My One-Man Book Club: Vol. One, Chapter One

St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village is a dangerous place to browse. Some stores are just set up in some inexplicable way (or probably an explicable way, but I’m too lazy to suss it out) that almost guarantees impulse buying, and this is one of them. Tonight, before heading over to a friend’s birthday dinner, I popped in and made just such a buy, but I think this one might be a keeper. It’s called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard.

Before you go thinking that I’m so desperate as to be reaching for self-healing platitudes, here is Gilbert’s defense of the book’s title in the foreword:

Despite the third word of the title, this is not an instruction manual that will tell you anything useful about how to be happy. Those books are located in the self-help section two aisles over, and once you’ve bought one, done everything it says to do, and found yourself miserable anyway, you can always come back here to understand why. Instead, this is a book that describes what science has to tell us about how and how well the human brain can imagine its own future, and about how and how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy.

Luckily, I’m not miserable, but I’ve been making a few day trips into misery’s outlying territories lately, and I’ve also been thinking a lot about what role anticipation and future-thinking have in creating happiness (or its approximation). Anticipation is a stimulant for everyone to some degree, I imagine, but I’ve always been acutely aware of just how strong its influence is on me. I think for some people anticipation is 80 or 90 percent of an event’s appeal (or lack thereof), which doesn’t seem healthy, and I think I might be one of those people. To take two examples, one from each pole:

I don’t have a particularly strong fear of flying. When I’m on a plane, that is. Once seated, barring horrific turbulence, I’m actually pretty relaxed in the air. But for the week or two leading up to a flight, I’m a semi-nervous-wreck about the whole thing. On the other hand, every year I anticipate a certain fantasy baseball draft with childlike glee. The actual draft, of course, is three or four hours of me making a series of choices that I almost immediately recognize as boneheaded, surrounded by men older and even more bitter than I am, cursing at each other in mostly unfriendly ways. Experiencing this time and again does nothing to diminish my eager anticipation of it eleven and a half months later.

It’s always been my suspicion that this trait says something important about the ways in which I’m satisfied and disappointed with the world, alternately, and so, as I’m sharply interested in increasing the satisfaction level these days, this seems like the right book at the right time, and I think I’ll occasionally share my thoughts with you as I make my way through it. Think of it as a book club, but without all the people and snacks.

(It will seem more club-like if some of you participate in the comments section, which could take the form of you reading the book along with me; I’d certainly understand, though, if it takes the form of your personal, non-book-related thoughts and anecdotes about the H word.)

Tonight, though, it’s getting late, so I’m almost sure that what will make me happy is going to bed. I’m anticipating it greatly. I’ll leave you with an abridged excerpt (again from the foreword; I haven’t gotten very far, considering that I bought the book four hours ago, so for the purposes of this project I’m taking it on faith that it will remain interesting and funny). More soon.

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves...

Yeah, yeah. Don’t hold your breath. Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that....

How can this happen? Shouldn’t we know the tastes, preferences, needs, and desires of the people we will be next year -- or at least later this afternoon? Shouldn’t we understand our future selves well enough to shape their lives -- to find careers and lovers whom they will cherish, to buy slipcovers for the sofa that they will treasure for years to come? So why do they end up with attics and lives that are full of stuff that we considered indispensable and that they consider painful, embarrassing, or useless? Why do they criticize our choice of romantic partners, second-guess our strategies for professional advancement, and pay good money to remove the tattoos that we paid good money to get?