For Some, ‘Tis a Gift to Be Simple
By Ron Lieber, NY Times, Aug. 29, 2014
Last month, I spent a day in a library for the first time in over 20 years. I was there to work, but I appeared to be the only one doing so. Everyone else lolled about as the rain fell outside, helping themselves to the endless shelves of newspapers and magazines or browsing the newest fiction.
My work brings me joy. But as I looked around at the older patrons especially, I was overcome by a single emotion: jealousy. It had been too long since I’d sampled the simple but profound pleasure of losing myself in the stacks. I wanted to feel it again.
That craving stayed with me, and it helped me recognize how important some research from the June issue of The Journal of Consumer Research could be for helping many Americans find peace of mind as they contemplate their retirement savings. The lead article reported that older people often draw as much happiness from ordinary experiences--like a day in the library--as they do from extraordinary ones.
If you can cover basic expenses, pursuing inexpensive, everyday things that bring comfort and satisfaction can lead to happiness equal to jetting about on international trips in your 70s and 80s.
The study’s authors, Amit Bhattacharjee and Cassie Mogilner, met when Mr. Bhattacharjee was earning his doctorate at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where Ms. Mogilner is an assistant professor of marketing. When they decided to work together, they did not set out to make grand pronouncements about aging.
Instead, they were trying to help answer one of the next big questions in the emerging field of happiness studies. Already, scholars in the field have established that experiences tend to make people happier than possessions. What we do, it seems, has more potential for lasting satisfaction and memory-making than what we have. But Mr. Bhattacharjee, who is now a visiting assistant professor of marketing at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and Ms. Mogilner wanted to know what sort of experiences made people the most happy and why.
To find out, they conducted eight studies in which they asked participants about their recollections of, planning for or daydreaming about various happiness-making experiences. They also checked to see what sort of things their subjects were posting about on Facebook. The researchers’ definitions of ordinary and extraordinary experiences, when they prompted people to discuss one or the other, were simple and focused on frequency; ordinary experiences happen often and occur in the course of everyday life while extraordinary ones are much more rare.
Extraordinary experiences bring great joy throughout life. No surprise there. But what the pair found again and again was that the older people got, the more happiness ordinary experiences delivered. In fact, the happiness-making potential of everyday pursuits eventually grows equal to that of ones that are rarer.
For Mr. Bhattacharjee, 32, the findings helped clarify a few things about his own parents. He had been attracted to research on moral beliefs and well-being in part because of his upbringing in a Bengali-speaking household of Indian immigrants. “My whole life, I felt like I was trying to sort out these competing cultural standards,” he said. “What is good? What is desirable? There are very different sorts of standards that people apply.”
When his younger brother started college, the two siblings plied their empty-nester parents with restaurant gift cards and theater tickets so they could revel in their freedom from full-time parenting duties. “They just had zero interest,” he recalled. “They really relish the ordinary. At some point, I stopped fighting it. And once I started working on this stuff, it helped crystallize for me that their conception of what is valuable is different.”
Different from what a young person might have expected, at least. His parents were never much for the grand journey or the statement vehicle.
Now that Arun Bhattacharjee, 73, is more than half a decade into retirement, he devotes his days to reading the newspaper and books and regular strolls near the family home in Audubon, Pa. “I walk in the neighborhood around the block a few times,” he said. “Everybody knows me. Rain or shine.”
His wife, Ratna, 63, still works as an engineer. She and Arun go to India about once a year to see her mother. The family of four did head to Las Vegas for a vacation recently. “I have not lost interest in those kinds of things,” Arun Bhattacharjee said. “But I don’t need that sort of thing all of the time to give me pleasure. I can get it from simple things.”
Older people are not set in their ways, nor should they want to be, and it would be a mistake to think we know ourselves well enough to be certain of what will give us the most satisfaction when we’re older. Retirement is just the sort of transition point that causes many people to seek new adventures and try on new ways of being in the world. No one should deny themselves that if they can afford it.
But plenty of people won’t have the money to go to faraway places or pay to jump out of airplanes. Low-cost extraordinary experiences may well be nearby, but there ought to be much comfort in the evidence that everyday things that cost little or nothing can deliver the same amount of joy. A garden. The elaborate meal that emerges from it and the spare time to invent the recipes. A return to a neglected musical instrument. All-you-can-consume subscriptions to Netflix and Spotify, with watchlists and playlists that stretch on for years.
As for me, I’m merely middle-aged. But I’m almost positive that the first thing on my retirement wish list will be a brand-new library card.