.
Try this exercise: visualize a scale from 0 to 100, where on the low end is starvation, and on the high end is eating the best meal on the planet. How might an everyday experience like eating a burrito or a burger compare? Since starving to death is by definition existentially dire, and eating lavishly a luxurious indulgence, we can assume such a scale is actually logarithmic.
That’s different from what’s called a linear scale, where each unit of distance corresponds to the same increment. In contrast, a logarithmic scale is one where each unit is a multiple of a base value raised to a power — more accurate for displaying data that spans a broad range, especially when the numbers from low to high have big differences in magnitude.
So let’s see how gains in happiness are perceived relative to such a baseline where perceived happiness is measured from 0 to 100 on the y-axis, and food quality is measured from 0 to 100 on the x-axis. Note how increases in value at the lower end (starvation) create larger relative changes in happiness than similar increases at the higher end (best meal ever).
A heavier weighting early on reveals the principle of diminishing returns — illustrated by a boost in happiness from starvation to a meal that merely keeps you alive of 50, compared to a far smaller jump from gourmet dining to the best meal ever of less than 10. A burrito is 5x better than hunger, yet no more than 1x fabulous compared to a five-star dining experience.
Of course happiness continuously increases with each improvement in food quality, but begins to taper off as basic needs are met, and fancies are indulged. With expectations rising, fulfillment proportionally decreases. At the higher end improvement becomes marginal as sensations and emotions peak, more effort needed to receive ever fewer benefits.
I’ve applied this pollyanna but realistic philosophy to my eyesight, which is clinically a disaster, yet in this logarithmic sense superb. Born with astigmatism, nystagmus, and -9 dioptre myopia, I’m unable to drive a car, and see the world as a blur. Yet compared to being blind, I’m at the gourmet meal level of that logarithmic curve, and feel blessed to see and function.
Depicted in such a manner, the difference between starving/blindness and eating/seeing is enormous compared to living large with 20/20. That begs the question of why most of us, living relatively large, spend so much time complaining. Satisfaction is relative, and so is happiness, not only related to food/vision quality, but our overall quality of life across every category.
Given all that, our grievance culture flourishes. Living lives more luxurious than the pharaoahs of Egypt, our entire society is nonetheless triggered by minutiae, and on the brink of civil war. Instead, let’s sit back and gain a bit of perspective. Life is more logarithmic than linear, and as such most of us are far better off than the endless griping suggests. Carpe diem, and enjoy!
