I am an underbuyer. When in doubt, it’s easier for me to decide that I don’t really need the whatever-I’m-considering. I’m more likely to feel bad about buying something that I then don’t use, than to feel bad about not buying something that I could have used.

Whenever I have to buy something expensive, I have to overcome a slight internal resistance – even though I know that we need it, and that we can afford it, and that it’s not worth buying a cheaper alternative, because you get what you pay for (most of the time).

Spending money is a little bit easier when it feels like a long-term investment, like a bicycle, or winter boots, or a computer. Even then, though, it takes a bit of an effort. The hardest for me is to buy things that seem frivolous, that I like but don’t really need. One winter scarf is perfectly enough, so even if I see another really pretty one, it’s unlikely that I will buy it.

Or fruit. There is a part of my brain that insists on telling me that apples for 19.90 SEK/kg are perfectly good fruit, though slightly boring, and there is no need to splurge on grapes for 49.90.

Lately, though, I have begun to train myself to ignore that part of the brain. If there’s one thing in my everyday life that I really enjoy, it is simple, fresh, good-quality food. Often when I look back at my day and think about the highlights, it’s the freshly baked bread, or the cereal with fresh strawberries, that comes to mind.

And it’s not like we cannot afford it. For various reasons, we do not spend money on a car, or eating out, or alcohol and cigarettes, or movies and such. We run a not insignificant surplus every month.

So now, when I feel like eating the season’s first Swedish strawberries, 60% more expensive than the Belgian ones, I just do it. (I’ve nothing against Belgians, but their strawberries are a poor substitute for the real thing.) When the veggie stand down at Spånga Square has in-season Pakistani mangoes at exorbitant prices, I barely hesitate. (They keep a few of them in a small box right next to the cashier, with a hand-written sign describing them as “the best fruit in the world”.)

I love having a garden. I love our garden. Even though I don’t spend much time there every day (because our evenings tend to be busy, and because we have no evening sun in the garden), I love having it nearby and around me.

I love being surrounded by greenery rather than houses, cars or people. Looking out through the kitchen window during breakfast and seeing green grass, trees and blooming lilacs. Being met by growing things when leaving the house in the morning, and when coming home in the evening.

I love the quiet. Which is not a direct effect of having a garden, really, but a neighbourhood with gardens mean less dense housing, which in turn means more quiet.

I love the air and the smells. I like to end my day by walking out onto the balcony when brushing my teeth and just inhaling the garden. Just a few moments’ exposure makes a big difference.

This weekend I sent Eric and Ingrid out to have fun (they went swimming, and to Junibacken) so I could finally clear all the papers off my desk and do a GTD (Getting Things Done) weekly review. It had been way longer than a week since last time and I felt like I had lots of uncaptured tasks floating around.

Well, now both the projects and next actions have been captured, and I have them all under control. The flip side is that I now know exactly how much stuff there is that I should be doing instead of spending time in front of the computer. The lists are shockingly long. My list of next actions, which I’ve previously mostly managed to fit onto Post-Its on one A4 page, now cover the best part of three pages.

The flip side of that, in turn, is that I feel challenged. There is nothing like a bit of pressure to get me moving. Time to get those lists down to size again!

I am experiencing a decline – presumably temporary – in the need to express my thoughts in writing. I don’t feel that I am doing or thinking or experiencing anything just now that is worth writing down. Hence the relative decline in posting frequency. When the writing urge returns, you will notice.

I held a presentation again today, jointly with a colleague, at a conference organized by Konsultbolag1. (Ours is the last talk on the programme. I know my name isn’t there; the initial plan was that someone else would do this but I stepped in instead.) We spoke for 40 minutes, in front of ~60 people. I’m starting to think that I should do more of this: I enjoyed it even more than I anticipated, and got better feedback than expected.

Observations:

• I need to feel comfortable with the content and the presentation materials, but once I have that, and a rough idea of what I want to say about each point, further preparation is not useful to me. Some people rehearse and memorize individual phrases they intend to use. I sometimes try that, thinking of good ways of expressing things, but when I’m standing there on the stage that all disappears, flies right out of my brain, and I end up improvising anyway.
• Surprisingly many people deliver presentations without thinking through what they want to achieve. What is the purpose? What should the audience know or think or want or do after hearing your presentation? How does each page work towards that aim?
• You don’t need to be a leading-edge expert in order to deliver a useful talk. You just need to know more than your audience, and know your limitations.

I’ve added a new link to the sidebar: My interests. It’s a rough listing of things I am interested in, things I enjoy reading about. This is going to be a permanent work in progress – I will add and update the list whenever I think of it.

… I did nothing useful. Oh, actually, I did go to town to have a look at some Macs, and concluded that I want a MacBook Pro after all: the 13 inch screen of a MacBook felt too small. I’m sure it’s just framing – given three choices, 13/15/17, the extremes feel extreme and the middle feels kind of just right. But knowing that doesn’t change the fact that this is what I felt.

Due to favourable calendaric alignment (lots of holidays falling on weekdays) I’ve got two and a half weeks of vacation time this Christmas and new year, for the cost of only 6 vacation days. My ambitious plan for these weeks is to do all the stuff that has piled up and not gotten done over the last few months. I hope to:

• Take down the wall between the kitchen and the living room
• Clean up my desk and get rid of the many (but admittedly relatively tidy) piles of papers, magazines, CDs, DVDs, letters etc on it
• Do a proper GTD review, emptying my head of all the things I know I need to do and getting it all down on paper
• Unpack some more boxes from our move
• Sew a skirt for Ingrid
• Decide what kind of laptop to buy
• Do my UK tax return for last year

Despite Ingrid’s continuing illness (it now looks to be something flu-like) I got off to a good start today:

• Finished a curtain I have been working on for the last 10 days or so
• Got rid of one pile of paper from my desk by typing in all my expenses for the last month or so
• Processed (named, rotated and sorted into folders) all my photos from the last month or so

Let’s hope I don’t run out of energy before I’m done.

Do children make us happy? The question has been raised in a few articles. There was a Newsweek article earlier this year, reporting on a study of whether having children makes people happy. The study reported that

Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers

and

In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.

There’s also an essay at Babble.com, which has as its starting point Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness. The essay features this chart which also seems to say that married people without children are happier than those with children:

Stumbling on Happiness also mentions a study trying to ascertain which activities women enjoy most, and reporting that “taking care of children” is rated lower than grocery shopping, sleeping, or socializing.

The initial angle for both stories is that parents lie to others (perhaps because it isn’t socially acceptable to say that you were happier before you had children) and maybe even delude themselves:

“Perhaps parents find it psychologically advantageous to talk themselves into thinking this is a great thing,” theorizes Oswald, who has two daughters. “It would be psychologically difficult to come to the view early in life, I’ve made a huge mistake having these children. I imagine that humans are good at the flexibility of thought that stops them from taking that view.”

I don’t find that explanation very convincing. If parenting consistently made us unhappy, then we’d have died out long ago. So there must be more to this.

Firstly, this might be a new phenomenon, as Newsweek recognises: changes to family and work patterns may have made parenting a lot more stressful than it used to be. We don’t live with our extended families, we are stressed and hurried. (Perhaps even more so in the US, where these studies have been performed?) And our expectations have changed as well: rather than having kids so they can help you on the farm and one day inherit it, people now expect parenting to be a fulfilling experience, a way to realise themselves. And indeed people in the Western world are having fewer and fewer children. Perhaps they have indeed concluded that children aren’t worth the bother, the money, or the loss of freedom.

Another explanation is that the studies may have asked the wrong questions. Parents may not enjoy “taking care of children” but that doesn’t mean their children don’t make them happy. You wouldn’t conclude that beautiful clothes don’t make women happy because women don’t enjoy “taking care of clothes”, to pick a random example.

But even more importantly, I think the studies have looked at the wrong measure of happiness. Average happiness is not how we judge our lives, and not what we remember afterwards.

“How do [the experiences of parenthood] balance out?” Gilbert asks. “It turns out that if you average all the moments, they balance out a little on the negative side. Being a parent lowers your average daily happiness. But average daily happiness isn’t all there is to be said about happiness. Indeed one could make the case that average happiness across a day isn’t what we’re trying for. As human beings, it’s not our aim. It shouldn’t be our goal. What we should be looking for is special transcendent moments that may even come at the cost of a lower average.

This is what a childless / child-free adult’s happiness levels might look like over some arbitrary time period unmarked by any major life events:

And this is what they might look like for a parent:

The little ups and downs of normal life have been replaced by a rollercoaster. The lack of flexibility and freedom and time have dragged down the average, and there are more troughs than before. Those are the troughs of teething, sleepless nights, and tantrums, and later on “I hate you mummy!” and so on. But you also get more peaks, of the kind that make your heart melt and that you wish you could remember forever: the early morning snuggle, the happy child running to greet you with a hug.

Finally, long-term happiness is different from short-term satisfaction. Satisfaction is about the balance between feeling good and feeling bad. But for durable happiness, something more is needed. I myself think of it as growth. Gretchen Rubin, one of my favourite bloggers, has a slightly different angle and describes it as feeling right: “to be happy, you must think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right”.

Parenting makes you grow as a person. It’s corny but it’s true. You learn things about yourself, and you change, and you become a more mature person. You aren’t fully adult until you have taken care of someone else.

Links:
Newsweek: True or False: Having Kids Makes You Happy
Babble.com: Are You Happy? Are You Sure?
The Happiness Project: Do your children make you happy?
Momaroo: Do Kids Make You Happy?
Walrus Magazine: Parenting makes you miserable. Discuss.
National Post: Do our kids make us happy? Answer: It depends what you mean by ‘happy’.

Sometimes I see people who aren’t there, instead of the people who are.

I pass some random person in the street, and for a brief moment I know it’s someone familiar – and it’s always someone who couldn’t possibly be there, because I know they’re in another country. Then my brain catches up and I see that there’s barely even a likeness. But for that fleeting moment there is such a strong connection that I cannot think about anything else, and when it’s gone, there’s always a sense of loss.

A few times this summer I “saw” colleagues from London. I remember several similar occurrences from when I first moved to Sweden 16 years ago. It says something about the strength of the sensation: even now I can remember where I was walking (outside my high school) when I “saw” one of them.

Interestingly I have never “seen” the people I used to see most often, or the people I missed most, but acquaintances whom I hadn’t even thought much about before moving.