Happiness

I'm a huge fan of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner and their Freakonomics exploits.  I enjoy them so much that I chose to play their lectures today while I was attempting to clear out two years of clutter from my desk.

Anyway, while listening to one of their lectures, I heard something.  It caught my ear enough to cause me to stand up, walk over to the computer, hit pause, rewind, and actually listen to something I'd already heard.

Anyone who grew up with the internet will understand why this means I was really intrigued.

It turns out they have a collaborator who did some studies over the last couple of decades that observed that as women have earned more and have gotten more power in the workplace, their general happiness seems to be declining.  They were at a loss for explanation.

Well, let me explain.

Once upon a time, we were all relatively egalitarian hunter gatherers.  The introduction of agriculture meant that agrarian societies could house more people on less land, and thus take land from hunter gatherers.  Agriculture also meant that your best means of survival was to produce as many offspring as possible to help cultivate the land and fend off hunter gatherers.  It's a simplification, but a fair one, to say that we have been living in this mindset since then, and that the primary role of the female of the species since the invention of agriculture has been to rear the young to survive in this world.  If the household's primary currency is able-bodied people, then the role of child-rearing is essential to the survival of the family unit and the tribe.  Additionally, when the tribe got large enough to require state-level institutions to survive, it would make little sense for already-taxed-to-the-brim females to take up that role when there are plenty of males around to do the job.

I think I know why female happiness is declining despite increased earnings and power.  It's because we're expected to do it all.  We wanted real jobs, and we got them.  However, we still have the remnants of our past demanding internally and externally that we be good at mothering, housekeeping, and nailing down a real job.  Our husbands could always come home from work guilt-free and ask for a dry martini and a foot massage because they had "worked so hard."  Anything we did was just "cute."

I want a wife.