Pursuing Purpose, Outgrowing Capitalism
At 26 I was a career-focused person, with few thoughts about whether my job gave me purpose, and no clue over what gave me happiness or fulfillment besides friendships and the highs and lows of romantic relationships. Two years later I was grounded and balanced, with a clear sense of purpose that has kept me happy and fulfilled.
The stark change in myself and my life in just two years had nothing to do with the pursuit of the apparent default for most people: money and income, and at the country level, economic growth measured by gross domestic product.
There is a common assumption that happiness keeps growing with income. But are the highest earners the happiest? A well-known study by Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton found that, among US residents, happiness does rise with income, but only up to a certain level[1]: a comfort threshold. Beyond it, income and happiness are simply unrelated. Below the threshold you face pressure to satisfy needs; above it, you can pursue the life you want to live. It’s like the surface of the sea. Below it you have to swim; above it you can fly.
Some degree of financial security is normally a precondition to a life of purpose. Research shows that without such security people will stay in bad jobs. They will stay in bad marriages, and couples with low income and pressing debts are much more likely to divorce. They will circumscribe their lives overall. In her study, nurse Bronnie Ware found that two of the top five regrets of the terminally ill were job-related: having worked too much and not having followed one’s passion[2]. As a character in Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven says, “By four or five o’clock the day’s just turned into another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o’clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in and day out, and that’s what happens to your life.”
I myself could afford to do little but study and work until I felt financially secure. Only then did I have the luxury to take a year off, volunteer in Swaziland, and go on a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat. Had I felt less financially secure, I might still be living an okay life, with good and bad times, and end up like a typical subject in the study by Bronnie Ware.
Does a similar phenomenon occur on a nationwide scale? I wasn’t surprised when I found more evidence that economic growth does not increase individual happiness or life satisfaction than evidence that it does[3]. Developed countries have become much richer since the 1960s but reported happiness and life satisfaction have not risen[4]. In fact, nations with brisk economic growth often see a decline in happiness and life satisfaction[5]. Among developed nations, authors Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson found no correlation between the income per capita and a broad array of well-being measures, including individual happiness[6].
These facts raise some elephant-in-the-room questions: Why are most countries prioritizing the maximization of GDP instead of people’ well-being? Why, with all the wealth and productivity achieved in our developed economies, can’t we all live above the comfort threshold? Why so few have the luxury that I had: Investing time in finding meaning and pursuing purpose?
We live in societies where few are getting very rich, yet we have persistent poverty, an ever-widening gap between haves and have-nots, and chronic insecurity and dependence on our employers. Economist Thomas Piketty showed that this state is nothing new: Except for a short window of 30 years after World War II, inequality has always been increasing and the causes seem intrinsic to capitalism. It widens the gulf between us and locks most people into a life of threading water below the comfort threshold.
After reading Piketty’s work, my own sense of purpose materialized in a seven-year project: my book Outgrowing Capitalism: Rethinking Money to Reshape Society and Pursue Purpose. In it I show that capitalism yielded great boons as countries grew from feudalism to the 20th century but we are now ready to evolve beyond it. Capitalism focuses on capital, the means of production, and for centuries it made the average person richer. It thereby boosted purchasing power and hence caused more production which bred more consumption and so on. But this virtuous circle has ceased. Median income growth has stalled for decades and our middle classes can no longer afford all we might produce. Our weak purchasing power is now limiting production, so the wonders of the future are arriving more slowly and some may not arrive at all. At the same time, we face large-scale crises like climate change and are floundering.
In Outgrowing Capitalism I propose and detail monetism, a pragmatic system grounded on a new way of creating and managing money and inflation. It prioritizes a universal basic income to provide financial security for everyone. Greater purchasing power and less dependence on debt will yield greater and more stable production. Monetism will overcome problems like poverty that seem as permanent as time, and direct massive funds toward a cooler, cleaner planet. And in a world where people have a chance to realize their potential, far fewer will die regretting that they never followed their passions.
We can all live lives of purpose.
[1] Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life But Not Emotional Well-Being,” Center for Health and Well-Being, Princeton University, 2010
[2] Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing, May 2012.
[3] For the full debate, see Ed Diener, Daniel Kahneman, and John Helliwell, International Differences in Well-Being, February 2010.
[4] Richard A. Easterlin, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?” in Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz, 1974
[5] Carol Graham, Soumya Chattopadhyay, and Mario Picon, “The Easterlin and Other Paradoxes: Why Both Sides of the Debate May Be Correct,”
[6] Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone, 2009.