The
man who claims that he is about to tell me the secret of human
happiness is eighty-three years old, with an alarming orange tan that
does nothing to enhance his credibility. It is just after eight o’clock
on a December morning, in a darkened basketball stadium on the outskirts
of San Antonio, and — according to the orange man — I am about to learn
‘the one thing that will change your life forever.” I’m skeptical, but
not as much as I might normally be, because I am only one of more than
fifteen thousand people at Get Motivated!, America’s “most popular
business motivational seminar,” and the enthusiasm of my fellow audience
members is starting to become infectious.
“So you wanna know?”
asks the octogenarian, who is Dr. Robert H. Schuller, veteran self-help
guru, author of more than thirty-five books on the power of positive
thinking, and, in his other job, the founding pastor of the largest
church in the United States constructed entirely out of glass. The crowd
roars its assent. Easily embarrassed British people like me do not,
generally speaking, roar our assent at motivational seminars in Texas
basketball stadiums, but the atmosphere partially overpowers my
reticence. I roar quietly.
“Here it is, then,” Dr. Schuller
declares, stiffly pacing the stage, which is decorated with two enormous
banners reading “MOTIVATE!” and “SUCCEED!,” seventeen
,
and a large number of potted plants. “Here’s the thing that will change
your life forever.” Then he barks a single syllable — “Cut!” — and
leaves a dramatic pause before completing his sentence: ‘… the word
‘impossible’ out of your life! Cut it out! Cut it out forever!”
The
audience combusts. I can’t help feeling underwhelmed, but then I
probably shouldn’t have expected anything different from Get Motivated!,
an event at which the sheer power of positivity counts for everything.
“You are the master of your destiny!” Schuller goes on. “Think big, and
dream bigger! Resurrect your abandoned hope! … Positive thinking works
in every area of life!’
The
logic of Schuller’s philosophy, which is the doctrine of positive
thinking at its most distilled, isn’t exactly complex: decide to think
happy and successful thoughts — banish the spectres of sadness and
failure — and happiness and success will follow. It could be argued that
not every speaker listed in the glossy brochure for today’s seminar
provides uncontroversial evidence in
support
of this outlook: the keynote speech is to be delivered, in a few hours’
time, by George W . Bush, a president far from universally viewed as
successful. But if you voiced this objection to Dr. Schuller, he would
probably dismiss it as “negativity thinking.” To criticize the power of
positivity is to demonstrate that you haven’t really grasped it at all.
If you had, you would stop grumbling about such things, and indeed about
anything else.
The organisers of Get Motivated! describe it as a
motivational seminar, but that phrase — with its suggestion of
minor-league life coaches giving speeches in dingy
hotel ballrooms
— hardly captures the scale and grandiosity of the thing. Staged
roughly once a month, in cities across North America, it sits at the
summit of the global industry of positive thinking, and boasts an
impressive roster of celebrity speakers: Mikhail Gorbachev and Rudy
Giuliani are among the regulars, as are General Colin Powell and,
somewhat incongruously, William Shatner. Should it ever occur to you
that a formerly prominent figure in world politics (or William Shatner)
has been keeping an inexplicably low profile in recent months, there’s a
good chance you’ll find him or her at Get Motivated!, preaching the
gospel of optimism.
As befits such celebrity, there’s nothing
dingy about the staging, either, which features banks of swooping
spotlights, sound systems pumping out rock anthems, and expensive
pyrotechnics; each speaker is welcomed to the stage amid showers of
sparks and puffs of smoke. These special effects help propel the
audience to ever higher altitudes of excitement, though it also doesn’t
hurt that for many of them, a trip to Get Motivated! means an extra day
off work: many employers classify it as job training. Even the United
States military, where “training” usually means something more rigorous,
endorses this view; in San Antonio, scores of the stadium’s seats are
occupied by uniformed soldiers from the local Army base.
Technically,
I am here undercover. Tamara Lowe, the self-described “world’s No. 1
female motivational speaker,” who along with her husband runs the
company behind Get Motivated!, has been accused of denying access to
reporters, a tribe notoriously prone to negativity thinking. Lowe denies
the charge, but out of caution, I’ve been describing myself as a
“self-employed businessman” — a tactic, I’m realizing too late, that
only makes me sound shifty. I needn’t have bothered with subterfuge
anyway, it turns out, since I’m much too far away from the stage for the
security staff to be able to see me scribbling in my notebook. My seat
is described on my ticket as “premier seating,” but this turns out to be
another case of positivity run amok: at Get Motivated!, there is only
“premier seating,” “executive seating,” and “VIP seating.”
In
reality, mine is up in the nosebleed section; it is a hard plastic
perch, painful on the buttocks. But I am grateful for it, because it
means that by chance I’m seated next to a man who, as far as I can make
out, is one of the few cynics in the arena — an amiable, large-limbed
park ranger named Jim, who sporadically leaps to his feet to shout I’m
so motivated!” in tones laden with sarcasm.
He explains that he
was required to attend by his employer, the United States National Park
Service, though when I ask why that organization might wish its rangers
to use paid work time in this fashion, he cheerily concedes that he has
“no fucking clue.” Dr. Schuller’s sermon, meanwhile, is gathering pace.
“When I was a child, it was impossible for a man ever to walk on the
moon, impossible to cut out a human heart and put it in another man’s
chest … the word ‘impossible’ has proven to be a very stupid word!” He
does not spend much time marshaling further evidence for his assertion
that failure is optional: it’s clear that Schuller, the author of “Move
Ahead with Possibility Thinking” and “Tough Times Never Last, but Tough
People Do!,” vastly prefers inspiration to argument. But in any case, he
is really only a warm-up man for the day’s main speakers, and within
fifteen minutes he is striding away, to adulation and fireworks, fists
clenched victoriously up at the audience, the picture of
positive-thinking success.
It is only months later, back at my
home in New York, reading the headlines over morning coffee, that I
learn the news that the largest church in the United States constructed
entirely from glass has filed for bankruptcy, a word Dr. Schuller had
apparently neglected to eliminate from his vocabulary.
For a
civilization so fixated on achieving happiness, we seem remarkably
incompetent at the task. One of the best-known general findings of the
“science of happiness” has been the discovery that the countless
advantages of modern life have done so little to lift our collective
mood. The awkward truth seems to be that increased economic growth does
not necessarily make for happier societies, just as increased personal
income, above a certain basic level, doesn’t make for happier people.
Nor does better education, at least according to some studies. Nor does
an increased choice of consumer products. Nor do bigger and fancier
homes, which instead seem mainly to provide the privilege of more space
in which to feel gloomy.
Perhaps you don’t need telling that
self-help books, the modern-day apotheosis of the quest for happiness,
are among the things that fail to make us happy. But, for the record,
research strongly suggests that they are rarely much help. This is why,
among themselves, some self-help publishers refer to the “eighteen-month
rule,” which states that the person most likely to purchase any given
self-help book is someone who, within the previous eighteen months,
purchased a self-help book — one that evidently didn’t solve all their
problems. When you look at the self-help shelves with a coldly impartial
eye, this isn’t especially surprising. That we yearn for neat,
book-sized solutions to the problem of being human is understandable,
but strip away the packaging, and you’ll find that the messages of such
works are frequently banal. The “Seven Habits of Highly Effective
People” essentially tells you to decide what matters most to you in
life, and then do it; “How to Win Friends and Influence People” advises
its readers to be pleasant rather than obnoxious, and to use people’s
first names a lot. One of the most successful management manuals of the
last few years, “Fish!,” which is intended to help foster happiness and
productivity in the workplace, suggests handing out small toy fish to
your hardest-working employees.
As we’ll see, when the messages
get more specific than that, self-help gurus tend to make claims that
simply aren’t supported by more reputable research. The evidence
suggests, for example, that venting your anger doesn’t get rid of it,
while visualising your goals doesn’t seem to make you more likely to
achieve them. And whatever you make of the country-by-country surveys of
national happiness that are now published with some regularity, it’s
striking that the “happiest” countries are never those where self-help
books sell the most, nor indeed where professional psychotherapists are
most widely consulted. The existence of a thriving “happiness industry”
clearly isn’t sufficient to engender national happiness, and it’s not
unreasonable to suspect that it might make matters worse.
Yet the
ineffectiveness of modern strategies for happiness is really just a
small part of the problem. There are good reasons to believe that the
whole notion of “seeking happiness” is flawed to begin with. For one
thing, who says happiness is a valid goal in the first place? Religions
have never placed much explicit emphasis on it, at least as far as this
world is concerned; philosophers have certainly not been unanimous in
endorsing it, either. And any evolutionary psychologist will tell you
that evolution has little interest in your being happy, beyond trying to
make sure that you’re not so listless or miserable that you lose the
will to reproduce.
Even assuming happiness to be a worthy target,
though, a worse pitfall awaits, which is that aiming for it seems to
reduce your chances of ever attaining it. “Ask yourself whether you are
happy,” observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, “and you cease to be
so.” At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the
corner of an eye, not stared at directly. (We tend to remember having
been happy in the past much more frequently than we are conscious of
being happy in the present.) Making matters worse still, what happiness
actually is feels impossible to define in words; even supposing you
could do so, you’d presumably end up with as many different definitions
as there are people on the planet. All of which means it’s tempting to
conclude that “How can we be happy?” is simply the wrong question — that
we might as well resign ourselves to never finding the answer, and get
on with something more productive instead.
But could there be a
third possibility, besides the futile effort to pursue solutions that
never seem to work, on the one hand, and just giving up, on the other?
After several years reporting on the field of psychology as a
journalist, I finally realized that there might be. I began to think
that something united all those psychologists and philosophers — and
even the occasional self-help guru — whose ideas seemed actually to hold
water. The startling conclusion at which they had all arrived, in
different ways, was this: that the effort to try to feel happy is often
precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant
efforts to eliminate the negative — insecurity, uncertainty, failure,
or sadness — that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious,
uncertain, or unhappy. They didn’t see this conclusion as depressing,
though. Instead, they argued that it pointed to an alternative approach,
a “negative path” to happiness, that entailed taking a radically
different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives
trying hard to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty,
embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming
familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these
people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might
actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions — or,
at the very least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them.
Which is a bewildering thought, and one that calls into question not
just our methods for achieving happiness, but also our assumptions about
what “happiness” really means.
Which is how I came to find myself
rising reluctantly to my feet, up in a dark extremity of that
basketball stadium, because Get Motivated!’s excitable mistress of
ceremonies had announced a “dance competition,” in which everyone
present was obliged to participate. Giant beach balls appeared as if
from nowhere, bumping across the heads of the crowd, who jiggled
awkwardly as Wham! blared from the sound system. The first prize of a
free trip to Disney World, we were informed, awaited not the best dancer
but the most motivated one, though the distinction made little
difference to me: I found the whole thing too excruciating to do more
than sway very slightly. The prize was eventually awarded to a soldier.
This was a decision that I suspected had been taken to pander to local
patriotic pride, rather than strictly in recognition of highly motivated
dancing.
* * *
One of the foremost investigators of the
problems with positive thinking is a professor of psychology named
Daniel Wegner, who runs the Mental Control Laboratory at Harvard
University.
This is not, whatever its name might suggest, a
CIA-funded establishment dedicated to the science of brainwashing.
Wegner’s intellectual territory is what has come to be known as “ironic
process theory,” which explores the ways in which our efforts to
suppress certain thoughts or behaviors result, ironically, in their
becoming more prevalent. I got off to a bad start with Professor Wegner
when I accidentally typed his surname, in a newspaper column, as
“Wenger.” He sent me a crabby email (“Get the name right!”), and didn’t
seem likely to be receptive to the argument that my slip-up was an
interesting example of exactly the kinds of errors he studied. The rest
of our communications proved a little strained.
The problems to
which Wegner has dedicated much of his career all have their origins in a
simple and intensely irritating parlor game, which dates back at least
to the days of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who reputedly used it to torment his
brother. It takes the form of a challenge: can you — the victim is asked
— succeed in not thinking about a white bear for one whole minute? You
can guess the answer, of course, but it’s nonetheless instructive to
make the attempt. Why not try it now? Look at your watch, or find a
clock with a second hand, and aim for a mere ten seconds of entirely
non-white-bear-related thoughts, starting … now.
My commiserations on your failure.
Wegner’s
earliest investigations of ironic process theory involved little more
than issuing this challenge to American university students, then asking
them to speak their inner monologues aloud while they made the attempt.
This is a rather crude way of accessing someone’s thought processes,
but an excerpt from one typical transcript nonetheless vividly
demonstrates the futility of the struggle:
Of course,
now the only thing I’m going to think about is a white bear … Don’t
think about a white bear. Ummm, what was I thinking about before? See, I
think about flowers a lot … Okay, so my fingernails are really bad …
Every time I really want, like … ummm … to talk, think, to not think
about the white bear, then it makes me think about the white bear more …
At
this juncture, you might be beginning to wonder why it is that some
social psychologists seem to be allowed to spend other people’s money
proving the obvious. Of course the white bear challenge is virtually
impossible to win. But Wegner was just getting started. The more he
explored the field, the more he came to suspect that the internal
mechanism responsible for sabotaging our efforts at suppressing white
bear thoughts might govern an entire territory of mental activity and
outward behavior. The white bear challenge, after all, seems like a
metaphor for much of what goes wrong in life: all too often, the outcome
we’re seeking to avoid is exactly the one to which we seem magnetically
lured.
Wegner labelled this effect “the precisely
counterintuitive error,” which, he explained in one paper, “is when we
manage to do the worst possible thing, the blunder so outrageous that we
think about it in advance and resolve not to let that happen. We see a
rut coming up in the road ahead, and proceed to steer our bike right
into it. We make a mental note not to mention a sore point in
conversation, and then cringe in horror as we blurt out exactly that
thing. We carefully cradle the glass across the room, all the while
thinking ‘Don’t spill’ and then juggle it onto the carpet under the gaze
of our host.”
Far from representing an occasional divergence from
our otherwise flawless self-control, the capacity for ironic error
seems to lurk deep in the soul, close to the core of our characters.
Edgar Allan Poe, in his short story of the same name, calls it “the imp
of the perverse”: that nameless but distinct urge one sometimes
experiences, when walking along a precipitous cliff edge, or climbing to
the observation deck of a tall building, to throw oneself off — not
from any suicidal motivation, but precisely because it would be so
calamitous to do so. The imp of the perverse plagues social
interactions, too, as anyone who has ever laughed in recognition at an
episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” will know all too well.
What is
going on here, Wegner argues, is a malfunctioning of the uniquely human
capacity for metacognition, or thinking about thinking. “Metacognition,”
Wegner explains, “occurs when thought takes itself as an object.”
Mainly, it’s an extremely useful skill: it is what enables us to
recognize when we are being unreasonable, or sliding into depression, or
being afflicted by anxiety, and then to do something about it. But when
we use metacognitive thoughts directly to try to control our other,
everyday, “object-level” thoughts — by suppressing images of white
bears, say, or replacing gloomy thoughts with happy ones — we run into
trouble. “Metathoughts are instructions we give ourselves about our
object-level thinking,” as Wegner puts it, “and sometimes we just can’t
follow our own instructions.”
When you try not to think of a white
bear, you may experience some success in forcing alternative thoughts
into your mind. At the same time, though, a metacognitive monitoring
process will crank into action, to scan your mind for evidence of
whether you are succeeding or failing at the task. And this is where
things get perilous, because if you try too hard — or, Wegner’s studies
suggest, if you are tired, stressed, depressed, attempting to
multi-task, or otherwise suffering from “mental load” — metacognition
will frequently go wrong. The monitoring process will start to occupy
more than its fair share of limelight on the cognitive stage. It will
jump to the forefront of consciousness — and suddenly, all you will be
able to think about is white bears, and how badly you’re doing at not
thinking about them.
Could it be that ironic process theory also
sheds light on what is wrong with our efforts to achieve happiness, and
on the way that our efforts to feel positive seem so frequently to bring
about the opposite result? In the years since Wegner’s earliest white
bear experiments, his research, and that of others, has turned up more
and more evidence to support that notion. One example: when experimental
subjects are told of an unhappy event, but then instructed to try not
to feel sad about it, they end up feeling worse than people who are
informed of the event, but given no instructions about how to feel. In
another study, when patients who were suffering from panic disorders
listened to relaxation tapes, their hearts beat faster than patients who
listened to audiobooks with no explicitly “relaxing” content. Bereaved
people who make the most effort to avoid feeling grief, research
suggests, take the longest to recover from their loss. Our efforts at
mental suppression fail in the sexual arena, too: people instructed not
to think about sex exhibit greater arousal, as measured by the
electrical conductivity of their skin, than those not instructed to
suppress such thoughts.
Seen from this perspective, swathes of the
self-help industry’s favorite techniques for achieving happiness and
success — from positive thinking to visualizing your goals to “getting
motivated” — stand revealed to be suffering from one enormous flaw. A
person who has resolved to “think positive” must constantly scan his or
her mind for negative thoughts — there’s no other way that the mind
could ever gauge its success at the operation — yet that scanning will
draw attention to the presence of negative thoughts. (Worse, if the
negative thoughts start to predominate, a vicious spiral may kick in,
since the failure to think positively may become the trigger for a new
stream of self-berating thoughts, about not thinking positively enough.)
Suppose you decide to follow Dr. Schuller’s suggestion and try to
eliminate the word “impossible” from your vocabulary, or more generally
try to focus exclusively on successful outcomes, and stop thinking about
things not working out. As we’ll see, there are all sorts of problems
with this approach. But the most basic one is that you may well fail, as
a result of the very act of monitoring your success.
This problem
of self-sabotage through self-monitoring is not the only hazard of
positive thinking. An additional twist was revealed in 2009, when a
psychologist based in Canada named Joanne Wood set out to test the
effectiveness of “affirmations,” those peppy self-congratulatory phrases
designed to lift the user’s mood through repetition. Affirmations have
their origins in the work of the nineteenth-century French pharmacist
Emile Coue, a forerunner of the contemporary positive thinkers, who
coined the one that remains the most famous: “Every day, in every way, I
am getting better and better.”
Most affirmations sound pretty
cheesy, and one might suspect that they would have little effect.
Surely, though, they’re harmless? Wood wasn’t so sure about that. Her
reasoning, though compatible with Wegner’s, drew on a different
psychological tradition known as “self-comparison theory.” Much as we
like to hear positive messages about ourselves, this theory suggests, we
crave even more strongly the sense of being a coherent, consistent self
in the first place. Messages that conflict with that existing sense of
self, therefore, are unsettling, and so we often reject them — even if
they happen to be positive, and even if the source of the message is
ourselves. Wood’s hunch was that people who seek out affirmations would
be, by definition, those with low self-esteem — but that, for that very
same reason, they would end up reacting against the messages in the
affimations, because they conflicted with their self-images. The result
might even be a worsening of their low self-esteem as people struggled
to reassert their existing self-images against the incoming messages.
Which
is exactly what happened in Wood’s research. In one set of experiments,
people were divided into subgroups of those with low and high
self-esteem, then asked to undertake a journal-writing exercise; every
time a bell rang, they were to repeat to themselves the phrase “I am a
lovable person.” According to a variety of ingenious mood measures,
those who began the process with low self-esteem became appreciably less
happy as a result of telling themselves that they were lovable. They
didn’t feel particularly lovable to begin with — and trying to convince
themselves otherwise merely solidified their negativity. “Positive
thinking” had made them feel worse.
* * *
The arrival of
George Bush onstage in San Antonio was heralded by the sudden appearance
of his Secret Service detail. These were men who would probably have
stood out anywhere, in their dark suits and earpieces, but who stood out
twice as prominently at Get Motivated! thanks to their rigid frowns.
The job of protecting former presidents from potential assassins, it
appeared, wasn’t one that rewarded looking on the bright side and
assuming that nothing could go wrong.
Bush himself, by contrast,
bounded onstage grinning. “You know, retirement ain’t so bad, especially
when you get to retire to Texas!” he began, before launching into a
speech he had evidently delivered several times before. First, he told a
folksy anecdote about spending his post-presidency cleaning up after
his dog (“I was picking up that which I had been dodging for eight
years!”) Then, for a strange moment or two, it seemed as if the main
topic of his speech would be how he once had to choose a rug for the
Oval Office (“I thought to myself, the presidency is going to be a
decision-making experience!”). But his real subject, it soon emerged,
was optimism. “I don’t believe you can lead a family, or a school, or a
city, or a state, or a country, unless you’re optimistic that the future
is going to be better,” he said. “And I want you to know that, even in
the darkest days of my presidency, I was optimistic that the future was
going to be better than the past for our citizens and the world.”
You
need not hold any specific political opinion about the forty-third
president of the United States to see how his words illustrate a
fundamental strangeness of the “cult of optimism.” Bush was not ignoring
the numerous controversies of his administration — the strategy one
might have imagined he would adopt at a motivational seminar, before a
sympathetic audience and facing no risk of hostile questions. Instead,
he had chosen to redefine them as evidence in support of his optimistic
attitude.
The way Bush saw it, the happy and successful periods of
his presidency proved the benefits of an optimistic outlook, of course —
but so did the unhappy and unsuccessful ones. When things are going
badly, after all, you need optimism all the more. Or to put it another
way: once you have resolved to embrace the ideology of positive
thinking, you will find a way to interpret virtually any eventuality as a
justification for thinking positively. You need never spend time
considering how your actions might go wrong.
Could this curiously
unfalsifiable ideology of positivity at all costs — positivity
regardless of the results — be actively dangerous? Opponents of the Bush
administration’s foreign policies might have reason to think so. This
is also one part of the case made by the social critic Barbara
Ehrenreich, in her 2009 book “Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is
Undermining America.” One underappreciated cause of the global financial
crisis of the late 2000s, she argues, was an American business culture
in which even thinking about the possibility of failure — let alone
speaking up about it at meetings — had come to be considered an
embarrassing faux pas.
Bankers, their narcissism stoked by a
culture that awarded grand ambition above all, lost the capacity to
distinguish between their ego-fueled dreams and concrete results.
Meanwhile, homebuyers assumed that whatever they wanted could be theirs
if they wanted it badly enough ( how many of them had read books such as
“The Secret, which makes exactly that claim?) and accordingly sought
mortgages they were unable to repay. Irrational optimism suffused the
financial sector, and the professional purveyors of optimism — the
speakers and self-help gurus and seminar organizers — were only too
happy to encourage it. “To the extent that positive thinking had become a
business in itself,” writes Ehrenreich, “business was its principal
client, eagerly consuming the good news that all things are possible
through an effort of mind. This was a useful message for employees, who
by the turn of the twenty-first century were being required to work
longer hours for fewer benefits and diminishing job security. But it was
also a liberating ideology for top-level executives. What was the point
in agonizing over balance sheets and tedious analyses of risks — and
why bother worrying about dizzying levels of debt and exposure to
potential defaults — when all good things come to those who are
optimistic enough to expect them?”
Ehrenreich traces the origins
of this philosophy to nineteenth-century America, and specifically to
the quasi-religious movement known as New Thought. New Thought arose in
rebellion against the dominant, gloomy message of American Calvinism,
which was that relentless hard work was the duty of every Christian —
with the additional sting that, thanks to the doctrine of
predestination, you might in any case already be marked to spend
eternity in Hell. New Thought, by contrast, proposed that one could
achieve happiness and worldly success through the power of the mind.
This
mind-power could even cure physical ailments, according to the newly
minted religion of Christian Science, which grew directly from the same
roots. Yet, as Ehrenreich makes clear, New Thought imposed its own kind
of harsh judgmentalism, replacing Calvinism’s obligatory hard work with
obligatory positive thinking. Negative thoughts were fiercely denounced —
a message that echoed “the old religion’s condemnation of sin” and
added “an insistence on the constant interior labour of self-
examination.”
Quoting the sociologist Micki McGee, Ehrenreich
shows how, under this new orthodoxy of optimism, “continuous and
neverending work on the self [was] offered not only as a road to
success, but also to a kind of secular salvation.”
George Bush,
then, was standing in a venerable tradition when he proclaimed the
importance of optimism in all circumstances. But his speech at Get
Motivated! was over almost as soon as it had started. A dash of
religion, a singularly unilluminating anecdote about the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001, some words of praise for the military,
and he was waving goodbye — “Thank you, Texas, it’s good to be home!” —
as his bodyguards closed in around him. Beneath the din of cheering, I
heard Jim, the park ranger in the next seat, emit a sigh of relief. “OK ,
I’m motivated now,” he muttered, to nobody in particular. “Is it time
for some beer?”
“There are lots of ways of being miserable,” says a
character in a short story by Edith Wharton, “but there’s only one way
of being comfortable, and that is to stop running around after
happiness.” This observation pungently expresses the problem with the
“cult of optimism” — the ironic, self-defeating struggle that sabotages
positivity when we try too hard. But it also hints at the possibility of
a more hopeful alternative, an approach to happiness that might take a
radically different form. The first step is to learn how to stop chasing
positivity so intently. But many of the proponents of the “negative
path” to happiness take things further still, arguing — paradoxically,
but persuasively — that deliberately plunging more deeply into what we
think of as negative may be a precondition of true happiness.
Perhaps
the most vivid metaphor for this whole strange philosophy is a small
children’s toy known as the “Chinese finger trap,” though the evidence
suggests it is probably not Chinese in origin at all. In his office at
the University of Nevada, the psychologist Steven Hayes, an outspoken
critic of counterproductive positive thinking, keeps a box of them on
his desk; he uses them to illustrate his arguments. The “trap” is a
tube, made of thin strips of woven bamboo, with the opening at each end
being roughly the size of a human finger. The unwitting victim is asked
to insert his index fingers into the tube, then finds himself trapped:
in reaction to his efforts to pull his fingers out again, the openings
at each end of the tube constrict, gripping his fingers ever more
tightly. The harder he pulls, the more decisively he is trapped. It is
only by relaxing his efforts at escape, and by pushing his fingers
further in, that he can widen the ends of the tube, whereupon it falls
away, and he is free.
In the case of the Chinese finger trap,
Hayes observes, “doing the presumably sensible thing is
counterproductive.” Following the negative path to happiness is about
doing the other thing — the presumably illogical thing — instead.
Excerpted from “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking” by
Oliver Burkeman, published in November 2012 by Faber and Faber, Inc.,
an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2012 by
Oliver Burkeman. All rights reserved.
