Gratitude = Efficiency
If you’ve ever said, “I’ll be happy when I get [insert desire],” you’re being wildly inefficient in the game of life.
Efficiency, in any context, means getting what we want while using the fewest resources. If we think about it like an equation, it’s the value of the outcome divided by the value of the resources used.
Humans chase happiness and fulfillment. It is the reason we do almost anything. We work jobs to make money, to spend it in ways that make us happy. We make plans to do things that will make us feel fulfilled. But, most people are incredibly inefficient at getting happiness.
Happiness is a fleeting feeling that has rapidly diminishing returns. You’ve felt it: working towards something and finally achieving it, or buying that big ticket item you’d been waiting months to afford, just to find your contentment slides back to baseline a few days later. Our capacity for happiness in a single moment has a ceiling. Were you hundreds of times happier when you graduated college or bought a new car than when you laughed with an old friend? The prior probably cost hundreds of times more in time or money, but your happiness doesn’t scale.
The irony is that those most obsessed with efficiency are optimizing for an intermediate goal at the expense of the overall goal. The most ambitious business man is fixated on efficiency of time, money and productivity. How can we cut costs this quarter? How can we grow faster? I will be happy when we hit our next milestone. With blinders on everything but their future they sign the contract of desire. As Naval Ravakant put it best, “desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”
Gratitude is the most efficient path to happiness. A warm cup of coffee on a crisp fall morning, with just the right amount of steamed milk, can bring more joy than a fine steak dinner if you take a moment of gratitude for the drink - and at a fraction of the cost. Every day offers small, unclaimed tokens of happiness, but we’re too fixated on expensive goals with poor happiness returns on investment to stop and notice them.
This is certainly not to say “Don’t be ambitious”. Set your aims high and extract your full potential from the life you’ve been given. Don’t mistake finding pleasure in simple things with low aim. When you set out on a long, difficult hike your mind is set on the summit. Don’t run up the mountain, staring at your feet and waiting to enjoy your efforts until you reach the top. Consider the total experience. If you stay present on the way up, gratefully taking in the flowers, the birds and the clouds, you’ll accumulate more happiness for the same climb and still get to experience an identical view from the top. Apply this to your life.
All great things take time. On the way to our lofty goals we must live through the comparatively mundane hours of life that lead us there. Each one presents opportunities to collect happiness that we’d otherwise miss, with gratitude being the key to unlocking it. Set a reminder on your phone, leave a sticky note somewhere you frequently pass by, whenever you see something yellow, take a second to allow yourself to collect a bit of unclaimed happiness. It's often free. This is infinite efficiency.
