Optimize for relationships

I call this the “Jaye Test.” Does your home (and neighborhood) act as a center of gravity for your friends and family or does it isolate you in favor of status and storage?

This difference helps explain why Europeans report higher well-being than their American counterparts, despite having smaller homes and smaller... See more

Prioritize your neighborhood

Neighborhoods drive our happiness (or unhappiness) more than we think.

When Lina Martinez, director of POLIS, the Center for Wellbeing Studies at Universidad Icesi in Colombia, studied the happiness of households in the city of Cali, she couldn’t find much difference between poorer and richer areas. “Their happiness is... See more

In his 2024 peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Public Economics, the assistant professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands found that just the presence of bulky domiciles down the street virtually erased any satisfaction people gained from moving into their own bigger homes. “Larger homes do not increase well-being per se,”... See more

Then there’s the tax of moving to distant, affordable suburbs or taking out big mortgages: More debt, longer commutes, more maintenance and less time for socializing and exercise, among other trade-offs. We can end up, Rojas said, overworked and under-relating.

Finally, there’s the coup de grâce of contentment : keeping up with the Joneses.

“Compar... See more