Road to temple

Road to Temple

Does Money brings happiness?

It was a cold December evening. I was driving the seven seater to the temple. This was one of our family ritual to visit and say hello to the gods living in flushing meadows overseeing the Arthur Ashe stadium and deciding the next US champion. The trip on a normal day would take anywhere between a good 45 minutes to an hour drive. One of the other related benefit was to visit the temple canteen for a south indian feast, however we should not be mentioning about this as the Gods might get a bit upset with us.

After our first mile, My daughter started with her standard operating procedure “Are we there yet?”. A silence followed and another question popped out as expected “How long will it take to reach the temple?”. The silence continued. 

“Can I have your iPhone?”  - She continued

“No!”, Mom was instinctively reactive. My daughter accomplished her first objective to break the silence.

“Can I watch a movie?” - She continued.

“No!”, Another quick reply from my wife. Moms are tend to enforce the rules. And the rules don’t have to be rational and will not. The expectation is to follow the rules. The kids knew them by heart. My daughter immediately ignored her ‘No’ and turned back to me.

“Can I watch movie? Whatever is in the player and I’ll not demand anything else!”. I was thinking of the two outcomes. Either to continue arguing with her or to cede to her request. The second was an easy option and I started the movie. That moment I realized the requirement of an in-between passenger air bag! My wife was furious as I overruled her stern ‘No’. I increased the volume as Woody and Buzz lightyear filled the ether inside the car and we were on the highway.

Within few minutes, my son who was watching the sides, started spotting the colorful light arrangements that were made for the Christmas. He started wowing and applauding some of the grand installations on the way and my daughter was also distracted by his comments. She immediately dropped her movie request and started gazing outside. I switched off the movie and brought back the silence but could still feel the hissing and puffing of my wife’s anger.

“Amma, look at the decoration!”, both my son and daughter shouted at once as we were passing through Greenwich area. My wife turned her head and nodded and said, “ It is a rich neighborhood”. 

That answer took a while for my son to absorb and respond. “ What do you mean by rich?”

“The people here in these towns have a lot of money and they spend them to be happy”, My wife’s modest reply brought in another question from my son.

“Does having more money bring happiness?” - My son asked innocently. Sometimes the innocent questions are so profound. As an observer I was listening to their conversation as my wife was trying to explain him how having more money will bring more happiness. As any Indian mom, she started quoting her lifetime stories of how she would expect the holidays when she was young, with the sheer expectations of getting a set of new cloths and an opportunity to eat outside and have more ‘happiness’. She also did not forget to conclude to hint at my kids that how different they are in reacting to a new toy or a dress. She also insisted that she would have been happier, if she had 'stuffs' to match her expectations then, She concluded with a moral that they should be happy as we as a parent how well we support our kids in providing them shelter, food, education, toys and dresses. 
I was sure and expecting that my daughter would go back to her movie demand pretty quickly. My son did not leave there and started pondering:

“Does it mean that we are rich?” - he asked in a feeble voice

“No! We are not rich, but we are comfortable” - she wanted to sound modest. “ When we were kids we were in the higher middle class and now we are…well! in the higher middle class!”

“What is a middle class, amma?” 

“Middle class is us! we are not rich at the same time we are not poor!” - She thought that she explained it well; But I doubted. Even I could not understand that. 

My journey started. Noted Sociologist Leonard Beeghley identifies a male making $57,000 and a female making $40,000, bringing home roughly an annual income of $97,000 constitutes a middle class; However the general theory on this classification varies anywhere between $25,000 to a $100,000 annual household income. The social classification had been tricky and the wealth dispersion on the top is so skewed that there is a wide and marked difference between the ranks of the people in the top 5% of the spectrum. The concept of lower middle class and the upper middle class is sheer a perception and not to scale! And on practical note the recent recession cycles have made this middle class disappear. 
On a recent visit to my friends office, which is a fortune 50 company a few years ago and still a cash rich organization on date with worldwide offices. The offices were on a grand, pristine ground overlooking long island sound. High detailings and modern furnitures and wall to wall new carpets. As a guy working in the city for so many years, that amount of office space really made me to wow! Strangely the silence of that enormous office stuck me. He said to me “Look at the windows.” I looked around and see offices all over but not a single person. “What do you see?” he asked. “I don't know” I replied quizzically. “They're empty! All the cubicles are empty." and he made a remark, that I still remember "The middle class is being hollowed out.” And I took a closer look. Entire floor were dark or there were floors with one or two cubicles but the rest empty. “It’s all out- sourced, or technology has taken over for the paper shufflers,” he continued.

“Not all the news is bad,” he said. “More people entered the upper class than ever last year. We have more vice presidents than ever and the top tier bonuses have doubled.” Also he he said, "More and more people are temp staffers than ever."

And that’s the new paradigm. The middle class has died in all tiers, both the upper and the lower middle class. The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam well orchestrated by the corporate America. 

Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class. The working class which was making a household income of around $90,000 a year. Most jobs that existed 20 years ago aren't needed now. Maybe they never were needed. The entire first decade of this century was spent with CEOs in their golf circles whining through their tee times, “how are we going to fire all this dead weight?” The recession that started in 2008 finally gave them the chance. “It was the economy!” they said. 

The country has been out of a recession since 2009. Four years now. But the jobs have not come back. If you ask any of these CEOs: did you just use that as an excuse to fire people, and they would wink and say, “let’s just leave it at that.”

I’m on the a senior manager in a non profit organization and that is happening even here. Everyone is getting fired. Everyone is toilet paper now.

The another reason for this ‘Flush’ attitude is that the corporations and the people who manage to run the corporations, don't like you. I was talking to a Senior director who was leading the deployment a major billion project worldwide, the first thing he told everyone was “Don't try to be a superman!” This was a very subtle way of saying “I don't want anyone to be an individual star.”

In other words, his main job was to destroy the career aspirations of his most talented people, the people who swore their loyalty to him, the people who worked 90 hours a week for him. If they only worked 30 hours a week and were slightly more mediocre he would've been happy. But he doesn't like you. He wants you to stay in the hole and he will throw you a meal every once in awhile in exchange for your excrement. This is happening across all industries and and at all levels. Basically, it’s all of your bosses. Every single one of them.

To answer my son’s question of the happiness, It is very natural to think that the increase in salary will translate to happiness. It is true, if you don't want to side with science. Scientific studies show that increase in salary only offers a marginal or zero increase in “happiness” above a certain level. The reason is very simple based on the established fact that people spend what they make. If there is a salary increase, that really get translated into a new car, a new addition to the home, a larger couch, a bigger TV or a new apple iPad. After that you will still ask yourself “where did all the money go?” Even though you don't need any of the items that you added, all you end up is with a requirement of an another salary increase. So you’ll be back to the organizational casino betting on your hand on the next black jack.

I turned back to my son, “Happiness is all about being happy about what you have!” There was a long silence. and I asked him, "Did you understand?"

“Yes I did!” My daughter cried “Can we have the movie now?”

My wife happily said "Yes!"; She would be fine with Tom Hanks and Tim Allen do the talking!