ShouldLabs is a project that sprung from a single question, “Is life as complicated as we think it is?” Certainly life is complex, with hundreds of thousands little choices made every, single day. In one sense, all of these choices, from where you eat lunch this afternoon to how many pairs of Rocky and Bullwinkle Underoos you’ve owned over the course of your life, shape who you are and where you will end up, but in one sense they also all lead inexorable to the heat death of the Universe, so this might not be the best framework to explore the actual value of choices in our lives.
Instead of looking at the millions of different decisions that trivially affect our lives, we decided to take a look at a small number (less than 20) of common choices that make up the bulk (ahem) of human experience in a modern, industrial society. These are things like when and if you get married, how much debt to hold, and how long to stay in school. All of these choices have been correlated to increases or decreases in Health, Wealth, and Happiness through independent scientific research.
ShouldLabs is about categorizing and synthesizing these relationships, and from them developing a framework for helping you understand your major decisions and potentially living a more satisfying life.
What ShouldLabs Is Not
We are not here to tell you how to live your life. Statistics, even that best ones, are just that. They represent the average outcomes of the average members of a population under study. Chances are extraordinarily good that all people, everywhere, fall outside of the range that statistics would imply on at least some of the choices we study. Even if that were not clearly and irreversible true the categorizations we make are imperfect at best, based on relatively rough estimates of the impacts each choice has on Health, Wealth and Happiness from scientific results that are often purely correlational and are sometimes rather weak. Where possible we have tried to enumerate some of these weaknesses in our “Questions” section, but much of this research is ongoing and errors will have been made.
What we can do is help you understand how certain choices might impact your life, and look at some of the strongest evidence we could find for these impacts. Making informed decisions and being happy with those decisions is the best we can hope to do in most cases and ShouldLabs ultimately should be a tool for informing those decisions.
What’s Next
Ultimately we are driven to improve the data available, and to that end would love for you to take our Life Choices Survey. This Survey will help us test the validity of our model, and will give us stronger footing on which to base the kinds of predictions and proscriptions you might have come here looking for. It might also tell us we’re full of crap, but that’s the entire point of science.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we highly suggest you take a look at The Questions that we are trying to answer and when you’re done there, feel free to take our Life Choices Survey.