Cottleston Pie

The NYTimes recently published an article that one of my favorite topics: what makes people happy? Certainly not always what people might think would make them happy or what they think should make them happy.

Today's article in question is: What Makes People Happy? TV, Study Says . The headline result is unsurprising to me. Call a friend during his or her favorite TV show just to chat... But don't call me during mine. ;-) Everyday life on sitcoms can be very smart and funny business when everybody talks like some alumnus of the Harvard Lampoon has carefully crafted the lines. That probably because some alumnus did.

The more surprising result is that raising children is more fun than housework, but not much. I've never done such raising myself, but have heard it many times proclaimed as the joy of many a parent's existence. The paradox just highlights that the method of measuring happiness that was the topic of the article is just one particular metric. It measures what makes people enjoy the moment.

However, most of us look back with great satisfaction at swaths of time and what was accomplished even though some, much, or even most of the time, the journey was less than fun. Sometimes the harder the trials, the sweeter the memory of overcoming them. I know that a lot of schoolwork can fall into that category, especially when the hard work leads to success. I would guess that a lot about childrearing does too.

This being such an interesting topic to me, it's now a proud category on this blog.

The article that really put-it-together and potentially explains so much was The Futile Pursuit of Happiness.

There are a few terms coined in the article which are going to go into my vocabulary, not because the terms are particularly interesting in themselves, but the ideas behind them deserve a compact representation.

• affective forecasting: how we forecast our feelings, and whether those predictions match our future emotional states.
• impact bias: the gap between what we predict and what we ultimately experience. ''impact'' meaning the errors we make in estimating both the intensity and duration of our emotions and ''bias'' our tendency to err.
• empathy gap: the fundamental difference between how we behave in ''hot'' states (those of anxiety, courage, fear, drug craving, sexual excitation and the like) and ''cold'' states of rational calm. This empathy gap in thought and behavior -- we cannot seem to predict how we will behave in a hot state when we are in a cold state -- affects happiness in an important but somewhat less consistent way than the impact bias.
• miswanting: mistakes of expectation that can lead directly to mistakes in choosing what we think will give us pleasure.

I definitely have some memorable and significant cases of miswanting. As I bet we all do of course. One of my own examples: I'm now pretty wary of any desire I may have for a pet. I desired a pet badly as a kid. I can vividly remember sitting on the stairway and envisioning the happiness that would be the inevitable result. Well, I had two pets and I've learned my lesson from experience. The novelty wore off quickly. (This isn't a proof about all pets. I've some evidence that some pets would work. But my error in prediction specifically about the pets I did have was real. )

I put these Futile ideas together with those of stress and get a powerful notion. The desired stress relief that I may seek because I predict it will so wonderfully relieve some awful stress may not relieve the pressure with anywhere near the high quality I anticipate.

Or specifically to follow-up my last post, that she won't make me as happy as I think I will be. ;-) At least, that's the game I get to play with myself now: I tell myself to relax and temper my desire by remembering that the relief and happiness that would be the result are probably overblown in my own mind. That might even be true. But this analysis is hampered by a particular manifestation of the empathy gap: it's hard to think of her and avoid entering a "hot" state where my values may shift significantly from a "cold" state rational analysis.

I've discovered that one particular way to put myself into a cold state where I can see the ups and downs and weigh long-term consequences is to imagine myself married. The thought can be somewhat sobering.

But, what if after some years, we were to get a divorce?! There's a chill, but no longer a "cold" state. It may be worthy of consideration though. Along those same lines was another article that appeared before The Futile Pursuit of Happiness, but which makes a lot of sense with the Futile ideas in mind: Untying The Knot.

Do not get me wrong about all this, I definitely recognize that I've had a goodly number of experiences where I did get what I wanted and while perhaps it didn't make everything as perfect as I sometimes imagined (and certainly I would expect that to be mutual), it was fantastic while each lasted and I certainly wouldn't trade back any of it.

This whole train of thought is certainly not overly cynical, quite the opposite. I think it hopeful to find that perhaps people, including and especially myself, act in such a predictably irrational way. This whole analysis is just an experiment in trying to understand how things are. I think that my modus operandi for living might most appropriately be described as Taoist, and so as not to fight the flow, I seek to have some understanding of it.

I ran across three amazingly cogent articles in the last few weeks. All strongly, though unintentionally, related. Here's the first (with one forward link to the next post about the other two articles).

Scientific American: Taming Stress
An emerging understanding of the brain's stress pathways points toward treatments for anxiety and depression beyond Valium and Prozac

Anxiety and depression are apparently both two possible (over-)reactions to stress (not that other things cannot contribute, but stress appears to be a major contributing factor). Opposite sides of a coin, these are my one-sentence summaries of the two conditions:

• anxiety is an over-generalized reaction that can trigger hyperactive fight-or-flight reactions even in the absence of a suitable stressor
• depression is a condition when the body gives up the fight externally, feelings of helplessness and acceptance of an ill-fate follow. Inwardly, the body may begin self-destructive internal conflict (e.g. ulcers).

Everyone experiences these conditions in some measured amount as we go through the trials and tribulations of life. The point when they become debilitating enough to be described as an illness is somewhat arbitrary. Reactions strong enough to be classified as an illness are not what primarily concerns the rest of my discussion here as I don't think I'm ill. But the pathways are the same, so the study driven to help those with medical need is interesting and enlightening to us all. (I am also personally interested in the depressive condition because I've friend(s) that took medication for depression. I won't talk more about that here though.)

So, now I get to my own personal, "Aha!" Those intense, persistent feelings of distress that I sometimes find driving me into a frenzied state of action are an anxiety reaction to stress. The stressors that appear to cause me the greatest, most long-lived, most easily-activated stress responses, even with the removal of actual stressful circumstances, involve friends and love-interests, um, particularly the latter. For whatever reason, I find I've a tendency to be moved towards anxiety rather than depression. Which can be a good thing because it can spur me to greater personal productivity and creativity. However, it can also be emotionally painful and draining, so it is not without significant price.

I've even found that the absence of anxiety can make me feel unmotivated and unproductive.

This makes for a complicated situation with regard to women. Here's the generalized, possible cycle that I imagine is possible:

1. I'm single, pining for love in one way or another, and stressed about it. The stress flows over into other aspects of my life in the form of anxiety. But the anxiety gives me energy for creative productivity and self-improvement. At this stage, I know that having a relationship with the right woman will make me happy and that my creative productivity will be spurred by this happiness rather than the anxiety.
2. I get what I think I want, woo-hoo, a really wonderful girlfriend and I'm happy to no end. :-)
3. Eventually, like everyone, my happiness is not as long-lived and intense as I thought it would be (impact bias; my affective forcasting wasn't quite as perfect as I thought it would be) and I lack the productivity that I had prior to the relationship (loss of anxiety).
4. So, I find the relationship feeling stagnant, and I think perhaps I should breakup so I can go back to my productive self and also find a relationship with the right woman, because "I know that having a relationship with the right woman...." See step 1.
5. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Ultimately, it's very often only tangentially my own decision anyway. She, whoever she may be, has a lot of say in the situation. Perhaps she has very much the same dilemma (perhaps unconsciously)? Or perhaps she finds that being single and pining leads to unproductive depression rather than productive anxiety, so she is uninterested in ever not being in a relationship. I have heard tell that there are some people who always want to be in a relationship of some sort.

As far as relieving stress when I wish to, I think it'll be useful to remember and try to act upon avoiding the exacerbating factors that the article mentions:

• no outlet for frustration,
• no sense of control,
• no social support, and
• no impression that something better will follow.

The examples in the article were enlightening, particularly the volume control scenario. I think I've found myself in similar situations and I've wondered why I can turn music up loud for myself but find loud sound otherwise very trying.

Jogging or other intense physical activity that leaves me exhausted is my 'gnawing on wood' outlet. So, if upon receiving a phone call or email or some other missive, I suddenly announce that I'm going to go running (on a dark, rainy night in an unfamiliar city), then it's likely I just got some news that I find pretty intensely unsettling.

I was mailed this link just today by a friend along with this note:

"The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday."

I guess this only further proves Travis's theory: people can't do math.

The article is an Op-Ed piece that was published in January. I had been citing those same statistics and ideas in conversation for some time (probably to the same friend that just sent the link today, amongst others). And this is the exact article where I got them!

Don't let that take away from the power of the idea. If the statistics accurately reflect the way that people think, then that explains so much! People's misperception of probability can explain why so many people voted against their own best-interest (an economists nightmare) in voting for Bush the tax-cutter-for-the-wealthy.

Misunderstanding of probability can also explain why so many people play the lottery.

And from an entirely different direction, I concluded that many people don't deal well with probability when judging the acceptability of risk in their lives: An Acceptable Risk. I could probably give many more examples along similar lines.

So, I'm now working with the generalization that many people, even very intelligent people, make irrational decisions as a result of their misunderstanding of probability. This is important. It's not like Calculus: something that very few people need to do in real life. Some of life's most critical decisions depend upon it.

Given that hypothesis, the classic Birthday Problem is a fun demonstration of how intuition can be so wrong, or at least it is no help at all. The problem asks, "how many people need to be in a room for there to be better than a 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday?" Many people will give very logical and understandable, but incorrect, answers. I didn't get it when I first heard it in a probability class in college.

Now we may have an explanation, but what to do about it? (besides playing parlor games)