The fact that we still refer to things as pre- and post-COVID shows just how impactful this period of time was in our lives. What initially seemed like house arrest for only a few weeks ended up having a lasting impact. One of those impacts appears to be happiness. In a recent post by Aziz Sunderji, who is the author of Home Economics (you should subscribe), he shared this chart:
The data is taken from the General Social Survey. What it shows is the shift in the "very happy" group of Americans, and the ten demographic groups that experienced the biggest declines in reported happiness. Overall, the share of Americans reporting to be "very happy" has dropped from 29% before COVID (2016-18) to 22% in our post-COVID world (2022-24).
The biggest decline is among those who make the most money and were previously quite happy. Top earners went from 49% reporting they were "very happy" to 30%. On the other end of the spectrum, the unhappiest people moved the least. If you were unhappy before, chances are you have a similar level of unhappiness today. All of this is problematic.
This is an important societal problem to solve, and I'm not going to come close to doing that in today's pithy blog post. But I did want to point out two things (the latter of which is the key takeaway in Aziz's post).
First, I think it's important to note that at the top of this chart are those with "excellent health." The older I get, the more I have come to realize that the greatest luxury in life is our health. If you don't have your health, nothing else matters. This probably seems obvious, but it remains a real challenge in our increasingly sedentary world.
Second, Aziz notes that the groups that held up the best in terms of happiness all shared one trait: social connection. Interacting with other humans and your friends is good for your mental health!
Of course, the problem is that we are designing our cities and our economies in the opposite direction. Call it "sedentary isolation." AI is a powerful multiplier that allows us to do and produce more while we sit at our desks. And autonomous vehicles are in the process of making long, painful commutes more enjoyable. Now you have more time to sit and stare at a screen while a car drives you!
This is not to say that I'm against these new technologies. I'm not. But driving or not, I don't want to sit in an AV for hours each day. There are real individual and collective costs to social isolation and car-dependent land-use patterns. Let's not forget the simple merits of living in a walkable neighbourhood and socializing with friends, in person.
Cover photo by Ryan Searle on Unsplash
Chart from Aziz Sunderji, "The Great Happiness Compression," Home Economics.
It's a long game
Why early success does not predict exceptional performance as an adult
Conventional wisdom suggests that the way to get really good at something is to (1) start as early as possible learning the thing and (2) focus exclusively on the thing. This is relevant information for elite schools, sport academies, and other institutions because it leads to, "let's find the best young talent and then further accelerate their skills through discipline-specific practice."
But recent research has found that this typically isn't the case. By looking at more than 34,000 adult international top performers in different domains ranging from classical music composers to Olympic champions, researchers found the following three major features associated with human development (quoted verbatim from here):
Early exceptional performers and later exceptional performers within a domain are rarely the same individuals but are largely discrete populations over time. For example, world top-10 youth chess players and later world top-10 adult chess players are nearly 90% different individuals across time. Top secondary students and later top university students are also nearly 90% different people. Likewise, international-level youth athletes and later international-level adult athletes are nearly 90% different individuals.
Most top achievers (Nobel laureates and world-class musicians, athletes, and chess players) demonstrated lower performance than many peers during their early years. Across the highest adult performance levels, peak performance is negatively correlated with early performance.
The pattern of predictors that distinguishes among the highest levels of adult performance is different from the pattern of predictors of early performance. Higher early performance in a domain is associated with larger amounts of discipline-specific practice, smaller amounts of multidisciplinary practice, and faster early discipline-specific performance progress. By contrast, across high levels of adult performance, world-class performance in a domain is associated with smaller amounts of discipline-specific practice, larger amounts of early multidisciplinary practice, and more gradual early discipline-specific performance progress. These predictor effects are closely correlated with one another, suggesting a robust pattern.
In other words, it's a long game:
The most successful and highest-performing adults seem to start off as well-rounded kids.
Cover photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
I have heard from some of you that you don't like it when I write about crypto and NFTs. This personal blog is supposed to be largely about city building after all. So today I thought I would write about crypto and NFTs. More specifically, this podcast episode, which I watched last night.
It's with Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon of the venture firm a16z, and it's actually less about specific things like NFTs and more about the reinvention of the internet in general. Why I found it particularly interesting is that Marc co-invented the first widely-used web browser. Anyone remember Netscape?
So he was around for what we are now calling web 1 and he is around for what we are today calling web 3. And there are lots of parallels between then and now. Similar to today with crypto, the early internet had lots of critics and lots of people who thought it was dumb and that it would never amount to much.
Oops.
Here are a few other thoughts and ideas from the podcast that I found interesting (some of them even relate to city building):
No matter how many times we have seen the same movie, humanity seems doomed to repeat the same mistakes when it comes to, among other things, embracing new ideas and innovations. I agree with Marc in that part of this is generational. Younger people are often more open to new ideas because they view it as a way for them to establish themselves and make their mark on the world. Whereas older people (established people) often view new ideas and change as a threat to their current position in the world.
Marc drops a number of books throughout the talk and one of them is The Mystery of Capital -- Why Capitalism Succeeds in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. This is a well known book by Hernando De Soto and the big idea is that property ownership and property rights are really the fundamental ingredients in our modern world. People need to know that if they hold title and invest money into something, it's not just going to get taken away by someone. And it is this underlying legal structure that has allowed people to leverage property into wealth.
This is a fascinating observation in its own right, but it also relates to crypto. Hear me out. Chris Dixon makes the argument in the episode that web1 democratized information (anyone can search for stuff), and that web2 democratized publishing (anyone can share stuff through platforms like Twitter or the blogging platform I'm writing on right now). He then goes on to argue that the promise of web3 and crypto is really to democratize ownership of the internet. Anyone can buy crypto tokens.
Why might this be a big deal? Well if property rights in our offline world are a fundamental ingredient to modern society, it seems logical to me that property rights in our digital world(s) might also be equally transformative. And this is precisely one of the things that blockchain technologies enable for the very first time.
Finally, on a mostly unrelated note, I liked Marc's comparison of happiness vs. satisfaction in life. Happiness, he explains, is like getting an ice cream cone on a hot summer day. The first and second feel great, but after that you move on. Satisfaction on the other hand is enduring. It's the feeling you get from working on something really challenging and then finally succeeding. And that's exactly how I feel about real estate development. There are lots of shitty days and lots of grinding. But in the end, I do feel very satisfied.