How did these purchases affect people’s overall sense of happiness? By looking at the data in more detail, the authors found that these purchases affected people’s satisfaction with the area of their lives that were affected by the purchase. People who spent money on experiences related to their social life saw an improvement in their satisfaction with their social life. People who spent money on experiences related to fitness saw an improvement in their satisfaction with their health. These increases in satisfaction with a particular area of their lives also affected people’s overall sense of well-being and happiness.
So if you spend your money on experiences, you can increase your happiness. There are a two key ground rules, though. First, stay within your budget. Spending more money than you have creates stress and lowers happiness. Second, don’t blow all of your money on one great event. You are better off sitting in the cheap seats for a number of sporting events than sitting courtside at one. Spread those good experiences out over time.
via Money can buy happiness if you spent it right | Psychology Today.
rePost :: :: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Facebook's identity lock-in
Nice question this post provokes. Should I delete my Facebook account?
Facebook’s identity lock-in
May 21, 2010
“You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal.” -Bob Dylan
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a knack for making statements that are at once sweeping and stupid, but he outdoes himself with this one:
You have one identity … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Facebook’s identity lock-in.
rePost :: The Future of Apple's Curated Computing
Will most definitely be buying an android 2.2 phone.
I will still probably buy an iPhone some day because they are very cool. However, I will never develop for it, because I’m a crazy one. A misfit. And I’m not fond of rules.
Now where did I pick up that idea?
via The Future of Apple’s Curated Computing.
rePost :: ::Why Engineers Hop Jobs
Well I’m as unreliable, lazy, and entitled as the next guy, but that’s not why I’ve hopped jobs in the past. People in my generation have a very low tolerance for bullshit, and software engineering, in general, is a very high bullshit career. If you couple that with the standard load of bullshit you would get from a non-technical Harvard MBA type boss — like many CEOs that you find trying to get rich in Silicon Valley by hiring some engineers to “code up this idea real quick” — it’s no wonder that a good engineer will walk off the job after his one year cliff vesting.
As an engineer, you are told that you’re “lucky to have a job”, because there are “a hundred people lined up outside, ready to take it”. (As chance would have it, there are at least a thousand lined up to take the job of rich prick who tells people what to do). This backlash is the product of diseased thinking. A CEO who makes an engineer work 80 hours a week is a driven entrepreneur, but an engineer asking for a comfy chair is a prima donna. So, when we are up to our knees in golf-course, martini-lunch bullshit, don’t be surprised when we jump ship for a higher salary.
via Why Engineers Hop Jobs.
rePost :: NUMMI | This American Life
Was listening to this episode of This American Life and what hit me was how much these autoworkers were proud of their work. I hope we can all have this attitude towards what we do.
A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: how it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn't learn the lessons – until it was too late.
via NUMMI | This American Life.
rePost :: :: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Not addiction; dependency
I have to admit a certain affinity towards how Ternovskiy feels. It is an impulse I try to fight against constantly.
By “the world,” of course, Ternovskiy means the Internet, which is also where most of his friends are. His closest confidant is a Russian immigrant named Kirill Gura, who lives in Charleston, West Virginia. Every night for the past five years, Ternovskiy has turned on his computer, found Kirill on MSN Messenger, and talked to him until one of them fell asleep. “He’s a real friend,” Ternovskiy says … Ternovskiy says that he sees the computer as “one hundred percent my window into the world.” He doesn’t seek much else. “I always believed that computer might be that thing that I only need, that I only need that thing to survive,” he says. “It might replace everything.”
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Not addiction; dependency.
rePost :: ::The Productivity Myth – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review
Must forward the linked study to the boss. harharhar
# A comprehensive study by Ernst & Young showed that the longer the vacation their employees took, the better they performed. Yet more than half of all Americans now fail to take all of their vacation days and 30 per cent of Americans use less than half their allotted vacation time.
via The Productivity Myth – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review.
rePost :: Great Words For Steve Nash :: Bill Simmons: Phoenix Suns trying to erase 40 years of stomach punches – ESPN
3. Last summer, Kerr had to sign Nash — only the face of his franchise, the most popular Phoenix athlete ever and the heart of his locker room — to a contract extension. Kerr knew Nash couldn’t stop rehashing the past four years, thinking of all the couldas and wouldas and whatmightabeens. He knew Nash wondered if Kerr and Sarver knew what they were doing. He knew that, if this were anyone else, Disgruntled Superstar X would have demanded a trade or made it clear, “I’m playing this last year out, and if we fall short again, I’m out of here.”
But he also knew Steve Nash isn’t wired that way. He’s loyal. He’s Canadian. He’s old-school. He believes in things like, “I am the leader of this team, so as soon as I say that I might want to leave, I can’t lead anymore.” Nobody else would have stayed. Steve Nash stayed. Kerr promised him things would be better, that the window hadn’t closed, that he would, for lack of a better word, fix this. He even believed it.
via Bill Simmons: Phoenix Suns trying to erase 40 years of stomach punches – ESPN.
rePost :: Marginal Revolution: What has happened to surprise marriage proposals?
The most likely ones to accept such proposals are women who are unsure of their “quality,” either on the mating market or in unmarried life. Accepting the proposal takes on one kind of risk but relieves the woman of another.
Overall it seems that women are today more certain about the utility value of their alternatives to a surprise marriage proposal and that means they turn them down. The proposals may seem like harmless “cheap talk” (propose to lots of women above your station in life and thus the custom persists, even if it rarely succeeds), but Google-savvy, credential-savvy women can evaluate men better than ever before and the lower status guys don’t get close enough to them to try a shock proposal, much less make it stick.
Is it a prediction that rapid, surprise proposals are more common in societies where male high achievers are hard to identify in advance? How important is inequality of income and volatility/uncertainty of income?
Perhaps for aesthetic reasons, I find the decline of the surprise proposal slightly sad (though in part reflective of some positive societal developments), and I am pleased to reaffirm that I do not believe in the consultative approach.
via Marginal Revolution: What has happened to surprise marriage proposals?.
Quote ::"You might not always have something to say ……"::Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Sunday rambles
Placing the spreadsheeting-of-the-self trend in the context of the social-networking trend, Wolf observes, “You might not always have something to say, but you always have a number to report.” To give it a different spin: Who needs imagination when you have the data?
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Sunday rambles.