This is my last column for 2023. I’m back early in the new year but I thought I would try to be helpful before this exhausting year ends. It doesn’t immediately seem like it, but this is a dangerous place. Advice is a risky thing. You know what they say: Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.

Anyway, after considering all caveats, I do have one modest suggestion about what could be helpful in life, work and politics – try to integrate maths into… how does one describe it… the equation. Life is mathematics. We don’t appreciate it enough and if we did, we might profit from it.

Maths, if you think about it, is just another language. You take symbols and arrange them in a way that conforms to a system you are using, which other people understand and somehow that’s very constructive. I mean, very constructive. The great advantage of maths is that it can make logical ideas really bounce into your consciousness.  

For example, in relationships, consider this equation: HIFTM = NPxN. In this equation, HIFTM stands for “Honey I forgot the milk”, because if you are anything like me, every time you go to the shop you immediately forget what your partner asked you to buy. You also forgot to put what you were supposed to buy in the appropriate phone app for lists. And you didn’t do that because you didn’t think you would need to because you were definitely going to remember. 

Anyway, the result is NPxN, where NP is the same as “No Pudding”, although it could also be some other kind of reward, and N is the number of days that the NP applies. Suddenly the whole process is very deliberate and specific. That’s maths for you. 

But it’s also very flexible. Consider this equation: HIFTM + BIDRTBTP = NPxN3. Once again, HIFTM stands for the milk issue, whereas BIDRTBTP stands for “But I did remember to buy the Porsche”. That results in a substantial increase in N, as you might imagine. 

Someone I listen to often on podcasts is Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business and now a big personality in the US. Some time ago, he wrote a book called The Algebra of Happiness. To be honest, I found the book a little self-referential. Personal anecdotes do make the text come alive, but if there are too many of them, it starts to seem like you are writing a self-help book for yourself rather than for your reader. 

However many partners bicker (and they do a lot), I think there is a huge psychic advantage to being in a long-term relationship.

But he is interesting and smart, so there is that side of it too. And some of his equations are fabulous. The one I particularly like is 1 + 1 > 2. The formula is an injunction to try hard to sustain a relationship or a marriage. It’s strange how the lives of our single friends seem so much more interesting and exciting. Their stories about their Tinder dates seem so much fun, and if not, then amusingly disastrous. 

But, says Galloway, “the prepping, pruning, preening, planning, Tindering, texting, courting, rejecting, Coachella-ing, gaming, and being rejected are exhausting”. More importantly, statistically, being married or in a long-term relationship is enormously beneficial. The household worth of married people grows by about 14% every year. Married couples in their fifties have about 3x the assets of their single peers. 

Why is that? Lots of reasons, Galloway says: You share expenses and responsibilities; you both tend to make better decisions; you both allocate your attention capital on things that grow, like your career, not on what is most probably inconsequential like your attractiveness to others. However many partners bicker (and they do a lot), I think there is a huge psychic advantage to being in a long-term relationship. Sharing your life makes it more real and that applies not just to your partner but to your friends and acquaintances too. 

Galloway has another mathematical tool, the Venn diagram, and the one he uses has to do with your career. The Venn diagram here consists of three concentric circles that read, “things that you don’t suck at”, “things you might be good at”, and “things people will pay you to do”. The point is to focus your career on the intersection of the three circles. 

You have to compromise because the structure of a Venn diagram requires you to tip your hat, not just at one, but all three. The people who speak at university graduations will tell you to follow your passion or never give up. There is a good chance, a) they didn’t, and b) they are already rich. Following your passion to the exclusion of the other two circles is a very high-risk game and mostly ends badly.

Read more in Daily Maverick: After the Bell: A paean to Smuts’s contradictory contribution to human rights 

This is rather similar to the Japanese notion of “ikigai”, which adds the dimension of “things the world needs”. This construction demonstrates that your passion will probably fall between the things you love and what you are good at; your profession would be the intersection between what you are good at and what you are paid for; and your mission would be the intersection between what you love and what the world needs. 

In theory, the intersection between what you are paid for and what the world needs is your vocation, but I think that’s kinda arb. The concept needed a description, but it doesn’t really make sense to me. Anyway, ikigai, or to put it another way, nirvana, lies in the intersection of all four.  

My own preference would be to put it into a simple equation, and I’m rather drawn to the idea that you need three things for happiness: Someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to. 

Another way to describe that would be to just add Love, Integrity, Function and Expectation. And if that’s the case, then Happiness = LIFE. There is an equation to aspire to. DM