Why You Wouldn’t Be Happier in the Caribbean
Let’s say you’re living in New York, and it’s winter. The streets are carpeted in dirty snow. You’re busy scraping the windscreen of your car. The wind keeps blowing runaway shavings of ice into your face, and your shoes are filling with slush. Your fingertips feel as though they’re full of needles. With a jerk, you manage to open the frozen door of your car. You sit down on the leather seat, cold as a block of ice, and rest your hands on the chilly steering wheel. Your breath forms white clouds as it leaves your mouth. Question: how much happier would you be if you lived in Miami Beach, where it’s a balmy twenty-six degrees with a gentle sea breeze? Put it on a scale from 0 (not even a little bit happier) to 10 (infinitely more happy).
Most people I ask give an answer between 4 and 6.
Having driven out of your parking spot, you set off for work. Moments later you’re in a traffic jam on the motorway. You reach the office thirty minutes late, where you’re greeted by a flood of e-mail and the usual headache with your boss. After work you do your weekly shopping. Back home you cook your favorite meal (it tastes delicious), settle down on the sofa, watch a good film and go to bed.
Ditto in Florida. Set off, get stuck in a jam, deal with the e-mails and the annoying boss, do the weekly shop, eat tasty food, watch a good film. I’ll ask you again: how much happier would you be if you lived in Miami Beach? Most people now give an answer between 0 and 2.
I lived in Miami Beach for ten years. Before and after that I lived in Switzerland—slushy snow, occasionally icy windscreen and all. How much happier was I in Miami Beach? Answer: I wasn’t.
It’s called the focusing illusion. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it,” as Daniel Kahneman explains. The more narrowly we focus on a particular aspect of our lives, the greater its apparent influence. At the beginning of the description above, I concentrated almost entirely on the weather—ice in New York, sun in Miami Beach. This aspect was therefore dominant when I asked you to compare the satisfaction of living in New York with that of living in Miami.
We then sketched out a whole day, from morning commute to a comfy evening on the sofa, in which the weather was only one element. If we broaden that to even longer timespans—a week, a month, a year, a whole lifetime—we find that the climate suddenly becomes a negligible aspect of overall satisfaction.
Overcoming the focusing illusion is key to achieving a good life. It will enable you to avoid many stupid decisions. When you compare things (cars, careers, holiday destinations), you tend to focus on one aspect particularly closely, neglecting the hundred other factors. You assign this one aspect inordinate significance because of the focusing illusion. You believe this aspect is more critical than it really is.
So what can you do to combat this? You either compare all hundred factors, a labor-intensive process, or—more practically— you try to see the two things you’re comparing as wholes. Compare them from a distance to avoid overemphasizing any single factor. Easier said than done. Let me illustrate my point: a toddler thinks solely about what’s currently in front of it. If I take away one of my three-year-old’s toys, he shrieks like the world is coming to an end—even though he has a dozen others and has been ignoring the one I just removed. Over the course of our lives, we learn to emancipate ourselves from the momentary situation. If I feel like having a beer on a warm summer’s evening, then I open the fridge to find that we’ve run out, I don’t start screaming blue murder. I can take my focus off the beer, so the desolate emptiness of my fridge has only a minimal impact on my wellbeing. The evening isn’t ruined after all.
Unfortunately, however, our development in this regard is incomplete. We find it immensely difficult to view our current situation through an ultra-wide-angle lens. Otherwise we wouldn’t get upset about trivialities.
How many times have you asked yourself how much better life would be if you had a different job, lived in a different location, a different house, had a different haircut? Okay, it would be a little different. But now you know that the effect of a change is considerably less than you might think. Take the longest possible view of your life. Realize that the things that seemed so important in the moment have shrunk to the size of dots—dots that barely affect the overall picture. A good life is only attainable if you take the occasional peek through a wide-angle lens.
When I checked into the Shangri-La Hotel beside the Jardins du Trocadéro on my last visit to Paris, I found myself standing next to a man who started berating the receptionist—apparently because she couldn’t offer him a room with a view of the Eiffel Tower. “You’re ruining my whole trip to Paris!” he bawled. I shook my head. Whether or not you can see the Eiffel Tower from your hotel bed doesn’t actually matter. Far more important is how soundly you sleep. A view of the Eiffel Tower is much too small an aspect of a successful trip to Paris. In any case, you get more than enough of the tower as soon as you step outside the hotel. But the man, now beet-red, seemed about to burst with rage. The focusing illusion had turned a molehill into a mountain.
We’re especially vulnerable to the focusing illusion when it comes to money. How much happier would you be as a multi-millionaire? Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world, once compared his own life with that of an average citizen. It didn’t feel that different. Buffett spends a third of his life asleep on a normal mattress—just like you and me. Buffett buys his clothes off the rack as cheaply as mine or yours. His favorite drink is Coca-Cola. He eats no better or more healthily than a student. He works at a normal desk, on a normal chair. His office has been in the same place since 1962—in a dull building in Omaha, Nebraska. If you compare Buffett’s life minute for minute with yours, the effect of his wealth is negligible.
One teeny-weeny difference: Buffett owns a private jet, while the likes of us are squeezed into Economy. After this chapter, however, we know that much worse than a narrow airline seat—where you’ll spend at most 0.1 percent of your life—is a narrow mindset. By focusing on trivialities, you’re wasting your good life.