How to be happy and build socialism (for real this time)

Recently a couple of friends started a mail discussion on where to live. Some people like to choose places with interesting work opportunities but I think that approach maximizes the wrong thing. I think that happiness should be the ultimate factor. When it comes to happiness the more important question is how to live instead of where to live.

So how should you live? I think science, namely psychology, can now offer an excellent answer. In the last couple of decades psychology evolved from a "quackery" into a solid science. The Happiness Hypothesis book by Jonathan Haidt does an excellent job of presenting the latest research on happiness. I particularly like Haidt's thorough scrutiny of known facts. For example, it is known that married people are happier. But are they happier because they are married or are they married, because they are happy and thus more attractive to others?

Here is my short summary of the book.

• Perhaps the most important factor is how well socially connected you are—your family, friends or local community are very important. When it comes to a local community, I have been a member of various sport clubs or volunteering groups and many of my happiest memories come from these communities. And don't let me started on all the memories with friends.
• Some people mistakenly equal comfort and pleasure with happiness, but it doesn't work that way. If you derive happiness from drinking wine, after a while it wears off and you would need to upgrade to a more expensive wine or find something else instead (see hedonic treadmill). Stoics and Buddhists were right: go ahead and take a cold bath!
• Nietzsche was right when he said "That which does not kill us makes us stronger". In the last 4 years I have struggled with health problems, but I think I'm happier as a result. I really appreciate ordinary things like a good friend or a day without pain. Also, lack of adversity is one of the reasons why overprotected kids end up being less happy adults.
• Money only buys you happiness until a certain level of income and then they don't matter anymore. If you want to use money to increase happiness, use them on other people or buy experiences instead. There is also new evidence that saving might be the best option.
• Altruism is a great source of happiness. Giving a gift is more beneficial to the person giving the gift rather than the one receiving it.
• Work is not as important as most people think, but it has a measurable effect particularly if you have some autonomy in your work. Also, many people experience flow when they are immersed in a challenging exercise. I remember countless nights when I barely drank or ate until a particular math or programming problem was done.
• Genes and early environment are an important factor in happiness but they are the thing of the past, so there is little you can do.
• The place where you live is not as important as people think. You'll be as happy in sunny California as in cold and dark Tromsø. Although there are some environmental factors that stress you out and make you less happy, like commuting or high noise levels. Stress in general is a bad thing and not just for happiness.
• Some sense of morality and meaning of life are important too. Traditionally these have been provided by religions but atheists also need them to be happy.

If I were to sum up the book in one sentence, it would be "Relationships matter the most and career, money and comfort are overrated." Your grandma would probably tell you the same thing, but it's good when scientific findings agree with reality for once.

Live like my parents

My parents have lived their life as preached by Happiness Hypothesis even though they haven't read it. They have very strong social ties, spend money mostly on travelling and don't work a lot.

For example, my father is a doctor but he is better known as the head of an orienteering club. He doesn't have an impressive professional career but he has a spectacular career as a volunteer. Did you know that Pezinok once hosted the World School Orienteering Championships? Alright, you have probably never heard of the small town Pezinok, but still...

When it comes to money, they spend most of it on experiences. My brother and I didn't have a lot of fancy things while growing up, but by the time I was 10 years old I have been to half of Europe. They still travel a lot with their small community of 20–30 people, doing things like biking for a week in the Alps. Most people my age wouldn't dare to go on the bike tours these almost retired people manage to do.

Economic systems

Do you know what is absolutely essential in capitalism? Reputation and trust. When you buy a meal in a restaurant, you trust the employees that they will not serve you spoiled food that makes you sick. If they did that, you wouldn't come back and you would tell all your friends to stay away from the restaurant. The reputation of the restaurant would get damaged, people would trust them less and the restaurant would get fewer customers. They might lower their prices as a result.

If this happened repeatedly, you would mistrust restaurants altogether and stop eating out. This would then lead to an inefficient outcome: you could be doing your normal job instead, get a higher salary for that and then use it to buy an excellent meal. Instead you forgo your salary and cook a mediocre meal at home, while the restaurant decreases its revenue. When people don't trust companies, everyone is worse off—the regular people as well as the companies. By the way, high level of trust (and capitalism) is one of the secrets behind the Scandinavian success.

Sometimes capitalism doesn't lead to good outcomes. People near a major tourist attraction just come and go, so the owner of a restaurant might not care about reputation and serve bad food (word of advice: don't shop near tourist attractions). In a closely knit community you can't afford cheating like that, because people would gossip about you and maybe even exclude you from the community. Evolutionary psychologists theorize that our obsession with gossip makes a community well-functioning. Gossip is a great tool, you quickly get to know who's a cheater and who's honest.

When you are doing transactions in a community, you rarely pay the market price, if you pay at all. When you help a friend move, you might get a lunch as a reward. Even a friendly outing to a bar is a transaction: you trade your time and company in exchange for theirs.

Being a member of a community gives you access to goods that capitalism is bad at providing. Only a friend's hug feels like a friend's hug. Only your grandma can cook a pork knee exactly like your grandma. Only your friend can plan a vacation tailored for your small gang taking into account everyone's preferences. No company can ever do those things, although the Japanese would disagree.

The economic system I just described is very similar to socialism. Socialism and capitalism have both its place in a society and both have advantages and disadvantages. Once you start applying them where they don't belong, you'll get into trouble. If you charge your partner each time you have sex, your relationship won't last long. If you make a whole country use socialism, it will also end in a disaster, because it takes enormous brain power and gossip to track reputation in a huge community. The people who founded the Soviet Union overestimated the capacity of our brains by a factor of about one million.

A small community has a cultural advantage in addition to an economical one. You can ignore your country's culture, since you spend most of your time in your own subculture. You can also ignore politics to a large extent. When a politician messes up unemploymeent benefits, you stay calm, because you have 10 people who would help you if needed.

Work is less important

Apart from work not being the main factor in happiness, I see many other problems with prioritizing work over everything else. For example, if you move to a different place solely for work, you severely cut your social ties. Most people think they will find new friends in the new place, but that rarely works out. Most expats end up befriending other expats and only integrate with the locals very slowly. If you really want to prioritize work, choose a place with more expats.

I also realized that where and what I work with doesn't matter that much. I like to do many things and most of them can be done almost anywhere.

• I really enjoy writing and people seem to enjoy reading my articles. My most successful post I wrote for Spotify has been viewed 49 000 times until now.
• I also like to organize vacations for my friends and they trust me that I pick good places. In the summer I can barely focus on regular work and I often procrastinate by planning vacations.
• From the jobs I have actually been paid to do, I have enjoyed teaching the most. That is another option that can be done almost anywhere.

All jobs mentioned above—writer, travel guide and teacher—usually don't offer high salary, but that is not an issue if you don't care about money, as I explain below.

Early retirement

My life turned around by 900 degrees (that's 360 + 360 + 180 for the mathematically inclined) when I started reading about saving, investing and early retirement. Did you know that you can retire in 17 years if you manage to save half your salary every month?

What happens when I save enough to retire? I won't start laying around doing nothing! I might just do something else than before, like starting a travel agency specializing in bathing in ice-cold lakes all over the world. Perhaps I could write books or teach courses about bathing in those ice-cold lakes. These ideas might not be very profitable but that doesn't matter, since my investments would provide enough income anyway. Interestingly, I achieve flow more often when working on hobby projects than in regular jobs, so doing this should also increase my happiness. And I would also like to work less than 40 hours a week to have times for activities and people that make me more happy.

You might think that saving 50% is impossible, especially in this economy. This is nuts, because you have it 10 times easier than your great-great-grandmother. People in the US spend less than 13% of their income on food, while in 1950 it was 30% and I bet similar development has happened all over the world. A couple of centuries ago sometimes even 100% of your income wasn't enough during a famine. People are so poor that whenever I go to a shopping mall in any modern country, it's always full of people. With such enormous economic prosperity and wealth people still have trouble surviving from paycheck to paycheck and happiness is not increasing. Everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy.


Buying expensive things doesn't make you happy, so why would you waste money on them? If you imagine yourself retiring in 15 years and having more time to do things that make you truly happy, getting rid of your expensive habits becomes a piece of cake.

The rise of the robots and artificial intelligence is also a very good reason to save as much as possible, because we will all lose jobs sooner or later.

Conclusion

The message of all the knowledge about economics, stock market and the science of happiness is crystal clear to me. Use capitalism to get wealthy, retire early, embrace the power of socialism and increase your happiness in the process. Marxists used to say that socialism is the next step after capitalism and I guess they were right. I still think that Marxism is a dangerous ideology that killed at least 100 million people, but deep inside of it lies a bit of truth.

A good place to look for wisdom is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents. – Jonathan Haidt in Happiness Hypothesis

Living with histamine intolerance and other things, part 3: How to be a professional patient

You might want to read part 2 first.

Last year a doctor told me to take histamine antagonists every day and I lowered the dosage almost immediately to about 20%, because taking it every day was too much. This worked well for about a year but I was slowly acquiring debt that I had to pay back later. Histamine is essential for the body and if you start messing with it, the body fights back. I tried to get off the medication, but then I couldn't sleep instead. At the same time my stomach problems got worse. Sometimes I had to give lectures and I could only do a good job if I didn't eat for 18 hours. Paradoxically, my stomach didn't like food.

I started taking too many sick days. It reached a point when I felt truly powerless and I cried for the first time in ages. But as one of the best amateur psychologists Louis CK says, you are lucky to live sad moments (the important bit starts at 1:11, but you should watch the whole video).


When you have the three basic F's—family, friends and F-You money—you have absolutely nothing to worry about and the sadness will quickly disappear.

After this moment I went on a sick leave for a couple of months. My suspicion for stomach problems turned out to be correct when I received a new stomach diagnosis while visiting my parents in Slovakia. I don't see a point of revealing this one, so I just call it diagnosis X. After starting the treatment, I have immediately gained 4 kilograms, although there are still some unresolved issues and I have a suspicion that there is a deeper problem causing both histamine intolerance and diagnosis X.

I am still taking very cold showers and try to exercise, but I have to agree with the guy who once said:

Cold showers are a great tool, but they are not a solution to all your problems. – Lukáš Poláček

I know, I know, I'm quoting myself, but that is not the first time I have done that, so you have to deal with it.

It was time to go back to Sweden. This time I came back prepared for the Swedish doctors.

Professional patient

A few years ago a private company mailed my blood to Germany for a histamine intolerance test, because the diagnosis is mostly unknown in Sweden. In the next couple of years I got used to explaining the diagnosis to the Swedish doctors. This year after getting my diagnosis X in Slovakia, my general doctor told me that Sweden doesn't have a tradition of treating it. Cool, now I can educate the Swedish doctors about 2 diagnoses at once!

Even though I have read quite a lot about my problems, I decided to do much more and become a professional patient. I started by reading some medical books as well as various internet resources. Recently I have also started to read scientific papers in medicine. If you ever plan to be sick, don't be scared of medical textbooks, they are quite readable and often have nice pictures.

The doctors of course don't like patients who self-diagnose themselves and I'm not encouraging you to do the same. When you are in a restaurant, you don't go to the kitchen and show the cook how to sear a steak; but when you order Château Lafite year 1869 and get 1898 instead, you immediately recognize the difference in taste and complain. A doctor once tried to give me medicine that would not work. After telling him that, he admitted I was right and referred me to a specialist instead.

I think most doctors take this self-education well. One time I couldn't recall the Swedish word for a certain body part, so I used the Latin word instead and the doctor asked me if I study medicine. I think that actually helped my interaction with him.

I want to thank my friend Miro who has been a professional patient for a long time and has been an inspiration to me.

Misaligned incentives

When it comes to saving for retirement, I advise my friends to manage the savings themselves, because whether you leave it to the government or a private company, they will not act in your best interest. The problem is that their incentives are not aligned with yours (except for Vanguard, whose founder should get a medal). If you don't want to get screwed, you should educate yourself or ask a friend whom you trust.

You will encounter misaligned incentives in the health care, too. For a doctor paid by the government you are an expense, so they might make as little effort as possible. A private doctor might keep you sick, so that you return many times and keep paying. And then there are various scammers trying to sell you expensive placebos. Believing that the government will act in your best interest is as naive as believing that a private company would put your interests before their profit.

So far the only solution I found to this problem is self-education. This is not the first time that reading about economics and game theory helped me solve some real life problems. That's why you should read non-fiction books too.

Swedish health care

Sven C. Larsson in the book Remaking America mentions examples of patients treated badly by the Swedish health care system. He compares some situations with the removal of life boats from Titanic, because not enough are available for all the ship's passengers.

A sure way to achieve equality is to make everyone suffer. But once people know about it, they start to cheat. They would bring inflatable life boats on Titanic in their baggage. I brought my inflatable life boat by getting a diagnosis in the Slovak health care system and educating myself. This is to be expected, since equality is an unstable equilibrium.

I'm not saying private doctors are perfect; they have made mistakes too. Two months ago, I borrowed a medical book that was co-written by a private doctor that I visited before. Apparently he's an expert on the topic and he is often interviewed in the national media. Despite all this he also didn't find diagnosis X.

Experts will continue making mistakes, but the government-funded system does very little to counteract them. You might meet a doctor that can't help you and then you need to wait 2 more months for another one, while you continue to suffer. If you are in Sweden, buy private insurance; it's cheap and worth it.

There are some positive things about the government-funded system, for example it's world-class when it comes to preventing people from dying. However, people who are not in the immediate danger of dying need to wait for a long time and are often given a bad service.

After 4 years of lousy treatment and low quality of life, I don't trust the Swedish doctors anymore whether they are private or government-funded. I would appreciate any tips for other countries with a functioning health care system.

My PhD

With all these health problems and uncertainty, I decided not to finish my PhD. The sick leave that I accumulated over the years and working 20% at Spotify would still give me about a year to finish, but health is a top priority now. I am still taking a couple of sick days every month and I am slowly writing a small thesis to finish with a smaller degree called licentiate (the degree is almost unknown outside of Sweden).

Even if I won't finish with a degree I wanted, all the scientific education has proved useful when reading scientific papers in medicine. And I have probably read more medical than computer science papers this year, so I already feel like I switched fields. Recently I have seen some exciting studies done on rats, guinea pigs and cows that show that some of my problems might be treatable. It's time to replicate these studies on humans.

Why Slovakia and Sweden are two superwealthy countries

According to Wikipedia, "at the most general level, economists may define wealth as anything of value". But what is value?

People mistake price for value. Why would you do that, if you don't plan to sell your stuff? I paid a lot for my skiing and mountaineering equipment, but I would be willing to pay 5 times as much, since it had brought so much fun to my life. And I would feel even more wealthy, if I lived closer to mountains and could use it more often.

Most of my skiing and mountaineering equipment on one pile

On the other hand, I wouldn't pay even 1/10 of the price of some other things, because they have very little value to me. Diamonds are a good example: I have seen more beautiful stones in nature and they are overpriced anyway, thanks to a cartel and heavy marketing.

We also value things that don't have a price attached to them, like friends and family. It's impossible to sell a friendship, yet we benefit a lot from it.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. – William Bruce Cameron

If you ask me which countries are superwealthy, I might say 30% of them. The world is a great place right now:

• Global poverty has been decreasing faster than ever. In 1950, the average American household spent 30% of its budget on food while it's only 13% now (I suspect similar progress in the rest of the world, too).
• The world is most probably the safest it has ever been. Even with the two world wars, the 20th century was mostly likely the most peaceful century so far. If you were a man in a hunter-gatherer society more than 10 000 years ago, you had about 25% chance of being killed by someone else. This number has been estimated to be at most 3% in the 20th century and it will mostly likely be lower in the 21st century.
• We live longer and we almost eradicated some diseases through vaccination at some places.
• Societies around the world are more tolerant and free. A few centuries ago you were stuck in the same social class as your parents. In the 1950's in the US, black people were still subject to heavy discrimination. If you lived in the communist block in 1989, you could not travel out of your country freely.

With so much prosperity and development, it's surprising to me that we keep consuming and working so much. One measure that is not getting better, is happiness and a contributing factor is materialism.

I hope everybody could get rich and famous and will have everything they ever dreamed of, so they will know that it's not the answer. – Jim Carrey

We also keep hearing that we need consumption to keep the economy going, but this is one of the most common economic fallacies. Mr. Money Mustache wrote a great explanation of it in What if Everyone Became Frugal?. The world gets richer by saving, not by consuming.

Slovakia and Sweden are two countries where I have been living permanently, so I know them pretty well. Here are a few reasons why they are superwealthy in my opinion and it has little to do with material wealth.

System for talented students, a point for Slovakia

TopCoder is an American company organizing regular programming competitions. Each person has a rating, similar to the one used in chess or tennis. If you have rating above 2200, you reach red color, which is a status that only about 300 people on Earth have at one time. A couple of years ago, someone made a ranking of countries by the number of red programmers per capita and Slovakia was first. I don't think this is a coincidence.

Slovakia has a great system for talented high schoolers in many scientific disciplines. This tradition started already when Slovakia was part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire. In the historical rankings of International Mathematics Olympiad, Hungary is number 4 and in International Olympiad in Informatics, Slovakia is number 7. Both countries are very small compared to other countries in top 10 (Russia, China and USA are dominating both).

This system is so great that I decided to contribute 1% of my income forever to Trojsten (thanks Kubo for inspiration). Trojsten is a foundation that organizes competitions and training camps in math, programming and physics for high schoolers. When I was at university, I helped running it, giving back what I got when I was in high school.

Additionally, my alma mater, Comenius University, was very good. Sometimes the talented Swedish high schoolers ask me for school recommendations and I half-jokingly recommend Comenius even before MIT or Oxford. At Comenius you are not swamped with homeworks and projects, so you have plenty of time to do other things, like volunteering or part-time work. Even though the course load was low, we still learned a lot from the courses.

Psychologists claim that children these days spend too much time in organized activites and play too little, leading to underdeveloped social skills and creativity. I think there is too little play even among university students. Some of them spend a lot of time in classroom, while they could be doing something else, learning valuable skills that can't be learned while sitting in the classroom. When we organized our week-long training camps, there was often noone older supervising us. This was our way of playing and we had a lot of fun doing that. In many ways, what I learned there is now more valuable than my formal university education.

As you can see, if you are a talented student in Slovakia, you have plenty of opportunities for development, but unfortunately such system for talents doesn't work in Sweden. For example, the Swedish programming olympiad gets only very little money from the state (33% of my income taxes last year).

I have been told that the reason is the famous Swedish striving for equality. As is often the case, the Swedes get the equality wrong: since we are all equal, there are no talents. Contrary to this statement, the Swedish state supports sports and young talented sportsmen with a lot of money. I have been competing at international level in both sports and programming/math and I think there is very little difference between the two. Talent is very important but you also need to train a lot, you need a good coach and a community of other competitors to stay motivated.

At KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, there is such a community for university students with coaches supported by the university. A couple of years ago I invited few high school students living in Stockholm to our trainings at KTH. These students are so talented and hard-working, that they already won the Nordic Championships in programming, beating all university students in Scandinavia, while still being in high school.

Ironically, the Swedish equality ideal only leads to inequality of opportunities. If you are a talented high school student living in Stockholm, you are lucky and can get great coaching and meet other talented programmers. We want to improve this by organizing a training camp where students from the rest of Sweden could come, but getting money for it is hard.

Level of trust, a point for Sweden

Last fall I spent a couple of weeks in Berkeley and one weekend we decided to go to Yosemite. We booked a car and the rental company was supposed to pick us up and drive us to the rental station on the other side of town. They were late, so I called them twice and they promised the car would be there soon. The car didn't arrive, so I called again and it turned out that they were lying to me, the car was not on the way and we had to take a bus instead.

How could anyone lie to me like that? Then I realized that I have been in Sweden for too long. In Scandinavia people don't lie that much and there is little corruption, which leads to trust in strangers and public institutions. Scandinavian countries top the list of countries by the level of trust.

When people don't lie, steal and corrupt, there are very few lawsuits, they don't have to install expensive protection in their houses and the government is more efficient. In the end people are more productive and can work less than in countries with lower trust. Such countries are in fact richer even with a slightly lower GDP.

Slovakia is far behind in this regard but things are improving. During communism corruption was often the only way to get things done, but the number of people giving bribes has been steadily declining for a while.

Nature, points for both

Both countries have amazing nature. Here are two photos made by me for illustration.

My friend Martin and Tatras, the highest Slovak mountain range.

Frozen lake in Tyresta national park. In winter a ski track is prepared on the lake.

Nature has many benefits even though we don't have to pay for using it. You can have a week long camping vacation in the mountains for free, provided you have the right equipment. Such a holiday would be more fun for me than a lazy week on the beach that costs a lot. Spending time outdoors in nature also has many measurable benefits, like improved mood and concentration.

Conclusion

This was a highly subjective list but as I said earlier, each person can define wealth in their own way. For example, the value of the Trojsten community is that it gave me many great memories and valuable friendships. I'm excited to meet many of them in a couple of days in Italy.