Keeping customers, employees and investors happy is no mean feat writes The Economist
image: getty images
In the nearly 40 years that The Economist has served up its Big Mac index, the price of the McDonald’s burger in America has more than tripled. In that same period the cost of another meaty treat—a hot-dog-and-drink combo at Costco—has remained steady at $1.50. Last year customers of the American big-box retailer devoured 200m of them. Richard Galanti, Costco’s longtime finance boss, once promised to keep the price frozen “for ever”.
Customers are not the only fans of Costco, as the outpouring of affection from Wall Street analysts after Mr Galanti announced his retirement on February 6th made clear. The firm’s share price is 430 times what it was when he took the job nearly four decades ago, compared with 25 times for the s&p 500 index of large companies. It has continued to outperform the market in recent years. What lies behind its enduring success?
Costco is the world’s third-biggest retailer, behind Walmart and Amazon. Though its sales are less than half of Walmart’s, its return on capital, at nearly 20%, is more than twice as high. Charlie Munger, a famed investor who served on Costco’s board from 1997 until his death last year, called it a “perfect damn company”. Mr Galanti, who describes Costco’s business model as “arrogantly simple”, says the company is guided by a simple idea—hook shoppers by offering high-quality products at the lowest prices. It does this by keeping markups low while charging a fixed membership fee and stocking fewer distinct products, all while treating its employees generously.
Start with margins. Most retailers boost profits by marking up prices. Not Costco. Its gross margins hover around 12%, compared with Walmart’s 24%. The company makes up the shortfall through its membership fees: customers pay $60 or more a year to shop at its stores. In 2023 fees from its 129m members netted $4.6bn, more than half of Costco’s operating profits.
Joe Feldman, an analyst at Telsey Advisory Group, a research firm, argues that the membership model creates a virtuous circle. The more members the company has, the greater its buying power, leading to better deals with suppliers, most of which are then passed on to its members. The fee also encourages customers to focus their spending at Costco, rather than shopping around. That seems to work; membership-renewal rates are upwards of 90%.
Next, consider the way the company manages its product lineup. Costco stores stock a limited selection of about 3,800 distinct items. Sam’s Club, Walmart’s Costco-like competitor, carries about 7,000. A Walmart superstore has around 120,000. Buying more from fewer suppliers gives the company even greater bargaining heft, lowering prices further. By limiting its range, Costco can better focus on maintaining quality. Less variety in stores helps it use space more efficiently: its sales per square foot are three times that of Walmart. And with fewer products, Costco turns over its wares almost twice as fast as usual for retailers, meaning less capital gets tied up in inventory. It has also expanded its own brand, Kirkland Signature, which now accounts for over a quarter of its sales, well above average for a retailer. Its margins on its own-brand products are about six percentage points higher than for brands such as Hershey or Kellogg’s.
Last, Costco stands out among retailers for how it treats its employees. Some 60% of retail employees leave their jobs each year. Staff turnover at Costco is just 8%; over a third of workers have been there for more than ten years. One reason for low attrition is pay. Its wages are higher than the industry average and it offers generous medical and retirement benefits. Another is career prospects. The company prefers to promote leaders from within. Although Mr Galanti’s successor has come from outside, the rest of Costco’s executive team has been with the company for more than 20 years. The late Mr Munger was confident that Costco had “a marvellous future”. Its customers could be enjoying $1.50 hot dogs for many years to come.
Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older writes The Economist
ASK people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: “Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.” Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world's careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect—better than death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.
When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.
This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility—the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.
These ideas have penetrated the policy arena, starting in Bhutan, where the concept of Gross National Happiness shapes the planning process. All new policies have to have a GNH assessment, similar to the environmental-impact assessment common in other countries. In 2008 France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, asked two Nobel-prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to come up with a broader measure of national contentedness than GDP. Then last month, in a touchy-feely gesture not typical of Britain, David Cameron announced that the British government would start collecting figures on well-being.
There are already a lot of data on the subject collected by, for instance, America's General Social Survey, Eurobarometer and Gallup. Surveys ask two main sorts of question. One concerns people's assessment of their lives, and the other how they feel at any particular time. The first goes along the lines of: thinking about your life as a whole, how do you feel? The second is something like: yesterday, did you feel happy/contented/angry/anxious? The first sort of question is said to measure global well-being, and the second hedonic or emotional well-being. They do not always elicit the same response: having children, for instance, tends to make people feel better about their life as a whole, but also increases the chance that they felt angry or anxious yesterday.
Statisticians trawl through the vast quantities of data these surveys produce rather as miners panning for gold. They are trying to find the answer to the perennial question: what makes people happy?
Four main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and age. Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable than men, while most are more cheerful.
Two personality traits shine through the complexity of economists' regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. This is more than a tautological observation about people's mood when asked about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy.
Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain some cross-cultural differences: a study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese.
Then there is the role of circumstance. All sorts of things in people's lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, shape the way they feel. Being married gives people a considerable uplift, but not as big as the gloom that springs from being unemployed. In America, being black used to be associated with lower levels of happiness—though the most recent figures suggest that being black or Hispanic is nowadays associated with greater happiness. People with children in the house are less happy than those without. More educated people are happier, but that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer. And richer people are happier than poor ones—though just how much is a source of argument (see article).
The view from winter
Lastly, there is age. Ask a bunch of 30-year-olds and another of 70-year-olds (as Peter Ubel, of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, did with two colleagues, Heather Lacey and Dylan Smith, in 2006) which group they think is likely to be happier, and both lots point to the 30-year-olds. Ask them to rate their own well-being, and the 70-year-olds are the happier bunch. The academics quoted lyrics written by Pete Townshend of The Who when he was 20: “Things they do look awful cold / Hope I die before I get old”. They pointed out that Mr Townshend, having passed his 60th birthday, was writing a blog that glowed with good humour.
Mr Townshend may have thought of himself as a youthful radical, but this view is ancient and conventional. The “seven ages of man”—the dominant image of the life-course in the 16th and 17th centuries—was almost invariably conceived as a rise in stature and contentedness to middle age, followed by a sharp decline towards the grave. Inverting the rise and fall is a recent idea. “A few of us noticed the U-bend in the early 1990s,” says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business School. “We ran a conference about it, but nobody came.”
Since then, interest in the U-bend has been growing. Its effect on happiness is significant—about half as much, from the nadir of middle age to the elderly peak, as that of unemployment. It appears all over the world. David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and Mr Oswald looked at the figures for 72 countries. The nadir varies among countries—Ukrainians, at the top of the range, are at their most miserable at 62, and Swiss, at the bottom, at 35—but in the great majority of countries people are at their unhappiest in their 40s and early 50s. The global average is 46.
The U-bend shows up in studies not just of global well-being but also of hedonic or emotional well-being. One paper, published this year by Arthur Stone, Joseph Schwartz and Joan Broderick of Stony Brook University, and Angus Deaton of Princeton, breaks well-being down into positive and negative feelings and looks at how the experience of those emotions varies through life. Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age, then pick up; stress rises during the early 20s, then falls sharply; worry peaks in middle age, and falls sharply thereafter; anger declines throughout life; sadness rises slightly in middle age, and falls thereafter.
Turn the question upside down, and the pattern still appears. When the British Labour Force Survey asks people whether they are depressed, the U-bend becomes an arc, peaking at 46.
Happier, no matter what
There is always a possibility that variations are the result not of changes during the life-course, but of differences between cohorts. A 70-year-old European may feel different to a 30-year-old not because he is older, but because he grew up during the second world war and was thus formed by different experiences. But the accumulation of data undermines the idea of a cohort effect. Americans and Zimbabweans have not been formed by similar experiences, yet the U-bend appears in both their countries. And if a cohort effect were responsible, the U-bend would not show up consistently in 40 years' worth of data.
Another possible explanation is that unhappy people die early. It is hard to establish whether that is true or not; but, given that death in middle age is fairly rare, it would explain only a little of the phenomenon. Perhaps the U-bend is merely an expression of the effect of external circumstances. After all, common factors affect people at different stages of the life-cycle. People in their 40s, for instance, often have teenage children. Could the misery of the middle-aged be the consequence of sharing space with angry adolescents? And older people tend to be richer. Could their relative contentment be the result of their piles of cash?
The answer, it turns out, is no: control for cash, employment status and children, and the U-bend is still there. So the growing happiness that follows middle-aged misery must be the result not of external circumstances but of internal changes.
People, studies show, behave differently at different ages. Older people have fewer rows and come up with better solutions to conflict. They are better at controlling their emotions, better at accepting misfortune and less prone to anger. In one study, for instance, subjects were asked to listen to recordings of people supposedly saying disparaging things about them. Older and younger people were similarly saddened, but older people less angry and less inclined to pass judgment, taking the view, as one put it, that “you can't please all the people all the time.”
There are various theories as to why this might be so. Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology at Stanford University, talks of “the uniquely human ability to recognise our own mortality and monitor our own time horizons”. Because the old know they are closer to death, she argues, they grow better at living for the present. They come to focus on things that matter now—such as feelings—and less on long-term goals. “When young people look at older people, they think how terrifying it must be to be nearing the end of your life. But older people know what matters most.” For instance, she says, “young people will go to cocktail parties because they might meet somebody who will be useful to them in the future, even though nobody I know actually likes going to cocktail parties.”
Death of ambition, birth of acceptance
There are other possible explanations. Maybe the sight of contemporaries keeling over infuses survivors with a determination to make the most of their remaining years. Maybe people come to accept their strengths and weaknesses, give up hoping to become chief executive or have a picture shown in the Royal Academy, and learn to be satisfied as assistant branch manager, with their watercolour on display at the church fete. “Being an old maid”, says one of the characters in a story by Edna Ferber, an (unmarried) American novelist, was “like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.” Perhaps acceptance of ageing itself is a source of relief. “How pleasant is the day”, observed William James, an American philosopher, “when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”
Whatever the causes of the U-bend, it has consequences beyond the emotional. Happiness doesn't just make people happy—it also makes them healthier. John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King's College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help counteract their crumbliness.
Happier people are more productive, too. Mr Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who had seen the funny film performed 12% better. This leads to two conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose the economists' experiment rather than the psychologists' or psychiatrists'. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive skills—a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with an ageing workforce.
The ageing of the rich world is normally seen as a burden on the economy and a problem to be solved. The U-bend argues for a more positive view of the matter. The greyer the world gets, the brighter it becomes—a prospect which should be especially encouraging to Economist readers (average age 47).
Contrary to popular belief, not everyone loses their friends and goes bankrupt writes Tim Harford in The FT
At the start of the graphic novel Bloke’s Progress, our everyday hero Darren Bloke isn’t coping with the everyday stresses of life. He has a tedious job, a grinding commute, squalling children and too many bills to pay. Then he wins the lottery — and his troubles truly begin.
First, Darren becomes estranged from his friends, who keep pestering him for money. He hangs out with a richer crowd but feels out of place. He divorces his wife and marries a new woman. Then she divorces him. His money is soon gone, and so, too, are his family and friends.
In Bloke’s Progress, Darren is saved by conversations with the spirit of the Victorian sage John Ruskin. (Of course!) Ruskin’s insights deserve a separate column — or a book. But Darren’s tale made me wonder: is this what happens to people who win the lottery?
A glance at the newspapers suggests that it is. The Courier Journal tells the tale of David Lee Edwards from Ashland, Kentucky. He won $27mn in 2001, spent it on drugs, fast cars and a Learjet. He was living in a storage unit within five years, and died penniless. The Guardian explains that Michael Carroll, self-proclaimed “king of chavs”, was declared bankrupt just eight years after winning nearly £10mn — while Lee Ryan ended up sleeping rough, and spending time in jail for handling stolen cars, despite winning £6.5mn. If only the spirit of John Ruskin had been there to save them all.
But while these cautionary tales offer us a moralistic narrative arc that sticks in the memory, they aren’t necessarily typical. A lot of people win big prizes on the lottery, enough to allow us to draw more subtle — and less tragic — conclusions.
First, do lottery wins estrange us from our friends? Darren Bloke’s fate seems plausible: his friends kept asking him for money, leading him to feel exploited and them to accuse him of meanness. Yet a study by Joan Costa Font of the London School of Economics and Nattavudh Powdthavee of Warwick Business School finds that people who win more than £10,000 on the lottery spend more time socialising with their friends, although less time talking to neighbours.
This result won’t come as a shock to those who read a 2016 study by Emily Bianchi and Kathleen Vohs, which found that richer Americans tended to spend less time with neighbours and family, and more with friends. The simplest explanation is that money makes it easy to socialise for pure pleasure, while reducing the need to maintain relationships for practical reasons, such as sharing childcare.
Second, do lottery winners blow their winnings and lapse into poverty? Here, myths abound; the National Endowment for Financial Education is often cited as the source for a claim that 70 per cent of lottery winners go bankrupt. The NEFE has issued a press release explaining that it has not made that claim and has no reason to believe the claim is true.
A study by the economists Scott Hankins, Mark Hoekstra and Paige Marta Skiba looked at 35,000 lottery winners in Florida, of whom 2,000 later filed for bankruptcy (that’s less than 6 per cent, not 70 per cent). The researchers did find that lottery winners were more likely to file for bankruptcy than non-winners. Perhaps that is not surprising, since lottery enthusiasts tend to be low-income, and most of them don’t win much. Hankins, Hoekstra and Skiba found that bankruptcy struck with equal likelihood whether people won less than $10,000 or more than $50,000.
These Floridian winners, then, were more likely to face bankruptcy than non-winners, but bankruptcy was still an unusual outcome. Nor did it make any difference how much they won.
Third, do lottery winners quit their jobs, as Darren Bloke did? Not according to a study of Swedish lottery winners who had won an average of 2mn Swedish kronor — roughly £200,000 — at some stage between the mid-1990s and 2005. This was about eight times the annual salary of a nurse or police officer in Sweden at the time. The researchers, Bengt Furaker and Anna Hedenus, found that some of these winners reduced their hours or took some unpaid leave, but 62 per cent carried on working exactly as before, and only 12 per cent quit their jobs completely. Either people felt that the jackpot wasn’t quite large enough to make it sensible to quit, or — perhaps more likely — they rather enjoyed their jobs. John Ruskin, who celebrated the value of honest labour, would surely have approved.
Thus far we’ve seen that lottery winners spend more time hanging out with friends, are not notably at risk of bankruptcy and often keep working in their old jobs. The big question remaining is: are they happy?
Yes, say Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling and David Cesarini, who studied lottery winners in (again) Sweden. They find that winners of large prizes were significantly more satisfied with their lives — and in particular were significantly more satisfied with their finances. There is little sign in this data of the feckless or reckless lottery winners who squander their winnings.
The overall impression I get from these studies is that lottery winners are . . . well, rather sensible. “I won’t let it change my life,” goes the cliché, and perhaps the cliché is true.
Lottery winners typically use their money to increase their financial security and to spend more time with friends. They rarely quit their jobs. Some squander the money; most do not. Ruskin argued that money had no value unless it was wisely used. Lottery winners don’t do as badly as we might have feared.
In his Pensées, published posthumously in 1670, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal appeared to establish a foolproof argument for religious commitment, which he saw as a kind of bet. If the existence of God was even minutely possible, he claimed, then the potential gain was so huge – an “eternity of life and happiness” – that taking the leap of faith was the mathematically rational choice.
Pascal’s wager implicitly assumes that religion has no benefits in the real world, but some sacrifices. But what if there were evidence that faith could also contribute to better wellbeing? Scientific studies suggest this is the case. Joining a church, synagogue or temple even appears to extend your lifespan.
These findings might appear to be proof of divine intervention, but few of the scientists examining these effects are making claims for miracles. Instead, they are interested in understanding the ways that it improves people’s capacity to deal with life’s stresses. “Religious and spiritual traditions give you access to different methods of coping that have distinctive benefits,” says Doug Oman, a professor in public health at the University of California Berkeley. “From the psychological perspective, religions offer a package of different ingredients,” agrees Prof Patty Van Cappellen at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Studying the life-extending benefits of religious practice can therefore offer useful strategies for anyone – of any faith or none – to live a healthier and happier life. You may find yourself shaking your head in scepticism, but the evidence base linking faith to better health has been decades in the making and now encompasses thousands of studies. Much of this research took the form of longitudinal research, which involves tracking the health of a population over years and even decades. They each found that measures of someone’s religious commitment, such as how often they attended church, were consistently associated with a range of outcomes, including a lower risk of depression, anxiety and suicide and reduced cardiovascular disease and death from cancer.
People who pray tend to have a more positive outlook on life – and those who pray for the wellbeing of others tend to live longer. Photograph: Kumar Sriskandan/Alamy
Unlike some other areas of scientific research suffering from the infamous “replication crisis”, these studies have examined populations across the globe, with remarkably consistent results. And the effect sizes are large. Dr Laura Wallace at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, for instance, recently examined obituaries of more than 1,000 people across the US and looked at whether the article recorded the person’s religious affiliation – a sign that their faith had been a major element of their identity.
Publishing her results in 2018, she reported that those people marked out for their faith lived for 5.6 years more, on average, than those whose religion had not been recorded; in a second sample, looking specifically at a set of obituaries from Des Moines in Iowa, the difference was even greater – about 10 years in total. “It’s on par with the avoidance of major health risks – like smoking,” says Wallace. To give another comparison: reducing hypertension adds about five years to someone’s life expectancy.
Health effects of this size demand explanation and scientists such as Wallace have been on the case. One obvious explanation for these findings is that people of faith live cleaner lives than the non-religious: studies show that churchgoers are indeed less likely to smoke, drink, take drugs or practise unsafe sex than people who do not attend a service regularly (though there are, of course, notable exceptions).
This healthier living may be the result of the religious teaching itself, which tends to encourage the principles of moderation and abstinence. But it could also be the fact that religious congregations are a self-selecting group. If you have sufficient willpower to get out of bed on a Sunday morning, for example, you may also have enough self-control to resist life’s other temptations.
Importantly, however, the health benefits of religion remain even when the scientists have controlled for these differences in behaviour, meaning that other factors must also contribute. Social connection comes top of the list. Feelings of isolation and loneliness are a serious source of stress in themselves and exacerbate the other challenges we face in life. Even something as simple as getting to work becomes far more difficult if you cannot call on a friend to give you a lift when your car breaks down.
Chronic stress response can result in physiological changes such as heightened inflammation, which, over the years, can damage tissue and increase your risk of illness. As a result, the size of someone’s social network and their subjective sense of connection with others can both predict their health and longevity, with one influential study by Prof Julianna Holt-Lunstad at Brigham Young University suggesting that the influence of loneliness is comparable to that of obesity or low physical exercise.
The 17th-century mathematician Blaise Pascal, author of the Pensées – and the famous wager. Photograph: Alamy
Religions, of course, tend to be built around a community of like-minded worshippers who meet regularly and have a shared set of beliefs. And many of the specific rituals will also contribute to a sense of communion with others. Christians, for example, are encouraged to pray on behalf of other people and this seems to bring its own health benefits, according to a brand new study by Prof Gail Ironson at the University of Miami.
Ironson has spent decades studying the ways that people with HIV cope with their infection and the influences of these psychological factors on the outcomes of disease. Examining data covering 17 years of 102 HIV patients’ lives, she found that people who regularly prayed for others were twice as likely to survive to the end of the study, compared with those who more regularly prayed for themselves. Importantly, the link remained even after Ironson had accounted for factors such as adherence to medications or substance abuse or the patient’s initial viral load.
Besides encouraging social connection, religion can help people to cultivate positive emotions that are good for our mental and physical wellbeing, such as gratitude and awe. Various studies show that regularly counting your blessings can help you to shift your focus away from the problems you are facing, preventing you from descending into the negative spirals of thinking that amplify stress. In the Christian church, you may be encouraged to thank God in your prayers, which encourages the cultivation of this protective emotion. “It’s a form of cognitive reappraisal,” says Van Cappellen. “It’s helping you to re-evaluate your situation in a more positive light.”
Awe, meanwhile, is the wonder we feel when we contemplate something much bigger and more important than ourselves. This can help people to cut through self-critical, ruminative thinking and to look beyond their daily concerns, so that they no longer make such a dent on your wellbeing.
Last, but not least, religious faiths can create a sense of purpose in someone’s life – the feeling that there is a reason and meaning to their existence. People with a sense of purpose tend to have better mental wellbeing, compared with those who feel that their lives lack direction, and – once again – this seems to have knock-on effects for physical health, including reduced mortality. “When people have a core set of values, it helps establish goals. And when those goals are established and pursued, that produces better psychological wellbeing,” says Prof Eric Kim at the University of British Columbia, who has researched the health benefits of purpose in life. Much like awe and gratitude, those positive feelings can then act as a buffer to stress.
Volunteers sort produce at a food bank warehouse in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, in February this year. People who spend time helping others seem to live longer. Photograph: Vickie Flores/EPA
These are average effects, which don’t always take into account that huge variety of people’s experiences. While some Christians might see God as a benevolent figure, others might have been taught that he is judgmental and punishing and those views can make a big difference in the effects on our health. In her studies of HIV patients, Ironson found that people who believed in a vengeful God showed a faster disease progression – as measured by their declining white blood cell count – compared with those who believed that he was a merciful figure.
Ultimately, most people’s faith will arise from real convictions; it seems unlikely that many people would adopt a particular religious view solely for the health benefits. But even if you are agnostic, like me, or atheist, this research might inform your lifestyle.
You can start by considering contemplative techniques, which come in many more forms than the mindful breathing and body-scan techniques that have proved so popular. Scientists have become increasingly interested in “loving-kindness meditation”, for example, in which you spend a few moments thinking warm thoughts about friends, strangers, even enemies. The practice was inspired by the Buddhist principle of mettā, but it also resembles the Christian practice of intercessory prayer. When practised regularly, this increases people’s feelings of social connection and empathy with the consequent benefits for their mental health. Importantly, it also changes people’s real-life actions towards others, for instance encouraging more pro-social behaviour. The power of religion is that it gives you this package of ingredients that are pre-made and organised for youProf Patty Van Cappellen
To build more gratitude into your life, meanwhile, you might keep a diary listing the things that you have appreciated each day and you can make a deliberate habit of thanking the people who have helped you; both strategies have been shown to improve people’s stress responses and to improve overall wellbeing. And to cultivate awe, you might go on a regular nature walk, visit a magnificent building within your city or watch a film that fills you with wonder.
If you have time and resources for greater commitments, you could also take up a voluntary activity for a cause that means a lot to you, a task that may help to boost your sense of purpose and which could also enhance your social life. Dr Wallace’s work has shown that the sheer amount of volunteering someone performs could, independently, explain part of the longevity boost of religious people, but charitable actions do not need to be linked to a particular faith for you to gain those benefits. “If people are able to plug into causes that really light up their intrinsic values, and then find a community that helps them reach their goals, that’s another way in which the framework of religion can be taken into a non-religious context,” says Prof Kim.
The challenge is to ensure that you build all these behaviours into your routine, so that you perform them with the same regularity and devotion normally reserved for spiritual practices. “The power of religion is that it gives you this package of ingredients that are pre-made and organised for you,” says Van Cappellen. “And if you are not religious you have to create it on your own.” You don’t need to make a leap of faith to see those benefits.
It was 2010 and the newspaper I worked for in Sydney commissioned me to interview yoga entrepreneur Bikram Choudhury.
He was in town to open the first of a chain of hot yoga studios. Choudhury’s brand of yoga – which he had trademarked and franchised – involved 26 poses in a humid, heated room with mirrors and carpets. When I visited the studio and caught the stench and the robotic instructions from a mic’d-up teacher, I thought: Yeah, this won’t take off.
I had been doing yoga for a decade by the time I met Choudhury. Once or twice a week, I’d go to nice, easy hatha classes, wearing whatever old tracksuit was to hand – just like everyone else in the room. Yet my progress was slow; I had never managed to get beyond beginners’ level. I was always at the back of the class, struggling to get my arm behind my calf to touch my other hand. I just assumed that this pace was my natural limit.
'He said he could do what he wanted': the scandal that rocked Bikram yoga
In his suite with harbour views, Choudhury told me about all the famous people who did his yoga – people such as Madonna and Jennifer Aniston. Then he looked me up and down.
“You,” he said. “You need to do some Bikram. You are overweight.”
“What? Huh?” I said, shocked at this breach in interview etiquette.
“Do my yoga,” he said, indicating a pair of lithe Bikram yoga instructors seated at his feet, “and you could look like them.”
For years after meeting him, I would walk past the fogged-up, vile-smelling Bikram yoga studios and think: screw you, Bikram.
But part of me also wondered if he had a point – could you completely change your body shape by doing his yoga? Should this even be an aspiration when you do yoga?
FacebookTwitterPinterest Yoga has morphed into a physical and spiritual ideal to which you aspire. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Choudhury is now in the sin bin. In 2016, he lost a lawsuit in which a former employee had claimed sexual harassment and wrongful termination – and he was ordered to pay $7m in damages.
But yoga – hot, cold – and all sorts of novelty yoga (including nude yoga, beer yoga and goat yoga) is booming. In the past decade, it has morphed from being an exercise you might do once a week at your local gym to a lifestyle – and a physical and spiritual ideal to which you aspire.
According to a 2016 Yoga Journal report, 36.7 million people practise yoga in the US, up from 20.4 million in 2012. The yoga market is now worth $16bn (£12bn) in the US and $80bn (£74bn) globally. In the UK, “yoga” was one of Google’s most searched-for words in 2016, while the yoga and pilates business brings in £812m a year, and rising.
People are packed into classes, which cost north of £10 a pop, yoga teacher training costs thousands (fees start at around £1,500 and can go to £5,000) and yoga retreats are pricey.
It is not just the studios. Take a look at the market for yoga mats. According to market research company Technavio, the US yoga and exercise mat business is expected to climb from $11bn (£8bn) now to $14bn (£10bn) in 2020. Sales of athleisure clothing, generated $35bn (£25bn) in 2015 – an all-time high – making up 17% of the entire US clothing market, according to market research firm NPD Group. Yoga pants by Lorna Jane cost $110, while GQ magazine has described Lululemon’s yoga pants as a cult obsession among “a certain set of gym-minded women and busy moms across the country”. You can even buy Lululemon prayer beads for $108 (£80).
In my local area of Sydney, upmarket yogis have colonised the high street. Most people I see walking around the city’s Bondi suburb have stopped wearing proper clothes. Unless you are around the bus stops in time for the morning commute, people dress almost exclusively in exercise gear – yoga pants, vest top and hoodie, flip flops in the summer, trainers in winter. They loiter in the aisles of the organic fruit and vegetable shop, their yoga mats hitting me in the face when they turn around. They zip around the narrow streets by the beach on mopeds or bicycles and, after class, gather around the large communal tables of cafes, sipping $10 juice in mason jars or almond milk chai. FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘After class they gather around sipping $10 juice.’ Photograph: Alamy
Secretly I wanted to be them. But it was more than just a look. Every yoga class I tried out in Bondi had a semi-spiritual element that I found enticing. At the start of class, the teacher might read some Sanskrit verse, or play sitar music while reading from a spiritual book – such as Eckhart Tolle. In increasingly non-religious countries such as the UK and Australia, this is where a lot of young people receive their moral or spiritual teachings.
In many respects, yoga is the perfect pastime for our age – the meditative elements give us the opportunity to find peace and stillness in a time of increasingly hectic and crowded information, the instructional bits give us moral lessons in the absence of traditional religion, while the stretchy, bendy, sweaty physical stuff is a great way of countering eight or more hours a day spent hunched over a computer. But is any of this yoga making us more enlightened or more compassionate? Or is it just another wellness industry trend that only the rich and idle can afford to properly indulge in?
One day last year, after my usual weekly class in a studio full of part-time models, I came across a flyer. It promised that in six weeks I could become a “modern yogi”. All I had to do was to attend classes six times a week, meditate daily, keep a journal and take part in weekly meetings that are part tutorial on mindfulness and part group therapy. The programme promised that “an exciting transformation will occur”. Could I become one of those people I saw walking around Bondi – yoga mat strapped to my back, my Instagram feed full of downward dogs on the cliffs, with a Pacific Ocean sunset in the background?
I started the $600 programme, stuck with it and found things started to shift. After doing yoga and meditation every day for six weeks, my body felt looser, more pliable. Getting up during cold winter mornings and bending down to pick a sock up off the floor became a lot easier. Physically it was tough, and it took a month to really get my fitness level moving, but gradually I was able to keep up with the more athletic Vinyasa classes. At the end of 90 minutes, I would be covered in sweat and felt a curious mix of exhausted and blank. The repetitive sequences became a routine that I did robotically, without thinking. I was bored in class, but I also turned off my mind and the classes themselves became like a moving meditation.
As for the spiritual aspect, occasionally the weird speeches the yoga instructors gave hit home. On Friday in my first week, in a move that shocked just about everyone, Britain voted to leave the European Union. The teacher, an Irishman, referenced Brexit in his sermon about 45 minutes into the class. “You might not like change. You may resist change,” he said, walking around the heated room. “You may not agree with it. You may think the change is a bad thing. A very bad thing. But change has happened. It has happened and you can’t do anything about it. To resist it is pointless.” His voice was heavy, sorrowful, and he sighed. “It is what it is.”
There was a feeling in the class that we needed to hear things like this – but afterwards, I thought: Is this going to be the extent of our resistance and our protest against political situations that we don’t like? We stretch and get a sermon, go and have a juice – and that’s it?
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘Occasionally the weird spiritual speeches the yoga instructors gave hit home.’ Photograph: Getty Images/Topic Images
I started thinking a lot about yoga and so many activities that are part of the wellness industry, and how so many people pour energy into their bodies when perhaps they should be trying to pour energy into the people and politics around them. Self care is great – but what if there’s no energy left to care about anyone else?
In the New York Times, American writer Judith Warner noted a disturbing social trend. Just as the women of the mid-70s took flight into consciousness-raising groups, the workforce, divorce and casual sex, their daughters are also taking flight, but that flight is inwards. “They’re fleeing to yoga,” she writes in the Times, “imitating flight in the downward-gazing contortion called the crow position. They’re striving, through exquisite new adventures in internal fine-tuning, to feel more deeply, live more meaningfully, better inhabit each and every moment of each and every day.”
Warner glumly, but correctly, concluded: “There is no sense that personal liberation is to be found by taking a more active role in the public world.” In fact, “such interiority seems to be a way to manage an unbearable sort of existential anxiety: a way to narrow the scope of life’s challenges and demands … to the more manageable range of the in-and-out of your own breath.”
The more yoga I did, the more compliments I received. My hair was shiny – people commented – and my skin glowed, my clothes were looser, and, like so many others, I began wearing athleisure gear to work. After all, work was just a pit stop on the way to another yoga class. Maybe Choudhury was right after all – maybe I could look different if I did a lot of yoga.
I wrote in my journal, I went to the Monday-night tutorials, I meditated, I drank cold-press juices, I did all the right things to become a modern yogi. I was on the way to achieving the ideal of the glowy person in the organic shop. I was almost there before I started wondering – is this really what I wanted to be?
The answer was, of course, no. I was a yogi for about two months before the narcissism of the whole enterprise got to me. There were other things, it turned out, that I had to do.
It was the first day after half term, and I was walking the kids into school when I found myself stunned by a statement made by one of the other parents: “I know I’m a good parent.” How can you possibly know that? Hope? Yes. Strive? Sure. But know? Like, really know? I would argue that if you “know” you are a really good parent, you almost definitely aren’t. How can you be certain that nothing you have said or done has messed up your kids in some way? When I was a kid, my mum told me I had “cute little boobies” and I didn’t go swimming for six months. I still wear a T-shirt in the pool.
The ultimate aim of any parent is for their children to grow up to be happy. But how the hell do you achieve that? Two of our children are at primary school. We really worry about one of them. The other one makes us worry for the school. Last week, he told us his new favourite word was “vagina” and he was going to say it as much as possible. I’m imagining appropriate context was irrelevant to him. Then I became terrified there would be appropriate context. Or inappropriate context. Basically, I didn’t want him using the word vagina. But you can’t say that to him. If you react with shock or panic, you are basically giving that word magic powers. It suddenly becomes a word that will always get attention and then you are in Sainsbury’s and your kid is saying: “Can I have a fidget spinner? Can I have a fidget spinner? VAGINA.”
Parenting presents dilemmas like this all the time. Recently, my wife told me that some of the parents had been giving their children practice test papers and had arranged for them to have tuition. While this seems excessive for primary school, I understand. Education seems to be placing increased emphasis on assessment and tracking, which means parents are terrified that if their kid doesn’t exceed their expected learning level at six years old, they are immediately put in the class that ends up working at McDonald’s.
But what’s wrong with that? The general assumption by parents seems to be that higher attainment leads to better job prospects, which lead to better pay, which leads to happiness. But studies over the past couple of years show that not to be the case. While it is clear that there is a strong correlation between poor education and mental health issues, what has also been found is that the odds of personal happiness are equivalent regardless of levels of educational attainment. I have taken this to mean that I can stop reading with my kids. And, by that, I mean I can stop feeling bad about not doing it. If happiness is not impacted by attainment, then why the hell are we all making our kids unhappy by forcing them to work harder? If they want to study hard, great; but if they don’t, why not just let them be happy slackers?
I have even begun to wonder if a “normal” upbringing might be detrimental to our children. All of the most interesting people had a horrible time as kids. All the best rappers struggled. Kanye West is a notable exception, but in lieu of a terrible upbringing he is trying his hardest to have a truly dreadful adulthood. I am contemplating sending my children out on to the streets for six months to give them a sense of appreciation and a decent backstory.
I’m not even sure that child labour is a bad thing. It has a bad press and we are instinctively opposed, but I think it suffers from the issues of both being poorly regulated and using the wrong children. We should be using children from this country. Our children are spoilt. The lower labour costs will bring us right back into competitive manufacturing and our children might be a little more grateful. Our second son often shouts: “I don’t want to go to school.” How about you go and make iPhones for a couple of years? We’ll see how much you want to go to school then, mate.
This “happiness dilemma” was brought into sharp focus recently when one of our sons asked if he could play on the Xbox on a weekday. (We have a weekends-only policy, mainly because I am trying to make some progress on Grand Theft Auto.) I said no, and he got upset. He told me he didn’t love me any more. Two things occurred to me at this point: 1) I had directly reduced his immediate happiness and 2) Him telling me he didn’t love me had absolutely no effect. In fact, he taught me a valuable lesson on how transient the idea of love can be. It did make me wonder why we were doing it though. What are we training him for? When he grows up, he will be able to play whenever he wants. The obvious argument is we don’t want him playing it too much. But then, why not just let him play and then if it becomes excessive, just say: “You’re playing it a bit too much”? He will argue, we will have to demand he stops, he will then shout and we will have to discipline him. It appears that the reason we have introduced a “weekends-only” policy is so we can have an easier life.
I don’t think my wife and I are doing a bad job of parenting necessarily, but we have no idea how what we are doing is impacting their future happiness, and I am no closer to figuring out how hard to push them at school. I have noticed, however, that our youngest son has cute little boobies, but I haven’t mentioned it. That’s progress.
