Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Gilbert

  The Limits of Prefeeling

  We can’t see or feel two things at once, and the brain has strict priorities about what it will see, hear, and feel and what it will ignore. Imagination’s requests are often denied. Both the sensory and emotional systems enforce this policy, and yet, we seem to recognize when the sensory systems are turning down imagination’s requests but fail to recognize when the emotional system is doing the same. For instance, if we try to imagine a penguin while we are looking at an ostrich, the brain’s policy won’t allow it. We understand this, and thus we never become confused and mistakenly conclude that the large bird with the long neck that we are currently seeing is, in fact, the penguin that we were attempting to imagine. The visual experience that results from a flow of information that originates in the world is called vision; the visual experience that results from a flow of information that originates in memory is called mental imagery; and while both kinds of experiences are produced in the visual cortex, it takes a great deal of vodka before we mix them up.24 One of the hallmarks of a visual experience is that we can almost always tell whether it is the product of a real or an imagined object. But not so with emotional experience. The emotional experience that results from a flow of information that originates in the world is called feeling; the emotional experience that results from a flow of information that originates in memory is called prefeeling; and mixing them up is one of the world’s most popular sports.

  For example, in one study, researchers telephoned people in different parts of the country and asked them how satisfied they were with their lives.25 When people who lived in cities that happened to be having nice weather that day imagined their lives, they reported that their lives were relatively happy; but when people who lived in cities that happened to be having bad weather that day imagined their lives, they reported that their lives were relatively unhappy. These people tried to answer the researcher’s question by imagining their lives and then asking themselves how they felt when they did so. Their brains enforced the Reality First policy and insisted on reacting to real weather instead of imaginary lives. But apparently, these people didn’t know their brains were doing this and thus they mistook reality-induced feelings for imagination-induced prefeelings.

  In a related study, researchers asked people who were working out at a local gym to predict how they would feel if they became lost while hiking and had to spend the night in the woods with neither food nor water.26 Specifically, they were asked to predict whether their hunger or their thirst would be more unpleasant. Some people made this prediction just after they had worked out on a treadmill (thirsty group), and some made this prediction before they worked out on a treadmill (nonthirsty group). The results showed that 92 percent of the people in the thirsty group predicted that if they were lost in the woods, thirst would be more unpleasant than hunger, but only 61 percent of the people in the nonthirsty group made that prediction. Apparently, the thirsty people tried to answer the researcher’s question by imagining being lost in the woods without food and water and then asking themselves how they felt when they did so. But their brains enforced the Reality First policy and insisted on reacting to the real workout rather than the imaginary hike. Because these people didn’t know their brains were doing this, they confused their feelings and prefeelings.

  You’ve probably been in a similar conundrum yourself. You’ve had an awful day—the cat peed on the rug, the dog peed on the cat, the washing machine is busted, World Wrestling has been preempted by Masterpiece Theatre—and you naturally feel out of sorts. If at that moment you try to imagine how much you would enjoy playing cards with your buddies the next evening, you may mistakenly attribute feelings that are due to the misbehavior of real pets and real appliances (“I feel annoyed”) to your imaginary companions (“I don’t think I’ll go because Nick always ticks me off”). Indeed, one of the hallmarks of depression is that when depressed people think about future events, they cannot imagine liking them very much.27 Vacation? Romance? A night on the town? No thanks, I’ll just sit here in the dark. Their friends get tired of seeing them flail about in a thick blue funk, and they tell them that this too shall pass, that it is always darkest before the dawn, that every dog has its day, and several other important clichés. But from the depressed person’s point of view, all the flailing makes perfectly good sense because when she imagines the future, she finds it difficult to feel happy today and thus difficult to believe that she will feel happy tomorrow.

  We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present. But rather than recognizing that this is the inevitable result of the Reality First policy, we mistakenly assume that the future event is the cause of the unhappiness we feel when we think about it. Our confusion seems terribly obvious to those who are standing on the sidelines, saying things like “You’re feeling low right now because Pa got drunk and fell off the porch, Ma went to jail for whupping Pa, and your pickup truck got repossessed—but everything will seem different next week and you’ll really wish you’d decided to go with us to the opera.” At some level we recognize that our friends are probably right. Nonetheless, when we try to overlook, ignore, or set aside our current gloomy state and make a forecast about how we will feel tomorrow, we find that it’s a lot like trying to imagine the taste of marshmallow while chewing liver.28 It is only natural that we should imagine the future and then consider how doing so makes us feel, but because our brains are hell-bent on responding to current events, we mistakenly conclude that we will feel tomorrow as we feel today.

  Onward

  I’ve been waiting a long, long time to show someone this cartoon (figure 12), which I clipped from a newspaper in 1983 and have kept tacked to one bulletin board or another ever since. It never fails to delight me. The sponge is being asked to imagine without limits—to envision what it might like to be if the entire universe of possibilities were open to it—and the most exotic thing it can imagine becoming is an arthropod. The cartoonist isn’t making fun of sponges, of course; he’s making fun of us. Each of us is trapped in a place, a time, and a circumstance, and our attempts to use our minds to transcend those boundaries are, more often than not, ineffective. Like the sponge, we think we are thinking outside the box only because we can’t see how big the box really is. Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception. The fact that these two processes must run on the same platform means that we are sometimes confused about which one is running. We assume that what we feel as we imagine the future is what we’ll feel when we get there, but in fact, what we feel as we imagine the future is often a response to what’s happening in the present. The time-share arrangement between perception and imagination is one of the causes of presentism, but it is not the only one. So if the train hasn’t yet arrived at your stop, if you aren’t quite ready to turn out the light and go to sleep, or if the folks at Starbucks aren’t giving you dirty looks as they get out the mops, let’s explore another.

  Fig. 12.

  CHAPTER 7

  Time Bombs

  “And yet not cloy thy lips with loathed satiety,

  But rather famish them amid their plenty,

  Making them red and pale with fresh variety—

  Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty.

  A summer’s day will seem an hour but short,

  Being wasted in such time-beguiling sport.”

  Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

  NO ONE HAS EVER WITNESSED the passage of a flying Winnebago, and everyone has witnessed the passage of time. So why is it so much easier to imagine the former than the latter? Because as unlikely as it is that a twenty-thousand-pound recreational vehicle could ever achieve sufficient lift to become airborne, a flying Winnebago would at least look like something, and thus we have no trouble producing a mental image of one. Our extraordinary talent for creating mental images of concrete objects is one of the reasons why we
function so effectively in the physical world.1 If you imagine a grapefruit sitting atop a round oatmeal box and then imagine tilting the box away from you, you can actually preview the grapefruit as it falls, and you can see that it will fall toward you when you tilt the box quickly but fall away from you when you tilt the box slowly. Such acts of imagination allow you to reason about the things you are imagining and hence solve important problems in the real world, such as how to get a grapefruit into your lap when you really need one. But time is no grapefruit. It has no color, shape, size, or texture. It cannot be poked, peeled, prodded, pushed, painted, or pierced. Time is not an object but an abstraction, hence it does not lend itself to imagery, which is why filmmakers are forced to represent the passage of time with contrivances that involve visible objects, such as calendar leaves blowing in the wind or clocks spinning at warp speed. And yet, predicting our emotional futures requires that we think in and about and across swathes of time. If we can’t create a mental image of an abstract concept such as time, then how do we think and reason about it?

  SpaceThink

  When people need to reason about something abstract, they tend to imagine something concrete that the abstract thing is like and then reason about that instead.2 For most of us, space is the concrete thing that time is like.3 Studies reveal that people all over the world imagine time as though it were a spatial dimension, which is why we say that the past is behind us and the future is in front of us, that we are moving toward our senescence and looking back on our infancy, and that days pass us by in much the same way that a flying Winnebago might. We think and speak as though we were actually moving away from a yesterday that is located over there and toward a tomorrow that is located 180 degrees about. When we draw a time line, those of us who speak English put the past on the left, those of us who speak Arabic put the past on the right,4 and those of us who speak Mandarin put the past on the bottom.5 But regardless of our native tongue, we all put the past someplace—and the future someplace else. Indeed, when we want to solve a problem that involves time—for instance, “If I ate breakfast before I walked the dog but after I read the newspaper, then what did I do first?”—most of us imagine putting three objects (breakfast, dog, newspaper) in an orderly line and then checking to see which one is furthest to the left (or right, or bottom, depending on our language). Reasoning by metaphor is an ingenious technique that allows us to remedy our weaknesses by capitalizing on our strengths—using things we can visualize to think, talk, and reason about things we can’t.

  Alas, metaphors can mislead as well as illuminate, and our tendency to imagine time as a spatial dimension does both of these things. For example, imagine that you and a friend have managed to get a table at a chic new restaurant with a three-month waiting list, and that after browsing the menus you have discovered that you both want the wasabi-encrusted partridge. Now, each of you has sufficient social grace to recognize that placing identical orders at a fine restaurant is roughly equivalent to wearing matching mouse ears in the main dining room, so you decide instead that one of you will order the partridge, the other will order the venison gumbo, and that you will then share them oh so fashionably. You do this not only to avoid being mistaken for tourists but also because you believe that variety is the spice of life. There are very few homilies involving spices, and this one is as good as they get. Indeed, if we were to measure your pleasure after the meal, we would probably find that you and your friend are happier with the sharing arrangement than either of you would have been had you each had a full order of partridge to yourselves.

  But something strange happens when we extend this problem in time. Imagine that the maître d’ is so impressed by your sophisticated ensemble that he invites you (but alas, not your friend, who really could use a new look) to return on the first Monday of every month for the next year to enjoy a free meal at his best table. Because the kitchen occasionally runs short of ingredients, he asks you to decide right now what you would like to eat on each of your return visits so that he can be fully prepared to pamper you in the style to which you are quickly becoming accustomed. You flip back through the menu. You hate rabbit, veal is politically incorrect, you are appropriately apathetic about vegetable lasagna, and as you scan the list you decide that there are just four dishes that strike your rapidly swelling fancy: the partridge, the venison gumbo, the blackened mahimahi, and the saffron seafood risotto. The partridge is clearly your favorite, and even without a pear tree you are tempted to order twelve of them. But that would be so gauche, so déclassé, and what’s more, you would miss the spice of life. So you ask the maître d’ to prepare the partridge every other month, and to fill in the remaining six meals with equal episodes of gumbo, mahimahi, and risotto.

  You may be one snappy dresser, mon ami, but when it comes to food, you have just cooked your own goose.6 Researchers studied this experience by inviting volunteers to come to the laboratory for a snack once a week for several weeks.7 They asked some of the volunteers (choosers) to choose all their snacks in advance, and—just as you did—the choosers usually opted for a healthy dose of variety. Next, the researchers asked a new group of volunteers to come to the lab once a week for several weeks. They fed some of these volunteers their favorite snack every time (no-variety group), and they fed other volunteers their favorite snack on most occasions and their second-favorite snack on others (variety group). When they measured the volunteers’ satisfaction over the course of the study, they found that volunteers in the no-variety group were more satisfied than were volunteers in the variety group. In other words, variety made people less happy, not more. Now wait a second—there’s something fishy here, and it isn’t the mahimahi. How can variety be the spice of life when one sits down with a friend at a fancy restaurant but the bane of one’s existence when one orders snacks to be consumed in successive weeks?

  Among life’s cruelest truths is this one: Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition.8 Just compare the first and last time your child said “Mama” or your partner said “I love you” and you’ll know exactly what I mean. When we have an experience—hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room—on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage. But human beings have discovered two devices that allow them to combat this tendency: variety and time. One way to beat habituation is to increase the variety of one’s experiences (“Hey, honey, I have a kinky idea—let’s watch the sun set from the kitchen this time”).9 Another way to beat habituation is to increase the amount of time that separates repetitions of the experience. Clinking champagne glasses and kissing one’s spouse at the stroke of midnight would be a relatively dull exercise were it to happen every evening, but if one does it on New Year’s Eve and then allows a full year to pass before doing it again, the experience will offer an endless bouquet of delights because a year is plenty long enough for the effects of habituation to disappear. The point here is that time and variety are two ways to avoid habituation, and if you have one, then you don’t need the other. In fact (and this is the really critical point, so please put down your fork and listen), when episodes are sufficiently separated in time, variety is not only unnecessary—it can actually be costly.

  I can illustrate this fact with some precision if you allow me to make a few reasonable assumptions. First, imagine that we can use a machine called a hedonimeter to measure a person’s pleasure in hedons. Let’s start by making a favoring assumption: Let’s assume that the first bite of partridge provides you with, say, fifty hedons, whereas the first bite of gumbo provides you with forty hedons. This is what it means to say that you favor partridge over gumbo. Second, let’s make a habituation-rate assumption: Let’s assume that once you take a bite of a dish, each subs
equent bite of the same dish taken within, say, ten minutes, provides one less hedon than the bite before it did. Finally, let’s make a consumption-rate assumption: Let’s assume that you normally eat at the brisk pace of one bite every thirty seconds. Figure 13 shows you what happens to your pleasure if we make these assumptions about favoring, habituation rate, and consumption rate. As you can see, the best way to maximize your pleasure in this case is to start with the partridge and then switch to gumbo after taking ten bites (which happens after five minutes). Why switch? Because, as the lines show, the eleventh bite of partridge (taken at minute 5.5) would bring you a mere thirty-nine hedons, whereas a bite of the as-yet-untasted gumbo would yield forty. So this is the precise point in the meal at which you and your friend should trade plates, seats, or at least mouse ears.10 But now look at figure 14 and notice how radically things change when we extend this gastronomic episode in time by altering your consumption rate. When your bites are separated by anything greater than ten minutes (in this case, fifteen minutes), then habituation no longer occurs, which means that every bite is as good as the first and a bite of gumbo is never better than a bite of partridge. In other words, if you could eat slowly enough, then variety would not only be unnecessary, it would actually be costly, because a bite of gumbo would always provide less pleasure than yet another bite of partridge.