A Life in Beta

I love food. I love being happy (however rarely!). Food often equals happiness in my tiny mind. And therefore I sometimes love food courts but in the end they have become my idea of hell. Too much choice you see. Too much hot, steaming, accessible, processed, artificially lit goodness before my outstretched tray….

I wasted an entire summer wandering around the Eaton Centre Food Court in Toronto in a daze in 1996, overwhelmed by the range of choice and the knowledge that whatever I chose…I’d really want something else, simply because something else would have been so much better. It was one of the few certainties in my then young, tanned if very uncertain life.

I’ve always suffered really bad cognitive dissonance.  Post purchase, post getting dressed of a morning (does my bum look big in this?), post choosing a holiday destination, post project allocation, post food order.  It’s often crippling. What should I choose/have chosen? Did Ido the right thing? Maybe I should have? I’ll order one of each….crippling I tell you…

When I was in India, a wonderful man I met in a random Chai shack in Jodphur told me: “Comparison is the death of happiness”.  It struck such a cord in me and it resonated with what something my Da - in a moment of uncharacteristic philosophical lucidity – said to me: “The problem with (your generation) is too much choice”.

I knew what he meant (even though I denied this and called him a ludite still longing for the dark ages) but I could never reconcile all this intellectually. Surely choice can only be a good thing. Denied to so many, the ability to choose must be one of the great gifts that can be bestowed on society or an individual. I think of the limited range of choices available to my grandparents in rural early 1900′s Ireland (and even to an extent my parents). Surely we honour them through the range of choices available to us - a measure of any society or families economic and social progression?  And surely, a little comparison with the choices of others now and again does no harm does it? It can offer perspective and even inspiration on occasion.

So why have I struggled for so long with these ideals of choice and its relation, comparison? And how can I do something about it?  Well, now I’m starting to get a sense for this thanks to a brilliant talk from Harvard Psychologist Dan Gilbert published via my favorite Internet resource outside the BBC: the incredible TED. 

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll always be miserable if we don’t get what we want. In fact he suggests that our “psychological immune system” can help us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned. His work on “happiness” hypothesises in a nutshell that:

• Our expectations of how “happy” different outcomes/choices will make us are invariably wrong or overstated.  The long term impact on our happiness of making one choice over another is often imperceptible or completely negligible
• This appears to be because there are two types of human happiness: natural and synthetic
• Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted. Synthetic happiness is what we manufacture when we don’t get what we wanted
• Synthetic happiness is just as real and enduring as the happiness we feel when we stumbleupon exactly what it is we wanted
• We all have the potential to synthesize happiness but many of us seem either unaware or unable to do so
• Freedom to choose is the friend of natural happiness – we all have the possibility to choose/realise what we want
• However, freedom to choose is not conducive to manufacturing synthetic happiness which may be required if we don’t get what we want. People with a limited number of choices or irreversible choices can end up with a sense of equal or greater satisfaction than those in possession of real happiness in spite of which choice they make. The “irreversible condition” is the friend of synthetic happiness suggests Gilbert
• However, those with a large number of choices available - or the opportunity to reverse choices already made - seem to find it much harder to synthesize happiness if necessary.

It’s an interesting concept and of course, over 2500 years old if we agree that this principle of not overstating the perceived gap between the present and an imagined future; acceptance of/embracing what one has not what one might have had underpins the Zen Buddhist tradition (among others).

There are some genuinely interesting considerations here for matters of Public Policy and for change management therein - particularly given the rise of the “freedom of choice for all citizens” agenda that has dominated so much of recent political debate in the UK and Western Society.  I was feeling a bit lightweight this evening to tackle it and anyway, Mr Schwarz is always so entertaining. Enjoy: “The Paradox of Choice”. I’ll revisit this in the future. I’m particularly interested in how this links to the simplification of Local and Central Government Services.

But back to me…….until I can develop my own mindfulness, my own sense of self awareness and acceptance of the impermanence of all things (ideally) then I will need to improve my powers of synthesizing happiness (just in case I don’t get what I want again!). And to give myself a fighting chance I clearly need to bound my choices better. That may be hard in some aspects of life where choices are not possible to bound by the individual but there are many areas where this is possible. And food courts are my first stop on the road to finding synthetic food happiness. No more wrangling on noodles or chippie or curry or fried chicken or sushi or hot dog or burger or salad bar (ok, ok but it’s always a potential choice!) or pizza etc etc.  No more cold sweats, no more wasted time waiting from my long suffering friends, no need for them to order a back up dish for me, no more stop and search incidents as I arouse suspicion with my seemingly endless decision making loops of the options, no more disappointment as I realised on first bite that “I should/could have had…it would have been much better….”.

And peace in the form of my very own slice of synthetic happiness shall descend; on a styrofoam food court tray. Amen.

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