The Joy Quota
The Joy Quota
I believe in asset allocation. There is a certain amount of funds available that can be dispersed in a diversified manner in such a way as to create the maximum safety and benefit. This is just good common sense. It doesn’t take a genius to know that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Yet that’s exactly what I did. For years. But I’m not talking about assets here. I’m talking about joy. For most of my life I have been wasting my joy quota on the wrong allocation.
What do I mean?
Simply put, I invested joy in all the wrong places. To such an extent that I believe my neural pathways became so ingrained I often forgot how to find happiness elsewhere.
Joy and Food
From as early as I can remember, I conflated joy and food. This is a theme throughout my childhood. When I was happy I ate. When I was sad I ate. A night out or a trip to another city was highlighted by where I stopped for lunch or dinner. Even going to the major league baseball game. Have you ever tasted the hot dogs at Wrigley field?
It didn’t improve as I got older. Trips to Mexico became centered on the all inclusive nature of the resort and the quantity of fine dining I could consume.
At some point I lost the ability to find joy in all the other important things. The relationships, the sites, the smells, the feels. My joy quota was so full and my brain was so miswired about the eating thing, that I often failed to appreciate the million other wonders around me.
Joy and Money
My other achilles heal was the idea of making money. Similar to food, I conflated joy and work with making money. I’m not just talking about the W2 here, but the countless other “jobs” that we toil at.
I constantly measured my blog by whether I could monetize. I spent hours a day thinking about real estate and other such pursuits, and often felt empty if my mind wandered to non money making activities.
The joy quote is only so big. There is only so much joy one person can have. I trained myself to waste my allocation on metaphorically poor asset classes. I decided to spend this rare resource on food and money.
The Winds of Change
It started with my GI system. Everything went haywire. The foods I loved started to make me sick. They gave me abdominal pain, and at some point it stopped being worth it. I started to track what I ate. I lost 25 pounds and started avoiding foods I use to consume regularly. Although I still have a joy for food, my brain has changed.
I now enjoy the smell and sight of food just as much as the taste. Food is much less often the driver of my daily activities. It has become less important. Over time. And now takes up a much smaller portion of my joy quota.
Financial Independence
The same can be said for money. This financial independence journey has taken me full circle. Instead of thinking about the economic ROI of my daily activities, I have developed money apathy.
Money is not as an important driver of my activities as it used to be. Since most of what I do today won’t really move the dial financially, I’ve stopped looking at it as an important factor when making choices.
Final Thoughts/Why It Matters
I truly believe that there is a joy quota. Human beings have a certain capacity for happiness that is probably genetically predetermined. Therefore it is very important how we divvy up our joy allocation.
I previously wasted most of my allocation with concerns about food and money. These proclivities became so hard wired that I often forgot to be aware of all the amazing things happening around me.
For various reasons food and money no longer hold as much sway over my life. Now that my joy quota has been set free I am finding satisfaction in so many other things. Meditation, reading, exercise, relationships, non productive work.
The list goes on and on.
And it feels a lot better.
Sounds like you’re in a great place! Thank you for sharing this!
Our society has it skewed , and this comes as a welcome reminder that joy is not dependent upon
how much you earn or what you purchase.
Very true. We shouldn’t waste our joy on the unimportant things.
I never thought of joy as an asset. But it makes complete sense. Our joy and attention are valuable assets and I am trying to make a more conscious effort to allocate both resources in a way that is important to me.
And you are doing it early on in your career which is important.
My experience is when you monetize everything or develop a perspective of optimizing everything to the Nth degree you become a slave. The “joy” of the activity is then destroyed by the ever increasing cost of doing business. At some point it becomes too expensive and pointless to pursue. When you’re living at the 3rd SD moving to the 4th SD buys you nothing but headaches. The ROI goes negative and you then are beset with a delusion it’s still positive and momentum to not change because you don’t want to deal with the risk changing entails. Change must entail moving out of the tail back toward 2 SD or even 1 SD and there is loss in that. In the meantime time expires and stress is relentless. No way to live.
I think this gets back to perfect is the enemy of good enough.
Equating food with joy is probably part of the reason America is so obese. And if sadness and depression keep getting worse, using food to counter it will probably get worse. It’s a horrible cycle.
Yep. Definitely a non virtuous cycle.