“Possessions are diminished by possession.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
A decade ago, I was obsessed with a goal. If only I achieved it, I thought, my happiness would know no bounds.
I worked hard towards it. Only to be disappointed.
No, I didn’t fail. In fact, I surpassed the goal.
Why then do I brand it tragic?
Because, I realized a strange quirk of the human condition: by the time you achieve your obsession, you’re no longer obsessed about it.
Much like Joe from the movie Soul (2020), who experiences ennui on the very day he won big.
Joe: Yeah. So, uh, what happens next.
Dorothea Williams: We come back tomorrow night and do to all again. What’s wrong, Teach?
Joe: It’s just that, I’ve been waiting on this day for… my entire life. I thought I’d feel different.
Dorothea: I heard this story about a fish. He swims up to this older fish and says, “I’m trying to find this thing they call ‘The Ocean.'” “The Ocean?” says the older fish, “That’s what you’re in right now.” “This?” says the younger fish, “This is water. What I want is The Ocean.”
Human, all too human
In his TED talk, below, Harvard professor Dan Gilbert talks about The Impact Bias.
This bias refers to “tendency to overestimate the intensity and duration of our emotional reactions to future circumstances. This occurs when we incorrectly predict how severely an event will impact our emotional state, imagining a stronger and more lasting emotional impact than we actually experience.”
In fact, “a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.”
Why does this happen?
According to Gilbert, humans possess the rare ability to simulate future situations.
As Daniel Kahneman remarked, “Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.”
But, sometimes, this simulator malfunctions. It can “make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are.”
The road not taken
When forced to choose between two paths, we’re numb with indecision.
However, it’s when the road we chose turns out to be difficult, we feel particularly despondent.
“If only I had taken the other path,” we rue!
This despondency, however, arises from an incomplete analysis.
While we now know what our current path entails, we still do not know what the other path had in store. For all we know, it could have been worse.
Back to the TED Talk, Gilbert asserts: “from field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, and on and on, have far less impact, less intensity, and much less duration than people expect them to have.”
Meaning, your happiness would have remained at similar levels regardless of the path you chose. Can we just stop having buyers’ remorse?
The humdrum of daily routine
More than difficulties, it’s the druggery of daily life that bogs us. We expect life to be full of purpose, meaning and passion.
What we face is incessant monotony. What we face is a daily commute to the office amidst a sea of traffic. What we face is work of the most mundane variant. What we face is swallowing some morsels of food to avoid starving as we race against time.
We ponder: is this all life is about?
When you zoom out enough, many of our lives are interesting and full of meaning. If you edit only the twists and turns (and remove the boring chunks) of our lives, it would be cinematic. The background music will make it cinema-worthy even.
Tim Urban coined a phrase “the pixel theory” to explain this with finesse.
“Jack sees his life as a rich picture depicting an epic story and assumes that the key to his happiness lies in the broad components of the image.”
“But this is a mistake, because Jack doesn’t live in the picture’s broad strokes, he lives at all times in a single pixel of the image—a single Today.”
“So while thousands of Jack’s Todays will, to an outsider from far away, begin to look like a complete picture, Jack spends each moment of his actual reality in one unremarkable Today pixel or another. Jack’s error is brushing off his mundane Wednesday and focusing entirely on the big picture, when in fact the mundane Wednesday is the experience of his actual life.”
It’s this expectation that everyday be interesting that is to blame. At a daily level, your life is boring. That, far from being a bug, is a feature.
One fine day, when you look back at all these quiet, dull days, you’ll retrospectively assign them a new meaning. But that’s supposed to happen with the benefit of hindsight. Your worm’s eye view of your daily monotony will rarely be as fulfilling.
As Steve Jobs said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
Where does this take us? To what Joe realizes in the climax (Soul, 2020).
Jerry: So, what do you think you’ll do? How are you gonna spend your life?
Joe: I’m not sure. But, I do know… I’m gonna live every minute of it.
Musings by Madhav 
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