Is Happiness a Zero-Sum Game?

A zero-sum game is one in which whatever payoff one player gets in at the direct expense of the other players. Most games are like that: typically there is one winner and one loser. If I win, you must necessarily lose. My happiness depends on your misery. There’s no way we can both be happy…if our happiness depends on the outcome of the game.

Life is like a game, and we tend to play it like a game. Have you seen the bumper sticker: “the player who dies with the most toys wins”? People want to have a nicer car, a nicer home, a prettier wife, a smarter kid, and a smarter dog than their neighbors. If your happiness depends on that, then you are likely to be disappointed in life because it takes 99 people for every one person who achieves the top 1 percent in something. Odds are, you’ll be one of the 99. And even if you are in the top 1 percent, it will be a hollow victory because its not like if you achieve some meaningless goal you achieve nirvana.

Half Sigma (always an interesting blog) has an older post on status:

The total amount of status is actually fixed relative to the total population. If Uncle Sam gave everyone a check for $1,000, are we really richer? No, because it just creates inflation, the amount of goods and services available to buy don’t change. In the same manner, if we were magically able to give everyone a new Mercedes, would everyone’s status go up? No, because the amount of status in society is fixed. In this case, the Mercedes would instantly become a symbol of having low status because it would represent the default car that everyone, even fast food laborers, drive.

Half Sigma has a post about how television commercials cause unhappiness by making us want things we cannot afford.

I say that TV commercials are a major source of unhappiness because they show us all sorts of things that we can’t afford to buy.
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People were probably happier before TV because back then they didn’t know what they were missing out on.

My wife use to watch the Home and Garden TV and she would salivate over the million dollar mansions. It used to irritate me because it would only create desire for things we could not have.

Here is a simple analogy. If you are reading this, you are probably a blogger. You might have the ambition to be a top 100 blogger (I am assuming that you aren’t already a top 100 blogger because why would you be wasting your time reading this?) There are millions of blogs, and only 100 top 100 blogs. You can do the math. Your chances of achieving this goal are tiny. But why would you want to make that your goal? Why wouldn’t you rather blog for the fun of blogging and get enjoyment out of having a few hundred interested people come by and read and comment on your blog? Isn’t that success enough?

The point is that we need to define our sense of happiness in a way that does not depend on the failure or success of others. We should be happy if we have a car, a home, a wife, a child, a dog (if you want one), and satisfying work. I have all that. I’m very happy. I also have a blog that some people read. Would I be happier if more people read my blog? I suppose, but really I don’t want to work any harder on it.

I remember a story that a professor told about the difference between success and happiness. He talked about a friend (call him Hans) who was from Austria but lived in the United States. Someone Hans knew (call him Fred) wanted Hans to contact a company in Austria the next time he visited his homeland so that Fred could negotiate a purchase of some merchandise. So Hans went to the Austrian manufacturer and told him of Fred, the rich American, who wanted to buy lots of his product. The Austrian manufacturer said, “I’ve got a nice house, I can go fishing every weekend, and I can eat out every Friday. If I have to work for your American friend and my Austrian customers, when will I have time to relax? No, I’m not interested.”

The Austrian businessman probably deserved to be driven out of business by a competitor in the long run, but in the short run, you have to admit, he was very happy.