Good men, at all times, surrender in truth all attachments. The holy spend not idle words on things of desire. When pleasure or pain comes to them, the wise feel above pleasure and pain.
- Buddha
Do not seek to have events happen as you want them, but instead want them to happen as they do happen and your life will go well.
- Epictetus
If money or power could buy happiness, then the author of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes should have been overjoyed. The text attributes itself to a king in Jerusalem, who looks back on his life and his search for happiness and fulfillment. He tried at one point to “make a test of pleasure,” by seeking happiness in his riches:
I made great works; I built houses and planted vineyards for myself; I made myself gardens and parks and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees…I also had great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and of the provinces; I got singers, both men and women, and delights of the flesh, and many concubines. So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem; also my wisdom remained with me. Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them.
- Ecclesiastes 2:4-10
But in what may he one of the earliest reports of a midlife crisis, the author finds it all pointless:
Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.
- Ecclesiastes 2:11
The author tells us about many other avenues he pursued—hard work, learning, wine—but nothing brought satisfaction; nothing could banish the feeling that his life had no more intrinsic worth or purpose than that of an animal. From the perspective of Buddha and the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, the author's problem is obvious: his pursuit of happiness. Buddhism and Stoicism teach that striving for external goods, or to make the world conform to your wishes, is always a striving after wind. Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance. (Stoics and Buddhists can have relationships, jobs, and possessions, but, to avoid becoming upset upon losing them, they must not be emotionally attached to them.) This idea is of course an extension of the truth that life itself is but what you deem it, and your mental state determines how you deem things. But recent research in psychology suggests that Buddha and Epictetus may have taken things too far. Some things are worth striving for, and happiness comes in part from outside of yourself, if you know where to look.
The author of Ecclesiastes wasn't just battling the fear of meaninglessness; he was battling the disappointment of success. The pleasure of getting what you want is often fleeting. You dream about getting a promotion, being accepted into a prestigious school, or finishing a big project. You work every waking hour, perhaps imagining how happy you'd be if you could just achieve that goal. Then you succeed, and if you're lucky you get an hour, maybe a day, of euphoria, particularly if your success was unexpected and there was a moment in which it was revealed. More typically, however, you don't get any euphoria. When success seems increasingly probable and some final event confirms what you already had begun to expect, the feeling is more one of relief—the pleasure of closure and release. In such circumstances, my first thought is seldom "Hooray! Fantastic!"; it is "Okay, what do I have to do now?"
My underjoyed response to success turns out to be normal. And from an evolutionary point of view, it's even sensible. Animals get a rush of dopamine, the pleasure neurotransmitter, whenever they do something that advances their evolutionary interests and moves them ahead in the game of life. Food and sex give pleasure, and that pleasure serves as a reinforcer that motivates later efforts to find food and sex. For humans, however, the game is more complex. People win at the game of life by achieving high status and a good reputation, cultivating friendships, finding the best mate(s), accumulating resources, and rearing their children to be successful at the same game. People have many goals and therefore many sources of pleasure. So you'd think we would receive an enormous and long-lasting shot of dopamine whenever we succeed at an important goal. But here's the trick with reinforcement: It works best when it comes seconds—not minutes or hours—after the behavior. Just try training your dog to fetch by giving him a big steak ten minutes after each successful retrieval. It can't be done.
The elephant works the same way: It feels pleasure whenever it takes a step in the right direction. The elephant learns whenever pleasure (or pain) follows immediately after behavior, but it has trouble connecting success on Friday with actions it took on Monday. Richard Davidson, the psychologist who brought us affective style and the approach circuits of the front left cortex, writes about two types of positive affect. The first he calls "pre-goal attainment positive affect," which is the pleasurable feeling you get as you make progress toward a goal. The second is called "post-goal attainment positive affect," which Davidson says arises once you have achieved something you want. You experience this latter feeling as contentment, as a short-lived feeling of release when the left prefrontal cortex reduces its activity after a goal has been achieved. In other words, when it comes to goal pursuit, it really is the journey that counts, not the destination. Set for yourself any goal you want. Most of the pleasure will be had along the way, with every step that takes you closer. The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than the relief of taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool. Yet people sometimes do just this. They work hard at a task and expect some special euphoria at the end. But when they achieve success and find only moderate and short-lived pleasure, they ask: Is that all there is? They devalue their accomplishments as a striving after wind.
We can call this "the progress principle": Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: "Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing."
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