There are Many Ways Humans Can Live Happily
... but that doesn't mean that there are many humans that can live happily in any given way
Resident Contrarian wrote a very nice essay around a topic I was thinking of in the past week as well: what sorts of lifestyles can work for people. His essay focuses on interpersonal relationships, particularly family, and how many people are lonely and unable to build the relationships they want despite having many theories about how to do that. Since I had some half formed, 3 AM style fever dreams on the matter, I wanted to jump on that bandwagon and add a bit. What follows is essentially a really long comment post in response to RC.
People have long thought “All these traditions and rules are stupid; we smart people should come up with better ways of doing things and just skip all this nonsense.” Every generation has thought the previous generation was stupid and uptight, and subsequently thought the next generation was dissolute and crazy. Every generation, ever, in all of human history, has had its version of “kids today, huh!” in response to every teenager’s absolute certainty that they know better. So much so that it is itself practically tradition.
Like most traditions, it is pretty much right: many traditions are kind of stupid, and most kids have no idea which ones those are.
RC touches on one of the most common sets of “traditions” to be challenged in the modern day, love and sex, but generally all traditional lifestyles are challenged by someone who knows better1. We humans, so ripe with hubris, often try to rationalize how we live, attempting to cut out the fat and streamline things. Of course we ignore the fact that we can’t perceive the vast array of factors we would need to really rationalize or optimize such a process… details are boring and no one likes being told “Well, maybe if you knew everything that could be made to work.” Admitting too much uncertainty to accomplish something doesn’t come across as very smart and rational to most folks, so you get ignored.
Yet, we do empirically see many different cultures, historical and contemporary, with many different lifestyles within them, and, well, lots of them seem to work. Sure, you don’t get many Americans deciding to move to Africa, the Middle East or South East Asia to engage in legal polygamy, but maybe if it works there it would work here?
Even beyond unusual marriage practices, there are many other lifestyles that people attempt to make work. People are constantly trying to optimize aspects of their lives, or cut out parts they don’t like, or maximize some aspects they love.
Fully remote work, never leaving your apartment, living entirely online? Someone is doing that.
Joining a commune? Who hasn’t?
Forgoing children to focus on your career and raising puppies? Hell, that’s practically the majority of young people these days.
What’s more, you can totally find people whose best life is exactly that: they live an extremely unusual lifestyle, and man, their life is stylin’. All you guys are chumps for clinging to your outmoded ways. They are living proof that traditional lifestyles are not the only way to do things.
And… yea sure, I can buy that. I mean, sure, who knows how happy those people are going to be in 10 to 50 years, but then I am not happy now, so who am I to judge?
But, and this is the important part, even if it is true that a lifestyle exists and has people who live it and are happy, that does not mean that it will make you happy.
“Well, yea, sure, that’s obvious. But it might,” I hear you say.
“Sure,” say I, “want to bet?”
Consider the following: humans can move around a lot of ways other than walking. Crawling, jumping, skipping, running, cartwheels, walking on one’s hands… it’s a long list. One can imagine a person who goes everywhere at a run, or by doing cartwheels. Is that at all likely to work for lots of people? Most people can run, but if you have little kids you notice pretty quickly that running everywhere leads to running into everything. Cartwheels are even worse, yet I would not be at all surprised to find there is someone who has spent a lot of time only moving around by cartwheel.
I would also not be surprised that they have a Facebook page all about it.
This is the modern problem, why we are increasingly convinced that every random lifestyle we can imagine totally works: availability bias. Every person who is living their best life getting everywhere by cartwheel has an easy to find profile extolling the virtues of wheeling life. So many health benefits! Much less wear and tear on shoes! No one asks them to help move!
What you don’t see are the millions of people who tried it and after five minutes and some new bruises bashfully pretend they never tried in the first place. Even those who make it long enough make a FB page and show off are less keen on posting a big update “This was a tremendous mistake. I don’t know what I was thinking. Walking is underrated.” People with minority interests proselytize their interests, but only ex-smokers preach returning to normalcy so loudly.
So while there are no doubt many different alternative lifestyles that work in the sense of making people happy, there is equally no doubt that the number of people who would be happy living that particular alternative lifestyle are very few. Otherwise there would be so many people doing it that it wouldn’t be called “alternative.”
That doesn’t mean that everyone is basically the same. What it means is that there is such a thing as human nature, and most people fall within a pretty small distribution of behavior preferences. Sure, some people like to read while others like TV. Some people like to hang out with friends and drink alcohol on weekends while others go hiking in the woods. Some people get married and have kids while others join a monastery and forsake all earthly possessions.
One of those things has a very, very small rate of incidence compared to the others, yet it has a very long history across many different cultures. Are you so sure your vegan polyamorous anarcho-syndicalist commune idea is more likely the best way to achieve happiness by comparison?
I mean, hell, give it a try! I am all for experimentation, but maybe be a little careful that your experiment can end in something other than a warning to others. Be careful not to do anything irreversible, because chances are you are wrong. Very, very wrong.
More importantly, don’t force other people to take part in your experiment. Pro-tip: most people don’t care what the hell you do until you start causing them problems. If you don’t demand they take part in what you are doing, demand they praise and celebrate your preferences, or just avoid inconveniencing them more than their other neighbors, they will pretty much always leave you alone even if they disapprove. Getting all up in people’s faces about how your life choices are better is possibly the best way to get them to hate you. No one wants to hear how your preference for dipping your wick is better than theirs.
I mean, do you even use beeswax, you paraffin burning corporate shill?
Have you read “Seeing Like a State?” It isn’t just kids who say “What you do is stupid, do something else!” and generally when the government does it they back it up with guns.
I can only judge from my own experience, but for me a very traditional marriage gave me the happiest months of my life, and then more than 17 years of increasing despair, loneliness, and a longing for death.
When another woman invited me to live with her instead it felt like a great weight had been lifted and I smiled for the first time in many months.
After moving in with her I started to gain back the 50 pounds I (unintentionally) lost over the year and had moments of happiness I wished would never end.
I now live with one woman five days a week most weeks, and still with my legal wife (at her request “for the kids”) most weekends.
I’m still a very unhappy man (it’s been about 19 years since I remember thinking of myself as happy), but I’m less miserable than I was before (I cried for many hours, most days, for over a year).
Legal married monogamy was wonderful - for about eight months, and then it became a Hell of loneliness.
My legal wife is still the most beautiful woman in the world to me (“already painfully beautiful” I told her when I asked her not to get cosmetic surgery), and she loves me in her way (“acts of service” is her ‘love language’ in the Pastor Chapman scheme, unfortunately mine in “words” very closely followed by “touch” with “gifts” a distant third), but she isn’t in-love with me.
From what I’ve read (and the revealed preferences of same sex couples) compared to men women are serial (one month to two years) monogamist, while men tend to want either till death or one night.
This is a curse by cruel fate!
I do know of a few decades long happy seeming decades long monogamous couples who still seem in-love with each other, but only a few, and I greatly envy them.
Mostly monogamy looks like an ocean of very bored woman and very lonely men.
After I left her to live with another woman on a dark o’clock Monday morning when I was about to leave my wife gave me the first kiss on my lips from her in about 19 years (my last kiss on the lips was from another woman, which was the first kiss I received in 18 years), and it was with that brief kiss I learned the horrible secret about how to have a woman’s love - be with another woman.
Had I known that secret I would’ve made up affairs and told my wife about them many years ago and had gotten to feel loved by her instead of the Hell of loneliness I lived through.
I wish I was one of the blessed in a loving monogamous romantic relationship (or I wish I had never known what it had been like for some months “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” is a lie!), but that isn’t my fate, and from what I see most others aren’t so blessed either.
I don’t think polygamy is the path to happiness either - at least not for most men, we long for a “one” too much.
Women on the other hand seem to like best alternating polygamy and monogamy, but as monogamy has declined women report an even bigger drop in happiness than men have over the last fifty years, so who knows?