Stephen Monrad

When we trade our labor for money or our money for things, we are making choices. The hope is that we make good choices and our lives improve. Hopefully we get value out of the things we buy.

What is it that counts as improvement? Do we know?

If the purpose of life is to achieve happiness or some other comfortable emotional state, it’s very difficult to tell when progress is being made. Our emotions are a writhing mass that we barely understand. We pursue things that we think might help, but the results are mixed. Was the new flat-screen tv worth the cost? Perhaps in the short term. In the long term, its value can be easily questioned.

Is there any other unifying goal other than happiness that we can pursue? I don’t think so. In practice, I think we end up pursuing a number of separate goals with little real idea of their relative importance. Get food. Buy clothing. Sleep. On simpler objectives like these, we can do a little optimizing. We can think about how effective solutions to specific problems are.

So how do we make big decisions in life if we don’t have a unifying goal to pursue? My guess is that we make the badly. We copy others. We make blind leaps into the unknown from time to time. Many people don’t like change at all because it’s scary. It’s more comfortable to simply maintain existing habits and patterns than to change.

Are our decisions driven by value? I don’t think so. I think we are mostly driven by habit. From time to time we drop some particularly counterproductive behaviors and substitute ones that might be better. What we end up with is a hodge-podge of behaviors that, if we are lucky, work reasonably well.