The Number That Would Solve All Your Problems
Let’s think about that for a moment. What is that number that would solve all the problems in your life? The number that would finally make you happy? I think we’ve all thought of it. I certainly have. You know, if I had doubled my salary, perhaps I could finally afford all the things that I need. Or if I had five million dollars, ten million dollars.
There’s always a number where we think that if we had this amount of money, then all our problems would be solved.
But actually, the thing is that we know what happens to people who suddenly get all this money, because we have lotteries and we have lottery winners. And there have been studies about what happens to lottery winners over time.
Why the lottery fantasy fails — and what an ex-slave from 2000 years ago can teach us about that.
The Fisherman and the Tourist
There is this fantasy that we all have. If we only had more money, then we could quit our jobs, for example. We could just sit at home and do whatever we like, make videos and write articles like this, or pay off the house, send the children to a better school. We would have all the freedom to lie on the beach.
And there is a beautiful story, actually, from a German author (Heinrich Böll’s “Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral” (1963)) who wrote a short story about tourists going to Greece and seeing the fishermen sitting there in the sun and enjoying their lives. And he, being a German, he tells them: you have to improve your lives. You cannot just sit around here. You have to do something.
And they say: so what should we do? Why is it not good to sit around?
Yeah, the German tourist says, you could, in the time you’re just hanging around here, you could go catch some more fish and then sell the fish. And then you could, in time, collect the money and save. Doing this for a decade, perhaps you can have a whole fleet fishing for you.
And then? says the fisherman.
Then, the German tourist says, finally, you could sit around in the sun and relax and you wouldn’t have to work anymore.
But this is exactly what I’m doing, says the fisherman.
You see that this idea of always working more, always putting more effort into what we’re doing, is a kind of a hamster wheel, because we are just staying on one point. And if we keep going and we keep going, we end up at the same point where we were previously. Perhaps we have a bigger number, but we are not necessarily happier.
It’s Not Only About the Money
The thing is, when we have this lottery daydream, it’s not only about the money.
The daydream is also about freedom, about leaving our jobs, being able to do what we want, being our own bosses. It’s the belief that my unhappiness is caused by my circumstances. It is the whole world, my bosses, my colleagues, the bad job that I’m doing. And if I could only change these circumstances, then I would be happy. And this sounds obvious.
If I had more money, I would have fewer problems.
But there are actually studies of lottery winners — Brickman is a famous one, and I can put a link down there — which show that lottery winners over time are not happier than other people.
This suggests that happiness to a great extent is not something that comes from the outside, but it is something that we carry in us.
There is the set-point theory of happiness: that some people are just happier people, and they are happier when they are poor, they are happier when they are rich. And some people are pessimistic, miserable, anxious, and if they get suddenly rich, they will be pessimistic, anxious, and miserable rich people.
So, of course, this is all a little bit relative. There is some influence, and it depends on many factors, you know, how money can make you happier. So, for example, if you are so poor that your poverty is really a big problem in your life, then having more money is going to make things better for you, obviously. But if you already have a life that’s not totally ruined by poverty, if you have a life that’s reasonably okay financially, and then you just double your income, ten times your income, this is not really going to improve things — or even if you get a million or ten million dollars. This is not going to improve things. This equation — more money, and then I will be happier — is not true. Because what makes us happier or unhappy is really not the circumstances and it’s not the money. It’s us.
Enter Epictetus
And this is something that the Greek-Roman philosopher Epictetus first saw. He was a slave in the Roman Empire, and he became one of the great teachers of philosophy in ancient times.
He is one of the founders of Stoicism, one of the big authors of Stoicism.
And being a slave, he knew something about living in bad circumstances. So what Epictetus was saying is not just the musings of an Emperor, like when you read Marcus Aurelius, or the thoughts of an idle philosopher who has nothing better to do. He was a slave. When he is talking about life and the problems of life, he is talking from the position of somebody who knows the life of a slave. And his core line is:
“Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.” — Epictetus, Handbook
The Traffic Jam
And this is something you can relate to if you think about how you react to frustrations in traffic, for example. Let’s say you are in a traffic jam. You are sitting there, and you are totally frustrated by this, you are totally angry, you are honking, the traffic doesn’t move, and you cannot think about anything else but this not moving traffic.
And now you look beside you — there is a car with somebody who looks, in the same traffic jam, totally relaxed and happy, because he is listening to an educational podcast.
He is sitting in his comfortable car seat that is the same as your car seat, he is perhaps sipping a coffee that he bought before he left home, and he is listening to this podcast. And he almost wishes that the traffic jam goes on, because then he doesn’t have to drive — he can just sit there and concentrate on the podcast. Or perhaps he is listening to a novel, and this novel is nice and it is enjoyable too, and he gets an hour of pleasure out of sitting in this traffic jam.
And what this is supposed to show is that it is not the traffic jam that is the problem, it is our perception of it.
A Free Chinese Lesson
And again, I can tell you a story of my own. I was once — I live in Hong Kong, perhaps you know this — and I was once in a bus, where I had a local woman in front of me, speaking very loudly in Chinese. I didn’t speak much Chinese then, but she was shouting into my ear, she was talking to someone, and I almost wanted to say: You know, you have a phone, you don’t need to shout so they can hear you — you can just switch on the phone and speak into the microphone. But of course, I mean, this was her thing, this was her style, this was how she communicated, so she was shouting into this phone just a meter away from me on the front seat.
And then it hit me. You know, I had this realization that I could now — what I just told you — I could now just sit there and be angry at her, which wouldn’t change anything, it would just give me half an hour of bus ride in which I’m angry. Or I could try to find some way to make this thing enjoyable to me.
And then it occurred to me that this is a free Chinese lesson. I was just learning Chinese. So here is somebody who is speaking easy, everyday Chinese. She’s talking to her friend — it’s not a lecture, it’s not, you know, a complicated book. She’s saying everyday things: what she shopped, where she went, you know, how the weather was. And I could just relax on the back seat and take out my dictionary and try to understand as much as possible. And I did this, and I arrived happy. I had learned some Chinese, I had caught a few words, you know, of what she said, and I had had a good experience on this bus ride. I had learned something. I almost wanted to thank her — she gave me a free lesson in Chinese.
And so you can try this yourself. Next time you are annoyed by something, remember Epictetus: it is not the circumstances that make us unhappy, but our judgment about the circumstances. And although the circumstances themselves are not in our power to change, our judgment is. We can change our judgment, we can think differently about things.
And so the money, the lottery, is not going to do anything to you. An anxious person with a lottery win is a rich anxious person.
If you always compared yourself to somebody who is richer, now, even with a lottery win, you have to compare yourself with somebody who is even richer. There is always somebody who is even richer.
And so the point is: you don’t need better circumstances, you don’t need a lottery win. You need a better relation to the circumstances that you have. You need a better mindset to find happiness at whatever place in life you are. And I know that this is easy to say, but try it and you will see that it actually works.
The Postponement Machine
The other thing is that the thought of the lottery win is not only a harmless illusion.
It is in reality a postponement machine about making your life better. Because dreaming of a lottery win absolves you, kind of, from actually doing something about your life, changing your perception, making your life better. You dream of this lottery win and then you don’t need to do anything. And this is the negative side of all these “visualize your success” suggestions that you sometimes get on social media, right?
Manifest your success. And it has shown in some studies that manifesting success actually makes success less likely, because the manifestation is then used as a replacement for the actual work towards that success. So instead of doing something, you sit there and you daydream about it.
And this article is actually a good example of that, because I avoided making this for a long time. If you look at my channel, for almost a year I have not made a video — for various reasons. I was afraid that it wouldn’t get views, or I was, you know, I thought it would be too much work. But at the same time, you know, while I was avoiding to do it, I was always watching videos about making videos, about making a career on YouTube, right? And this is exactly how, you know, seeing myself as a YouTuber, manifesting this, actually is counterproductive. I could imagine that I would make this video without actually making it. And of course nothing changed in this year. And it changed now, that I can get down and spend, you know, ten minutes doing this.
Where to Go from Here
If you found this interesting, perhaps you’re also interested in the question why death can be an advantage and thinking about death can be a good thing — and this article is right here on this Substack too.
I hope you enjoyed this. Thank you for being here and see you in the next one!
