Hesitancy drains possibility. You can’t decide what to do, so you procrastinate and whatever stream of thought is predominant carries you away. I’ve shared with numerous people a strategy for deciding among the many possibilities for life – use your imagination to simulate various life choices: family man, householder, spiritual seeker, rich man, poor man, hermit, you name it. I used these simulations to try on many hats, but for me it always boiled down to two possibilities: either living a life ignorant of my true nature, or living in certainty.
Imagining a life of ignorance, my mind generated scenes straight out of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich: me (Ivan) screaming for days as I contemplated the unknown void of death; the sickening realization that my life had been wasted and spent in illusion. “My God,” I thought, “I don’t want to end up like that!” Though I couldn’t imagine the solution, I found imagination an effective tool for determining my true desire – what would really make me happy, or satisfied. However, according to Daniel Gilbert in his book Stumbling on Happiness, my imagination was most likely wrong.
Gilbert is a Harvard University Professor of Psychology, but don’t hold that against him. He strikes me as a careful observer of human behavior (including his own) and has assembled a number of research studies to support his conclusion about how to find happiness. Some of the more dour spiritual seekers may cringe at the idea of equating finding happiness with the spiritual search. “We’re after the truth,” you say, “not an ecstatic buzz.” I agree. The real question is what do we want that will satisfy us; not what we label that satisfaction.
Gilbert’s book is an elegantly crafted deconstruction of our faith in memory and imagination. Using past and present experience, we plan our lives based on what we think will make us happy, projecting forward into time (whether minutes or decades) using our imagination. Memory and imagination are intertwined, and both are fundamentally flawed because of several factors.
- Current experience influences our view of the future and the past. “We fail to recognize that our future selves won’t see the world the way we see it now,” Gilbert says. For example, Pete Townsend of The Who once famously sang “I hope I die before I get old.” In an interview some years later he said:
…somebody comes up to you and says, “You said you were gonna die before you got old.” All you can do is nervously laugh it off by saying, “Oh, I was just a young kid when I said that, what did I know . . .
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Not only does the present influence the past and future, but we don’t even see the present accurately. We look for facts that support our positive view of ourselves. “The brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.”
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Another reason we view the past incorrectly is we tend to remember the unusual events rather than the ordinary ones. “The least likely experience is often the most likely memory.” We tend to remember the last moments of an experience more than what preceded, and we remember our feelings as we believe we must have felt.
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Our representation of the future lacks details and most of what we can imagine in detail is simply present experience slightly modified. In other words, we can’t imagine what we can’t imagine. The details we fail to imagine may drastically affect our future selves.
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We rationalize. “Negative events do affect us, but they generally don’t affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to.” Our brains are wired to interpret experience in a way that makes it positive for us. Our “psychological immune system” strikes a balance between reality and imagination. “If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to find our slippers.”
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Some of the beliefs about what makes us happy are not true, yet practically everyone believes them. These are “super-replicating” beliefs – belief in them helps continue society. One such belief is that wealth makes one happy.
The production of wealth does not necessarily make individuals happy, but it does serve the needs of an economy, which serves the needs of a stable society, which serves as a network for the propagation of delusional beliefs about happiness and wealth.
Another such belief is that having children makes one happy.
The belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it.
While we believe we are raising children and earning paychecks to increase our share of happiness, we are actually doing these things for reasons beyond our ken. We are nodes in a social network that arises and falls by a logic of its own, which is why we continue to toil, continue to mate, and continue to be surprised when we do not experience all the joy we so gullibly anticipated.
Gilbert leads us toward his conclusion by summarizing “that neither personal experience nor cultural wisdom compensate for imagination’s shortcomings.” The alternative is to ask other people about their current (not past) experience. He says that practically any future we can imagine is being experienced by someone right now and we should ask them about it. “The best way to predict our feelings tomorrow is to see how others are feeling today.” Gilbert correctly predicts we will object to his conclusion because we believe that we and everyone else is unique. His touché: “Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn’t see herself as average.”
Despite a couple of hundred interesting pages leading up to it, I’m left disappointed in Gilbert’s whimpering conclusion that we should play the averages. Perhaps he’s found the secret to minimizing disappointment, but that’s no permanent solution. It seems he’s proven happiness is a fleeting feeling that evolution refuses to let us hold. Yet, even that doesn’t matter, because our minds will in retrospect create a pleasant picture for us to remember. Rather than being in control, we’re along for the illusionary happiness ride.
Though unintended, Gilbert’s work implies what sages have said for centuries: we are not in control; we live in illusion.
What of my advice to use the imagination? Despite Gilbert’s conclusion, I still recommend the technique. Imagination helped me determine what wouldn’t bring lasting happiness, not what would. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to feel permanently fulfilled, to feel complete, and to feel whole. All I knew is that some choices held out hope for that possibility and some were dead ends.
Gilbert did remind me, though, that I observed a lot of other people when I was in the throes of debate over choosing a spiritual or a “normal” life. I supplemented my imagination with data from observation. Specifically, I remember saying, “I don’t want to wind up like that person!” I didn’t ask people how they felt, though, I just made judgments. Imagine, observe, and inquire would be a good way of gathering data.
Yet when we ask someone if they are happy right now, it is difficult to determine why. Maybe they just ate some tasty potato chips. Maybe they had a good conversation an hour ago. Maybe they were daydreaming some pleasantry. If you’re investigating lifestyles, if you’re looking at someone who you think has what you want, you need to observe people over a period of time to see how they respond to the up and downs of life.
One last thought that Gilbert neglects – why can’t imagination be refined? I harken back to Joseph Sadony’s idea of the imagination. In Gates of the Mind, Sadony proposed a far greater extension of Gilbert’s work: that we could not only imagine the future, but we could accurately predict it! Sadony said there was true and false imagination. If the imagination was followed by a feeling (what Gilbert calls pre-feeling) it was not to be trusted. If the imagination was preceded by a certain type of feeling, if it sprung from a feeling, then it was worthy of exploration. Sadony says:
I found that my imagination provided the truth in one instance and deceived me in another. It deceived me when I used my own reason and memory to speculate on things I didn’t know enough about. It deceived me when I concentrated or “tried.” It never deceived me when I didn’t try, and didn’t care, and had a “feeling” first that started my imagination going to piece together in a flash what was aroused from my memory by the feeling.
Was my youthful imagination wrong about the horrors of dying in ignorance? Probably so; it wouldn’t have been so bad. I failed to account for the power of rationalization, and for the ability of memory to smooth disappointments. I don’t think most people live lives of “quiet desperation.” Desperation is too strong of a word. All nature requires is quiet disappointment, slight dis-ease, and a memory of happiness past to keep us producing.