To be fair to Kaj they only said that one may rationally trade-off happiness for meaning, not that meaning intrinsically matters more.
For example you could theoretically have both meaning and happiness as components of wellbeing, with both having diminishing marginal contribution to wellbeing. In this case it would likely be best to have some meaning and some happiness. If one was very happy, but with no meaning, one could rationally trade off happiness for meaning to improve overall wellbeing—and this wouldn’t require thinking that meaning is intrinsically better than happiness.
I agree its uncontroversial that if there are multiple elements of well-being that don’t necessarily have equal weights—there will be a point at which getting more of the thing that matters less will be better overall than getting the thing that matters more.
Since Kaj included the Bryan Caplan quote it seemed to imbue the comment with a bit more opinion on what matters.
And most thoughtful traditions say to focus more on meaning that happiness. Meaning is how you evaluate your whole life, while happiness is how you feel about now. And I agree: happiness is overrated.
Getting back to the point. If a potential parent is told “you’ll be less happy but your life will have more of (whatever meaning means).” I’m trying to express, that if that potential parent asked me if they should take that tradeoff (from a self interested perspective), I’d say “make sure you’re getting a heck of a lot of meaning for every unit of happiness you lose”.
Full disclosure: I’ll probably make that tradeoff even though it doesn’t seem like a great bargain.
As a deeper aside, it’s odd that he defines meaning pretty much as life satisfaction / evaluation which is normally “how you evaluate your whole life”. They obviously aren’t the same to people if they give opposite rankings of countries.
As a deeper aside, it’s odd that he defines meaning pretty much as life satisfaction / evaluation which is normally “how you evaluate your whole life”. They obviously aren’t the same to people if they give opposite rankings of countries.
Yeah I think he may actually be referring to life satisfaction, but calling it meaning as a sort of informal short-hand. I’m not sure “meaning” is a very common wellbeing metric anyway.
To be fair to Kaj they only said that one may rationally trade-off happiness for meaning, not that meaning intrinsically matters more.
For example you could theoretically have both meaning and happiness as components of wellbeing, with both having diminishing marginal contribution to wellbeing. In this case it would likely be best to have some meaning and some happiness. If one was very happy, but with no meaning, one could rationally trade off happiness for meaning to improve overall wellbeing—and this wouldn’t require thinking that meaning is intrinsically better than happiness.
Very fair Jack!
I agree its uncontroversial that if there are multiple elements of well-being that don’t necessarily have equal weights—there will be a point at which getting more of the thing that matters less will be better overall than getting the thing that matters more.
Since Kaj included the Bryan Caplan quote it seemed to imbue the comment with a bit more opinion on what matters.
Getting back to the point. If a potential parent is told “you’ll be less happy but your life will have more of (whatever meaning means).” I’m trying to express, that if that potential parent asked me if they should take that tradeoff (from a self interested perspective), I’d say “make sure you’re getting a heck of a lot of meaning for every unit of happiness you lose”.
Full disclosure: I’ll probably make that tradeoff even though it doesn’t seem like a great bargain.
As a deeper aside, it’s odd that he defines meaning pretty much as life satisfaction / evaluation which is normally “how you evaluate your whole life”. They obviously aren’t the same to people if they give opposite rankings of countries.
Yeah I think he may actually be referring to life satisfaction, but calling it meaning as a sort of informal short-hand. I’m not sure “meaning” is a very common wellbeing metric anyway.