Authors: David Rakoff
So I didn’t.
In the three weeks leading up to the due date, I did no writing at all, aside from my self-pitying, stultifying diary, whose entries all began “T minus X days,” referring to the twentieth, when I would have to call my editor and tell her that I had failed, without even the necessary pages of twaddle I’d need to qualify for a kill fee. I was Penelope at her loom, filling my time with busywork. I woke each day at the crack and, when it seemed appropriate, I would pick up the phone and begin that day’s interviews with other psychologists, all purportedly in the name of re(me)search.
I spoke to James Pennebaker, the chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas in Austin, who worked with survivors of traumatic experiences. He found that if patients wrote, talked about, or articulately confronted what they had gone through, as opposed to suppressing the feelings, they showed marked improvements in physical health, immune function, and other markers. In another study he conducted in 1989 with David Watson, they found that even the kvetchiest patients, those with the least-positive attitudes, who complained most about their symptoms, turned out to be no objectively
sicker than those with low negative affect. It was nice to find out, then, that if one is characterologically incapable of
not
being a total fuckface, science has not shown you will die any sooner. People might just be gladder when you eventually do.
David Lykken conducted the Minnesota Study of Twins (not the baseball team; think Doublemint, or Romulus and Remus), collecting data from hundreds of pairs of identical and fraternal twins for years, measuring their subjective well-being (SWB)—their self-reported happiness—and found that “the effects on current SWB of both positive and negative life events are largely gone after just three months and undetectable after six … Most people will have adapted back to their genetically determined set-point.” Lykken found this to be the case across the board among his subjects, regardless of economic, racial, ethnic, gender, or other circumstantial factors. So if you win the lottery or have your limbs lopped off by an oncoming train, within 180 days, you’ll be back to your old self, which is very good—or bad—to know.
Many scientists have challenged Lykken’s results, and the media has misinterpreted his findings, often conflating the malleable and potential notion of heritability with the genetic verdict of heredity. Even Lykken himself contends that one mustn’t use one’s set-point as a pretext for resigning oneself to one’s DNA.
“After we published that study, I said something like ‘trying to be happier is like trying to be taller,’ and I regretted that as soon as I saw it in print,” said Lykken on the phone. “It was a smart-aleck comment and in fact I wrote a book to contradict it … one can manage to bounce along above one’s set-point, if you play your cards right and if you realize that the striving for winning the lottery or the big goals is not the solution unless working to get there is in itself gratifying … the important thing is that nature has equipped us, has arranged for us to do her bidding by marshaling
us with pain
and
pleasure. It’s extremely important that we not feel so happy all the time that we don’t get the work done or feel so sad all the time that we don’t get the work done.”
(The following is off point but amusing, and so I include it: reading further in Lykken’s article “The Heritability of Happiness” in the
Harvard Mental Health Letter
, I was diverted by—and have no memory as to the pertinence of—an absolutely charming and unintentionally hilarious paragraph about homosexuals, starting with a mention of his wife’s cousin, a man who “brought joy and new life into any room he entered. He was funny … a delightful and imaginative host, an ideal guest …” He goes on to mention that these qualities were wonderfully embodied by William Hurt in
Kiss of the Spider Woman
as well as Harvey Fierstein. “Only the intractably homophobic would fail to get a lift when he enters the room. What I am suggesting is that gay men, at least those with more feminine natures, seem to make an art of daily living, they enliven the tedious, decorate the drab, make the mundane more amusing … Perhaps the euphemism ‘gay’ is more apt than I had previously thought.”
Clearly Dr. Lykken has neither had his path blocked by twenty feet of retractable dog leash unreeled across the sidewalk, just so that some narcissistic, over-muscled invert’s pug—imaginatively named Will or Grace or
Liza
—might walk unimpeded by tax-paying humans, nor, I’m guessing, has Dr. Lykken been the opposite of helped by one of the evil queens on staff at Barneys, but on behalf of my fellow deviants, I would like to say—as I sit here in my own sodomitically bedizened surroundings [
the silks, the brocades, the stuffed cockatoo in the golden cage!
]—thank you, sir.)
———
I wasn’t getting any work done. At T minus nine days, I startled out of sleep an hour before the alarm, at 5:00
AM
, hissing, “Who the
hell
do you think you are?”—the words out of my mouth before I was fully conscious. I often resort to precisely this little pep talk to myself to get it together and stop fucking around—a cautionary admonition against sloth, usually uttered when I feel I’ve either eaten too much or am lying in bed too long. I sat down and began transcribing my notes. Some time before 9:00, I picked up the phone to call Martin Seligman himself. He had been very nice when setting up the interview, which made me feel like a shitheel. I tried to clear my mind of prejudicial thoughts, reminding myself who was the learned professional with numerous advanced degrees and who was the smart-ass faux journalist.
The phone was out. Mother
fucker
. I put on my sneakers and walked out to the corner to the pay phone to call repair. It was street-wide as there were already three people waiting on line. My mood briefly brightened to see that one of them was my next-door neighbor, a handsome Frenchman with a comically perfect V-shaped torso. As I crossed the street, one of the women pointed downtown and there, already in progress at the top of the horizon, a worst-case scenario even the most detail-obsessed defensive pessimist could not have foreseen. The first tower was on fire.
I never wrote the piece.
On the day I spent with Norem, both of us having no idea what would be transpiring mere weeks later, I had asked her if she thought it was all going to change, citing the Kruger and
Dunning study where optimists got a ticket back to earth when faced with the truth. Would the culture finally come up against reality and temper folks’ rampant enthusiasm in the absence of facts, I wondered? “It had better change,” she answered. “What’s been celebrated in the media for the last ten years were all these twenty-two-year-old dot-com zillionaires, and they were all really optimistic and a lot of people were really optimistic about them in a pretty unnuanced and stupid way. And things have gone well for them, and they made money during the boom years and are perfectly willing to take credit for all their financial astuteness, even though you had to be an idiot if you didn’t make money during those years, apparently. I didn’t,” she added.
Julie Norem is my kind of girl
, I thought at that moment, not knowing that by “my kind of girl” I meant oblivious to the point of consigning Madonna to the dustbin of history. We were both so very wrong. Not wrong in the way everyone not privy to a daily intelligence briefing about bin Laden being determined to strike in the United States was wrong, but because we both grievously misread the tenacity of American glee and its extreme resistance to sharing the emotional spotlight with doubt. Rather than blasting open the doors to allow negative thinking into the public consciousness, the September 11 attacks only seemed to galvanize the optimists to new, adamantine heights of impenetrable positivity. Optimism didn’t just not go away; it became belligerent, aggressive. There was now officially no room for valenced emotions.
As Norem pointed out, “arguing
for
negative thinking, under certain circumstances, is very different from arguing
against
positive thinking.” But the line had been drawn. One could no longer point out that doubts, when voiced, can give dimension to reasoning, improve performance, or stave off disaster. Just like the fallacious separation of the Happy from the Sad, it was
both a false division and an intrinsic judgment. Contingency thinking, and contingency thinkers, became saddled with such ancillary traits as being counterproductive, not team players, killjoys, Cassandras, or worse: people whose allegiances were seriously in question, appeasers. In reality, it was no more traitorous than a parent looking out for the best interests of his child. Say you came to me, for example, contemplating a preemptive invasion of a sovereign nation (an incursion predicated on cooked intelligence, misinformation, and outright lies, but never mind), and you tried to convince me that said incursion would spread the honeyed sunshine of democracy and freedom upon a formerly dark corner of the world and occasion from the inhabitants of that sovereign nation nothing but full-throated greetings to you and your troops as liberators and the heaping upon you of grateful garlands. I might say, “Well, that’s terrific, and best of luck on your dubiously noble and messianic project.” But if I in turn add, “Before you go, have you checked that you have enough soldiers, adequately outfitted with sufficient gear? We don’t want them scavenging the Baghdad rubbish heaps for scrap metal to fashion hillbilly armor, now, do we?” If that’s
all
I said, just that little bit of small-voiced advocacy for some contingency planning. If I never once asked after the authenticity of those aerial photographs presented to the U.N. by Colin Powell (merely acting according to the tenets of the loyal soldier he was. Truly, if he’s so bound by the ancient codes of honor, so haunted by the ghosts of the thousands of lives he is partially responsible for snuffing out, then let’s go all ancient Sparta on his loyal soldier ass. Let him fall upon his sword or offer up his tender throat to the blade. Isn’t that what they did back then? All that wrestling with himself on the Sunday morning news shows, the repellent too-little-too-late ex post facto tortured regret, his conscience-ridden resignation … well, all I
can say is Yiddishists everywhere should bow down before this apotheosis of chutzpah. But let me be clear about this: Bush and Co. didn’t lie because they are optimists. They lied because they are liars. Okay, back to the matter at hand …), supposing I didn’t mention any of that, nor even the complicit looking the other way as soldiers were sold shitty, inadequate, extortionate insurance policies. If
all
I said was, “Hey buddy, looks like you’ll need more soldiers, if only to protect all those vases,” it does not necessarily follow that my contingency thinking nullifies your positive agenda, or that my advancing some more detailed cognition means that I lack patriotism.
See how that works?
Except that it almost never works. It is an almost unwinnable battle. American self-assurance and individuality lionize the can-do positivity of the optimist. It’s what settled the prairies and built the railroads, I suppose, although I like to think it was the pessimists who had the anxious foresight to circle the wagons. Given the greater comforts of our lives off the frontier today, optimism seems even more like the natural choice. (It’s presumptuous of me to assess your level of luxury, I know, but if you’re reading this, chances are you’re bobbing along in the same lavishly appointed boat as I am: an inhabitant of the developed world, at least, which in and of itself makes us very lucky indeed, and which makes those among us who
still
report feelings of dissatisfaction and anxiety seem very ungrateful.) That very privilege imbues all of us with a sense of power over cause and effect, a feeling that our actions can and do affect outcomes—which they sometimes do—but it remains among the prettiest of delusions, one that is ground down and out of most people elsewhere on this earth.
A 1999 article from
The New York Times
told the story of
the villagers of the Cambodian hamlet of Bet Trang. Coming upon three thousand tons of cement-like material in a nearby field, they could not believe their good fortune. The white plastic of the sacks proved to have manifold uses, as ground sheets, tents, waterproofing, emptied out for grain storage, you name it. What a boon, until, of course the villagers developed headaches, diarrhea, and weight loss. Eventually it was found that the powder, compressed ash from an industrial incinerator, contained insane amounts of mercury and other hazardous metals. It was dumped there by the Formosa Plastics Corporation of Taiwan. And why was the waste dumped in Cambodia and not the country formerly known as Formosa? Because the comparatively wealthy citizenry of Taiwan had a first-world sense of liberty and entitlement, and an opinion about the poisoning of their habitat, and they understandably protested. But the Cambodian villagers did not complain, even as they got sicker and sicker. This calamity seemed not materially different from everything else they had endured over centuries of colonization and fratricidal civil war. They had been taught to expect nothing from this life. Certainly nothing good.
Buddhist detachment might have it all over Western notions of jealousy, guilt, covetousness, and general engagement in its deep understanding of the essentially amoral random anarchy of the universe. Asian cultures score more pessimistically on diagnostic measures, tending to value the self-effacing aspects of self-doubt. With less value placed upon positive emotion, there is less impetus for gratuitous optimism. But just like those anxious, sad-sack Westerners, there are, of course, exceptions everywhere. My friend Jim went to see Amma, the Indian mystic whose hugs, it is said, are a dose of extra-strength sympathy and benevolence (she dispenses these hugs to audiences around the
world, including America, so her fans must be Western in some healthy percentage). Amma is said to be a conduit of all the love of the universe channeled through one pair of arms, a single warm body plugging into the great celestial wellspring of lovingkindness. Jim, a man of perhaps the sweetest disposition I have ever known and an avowed optimist—he wrote a beautiful chapbook of poems devoted to it—waited for something like four hours in Madison Square Garden and was incredibly glad he did.