Everything Is F*cked(48)
It wasn’t until the 1980s that a few intrepid academics started asking themselves, “Wait a second, my job is kind of a downer. What about what makes people happy? Let’s study that instead!” And there was much celebration, because soon dozens of “happiness” books would proliferate on bookshelves, selling in the millions to bored, angsty middle-class people suffering existential crises.
One of the first things psychologists did when they started to study happiness was to organize a simple survey.9 They took large groups of people and gave them pagers—remember, this was the 1980s and ’90s—and whenever the pager went off, each person was to stop and write down the answers to two questions:
On a scale of 1–10, how happy are you at this moment?
What has been going on in your life?
The researchers collected thousands of ratings from hundreds of people from all walks of life, and what they discovered was both surprising and incredibly boring: pretty much everybody wrote “7” all the time. At the grocery store buying milk? Seven. Attending my son’s baseball game? Seven. Talking to my boss about making a big sale to a client? Seven.
Even when catastrophic stuff happened—Mom got cancer; I missed a mortgage payment on the house; Junior lost an arm in a freak bowling accident—happiness levels would dip to the two-to- five range for a short period, and then, after a while, would return to seven.10
This was true for extremely positive events as well. Getting a fat bonus at work, going on dream vacations, marriages—after the event, people’s ratings would shoot up for a short period of time and then, predictably, settle back in at around seven.
This fascinated researchers. Nobody is fully happy all the time, but similarly, nobody is fully unhappy all the time, either. It seems that humans, regardless of our external circumstances, live in a constant state of mild-but-not-fully-satisfying happiness. Put another way, things are pretty much always fine, but they could also always be better.11
Life is apparently nothing but bobbing up and down and around our level-seven happiness. And this constant “seven” that we’re always coming back to plays a little trick on us, a trick that we fall for over and over again.
The trick is that our brain tells us, “You know, if I could just have a little bit more, I’d finally get to ten and stay there.”
Most of us live much of our lives this way, constantly chasing our imagined ten.
You think, hey, to be happier, I’m going to need to get a new job; so you get a new job. And then, a few months later, you feel you’d be happier if you had a new house; so you get a new house. And then, a few months later, it’s an awesome beach vacation; so you go on an awesome beach vacation. And while you’re on the awesome beach vacation, you’re like, you know what I fucking need? A goddamn pi?a colada! Can’t a fucker get a pi?a colada around here?! So, you stress about your pi?a colada, believing that just one pi?a colada will get you to your ten. But then it’s a second pi?a colada, and then a third, and then . . . well, you know how this turns out: you wake up with a hangover and are at a three.
It’s like Einstein once advised, “Never get wasted on cocktails with sugar-based mixers—if you need to go on a bender, may I recommend some seltzer, or if you’re a particularly rich fuck, perhaps a fine champagne?”
Each of us implicitly assumes that we are the universal constant of our own experience, that we are unchanging, and our experiences come and go like the weather.12 Some days are good and sunny; other days are cloudy and shitty. The skies change, but we remain the same.
But this is not true—in fact, this is backward. Pain is the universal constant of life. And human perception and expectations warp themselves to fit a predetermined amount of pain. In other words, no matter how sunny our skies get, our mind will always imagine just enough clouds to be slightly disappointed.
This constancy of pain results in what is known as “the hedonic treadmill,” upon which you run and run and run, chasing your imagined ten. But, no matter what, you always end up with a seven. The pain is always there. What changes is your perception of it. And as soon as your life “improves,” your expectations shift, and you’re back to being mildly dissatisfied again.
But pain works in the other direction, too. I remember when I got my big tattoo, the first few minutes were excruciatingly painful. I couldn’t believe I’d signed up for eight hours of this shit. But by the third hour, I’d actually dozed off while my tattoo artist worked.
Nothing had changed: same needle, same arm, same artist. But my perception had shifted: the pain became normal, and I returned to my own internal seven.
This is another permutation of the Blue Dot Effect.13 This is Durkheim’s “perfect” society. This is Einstein’s relativity with a psychological remix. It’s the concept creep of someone who has never actually experienced physical violence losing their mind and redefining a few uncomfortable sentences in a book as “violence.” It’s the exaggerated sense that one’s culture is being invaded and destroyed because there are now movies about gay people.
The Blue Dot Effect is everywhere. It affects all perceptions and judgments. Everything adapts and shapes itself to our slight dissatisfaction.
And that is the problem with the pursuit of happiness.
Pursuing happiness is a value of the modern world. Do you think Zeus gave a shit if people were happy? Do you think the God of the Old Testament cared about making people feel good? No, they were too busy planning to send swarms of locusts to eat people’s flesh.