The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

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The second war you are fighting every day

The second war is the war between more and enough.

Today we live in a Culture of More instead of our old Culture of Enough.

New trend? No. Growing trend. Growing in our culture for more than a hundred years.

Pop Momand was one of the first to put a finger on our shift from the Culture of Enough to the Culture of More. Pop was born in San Diego on May 15, 1887, and moved to New York City at age twenty-one, where he got a job as a sketch artist for The New York World. After getting married, Pop had a bit of success under his belt, so he and his wife moved to Cedarhurst, New York—a suburb on Long Island with big homes and moneymakers. Though the Momands had a high quality of life, Pop and his wife found themselves in a constant race to have an even higher quality of life than their wealthier neighbors. It drained them! So they quit the fancy lifestyle, moved back to Manhattan, and got an apartment in a poor part of town. Then Pop created a comic strip based on his experience in the ritzy burbs and pitched it to his bosses.

The comic strip he created was called Keeping Up with the Joneses. (He originally called it Keeping Up with the Smiths but changed it because Joneses sounded better.) Pop told the story of the fictional McGinnises, whose obsession with high society dominates their lives. The Joneses are a couple the reader never sees—a comic-book Polkaroo—but they wave a commanding wand over the McGinnises’ lives.

Here’s the very first Keeping Up with the Joneses strip ever published, more than a hundred years ago, in 1913:

Visit http://bit.ly/1mgboXi for a larger version of this image.

Punchy, acerbic, reflecting society’s growing obsession with relative wealth, the strip took off, getting syndicated and picked up in hundreds of newspapers and eventually running for twenty-eight years. It was even turned into a book, a movie, and a musical.

Meg Jacobs writes in Technology and Culture about the growth of the Culture of More between 1890 and 1930:

“As new technologies enabled mass production and mass distribution, Americans no longer had to just be content with what they had; they could act on their desires. No longer a sin, envy was now a staple of the new consumer economy.”

Americans no longer had to be just content with what they had. They could act on their desires!

After World War I there were new mass production techniques that enabled mass marketing of products like washing machines, stoves, and canned goods that advertised convenience. Who didn’t want one? And along came installment buying for large items like houses. Suddenly we had radios to beam advertisements right into our houses. Buying things was driving the economy!

“We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture,” wrote Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers in a 1927 issue of Harvard Business Review. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

More, more, we all want more.

We have grown up in a world where more has always meant better. But that’s baloney! More than a hundred years later and we are still Keeping Up with the Joneses.

A couple years ago I asked my boss Mike how his young kids were doing as I was packing up my notes and leaving his office on a late Friday afternoon before the weekend. He was head of the department and had the only office at the company with abstract paintings on the walls and leather chairs beside his desk.

“Good, good, thanks. They’re excited to show me an app tonight which they built at school.”

“Oh, that’s cool.” I looked up. “Do they have their own laptops?”

“Yeah.” He smiled at me, looking a bit guilty.

He saw my quiet smile back and continued.

“Look, my kids are lucky . . . you and I both know that. But they don’t. Their world is different. We live in a big house, they go to private schools, they have their own computers. But their friends at school go to Europe for long weekends and we don’t do that. And one has an indoor basketball court in his house. My son came home from school yesterday and asked me why we didn’t have a basketball court inside our house.”

The Culture of More affects us all!

So what do we do?