
Around the World, People Have Surprisingly Modest Notions of the ‘Ideal’ Life - monort
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/around-the-world-people-have-surprisingly-modest-notions-of-the-ideal-life.html
======
DanAndersen
>Furthermore, people said, on average, that they ideally wanted to live until
they were 90 years old, which is only slightly higher than the current average
life expectancy. Even when participants imagined that they could take a magic
pill guaranteeing eternal youth, their ideal life expectancy increased by only
a few decades, to a median of 120 years old.

Part of the reason for these "surprising" results is probably the
individualistic framing of the question. It makes a difference if only you
have unnaturally long life, or if you are part of a family or society that is
similarly long-lived. For example, the thought of lingering on after friends
and family from my generation have died has no appeal to me.

In general, the implication that it's surprising that people didn't want
"happiness" and "life expectancy" as the end goals speaks to assumptions of
atomization among the creators of the study. Deep down, I think people want
meaning and a sense of narrative structure to their lives, not just chasing
after pleasures.

>And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was
about 130 – a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius.

How was the question structured? I have doubts that most people get the
statistics of what it means to be 130 IQ vs 150 IQ, etc.

~~~
nickjj
I also wonder if people felt like they had to give what they thought were
"normal" responses just to hide what people really thought of them.

Maybe I'm crazy but I find it really hard to believe anyone would rather die
than live forever if it meant being able to take a pill that prevented any
form of aging or health related issues.

~~~
smallnamespace
I think you might not have thought it all the way through yet.

For real, true immortality (a span of not hundreds, but also thousands,
millions, billions of years), the problem shifts to what it means to be 'you'.
You're not the same person you were when you were 5, 15, or 25, with different
goals, preferences, and motivations.

Extend that to geological time, and there become only a few reasonable cases:

1\. You stop changing; the core of your personality becomes completely fixed.
I would claim this is a form of death, because although you are still
physically healthy and moving about, change is an inherent part of life and
growth.

2\. Your personality drifts to the point that previous incarnations of your
'self' (even if you remember them) become very far from who you are currently.
In which case, you're not really immortal, you're just a series of 'different
people' who happen to share a single memory and narrative.

3\. Your personality shifts at some point to wanting to death, at which point
(assuming suicide is allowed) life ends

I highly recommend Schild's Ladder[1] and Permutation City [2], both by Greg
Egan, which do an excellent job of asking 'who am _I_?' if we had the ability
live for infinite time.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schild%27s_Ladder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schild%27s_Ladder)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_\(novel\))

~~~
nickjj
I've thought a lot about death, mortality, living in a futuristic world, etc..

I would immediately sign up for immortality instead of dying in ~70 years
given the magic pill rule scenario.

Just think of all of the amazing things you'll witness while not having any
forced pressure for all aspects of your life. You'll never get sick, you'll
never need to worry about finances because there's nothing that would put you
into a fear driven scenario where you "must" make money.

You could go through the years doing whatever you want and you'll live long
enough to escape technology bubbles that each generation lives through. Like
you said, you're pretty much a different person than you were 15 years ago. If
you were 150 years old but still 25 inside, you'd get to experience a
completely different world. It would be like having infinite lives with no
reset switch on your memory.

------
mrob
Do people genuinely have modest ambitions, or are they avoiding the mental
stress of thinking about how remote their true ambitions are from what's
realistically attainable?

~~~
coldtea
People genuinely have modest ambitions.

The "big ambitions" (and specifically, those not of the good kind, like e.g.
becoming a doctor and such, but the "private pool", expensive car, lotsa money
variety) have been shoehorned into the average American mind through over a
century of indoctrination, advertisement, and propaganda.

It's all about making people never be content with their material belongings
and thinking that the next purchase or achievement unlocked with make them
happy.

E.g. [https://www.amazon.com/Captains-Consciousness-Advertising-
Co...](https://www.amazon.com/Captains-Consciousness-Advertising-Consumer-
Anniversary/dp/0465021557/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=)

~~~
tntn
> not of the good kind, like e.g. becoming a doctor

I would estimate that around 90% of the people I know who want to become a
doctor (around 30 people) are motivated solely by the desire to make lotsa
money and be able to drive an expensive car. Just saying, I don't think you
can easily divide ambitions into "good" and "bad.

~~~
mantas
I'd say good ambitions are those where you want X for X itself. If you want to
be a doctor because you want love helping people - good. If you want to be a
doctor just for $$$ - bad. If you want to become a singer because you love
singing - good. If you want to be a singer just for $$$ - bad.

Old good "follow your passion"?

~~~
ahartmetz
As long as X is a good thing - a few people want power just so they can hurt
others...

~~~
Rexxar
Not really. For example, a doctor who is here only for money can chose more
expansive operation/treatment than necessary in order to win more even if it
is not a good choice for the patient.

~~~
alfredallan1
I think you might have nailed one of the more fundamental problems in US
healthcare.

------
SerLava
I remember watching something that claimed the ancient Egyptian concept of
heaven was, at some point, a place where you can perform agricultural labor
without drought, pests, or blight etc.

Different strokes I suppose.

------
camillomiller
“The data also revealed that participants from holistic cultures – those that
value notions of contradiction, change, and context – chose ideal levels of
traits that were consistently lower than those reported by participants from
nonholistic cultures.“

This is exactly the empyrical explanation I gave to myself when I tried to
understand why the people I met in Vietnam and Thailand are vastly happier
than the average Westerner.

------
analog31
I have modest ambitions for an "ideal" life. Give me a pleasant place to live,
Python, some musical instruments, and a working bicycle, and I'm happy.

Health and comfort for my family are also at the top of the list, likewise
wanting my kids to have a good education -- that's just part of my culture.

But I can see lots of ways that my life could become profoundly miserable. So
my pursuit of wealth is not so much to attain some high status, but to provide
a safety net for myself and my family.

------
Ari_Rahikkala
I don't know. Maybe if you've been reading bad science fiction with immortal
geniuses running around everywhere, it might seem that living to 120 and
having an IQ of 130 is leaving a lot on the table, but when you compare those
numbers to what we actually get, I think calling them "modest" is missing the
point. Those aren't numbers that say "I'm more or less content with my lot",
those are numbers that say you wish you were as smart as the smartest person
you ever met, and that the papers wrote stories about your birthdays. They're
an argument against the idea that transhumanism isn't something that people
actually want.

And of course, the implication is obvious: If everyone _did_ on average live
to 120 and get an IQ of 130 on our tests, then everyone would be wanting to
live 200 years, and quite a few people would probably want an IQ of 160 on the
old tests. That is, unless that was the point where people just switched to
transhumanism as simplified humanism: Having the choice to live longer and to
understand the universe better are probably always a good thing, regardless of
how long you've lived and how much you understand.

~~~
johnsonjo
Yeah. I agree that at least to our standards these answers are not modest.
Having a relatively high IQ and a relatively long life expectancy are both
(separately) relatively unlikely. So, to us these do not seem modest answers.

The goal of their study, however, was to see if it was true that when given
the choice to have some attribute or quality of your life maximized with few
limits would you choose the maximum. They say the choices were modest simply
because in philosophical writings they often assume people will always choose
the maximum if available. That is why they found this surprising and modest.

------
StavrosK
I legitimately don't know what I'd do with more "stuff" than what I currently
have. For me, the ideal life would be having lots of good friends, and enough
money to not have to worry about paying bills or doing things I like (i.e. a
salary of around 60k/yr where I live).

~~~
ryanmonroe
That makes perfect sense if you have a job that you would still go to every
day even if you weren't getting paid. But unless that's true, it's clear what
the benefit of more money would be, and it has nothing to do with "stuff":
having the freedom to choose what to do with your time.

~~~
StavrosK
Not really, that's kind of an invariant: As long as you have enough money to
not have to worry about things, you can choose not to work. Sure, that raises
the question of how you make money, but my point is that you don't need a lot
of it to be happy.

~~~
ryanmonroe
Well, I think the amount of money you would need to support yourself
indefinitely without being employed is an amount most people would call "a
lot". Certainly that amount is more than almost anyone making 60k a year has.

~~~
monort
Inflation adjusted rent of 60k a year is 1.5-2 million of capital, depending
on the risk you are willing to take.

------
the8472
> Even when participants imagined that they could take a magic pill
> guaranteeing eternal youth, their ideal life expectancy increased by only a
> few decades, to a median of 120 years old. And when people were invited to
> choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130 – a score that would
> classify someone as smart, but not a genius.

Medians? The distributions would be more interesting.

~~~
dogma1138
130 would put them in the top 2% while that’s technically not some luminary
super genius level that is for all intents and purposes “genius” as far as
every day life and normal expectations go.

If your IQ is 130-135 statistically you are “smarter” than nearly anyone you
meet in your life, in fact considering that 140-145 is at the 0.1%
statistically you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter by a distribution point
even at places that skew towards a higher IQ due to selection bias.

~~~
eutectic
If you have a high IQ then you will probably mostly hang out with other high-
IQ people.

~~~
notahacker
I think that's the assumption people are making when they select the 130s
range (which the original study apparently explained as "above average). More
people aspire to socialise with their existing friends and family and be a bit
smarter than them than aspire to trade their existing friends for what they
perceive as a nerd clique (and the ability to solve really difficult
mathematics problems isn't adequate compensation for that)

~~~
dogma1138
The problem is that the assumption of being in the top 2% is just above
average is wrong.

If you are in the top 2% of anything in life you are quite exceptional.

For comparison being in the top 2% of any Olympic sport would land you a spot
in most Olympic teams.

And to be clear this isn’t about if IQ is a good indicator of performance or
not but rather about how people evaluate themselves.

If placing yourself in the top single digit percentiles is considered modest
than I think we need to redefine modesty.

~~~
rifung
> For comparison being in the top 2% of any Olympic sport would land you a
> spot in most Olympic teams.

I think this is off by multiple factors of 10? 2% is really not THAT high..

In any sufficiently large city you can probably find 98 other players you are
better than..

~~~
dogma1138
Getting into an Olympic team and even passing the qualifiers isn’t the same as
winning gold or even any medal.

2% of top performers in their sports can qualify for an Olympic (summer games)
team spot.

And no we’re not even talking about extreme cases like those that happen in
the winter games from time to time.

Also remember your selection pool if you think the top 2% of professional
competitive swimmers in say 100M can’t get into the olympics again check their
scores vs the Olympic qualifiers.

We are already discussing a relatively very small pool of subjects here.

~~~
jerrre
"the top 2% of professional competitive swimmers" is very different from the
top 2% of the general public....

~~~
dogma1138
>For comparison being in the top 2% of any Olympic sport would land you a spot
in most Olympic teams.

Being in the top 2% of performers in a given sport qualifies you national and
even international achievements, if you chose to follow that or not it’s up to
you.

But in any case top 2% of any group is by definition exceptional.

------
coldtea
> _And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was
> about 130 – a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius._

Which, given what we know about plenty of genius biographies, and how frail
and paranoid their lives can be precisely because of their higher mental
faculties, seems like a perfect compromise.

~~~
eutectic
Except that the statistics show that smart people are happier, healthier, more
successful, less prone to mental illness, and just generally seem to live
better lives.

~~~
coldtea
> _Except that the statistics show that smart people are happier, healthier,
> more successful, less prone to mental illness, and just generally seem to
> live better lives._

Ever heard of diminishing returns? Statistics probably report of the more
widespread smart people (which 130 qualifies just fine), not geniuses.

~~~
thaumasiotes
[http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-01869-016](http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-01869-016)

> Adolescents identified before the age of 13 (N = 320) as having exceptional
> mathematical or verbal reasoning abilities (top 1 in 10,000) were tracked
> over 10 years. They pursued doctoral degrees at rates over 50 times base-
> rate expectations, with several participants having created noteworthy
> literary, scientific, or technical products by their early 20s. Early
> observed distinctions in intellectual strength (viz., quantitative reasoning
> ability over verbal reasoning ability, and vice versa) predicted sharp
> differences in their developmental trajectories and occupational pursuits.

------
tw1010
"Surprising" only if you're in a small minority of people. To the vast
majority, this is not surprising at all. To have an ambitious notion of an
ideal life, that is what's surprising. (If you define surprising as whatever
dominates the greatest concentration of the distribution, instead of focusing
on the anomalies in the tail.)

------
carapace
Surprising to whom?

\- - - -

When I was a young man I read in a book about Taoism of the farmer so content
that, though he could hear the rooster of the next village crowing, he had
never troubled himself to travel there.

When I read that I was vaguely horrified. Now, as an older man, I see the
wisdom in it.

~~~
sethrin
Ignorance may be bliss, but can it be wisdom?

------
Havoc
Very wary of the term "ideal" in this context.

Good...sure that's easy. Basically need my current mid tier salary guaranteed
minus the part of slogging 9-5 in the office.

Ideal...well I'll need a couple billions to start with.

------
amriksohata
The ideal life is searching for a higher purpose other than chasing money till
your death bed

~~~
wencha
A higher purpose like spirituality, a tightly knit community of people similar
to you, forming a family... something that some people are actively working
against, so nobody can enjoy it.

------
pasbesoin
For me: Good health, and peace and quiet. Fellow people to enjoy in same.

The U.S. has made it increasingly difficult to achieve these. "Health care"
has become wealth extraction, and a culture of excess combined with cheap
electronics have taught people to "turn it up".

And damned to your neighbor; they should learn to "collaborate" at work and
turn up their own music, at home.

It's exhausting.

------
reasonattlm
This study reports on attitudes to longevity that are reminiscent of the 2013
Pew survey [1]. When asked, people want to live a little longer than their
neighbors, at the high end of the normal life span for old individuals today.
When asked how long they want to live given the guarantee of perfect health,
people pick a number close to the maximum recorded human life span. This
sounds like a collusion between the instinctive desires for first conformity
and secondly hierarchy, deeply entwined with the human condition, present in
all of our primate cousins, a self-sabotaging gift from our evolutionary
heritage. We are hardwired to feel comfortable in a hierarchical social
structure. We desire to be higher in the hierarchy than those around us, yet
not so high that we are non-conforming.

One might argue that the interaction between the need for hierarchy and need
for conformity is also at the root of the essential conservatism in human
nature: the urge to preserve the present state of the world, to change it as
little as possible. Given a teacup, ambition is restrained to the safe,
conformist goal of two teacups - rather than, say, the disruptive change of a
tea set factory, a house, an end to aging, the colonization of Mars, the cure
for cancer. We live in an age of radical change, a revolution in the
capabilities of biotechnology presently underway, but when you ask people what
they want for their health, they'll claim nothing more than ten more years.
That is the least of what might be achieved soon in the medical sciences, but
without the desire for more than that, the rejuvenation research projects
capable of providing far more will continue to struggle to find funding.

At the same time as the potential has arisen for a future in which the
suffering and death of aging is banished, all disease controlled through
advanced medicine, the vast majority of people still march stolidly towards
what they assume to be the same fate as their grandparents [2]. They are
conforming. They expect to live a life that is the same in shape as it was for
those born in the early to mid 1900s, somehow holding this idea in their minds
at the same time as retaining the memory of living through the computing and
internet revolutions, alongside any number of other sweeping changes in the
nature of the human experience. How do we change this story that people are
telling themselves? That is the fundamental question for all advocacy for
radical change, such as the radical change of bringing an end to aging.

[1]: [http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-
beyond-...](http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-
americans-views-on-aging-medical-advances-and-radical-life-extension/)

[2]: [https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-
apot...](https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-apotheosis/)

~~~
sonnyblarney
Hierarchy? I'm sorry but what I would gather from that is more or less the
opposite: a kind of communitarian equality, if anything.

But my first instinct was to think that most people, when asked how long they
want to live will have difficulty answering beyond current lifespan because we
are instinctively trained to think that '100 = old and decrepit' \- even if
the question does say something along the lines of '100 but in 'good health''.

"for a future in which the suffering and death of aging is banished, all
disease controlled through advanced medicine, the vast majority of people
still march stolidly towards what they assume to be the same fate as their
grandparents [2]. They are conforming."

Again I disagree because this utopian future is still essentially an illusion,
which most people immediately recognize (they don't live in the tech bubble?),
and in reality, 90 is getting pretty old and that's it for today, and probably
for the next long while barring any 'big leaps' in tech. Which may happen, but
there's no reason to believe they would.

Science has not really extended life. All we've done is perfected the
conditions in which we live, and have learned out to take care of our bodies
well.

Like you own a bike and used to run it through the forest, not oil it, parts
would fall of. Now we run our bicycles on smooth surfaces, we get checkups,
replace parts, oil the wheels. We have not improved bikes, we just extend them
more or less towards their current, maximal life span.

Please tell me when they can regrow my hair, or do the simplest thing and make
the skin on my face 'not sag'. Then we can talk.

------
woodandsteel
I think that part of what is going on here is that in the holistic cultures
there is more satisfaction from close, stable social relations, like for
esteem, whereas in the non-holistic cultures there is more stress on
individualistic satisfactions.

------
maxander
It’s a nice result; a world full of 130-IQ humans with a 120-year life
expectancy sounds stable and achievable next to most techno-utopian visions.

But, I wonder if you asked a 115-year old whether they wanted to die in 5
years what they would say then.

------
megamindbrian2
A roof, clean water, and food. Waste and sewage removal is a mutually
beneficial luxury.

------
therealtomsmith
psychologicalscience.org has not been on any dating sites lately.

------
lerie82
figures a psychology website would try to categorize everyone in one little
box. nobody even knows what "life" is, so how would we even know what the
"ideal" life is.

people only go into the psychology field for the $$

~~~
coldtea
> _nobody even knows what "life" is, so how would we even know what the
> "ideal" life is._

Yeah, so we should never generalize, just point at individual things and say
"this".

> _people only go into the psychology field for the $$_

So much for not generalizing.

