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Happiness Amnesia
Sometimes I like to imagine a little bell going off in my ear when I’m about to do something I sense will make me less happy. In my mind, the bell doesn’t generally ring before momentous decisions such as weighing whether to quit a job or drop out of college: those decisions are usually accompanied by an extensive weighing of the pros and cons. Instead, this little bell I imagine goes off whenever we have to make one of the countless sundry decisions of life, particularly when our eyes or tastebuds are preoccupied with getting what they want: A Cuervo golden margarita the size of my head? Bell rings. A cool-looking pair of overpriced sneakers I don’t need and can’t afford? Bell rings. A meaningless, soon-to-be-forgotten, one-off affair with a beautiful woman trying to seduce me thousands of miles from home?
In other words, the bell would ring more often than you expect – and perhaps more often.
As the internet wisely points out, getting drunk is like borrowing happiness from tomorrow. Each day we must make decisions pertaining to everything from what we eat to whom we associate with – and these decisions and countless others impact our happiness.
Opportunities to increase or decrease our happiness are everywhere and we often choose badly, a phenomenon that is most evident when observing children. Left to their own devices – literally – most kids would rather play video games or watch Netflix all day. Yet how do these children feel when they must invariably cease doing so? They’re miserable. My own kids provide numerous examples. Here’s one: taking baths. They hate it. The very prospect of a bath prompts them to adopt an intolerable whine. A funny thing happens, though, when they’re actually takinga bath: non-stop shrieks of laughter and joy.
And adults aren’t much better than children, as you can see from the countless examples of people who can’t get out of their own way when it comes to their weight, their work, their lives.
Conversely, the things we find most satisfying are precisely those things which we tend to avoid: getting work done, eating healthfully, making new friends, visiting the sick and lonely. So there’s a disconnect between what we want and what makes us happy. Importantly, merely being aware of this this disconnect isn’t sufficient to overcome it – it requires daily vigilance.
It’s a kind of happiness amnesia. We are shocked to learn that the hard work of learning to play a guitar is more satisfying than ease of watching tv. And yet we never learn.
So the next time you must make a seemingly mundane decision, ask yourself which path would make you happiest, and with practice you may find you’ve develop your own little bell – and that it tends to go off when you least expect it.
Published in General
Yeah… And don’t you just hate that???
Yeah, when the kids were younger the two hardest things were getting them in the tub and getting them out of the tub.
I think there are three things which get in the way of the bell:
There is good advice here for decisions as to whether we should adopt new technologies. Including life-saving medical technologies.
David, I think you might have explained the lyrics of the Todd Rundgren song “All the Children Sing.”
See Ms. Malone
She spends another quiet evening alone
Sits in her study and stares at the phone
And a bell in her head will ring
All the children sing
All the dancers start to sway in time
The orchestra begins to play
Somebody pours the wine
The sun and moon collide
Isn’t gravity a funny thing
The universe explodes apart
All the children sing
Of Mr. Malloy
He’s always seen himself as one of the boys
He thinks that men are tough and women are toys
But a bell in his head will ring
All the children sing
All the birds are chirping harmony
The scent of love is in the air
Sunset on the sea
The angel of the lord
Just declared we aren’t worth a thing
The galaxy is null and void
All the children sing
Crawled across a thousand miles of desert sand
Looking from an answer from a holy man
And this is what he told me with a wave of his hand
He said, “A bell in your head will ring”
You’re a better man than I am, David. No beautiful woman has ever tried to seduce me. Now that I think about it, no not so beautiful ones either.
I will link to this post every time someone on Ricochet tells me that being a utilitarian simply means being a hedonist. Nicely done. By the way, I have never been offered a “one-off affair with a beautiful woman trying to seduce me thousands of miles from home,” so I can’t really confirm that particular example from personal experience. But I do hope I would be smart enough to say no. Besides, I am not a Brad Pitt lookalike, so it would almost certainly be a scam.
Having just survived 66 hours of my community in California being without electric power, and as a result: no hot showers, a major struggle to have hot coffee, and hot meals; ditto having cold foods like ice cream; the ability to fill up the car with gasoline; to go shopping for needed items or just for the heck of it; needing to conserve power for the cell phone, so no idle chit chat; ditto the use of the computer, so no ricochet, I feel the need to point out that absence does make the heart grow fonder.
Waking up this morning to a house with a humming fridge, and all that this usually awful noise implies, is one truly happy experience.
And hopefully for any new parents who are about to find out that they are with child, there will be great happiness at that news as well.
You don’t need to be psychic to expect a wave of babies born between July 9th and July 18th 2020, here in California-land.