A friend who went for a low paying job

Last year, a very close friend of mine called me. ‘Amwene ndazitaya. Ndapeza pena basi (I am quitting; I have found a new job).  He told me where he was moving to and I was left mouth agape. ‘Get out of town buddy!’ I responded. ‘No, am not joking,’ he quickly chipped in.

This friend is good at what he does. I have always admired to bits his skill and professional ethics! But he had left his full time job that earned him more than three quarters of a million kwacha for one offering him less than a quarter of a million kwacha. Something was wrong. I called the wife in disbelief, but she confirmed the same—‘ndi momwemo alamu (that’s true in-law).

Why would somebody walk away from a job that pays well and take up another that pays less? I stood there trying to solve the puzzle. I wished it was calculus because I would have applied my mathematical knowledge. So I was all over searching for answers.

I later discovered the answer to be simple. Money isn’t everything.

A long while back, I read Daniel Gilbert’s great book, Stumbling on Happiness. One little point he made stuck in my mind. Gilbert wrote about a study in USA that compared workers’ happiness with their salary levels. He found that there is a minimum income threshold on which people’s happiness gets fulfilled.

What did he find? He found that people earning less than $40 000 in a year were much less happy with their lives than people earning $40 000 exactly.

What’s interesting, though, is that people earning over $40 000 were not any happier with their lives. Additional income did nothing to increase people’s happiness.

Gilbert offered a bunch of his own conclusions from that study, but my conclusion was pretty simple: any income above a certain threshold does not make you happier. I know the threshold is not $40 000 for Malawi – it’s likely much lower. Besides, the threshold varies based on location, number of dependants, and so on.

What does that “enough” income (threshold) represent? It represents the amount of money needed to keep a roof over your head, food on your plate, a car in your driveway (for others), and a little bit of breathing room to enjoy life. Income beyond that does nothing more than inflate our basic standard of living – a nicer house, a nicer car, a nicer vacation.

But in the long run, those “nicer” things don’t contribute at all to lasting happiness. Once we have those “nicer” things, we’re right back where we started, wanting something nicer yet. Our Corolla becomes the Rav4 we’ve wanted, and then before long we want a BMW. Our 1 000 square foot house becomes a 1 600 square foot house, and then we want a palace. Our camping vacation in Dowa becomes a week-long holiday in Lake Malawi National Park, and then we want a holiday at Victoria Falls. Our ‘Mose wa Lero’ cell phone becomes a Nokia 5210, and then we want a Blackberry.

Once our bases are covered, more of the same doesn’t bring us much fulfilment. Instead, fulfilment comes from the things that make you happy and bring you value in life.

But for a lot of people, whether they’re acting on it or not, fulfilment comes from other sources. Perhaps it comes from being a parent. Perhaps it comes from work that they’re passionate about. Maybe it comes from obtaining degrees.

Whatever that fulfilment is, it rarely comes from acquiring more of the same things you already have.

These days, whenever I see someone making the active choice to go for a lesser paying job, I usually smile. Why? Because I can look at their face and know if they have found the magic for happiness or not.