What If We're Climbing the Wrong Mountain?

Could focusing more on community and less on money lead to a better life?

I came across three pieces of information recently that changed the way I see the world.

The first is from a Gallup survey of working hours from 2013 to 2014. According to Gallup, full-time workers in the United States report working an average of 47 hours per week. 39 percent report working over 50 hours per week, and a full 18 percent report working more than 60 hours per week. That's 5 12-hour days back to back to back; or slightly shorter days with some work on the weekends.

The second piece of information tells us how much we enjoy these hours at the office. The dispiriting answer is…not much. In 1955, Gallup pollsters asked working Americans, "Which do you enjoy more, the hours when you are on your job, or the hours when you are not on your job?" 44 percent of respondents said that they enjoyed work more than leisure. By 2006, only 19 percent felt that way.

Of course, maybe leisure's just gotten more entertaining. The dizzying variety of Netflix certainly beats most TV channels in 1955. But I don't think that's the whole story. In Bowling Alone (from which the 1955 number comes), Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam points out that work has gotten a lot less enjoyable in the past 70 years. Bosses increasingly read our emails and monitor our social media. Restructuring makes us all worry about our jobs, and relationships with coworkers and bosses can feel more like temporary alliances than like true friendships (Putnam notes that "when people were asked to list their closest friends, less than half of all full-time workers put even one co-worker on the list"). We watch coworkers come and go in the blink of an eye, which makes us more scared and nervous for our own jobs.

Or to put it another way: we're working a lot of hours. But we're enjoying them less and less.

Admittedly, these first two pieces of information don't seem so surprising. Our culture tells us that the way to be happy is to win the rat race. Fulfillment comes from the ability to buy lots of things, and security is having a big enough nest egg that we never have to worry. Is it any wonder that we put in long hours at the office, even though most of us would rather be somewhere else? 

But here's the third piece of information, and this one floored me. A study published in The Journal of Socio-Economics looked at how much money actually contributes to our happiness. The answer? Not much. The authors note that "Income only plays a small part in influencing our well-being." What really matters to our well-being is friendship and community. In fact, having one close friend contributed as much to a person's happiness as earning an extra $150,000 per year.

Or to put it another way: if you have a choice in your life between making time for one close friend and earing $50,000 per year, or working all the time and earning $180,000 per year, and your goal is to maximize your happiness…you're better off taking the first option.

(Of course, money isn't the only benefit of work; work can also give us profound meaning and purpose. My writing certainly gives me that. But even when that's the case, I think sometimes we can pursue work with such single-minded determination that we close ourselves off to other parts of life that we are also meant to enjoy).

It's not just happiness; the benefits of friendship and community touch every area of our lives. Putnam summarizes dozens of studies on the topic when he writes that, "social connectedness is one of the most powerful determinants of our well-being." "The more integrated we are with our community," he writes, "the less likely we are to experience colds, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, depression, and premature death of all sorts." Researcher Lisa Berman even speculates that social isolation can accelerate aging: she says that social isolation is "a chronically stressful condition to which the organism respond[s] by aging faster." 

The bottom line? Putnam again: "As a rough rule of thumb, if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half. If you smoke and belong to no groups, it’s a toss-up statistically whether you should stop smoking or start joining."

All this research on the importance of friendship and community completely changed the way that I see making money. I think a lot of us (especially men) see our careers as though we're trying to scale Mount Everest. It's hard, it's grueling, it requires every spare moment and every iota of effort we have—but damn, the view at the top is going to be worth it.

But the social science research I've seen suggests that we're really climbing a tiny cliff in our backyard. The cliff is steep and treacherous. It demands all of our time and energy. We spend late nights and weekends working our painstaking way up it, often eschewing human connection on the way. But when we get to the top, we find that the view isn't all it's cracked up to be. The juice isn't worth the squeeze, and the money we have doesn't make up for the hours we've lost.

So what if we reoriented ourselves? What if we spent more time trying to climb a bigger and more fulfilling (and, not coincidentally, more enjoyable) mountain–community and friendship? I'm certainly not advocating that we give up work or stop seeing its appeal (I love writing for a living; it's my dream job)---but what if we gripped it a little bit less tightly so that we could make more room in our lives for the other things that matter? How might our experience of life change for the better?

So here's our action item, as a community of practice. Sometime this next month, take off a day of work. Don't jeopardize your job, renege on your commitments, or do something that will put other people in a bind. But sit down and make a plan to take one full day off that you wouldn't normally take. Spend that whole day making memories with the people you love most—your kids, your spouse, your parents, your close friends.

And then, afterwards, think back on that day and ask yourself a question: how much money would someone have to pay me to make me skip my day of connection and go into the office instead?

(Oh, and if you're so moved, feel free to post pictures from your day off as a comment on this post).

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