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Stumbling on Happiness
We like to frolic in the best of all imaginary tomorrows–and why shouldn’t we? After all, we fill our photo albums with pictures of birthday parties and tropical holidays rather than car wrecks and emergency-room visits because we want to be happy when we stroll down Memory Lane, so why shouldn’t we take the same attitude toward our strolls up Imagination Avenue? Although imagining happy futures may make us feel happy, it can also have some troubling consequences. Researchers have discovered that when people find it easy to imagine an event, they overestimate the likelihood that it will actually occur.29 Because most of us get so much more practice imagining good than bad events, we tend to overestimate the likelihood that good events will actually happen to us, which leads us to be unrealistically optimistic about our futures.
For instance, American college students expect to live longer, stay married longer and travel to Europe more often than averages30. They believe they are more likely to have a gifted child, to own their own home and to appear in the newspaper, and less likely to have a heart attack, venereal disease, a drinking problem, an auto accident, a broken bone or gum disease. Americans of all ages expect their futures to be an improvement on their presents31 and although citizens of other nations are not quite as optimistic as Americans, they also tend to imagine that their futures will be brighter than those of their peers.32 These overly optimistic expectations about our personal futures are not easily undone: experiencing an earthquake causes people to become temporarily realistic about their risk of dying in a future disaster, but within a couple of weeks even earthquake survivors return to their normal level of unfounded optimisms.33 Indeed, events that challenge our optimistic beliefs can sometimes make us more rather than less optimistic. One study found that cancer patients were more optimistic about their futures than were their healthy counterparts.34
Of course, the futures that our brains insist on simulating are not all wine, kisses and tasty bivalves. They are often mundane, irksome, stupid, unpleasant or downright frightening, and people who seek treatment for their inability to stop thinking about the future are usually worrying about it rather than revelling in it. Just as a loose tooth seems to beg for wiggling, we all seem perversely compelled to imagine disasters and tragedies from time to time. On the way to the airport we imagine a future scenario in which the plane takes off without us and we miss the important meeting with the client. On the way to the dinner party we imagine a future scenario in which everyone hands the hostess a bottle of wine while we greet her empty-handed and embarrassed. On the way to the medical centre we imagine a future scenario in which our doctor inspects our chest X-ray, frowns and says something ominous such as ‘Let’s talk about your options.’ These dire images make us feel dreadful–quite literally–so why do we go to such great lengths to construct them?
Two reasons. First, anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact. For instance, volunteers in one study received a series of twenty electric shocks and were warned three seconds before the onset of each one.35 Some volunteers (the high-shock group) received twenty high-intensity shocks to their right ankles. Other volunteers (the low-shock group) received three high-intensity shocks and seventeen low-intensity shocks. Although the low-shock group received fewer volts than the high-shock group did, their hearts beat faster, they sweated more profusely and they rated themselves as more afraid. Why? Because volunteers in the low-shock group received shocks of different intensities at different times, which made it impossible for them to anticipate their futures. Apparently, three big jolts that one cannot foresee are more painful than twenty big jolts that one can.36
The second reason why we take such pains to imagine unpleasant events is that fear, worry and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives. We motivate employees, children, spouses and pets to do the right thing by dramatizing the unpleasant consequences of their misbehaviours, and so too do we motivate ourselves by imagining the unpleasant tomorrows that await us should we decide to go light on the sunscreen and heavy on the éclairs. Forecasts can be ‘fearcasts.’37 whose purpose is not to predict the future so much as to preclude it, and studies have shown that this strategy is often an effective way to motivate people to engage in prudent, prophylactic behavior.38 In short, we sometimes imagine dark futures just to scare our own pants off.
Prospection and Control
Prospection can provide pleasure and prevent pain, and this is one of the reasons why our brains stubbornly insist on churning out thoughts of the future. But it is not the most important reason. Americans gladly pay millions–perhaps even billions–of dollars every year to psychics, investment advisors, spiritual leaders, weather forecasters and other assorted hucksters who claim they can predict the future. Those of us who subsidize these fortune-telling industries do not want to know what is likely to happen just for the joy of anticipating it. We want to know what is likely to happen so that we can do something about it. If interest rates are going to skyrocket next month, then we want to shift our money out of bonds right now. If it is going to rain this afternoon, then we want to grab an umbrella this morning. Knowledge is power, and the most important reason why our brains insist on simulating the future even when we’d rather be here now, enjoying a goldfish moment, is that our brains want to control the experiences we are about to have.
But why should we want to have control over our future experiences? On the face of it, this seems about as nonsensical as asking why we should want to have control over our television sets and our automobiles. But indulge me. We have a large frontal lobe so that we can look into the future, we look into the future so that we can make predictions about it, we make predictions about it so that we can control it–but why do we want to control it at all? Why not just let the future unfold as it will and experience it as it does? Why not be here now and there then? There are two answers to this question, one of which is surprisingly right and the other of which is surprisingly wrong.
The surprisingly right answer is that people find it gratifying to exercise control–not just for the futures it buys them, but for the exercise itself. Being effective–changing things, influencing things, making things happen–is one of the fundamental needs with which human brains seem to be naturally endowed, and much of our behavior from infancy onward is simply an expression of this penchant for control.39 Before our butts hit the very first nappy, we already have a throbbing desire to suck, sleep, poo and make things happen. It takes us a while to get around to fulfilling the last of these desires only because it takes us a while to figure out that we have fingers, but when we do, look out world. Toddlers squeal with delight when they knock over a stack of blocks, push a ball or squash a cupcake on their foreheads. Why? Because they did it, that’s why. Look, Mum, my hand made that happen. The room is different because I was in it. I thought about falling blocks, and poof, they fell.
The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless and depressed.40 And occasionally dead. In one study, researchers gave elderly residents of a local nursing home a house-plant. They told half the residents that they were in control of the plant’s care and feeding (high-control group), and they told the remaining residents that a staff person would take responsibility for the plant’s well-being (low-control group).441 Six months later, 30 per cent of the residents in the low-control group had died, compared with only 15 per cent of the residents in the high-control group. A follow-up study confirmed the importance of perceived control for the welfare of nursing-home residents but had an unexpected and unfortunate end.42 Researchers arranged for student volunteers to pay regular visits to nursing-home residents. Residents in the high-control group were allowed to control the timing and duration of the student’s visit (‘Please come visit me next Thursday for an hour’), and residents in low-control group were not (‘I’ll come visit you next Thursday for an hour’). After two months, residents in the high-control group were happier, healthier, more active and taking fewer medications than those in the low-control group. At this point the researchers concluded their study and discontinued the student visits. Several months later they were chagrined to learn that a disproportionate number of residents who had been in the high-control group had died. Only in retrospect did the cause of this tragedy seem clear. The residents who had been given control, and who had benefited measurably from that control while they had it, were inadvertently robbed of control when the study ended.
Apparently, gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any at all.
Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable. For instance, people bet more money on games of chance when their opponents seem incompetent than competent–as though they believed they could control the random drawing of cards from a deck and thus take advantage of a weak opponent.43 People feel more certain that they will win a lottery if they can control the number on their tickets,44 and they feel more confident that they will win a dice toss if they can throw the dice themselves.45 People will wager more money on dice that have not yet been tossed than on dice that have already been tossed but whose outcome is not yet known,46 and they will bet more if they, rather than someone else, are allowed to decide which number will count as a win.47 In each of these instances, people behave in a way that would be utterly absurd if they believed that they had no control over an uncontrollable event. But if somewhere deep down inside they believed that they could exert control–even one smidgen of an iota of control–then their behavior would be perfectly reasonable. And deep down inside, that’s precisely what most of us seem to believe. Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts! Perhaps the strangest thing about this illusion of control is not that it happens but that it seems to confer many of the psychological benefits of genuine control. In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed,48 who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situations.49 These and other findings have led some researchers to conclude that the feeling of control–whether real or illusory–is one of the wellsprings of mental health.50 So if the question is ‘Why should we want to control our futures?’ then the surprisingly right answer is that it feels good to do so–period. Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy. The act of steering one’s boat down the river of time is a source of pleasure, regardless of one’s port of call.
Now, at this point you probably believe two things. First, you probably believe that if you never heard the phrase “the river of time” again, it would be too soon. Amen. Second, you probably believe that even if the act of steering a metaphorical boat down a clichéd river is a source of pleasure and well-being, where the boat goes matters much, much more. Playing captain is a joy all its own, but the real reason why we want to steer our ships is so that we can get them to Hanalei instead of Jersey City. The nature of a place determines how we feel upon arrival, and our uniquely human ability to think about the extended future allows us to choose the best destinations and avoid the worst. We are the apes that learned to look forward because doing so enables us to shop among the many fates that might befall us and select the best one. Other animals must experience an event in order to learn about its pleasures and pains, but our powers of foresight allow us to imagine that which has not yet happened and hence spare ourselves the hard lessons of experience. We needn’t reach out and touch an ember to know that it will hurt to do so, and we needn’t experience abandonment, scorn, eviction, demotion, disease or divorce to know that all of these are undesirable ends that we should do our best to avoid. We want–and we should want–to control the direction of our boat because some futures are better than others, and even from this distance we should be able to tell which are which.
This idea is so obvious that it barely seems worth mentioning, but I’m going to mention it anyway. Indeed, I am going to spend the rest of this book mentioning it because it will probably take more than a few mentions to convince you that what looks like an obvious idea is, in fact, the surprisingly wrong answer to our question. We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain–not because the boat won’t respond, and not because we can’t find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope. Just as we experience illusions of eyesight (‘Isn’t it strange how one queue looks longer than the other even though it isn’t?’) and illusions of hindsight (‘Isn’t it strange how I can’t remember taking out the garbage even though I did?’), so too do we experience illusions of foresight–and all three types of illusion are explained by the same basic principles of human psychology.
Onward
To be perfectly honest, I won’t just be mentioning the surprisingly wrong answer; I’ll be pounding and pummelling it until it gives up and goes home. The surprisingly wrong answer is apparently so sensible and so widely believed that only a protracted thrashing has any hope of expunging it from our conventional wisdom. So before the grudge match begins, let me share with you my plan of attack.
• In Part II, ‘Subjectivity’, I will tell you about the science of happiness. We all steer ourselves toward the futures that we think will make us happy, but what does that word really mean? And how can we ever hope to achieve solid, scientific answers to questions about something as gossamer as a feeling?
• We use our eyes to look into space and our imaginations to look into time. Just as our eyes sometimes lead us to see things as they are not, our imaginations sometimes lead us to foresee things as they will not be. Imagination suffers from three shortcomings that give rise to the illusions of foresight with which this book is chiefly concerned. In Part III, ‘Realism’, I will tell you about the first shortcoming: imagination works so quickly, quietly, and effectively that we are insufficiently sceptical of its products.
• In Part IV, ‘Presentism’, I will tell you about the second shortcoming: Imagination’s products are…well, not particularly imaginative, which is why the imagined future often looks so much like the actual present.
• In Part V, ‘Rationalization’, I will tell you about the third shortcoming: imagination has a hard time telling us how we will think about the future when we get there. If we have trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing how we will see them when they happen.
• Finally, in Part VI, ‘Corrigibility’, I will tell you why illusions of foresight are not easily remedied by personal experience or by the wisdom we inherit from our grandmothers. I will conclude by telling you about a simple remedy for these illusions that you will almost certainly not accept.
By the time you finish these chapters, I hope you will understand why most of us spend so much of our lives turning rudders and hoisting sails, only to find that Shangri-la isn’t what and where we thought it would be.
PART II Subjectivity
subjectivity (sub•dzėk•ti-v
CHAPTER 2 The View from in Here
But, O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!
Shakespeare, As You Like It
LORI AND REBA SCHAPPEL may be twins, but they are very different people. Reba is a somewhat shy teetotaler who has recorded an award-winning album of country music. Lori, who is outgoing, wisecracking and rather fond of strawberry daiquiris, works in a hospital and wants someday to marry and have children. They occasionally argue, as sisters do, but most of the time they get on well, complimenting each other, teasing each other and finishing each other’s sentences. In fact, there are just two unusual things about Lori and Reba. The first is that they share a blood supply, part of a skull, and some brain tissue, having been joined at the forehead since birth. One side of Lori’s forehead is attached to one side of Reba’s, and they have spent every moment of their lives locked together, face-to-face. The second unusual thing about Lori and Reba is that they are happy–not merely resigned or contented, but joyful, playful and optimistic.1 Their unusual life presents many challenges, of course, but as they often note, whose doesn’t? When asked about the possibility of undergoing surgical separation, Reba speaks for both of them: ‘Our point of view is no, straight out no. Why would you want to do that? For all the money in China, why? You’d be ruining two lives in the process.’2
So here’s the question: if this were your life rather than theirs, how would you feel? If you said, ‘Joyful, playful and optimistic,’ then you are not playing the game and I am going to give you another chance. Try to be honest instead of correct. The honest answer is ‘Despondent, desperate and depressed’. Indeed, it seems clear that no right-minded person could really be happy under such circumstances, which is why the conventional medical wisdom has it that conjoined twins should be separated at birth, even at the risk of killing one or both. As a prominent medical historian wrote: ‘Many singletons, especially surgeons, find it inconceivable that life is worth living as a conjoined twin, inconceivable that one would not be willing to risk all–mobility, reproductive ability, the life of one or both twins–to try for separation.’3 In other words, not only does everyone know that conjoined twins will be dramatically less happy than normal people, but everyone also knows that conjoined lives are so utterly worthless that dangerous separation surgeries are an ethical imperative. And yet, standing against the backdrop of our certainty about these matters are the twins themselves. When we ask Lori and Reba how they feel about their situation, they tell us that they wouldn’t have it any other way. In an exhaustive search of the medical literature, the same medical historian found the ‘desire to remain together to be so widespread among communicating conjoined twins as to be practically universal’.4 Something is terribly wrong here. But what?
There seem to be just two possibilities. Someone–either Lori and Reba, or everyone else in the world–is making a dreadful mistake when they talk about happiness. Because we are the everyone else in question, it is only natural that we should be attracted to the former conclusion, dismissing the twins’ claim to happiness with offhand rejoinders such as ‘Oh, they’re just saying that’ or ‘They may think they’re happy, but they’re not’ or the ever popular ‘They don’t know what happiness really is’ (usually spoken as if we do). Fair enough. But like the claims they dismiss, these rejoinders are also claims–scientific claims and philosophical claims–that presume answers to questions that have vexed scientists and philosophers for millennia. What are we all talking about when we make such claims about happiness?
Dancing About Architecture
There are thousands of books on happiness, and most of them start by asking what happiness really is. As readers quickly learn, this is approximately equivalent to beginning a pilgrimage by marching directly into the first available tar pit, because happiness really is nothing more or less than a word that we word makers can use to indicate anything we please. The problem is that people seem pleased to use this one word to indicate a host of different things, which has created a tremendous terminological mess on which several fine scholarly careers have been based. If one slops around in this mess long enough, one comes to see that most disagreements about what happiness really is are semantic disagreements about whether the word ought to be used to indicate this or that, rather than scientific or philosophical disagreements about the nature of this and that. What are the this and the that that happiness most often refers to? The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.
Feeling Happy
Emotional happiness is the most basic of the trio–so basic, in fact, that we become tongue-tied when we try to define it, as though some bratty child had just challenged us to say what the word the means and in the process made a truly compelling case for corporal punishment. Emotional happiness is a phrase for a feeling, an experience, a subjective state, and thus it has no objective referent in the physical world. If we ambled down to the corner pub and met an alien from another planet who asked us to define that feeling, we would either point to the objects in the world that tend to bring it about, or we would mention other feelings that it is like. In fact, this is the only thing we can do when we are asked to define a subjective experience. Consider, for instance, how we might define a very simple subjective experience, such as yellow. You may think yellow is a colour, but it isn’t. It’s a psychological state. It is what human beings with working visual apparatus experience when their eyes are struck by light with a wavelength of 580 nanometers. If our alien friend at the pub asked us to define what we were experiencing when we claimed to be seeing yellow, we would probably start by pointing to a mustard jar, a lemon, a rubber ducky, and saying, ‘See all those things? The thing that is common to the visual experiences you have when you look at them is called yellow.’ Or we might try to define the experience called yellow in terms of other experiences. ‘Yellow? Well, it is sort of like the experience of orange, with a little less of the experience of red.’ If the alien confided that it could not figure out what the duck, the lemon and the mustard jar had in common, and that it had never had the experience of orange or red, then it would be time to order another pint and change the topic to the universal sport of ice hockey, because there is just no other way to define yellow. Philosophers like to say that subjective states are ‘irreducible’, which is to say that nothing we point to, nothing we can compare them with, and nothing we can say about their neurological underpinnings can fully substitute for the experiences themselves.5 The musician Frank Zappa is reputed to have said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and so it is with talking about yellow. If our new drinking buddy lacks the machinery for colour vision, then our experience of yellow is one that it will never share–or never know it shares–no matter how well we point and talk.6