This article is Part 1 in a three-part series on building a sustainable life.
In 2002, late on Christmas night, the numbers to the Powerball lottery were announced — a jackpot of $314 million up for grabs. Jewell Whitaker shook awake her husband, John Whittaker. You got 4 out of the 5 numbers! she told him.
Delighted, Mr. Whittaker, 55, rolled over and went back to sleep.
He woke up the next day at 4:30 am to go to work. He owned a water and sewer pipe-laying business, one he scraped together by working in construction since he 14 years old. The business employed 100 people. It bought the brick house he lived in, in the burbs of West Virginia, where he lived with his wife and granddaughter, Brandi.
Whittaker checked the television. Last night’s announcement was wrong — he didn’t get 4 out of 5 numbers right.
He got all 5.
He took his prize as a one-time payout — $113,386,407.77, after taxes. Nothing would change, he declared. He’d tithe 10 percent of his winnings, donate, and start charitable foundations. The only change he wanted to make, was to spend more time with his family.
(You know where this story is going.)
On New Year’s Eve, Whittaker walked into the nearby strip club called The Pink Pony. He carried in $50,000 in cash. At the end of the night, the manager had to call a limo to take Whittaker home.
In March 2003, at the Tri-State Racetrack & Gaming Center, Whittaker was accused of groping the floor attendants. In November, Whittaker crashed into a concrete median and was charged with driving under the influence. Troopers discovered $117,000 in the car and a pistol.
He and his wife Jewell became estranged.
Since winning the lottery, Jack started giving his granddaughter Brandi large sums of money daily – sometimes as much as $5,000, cash. She spent it on junk food, clothes, and jewelry for her friends.
Then she started buying drugs.
On December 9, 2004, Brandi went missing. On December 20, nearly two years to the day when Whittaker bought his winning lottery ticket, police found Brandi’s body. She was dead, her body wrapped in a tarp and dumped behind an abandoned van.[note]https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/10/24/jack-whittaker-powerball-lottery-winners-life-was-ruined-after-m-jackpot/[/note]
Whittaker doesn’t blame the lottery winnings, or himself. “All of the problems I have had are because of my granddaughter’s drug-using friends,” he said.
“I’m going to find them and put them in jail.”
What is a sustainable life?
Some questions I’ve been thinking a lot about lately:
- How do you pursue your ambitions while being a good husband and father?
- How do you consistently work towards both without burning out?
- How much money do you need to be happy?
- What is the true cost of ambition?
You can bucket these questions into a simple question:
How do you build a sustainable life?
I’m careful to use the word “sustainable” and not “balanced.” Balanced feels loaded, mired in expectations of the prototypical suburban dad: work 9-5, Monday through Friday. Then go home and spend the evenings in front of the television with your family. Weekends are reserved for shuttling kids to practice and games, doing yard work, and watching football.
This is a great life, but personally, this “balance” would suffocate me.
My family grew up in a restaurant business. My grandfather opened his first restaurant, called Hoi Song, in Williamsburg in the 1950s. My parents worked in restaurants. So did my uncles, aunts, cousins. If you worked full-time, it means you worked from 10 am to 10 pm, six days a week, with two weeks of vacation a year.
When your entire family is immersed in that lifestyle, that becomes the normal. To others, it might sound like hell. For us, it was the only life we knew. And we made it work.
Is it the life I’d want for my family? No, but for me, it’s more sustainable than working a 9-5. What’s sustainable for one person is unsustainable for another.
Why a sustainable life is a good life
Cullen Roche wrote about the Scale of Monetary Happiness.
The Scale of Monetary Happiness shows that, yes, money makes you happier, and anyone who says otherwise is lying to you. However, there are two nuances worth pointing out:
- Money is the foundation. You need money as the foundation to address your physiological, safety, and security needs. Once the foundation is in place, you can build upon it. Conversely, if you have a shaky foundation (e.g. not enough money to provide stability) it’s more difficult to build the other attributes that lead to more happiness.
- Happiness generated by money hits a ceiling. Once you secured all the things that money can buy (e.g. health, employment, property, stability) more money doesn’t lead to more happiness. Money supports building friendships, family, and intimacy, but you can’t directly buy it.
How does the Scale of Monetary Happiness connect to building a sustainable life? The more I thought about it, the more I realized:
A sustainable life is one that pursues both what money can and cannot buy in equal measure.
Building a sustainable life needs to happen in a structured way.
Focus too much on the parts of the scale that money can buy, it becomes an anchor.
But spend too much energy on what money can’t buy, and the structure becomes top-heavy.
In both cases, the structure is unsustainable.
The story of John Whittaker is an extreme example, but not an outlier. when it comes to people who win the lottery. As lottery winners got used to what their new money could buy, things that money could buy no longer contributed to their happiness.[note]http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1980-01001-001[/note] The money became an anchor. It was too much and came too fast.
There wasn’t time to develop the parts of happiness that money cannot buy.
The process of building a sustainable life
While the Scale of Monetary Happiness is a good snapshot of what a sustainable life could look like, in my opinion, it’s not an accurate description of the process of building a sustainable life. Spending the first 30 years of your life solely dedicated to obtaining everything money can buy, and then working on your relationships, self-esteem, and purpose, is probably not a good formula for happiness.
Nor can you solely focus on love, self-esteem, and purpose for decades, while casually ignoring the need to earn a paycheck and make a living.
As I mentioned above, a sustainable life is one where you tackle both at once, where you pursue what money can and cannot buy in equal measure.
When approached this way, here’s how a sustainable life gets built:
The process (like many processes, as Reforge’s Brian Balfour likes to point out) is a loop.
Here’s a simple explanation of what the sustainability loop looks like:
- You obtain the resources to satisfy physiological needs (food water, shelter) as well as your safety and security (employment, stability)…
- Excess resources (time, energy, and money) can be invested in your relationships, your self-esteem, and your high purpose aka all the things money can’t buy…
- That invest yields evolution. Your community grows. Perhaps you get married. You have children. To serve new needs, you obtain more resources….
When you’re single and young (and getting help from your parents) it doesn’t take a whole lot to build a sustainable life. If you intend to not only serve yourself, but your family, employees, and community, it requires a great deal more work to build sustainability.
I loved this interview with Michelle Williams, where the writer described what sustainability meant to Ms. Williams and her family:[note]https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/07/michelle-williams-marriage-wedding-equal-pay[/note]
“Money was never a motivating factor for me. It’s never been the thing that’s gotten me out of bed to go to work.”
To support herself and Matilda, Williams lived frugally “in a very simple house, with a very junky car, and went on no vacations.” She drove a Prius, which she has since replaced with a mini-van with fabric-upholstered seats—”a couch on four wheels,” she calls it.
“They were like, ‘You can get leather for an additional $4,000 or something,’ and I was like, ‘Why?’ ”
“Keeping a life sustainable, that’s really important to me.”
There is no right or wrong sustainability loop. It varies from person to person. However, I’d argue the process of building sustainability into our lives looks similar.
In part 2 of this series, I’ll look at the formula to implement sustainability. Then in part 3, I’ll examine the individual ingredients to the formula, and how to build a sustainable life on a day-to-day basis.
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Photo Credit: It Could Happen To You
