Well, you might think, not everyone knows how to handle money, and there are bound to be people for whom it causes more problems than it solves. If you are like me, you think that you would deal with it just fine, thank you very much. Surely, for us, the opportunities the money opened would far outweigh the hassles. More than likely, we would both be wrong. McNabb's experiences may seem extreme, but they are not at all uncommon. One study found that virtually all the million-dollar winners in New Jersey experienced harassment and threats and that many lived in fear. Most ended up moving to avoid the unending phone calls and unexpected visitors, often to strange neighborhoods where they felt isolated from their friends and family. Salvatore Lenochi, for example, was bombarded with annoying phone calls from strangers, including one from a man who phoned every day demanding money for his invalid wife and himself. Someone threatened Lenochi's children with a knife. Family members became resentful of his good fortune. "Now I have the money and I'm not sure if I wasn't better off before," Lenochi said. A sociologist who interviewed lottery winners summarized it this way: "They have won the battle against poverty and deprivation, but are losing the war; they are financial successes but social and psychological causalities."'
If people knew that winning the lottery would not make them any happier, and might even cause substantial misery, they might think twice before plunking down their hard-earned dollars for lottery tickets. And yet state lotteries continue to earn billions of dollars, which is testimony to the conviction so many people have money can, indeed, buy them love (and happiness).
"I'LL NEVER GET OVER IT"
A few years ago, my friend Carolyn's mother died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine. Carolyn was devastated and she said she was sure that she would never get over her grief. And in some ways she was right. Five years later, Carolyn still misses her mother and often feels sad when she thinks about her. But the stomach-gnawing anguish she experienced in the days after her mother's death subsided little by little, more quickly than she expected. Before long, Carolyn was the funny, energetic, outgoing person she always was, who loves to solve difficult problems at work, spend time with her children, and play tennis.
If Carolyn could wave a magic wand and bring her mother back to life, she surely would. Nonetheless, she would be the first to admit that she recovered from her mother's death more quickly than she anticipated. She would also agree that, as tragic as her mother's early death was, good things came out of it, such as becoming closer to her father. After her mother's funeral she taught her father how to use e-mail and now keeps in much closer touch with him, exchanging e-mail several times a week.
Carolyn's experiences are consistent with research that finds that the bereavement process often unfolds in ways people do not anticipate. Many people either are not affected at all by the loss of a loved one or recover surprisingly quickly from intense grief. One study found that 30 percent of parents who lost babies as a result of sudden infant death syndrome never experienced significant depression. Another found that 82 percent of bereaved spouses were doing well two years after the death.'
To be sure, many people are devastated by the death of loved ones, especially if the death occurs unexpectedly. One study found that in the week after a spouse dies, the suicide rate increases by 70 times for men and 10 times for women. Another found that four to seven years after losing a spouse or child in a motor vehicle crash, a significant proportion of people were depressed. Thirty-two percent said that they could not "shake off the blues" on at least three to four days in the past week, compared with 11 percent of people who had not lost a spouse or child.'
Why do some people recover quickly whereas others do not? One important factor is the extent to which people are able to find some meaning in the loss. People who find meaning, such as believing that the death was God's will, that their loved one had accepted dying, or that death is a natural part of the life cycle, recover more quickly than people who are unable to find any meaning in the loss. Another important factor is the extent to which people find something positive in the experience, such as the belief that they have grown as a person, gained perspective, or, like Carolyn, that the death has brought other family members closer together.
The death of a loved one, for example, can create new opportunities for people to help others. When Candy Lightner's thirteen-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver in 1980, she channeled her rage and grief into a national movement to remove drunk drivers from the road, founding Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). In July 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh was abducted from a shopping mall and brutally murdered. His parents, John and Reve Walsh, became national advocates for missing children and were the driving force behind acts of Congress that established a center for missing children with a computerized database. John Walsh helped establish the television program America's Most Wanted, of which he is host. The people who recover the quickest from traumas are those who feel that it led to some good things, such as their ability to help others.'
This last finding is particularly interesting from the perspective of people's beliefs about grief before they lose a loved one. Most people imagine that it is a uniformly negative, devastating experience. They might be surprised to learn that most people experience frequent positive emotions after a loss, even if they also feel substantial grief. They might be even more surprised to learn that a loss or trauma might well change them in beneficial ways. I doubt that many of us have ever thought, "It would be terrible if he or she died, but at least I'll become a better person as a result." And yet many of us would. Ronnie JanoffBulman has studied victims of several different kinds of trauma, including the death of loved ones, rape, and debilitating injuries. As she puts it, "The victimization certainly would not have been chosen, but it is ultimately seen by many as a powerful, even to some extent worthwhile, teacher of life's most important lessons."'
People are surprisingly resilient not only in response to major life events like winning the lottery or losing a loved one, but also to everyday emotional events. One study assessed college students' happiness over a two-year period. Many good and bad things happened to the participants during this time. About a third lost a close family member, more than half broke up with a romantic partner, and more than half gained at least ten pounds. Over 80 percent were involved in a romantic relationship for at least two months, almost everyone made a new close friend, and over a quarter were admitted to graduate school. As important as these events were, they had only temporary effects on people's happiness. As the authors put it, "only recent events matter." This is even more true of adolescents than of adults. One study found that when adolescents were in extremely good or bad moods, it took them only forty-five minutes, on average, to return to their baseline level of happiness. (This finding will come to no surprise to anyone living with a teenager. )
The literatures on lottery winners, bereavement, and reactions to everyday life events all converge to show that people are more resilient than they know. As Adam Smith observed, "The mind of every man, in a longer or shorter time, returns to its natural and usual state of tranquillity. In prosperity, after a certain time, it falls back to that state; in adversity, after a certain time, it rises up to it."'
Why Are People So Resilient?
One possible reason for people's resilience is that, as noted by La Rochefoucauld four centuries ago, "Happiness and misery depend as much on temperament as on fortune." There are happy people who see a silver lining in every cloud, and disgruntled people who always see a rain cloud on the horizon. There is indeed evidence that happiness is a personality trait, and a heritable one at that. Monozygotic twins, for example, have fairly similar levels of happiness, even when they have been reared in separate families."'
Clearly, though, happy people are sometimes sad, and chronically grumpy people sometimes manage a smile. The fact that happiness is partly heritable does not mean that people are stuck at one level of happiness that never varies. The trick is to explain w
hy people return to their normal level of happiness relatively quickly after they experience events that make them happy or sad. Paul McNabb was ecstatic when he learned he had won a million dollars, but the thrill did not last very long. Why not?
ITS THE CHASE THAT MATTERS
One possibility is that the pursuit of a goal is as enjoyable as achieving it-if not more so. I often spend months or years collecting data on a research project, analyzing the data, writing an article reporting the results, and sending the article to a psychology journal. It might seem that the crowning moment would be when I get the letter in the mail saying that the article has been accepted for publication. After all, that is the culmination of a great deal of work and is what I've been working toward for all those months. And indeed, I am quite happy to receive such a letter-more so, certainly, than one saying that my article was rejected. But the pleasure does not last very long. I am happiest, I think, when I am making progress toward the goal-when one of my graduate students tells me that our most recent data look great or when I have had a good day of writing. Once the project is completed and the article accepted, my attention turns to the next project.
It is very important in life to have something to work toward, and once we achieve one goal, we shift our sights and work toward a new one. In fact when things are going really well, we achieve a state of "flow" in which we lose our sense of self and time. One composer described the experience of writing music like this: "You are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don't exist ... My hand seems devoid of itself, and I have nothing to do with what is happening. I just sit there watching in a state of awe and wonderment. And the music just flows out by itself." It is not just artists who have these experiences; people can experience flow doing almost anything."
Imagine that you are part of a grand experiment in which you are provided with everything you need. At regular intervals you are given gifts of money, food, love, sex, fame-whatever you want. The only catch is that you can do nothing that increases or decreases the likelihood of obtaining these rewards. In fact, in order to receive the rewards, you have to spend eight hours a day in a room doing nothing-no career to occupy your time, no one to talk to, no books to read, no paintings to paint, no music to compose-in short, nothing to engage you. Even though you can get any reward you want, this would be a hellish life. Compare it to a quite different existence, in which the tangible rewards are modest. You make only enough money to meet your basic needs and have few luxuries. But you get to spend every day absorbed in activities you love.
In such extreme cases few of us would choose the first life over the second. In everyday life, however, I think people sometimes opt for lives more like the first one. I see undergraduates striving for careers that will pay them lots of money but doom them to mind-numbing daily routines (tax law comes to mind, but that might just be me). The second kind of life is that of a struggling artist, a social worker who loves to make a difference in people's lives, or, I suppose, tax attorneys who are really turned on by the latest changes in Roth IRAs. Daily absorption is more important than the paycheck at the end of the month, as long as that paycheck covers our basic needs.
The importance of flow and absorption helps explain why a positive event that people have worked toward-such as the publication of one of my articles-does not cause lasting pleasure: the goal is met, and my thoughts turn to a new problem. The absorption view should predict, however, that the failure to achieve a goal that people have worked toward should cause prolonged sadness, especially if this failure prevents people from becoming absorbed in everyday, pleasurable activities. Although such failures are painful, the distress does not last as long as people think it will. Daniel Gilbert and I, for example, found that assistant professors overestimated the duration of their unhappiness if they failed to achieve tenure at their university, which was a major life goal for many of them. 12
Further, some important life events would seem to facilitate goaldirected behavior and yet still do not cause lasting happiness. Winning a million dollars allows people to work toward many goals they could not previously pursue, such as traveling, going to law school and studying tax law, or sitting at home and learning to crochet. So why doesn't it make people happier?
SUFFERING BY COMPARISON
A quite different explanation of emotional evanescence is that people's reactions to an event depend on how that event compares with their prior experiences to similar events. According to this view, we constantly compare our experiences with others like it and ask ourselves, "How does it compare?" The first meal we eat at a fancy three-star restaurant is wonderful. But after eating at a lot of fancy restaurants, we change our standard of comparison. A meal at a mere two-star restaurant now doesn't seem that special, because it wasn't as good as the cassoulet de mer at Chez Michel. The sad fact is that there may be a cost to extremely pleasurable experiences. They are wonderful when they occur, but they give us a new reference point against which all future experiences are compared, and many of them will suffer by comparison.
One study, for example, compared people who had won from $50,000 to $1 million in the Illinois State Lottery with a control group of nonwinners. The winners were no happier than the nonwinners; nor did they say they would be happier in two years. Even worse, the winners reported that they found several everyday activities, such as talking with a friend, watching television, and hearing a funny joke, less pleasurable than nonwinners did. Apparently, life's everyday pleasures paled in comparison with the extreme high of winning a large sum of money13.
Surely there is some truth to this notion. My wife and I share a beer at dinner most nights, and I think our standards have risen over the years. One inexpensive brand used to be as good as another; a Blatz or a Falstaff was as good as a Stroh's. Then we spent a sabbatical in Seattle, which is microbrewery heaven. We had a great time sampling all the different brands, and would often choose restaurants on the basis of which beers they served rather than the kind of food they happened to have. Our standard of comparison increased considerably, such that we can no longer enjoy an inexpensive beer with dinner. But, if truth be told, we probably do not enjoy our daily microbrew any more than we used to enjoy a Stroh's, before our standards were raised. What used to be special is now the norm. 14
A problem with the change-in-standards view, however, is under standing what people use as their comparison point at any given point in time. Sometimes we use our most extreme prior experience as the comparison point. After eating at Chez Michel's, meals at Nick's Diner might never be the same. But sometimes we compartmentalize our experiences and do not compare them with the extremes. A gourmet might have a quite enjoyable meal at Nick's, because he is comparing it with the meal he had yesterday at McDonald's, and not with his meal at Chez Michel in Paris last month.
The choice of a comparison point, and the way in which it influences emotional experiences, is a complex process that is probably determined by such things as how people define a category (e.g., "all meals" versus "meals in Greek diners"), how recent people's experience is in a particular domain (how long ago they ate at Chez Michel), and the amount of experience they have in a particular domain (e.g., one meal or a hundred meals at Chez Michel). For our purposes, the point is that a change in the standard of comparison helps explain why people adapt to life events; the bar is raised, and what was pleasurable (or painful) before seems ordinary now. But it is not the full story.15
HAPPINESS IS LIKE BLOOD PRESSURE
Another way to look at emotional evanescence is to compare happiness to physiological systems such as blood pressure. Allostasis refers to the process whereby bodily systems react to changes in the environment (as opposed to homeostasis, in which there is a single set point that a system tries to maintain). Blood pressure, for example, has to rise when we get out of bed in the morning, so that there is enough blood flow to the brain to keep us from fainting. When we sit down to read the morning newspaper, it goes down again. There is
not a single, ideal level of blood pressure that our body tries to maintain. At the same time, it is obviously not to our benefit for blood pressure to get too low or too high, and there are mechanisms in place to keep it within a limited range.
I believe that an analogous process occurs with human emotions. It is to people's advantage to react emotionally to their environments, such that emotions vary from moment to moment. It is also to people's advantage to have mechanisms in place to keep them away from the emotional extremes.
Think, for example, about the last time you experienced a state of euphoria. Maybe it was the day you were married, the day a child of yours was born, or the day you attained some other life goal, such as being admitted to the college of your choice. You probably felt on top of the world and experienced a wave of pleasure rushing through your body. Your heart was beating rapidly, your blood pressure went up, and you were short of breath.
Now imagine what it would be like to feel this way for an hour, a day, or a week. Sounds exhausting, doesn't it? No one has the stamina to maintain such an extreme emotional state. If our blood pressure and heart rate were elevated for several days, we might well keel over from a heart attack. Surely, there have to be mechanisms in place that prevent our bodies from being that revved up for too long.
Prolonged positive (or negative) emotions might also have psychological costs, making it difficult to concentrate and to notice new emotional information. One function of emotions is to signal people quickly which things in their environments are dangerous and should be avoided and which are positive and should be approached. People have very fast emotional reactions to events that serve as signals, informing them what to do. A problem with prolonged emotional reactions to past events is that it might be more difficult for these signals to get through. If people are still in a state of bliss over yesterday's success, today's dangers and hazards might be more difficult to recognize.
Strangers to Ourselves Page 16