The Algebra of Happiness summary

Before you decide to sacrifice your personal life on the altar of professional success, you might want to pause and consider what you’re sacrificing – above all, your relationships with your friends and family. If you’re working 80-hour weeks, you’re not going to have much time and energy left for those relationships and they’re going to deteriorate as a result.

But can’t you just put them on the back burner for now and get back to them later in life, after retirement? Well, it’s not so simple because, in the algebra of happiness, the logic of sacrifice applies to relationships just as much as it does to success. And as with success, the more or less time and energy you invest in your friends and family now, the more or less you’ll get back from them later in life.

It’s often said that money can’t buy happiness and that the best things in life are free. Now, both of these aphorisms are a bit overstated. Money, to the extent that it can lift us out of the instability, insecurity and material insufficiencies that come with poverty or a precarious middle-class income, can definitely increase our happiness. And many worthwhile experiences and hobbies require paying up-front investment costs, such as a plane ticket for an overseas vacation or an instrument you use to play music.

But those caveats aside, the aphorisms have a lot of truth to them. And, even in both of the exceptions just mentioned, money is simply a means to an end, not an end in itself. Let’s go back to experiences and hobbies. While money enables you to access or procure the equipment needed to enjoy these activities, it’s not obtaining the access or equipment that make you happy – it’s actually using them to do those activities.

Imagine you have the financial security of spending the golden years of your life doing the things you enjoy with the people you love the most. Sounds great, but are you willing to put your nose to the proverbial grindstone to make it a reality? Can you sacrifice aspects of your young adulthood for the sake of your happiness later in life?

We’re going to assume the answer is a definite yes, but, even if that’s not the case, you’ll still get a better idea of what’s involved in taking this difficult-but-rewarding path in life.

In contemporary culture, entrepreneurs are often portrayed as people who possess a unique set of virtues, like vision, tenacity and courage. Less attention is paid to the traits they don’t possess, namely, the traits of a good employee. There are three of these.

The first trait is dependability. If you want to keep your job, let alone get promoted, you’re going to have to do things like show up to work on time and pay attention at meetings, despite all of the terrible traffic and irrelevant conversations that get in the way.

Let’s say you’ve earned an in-demand degree, moved to a thriving supercity and sorted out the question of whether you should be an employee or an entrepreneur. Now what? How else can you ensure you achieve financial stability for the later years of your life?

The short answer is: to get rich. But to do that, you need to know what it really means to be “rich.” It’s not just having a lot of money. It’s having a comparatively high passive income and low expenditure.

Imagine you’re entering your golden years and you’ve played all of your cards right. You moved to a supercity. You worked your butt off for a company that builds waste treatment facilities across the great land in which you live. It’s not exactly the career you were dreaming of as a child, but it’s made you a lot of money – and you’ve invested that money wisely. Now you're rich, in the true meaning of the word. Your work has paid off.

But here’s the thing: you won’t enjoy that payoff unless you let yourself! Remember, the point isn’t just to make lots of money; it’s to make lots of money so that you can stop having to make lots of money! That way, you can work less and spend more time doing the things you love with your friends and family. This is the final objective.

In the preceding blinks, we’ve assumed that your overarching objective is to have enough financial security to enjoy your golden years with your loved ones – particularly the family you create with a partner. Of course, that’s assuming you have such a family and partner in the first place. In this final blink, we’ll take a look at how to find and maintain a relationship with a good life partner, that is, a person with whom you can form a true partnership when it comes to parenting.

To begin with, you need to know what you should be looking for in such a partner. Now, there are some one-size-fits-all requirements. For example, your partner should be an emotionally stable person who likes you for who you are. After all, it’s pretty unpleasant to share your life and kids with someone who’s emotionally unstable and hates you.