Year of Discovery (Week 19: Multi-layer Assumptions and Understanding Our Needs and Wants)
This last week, I wrapped up my time in San Francisco and headed to Italy to spend time with one of my closest friends. My time has been filled with conversations about where the world is heading and how people see their contributions to building a world they want to live in. I’ve spoken to friends who are new parents, top in their field, wondering what their broader purpose in life is, transitioning from work in emerging markets to the US, and more. We’ve spoken about vanity metrics in high-growth companies, capitalism and elitism, labels that divide and not unite, merging capitalistic values with building a more equal, just world, and holding the tension between optimism for the future and pragmatism for the present. Inspired, I found myself hastily scribbling down notes to hold onto the nuggets of wisdom shared throughout each conversation.
During my run this morning, I felt gratitude for the people in my life and the time to get to know myself again and to slow down. In my early 20s, the phrase ‘live today like it’s your last’ was about maximizing every experience and place I was in, constantly searching for something outside of myself. And today, living like it’s my last day is about quieting my mind, taking in each moment and awakening all of my senses to what’s in front of me: the magic of life.
This week, I’m writing reflections on multi-layer assumptions and understanding our needs and wants.
Multi-layer Assumptions
Since starting my YoD, I’ve thought a lot about ‘truth’ —are truths mostly universally accepted or mostly subjective? As I continue to ask people ‘why’ behind perceived facts and their beliefs, I’ve come to believe that: the sooner we realize that everything around us is simply made up of a series of assumptions, the sooner we can realize truths are mostly subjective and we need to continue to question them.
A friend shared this incredible piece by Nabeel Qureshi, where he says:
The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved.
I had the opposite tendency: as soon as I’d reached the end of the proof, I’d stop since I’d “gotten the answer”.
Afterwards, he’d come out with three or four proofs of the same thing, plus some explanation of why each proof is connected somehow. In this way, he got a much deeper understanding of things than I did.
I concluded that what we call ‘intelligence’ is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about ‘raw intellect’.
Questioning our assumptions about life, ourselves and the world is difficult and time-consuming. It’s often a lot easier to stop at our first answer and take that as the truth to move forward. Through intentionally slowing down this year, I’ve caught myself picking up old habits of prioritizing the speed of doing over the time that’s necessary to think and question. But when I have slowed down, I often leave with a new output or solution than the one I had at first thought.
Nobel Prize winner William Shockley calls this the ‘will to think’:
Motivation is at least as important as method for the serious thinker, Shockley believed…the essential element for successful work in any field was “the will to think”. This was a phrase he learned from the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi and never forgot. “In these four words,” Shockley wrote later, “[Fermi] distilled the essence of a very significant insight: A competent thinker will be reluctant to commit himself to the effort that tedious and precise thinking demands — he will lack ‘the will to think’ — unless he has the conviction that something worthwhile will be done with the results of his efforts.” The discipline of competent thinking is important throughout life… (source)
Some of the most game-changing discoveries about our world have also come from the innovator’s ability to slow down and think. Physicist Michael Faraday, often hailed as the ‘Father of Electricity’ who created many inventions like the electric motor, spent ample time questioning his own and others’ assumptions about how electricity works:
Faraday began to develop his own views on the nature of the force between a current-carrying wire and the magnetic needle it deflected. Ampère’s mathematics (which he had no reason to doubt) showed that the motion of the magnetic needle was the result of repulsions and attractions between it and the wire. But, to Faraday, this seemed wrong, or, at least, the wrong way around. What happened, he felt, was that the wire induced a circular force in the space around itself, and that everything else followed from this. The next step beautifully illustrates Faraday’s genius. Taking Sarah’s fourteen-year-old brother George with him down to the laboratory, he stuck an iron bar magnet into hot wax in the bottom of a basin and, when the wax had hardened, filled the basin with mercury until only the top of the magnet was exposed. He dangled a short length of wire from an insulated stand so that its bottom end dipped in the mercury, and then he connected one terminal of a battery to the top end of the wire and the other to the mercury. The wire and the mercury now formed part of a circuit that would remain unbroken even if the bottom end of the wire moved. And move it did — in rapid circles around the magnet! (source)
But we don’t all need to be scientists and academics to question our assumptions. I have assumptions about anything from the purpose of work, how education models succeed, the purpose of friendships, a partner’s role in my life, what it means to be a woman, etc. Each of us is a beautiful myriad of assumptions and as we continue to evolve, the fun and joy of life is to continue asking ourselves in areas we care about: why is this assumption true?
Understanding Needs vs Wants
What shook me about being in San Francisco was the growing wealth disparity that was so much more prevalent than I’d seen before and it made me think more about the values we have as a society in terms of our needs and wants and our shared responsibiity in taking care of one another.
In a talk I once heard, the speaker said something along the lines of: “It’s simple. Humans are animals and at the end of the day, all we really need is to eat, sleep, breathe and defecate. Everything else is just a want.” Maslow’s hierarchy suggests there are additional needs that humans have — but at our base physiological level, what the speaker said rang true to me.
A 2018 study from Purdue University found that the ideal income point for Americans is $95,000 for life satisfaction (an overall assessment of how one is doing and is likely more influenced by higher goals and comparisons to others) and $60,000 to $75,000 for emotional well-being (one’s day-to-day emotions, such as feeling happy, excited, or sad and angry). This made me wonder: is the happiness graph vis-a-vis income in fact a bell curve? That once our basic needs are met and we have enough discretionary income to invest in our psychological and self-fulfillment needs, that having too much individual wealth beyond that actually decreases our happiness?
From a study sampling 1.7 million people worldwide, the graph above shows that more money after a certain point actually decreases life satisfaction. If that’s the case, then why does the amount of wealth accumulated still often serve as a key marker of success, if we know that it won’t truly lead to more happiness?
This study has significant implications on individual, institutional and national levels. Individually, if we know that after a certain amount of income, our happiness actually decreases, how might that change…
- how we spend our money (to donating or giving more rather than spending on more wants)?
- how much money we do need to make? is it possible to spend time doing meaningful and fulfilling work sooner than we think?
- the tradeoffs between earning more vs having time to pursue other interests and living a healthy, balanced life?
Institutionally…
- how do we support more people on our payrolls to ensure their basic needs are met?
- how do we support people in ways that make them more whole and happy?
- do we need to go back to the first principles of work and its purpose in people’s lives?
Nationally…
- what is the governments role in ensuring its citizen live happier lieves? how might it regulate wealth as a way to actually increase happiness?
- is the wealth disparity actually creating more suffering and unhappiness on either end of the bellcurve, with a range that’s increasing everyday?
There’s an opportunity to shift our paradigm on how we spend our days and what a ‘successful’ life looks like when we think about how our income and jobs relate to our happiness. The question is: how do we do so?
What I’m reading this week: City of Thieves (a page-turning coming of age story set in the World War II siege of Leningrad).
