Author: sc

Steven Carlisle is an anthropologist and bicyclist residing in San Diego.
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Uncanny Cats: Why is the Movie Disturbing?

After reading a series of scathing reviews, I saw Cats last week - and liked it. In fact, I found the movie just about as entertaining as the reviews.

Especially the bad ones.

The film had hit a nerve. Reviewers seemed to be questioning all the life decisions they had made that lead them to the theater. The thing is, as much as they hated it, a lot of them really liked to, too. And they had a good deal of trouble making sense of the experience. (I loved this YouTube review - it's great entertainment in itself, but it's full of spoilers.)

What's this about? I think it has to do with our ideas about sex, animals, and the way our brain processes ambiguous information. It gave me an opportunity to

in an essay not so much on the film, but on the critical reception.

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The Expanding World of Social Prescribing

Take Two Aspirin, and Call Me in the Museum

If feeling good is most often about the relationship between your inner thoughts and your outer context, then why do so many treatments for unhappiness involve working on the inside alone?

This is a question that many doctors have begun asking, apparently. They have started a move toward social prescribing – giving prescriptions that involve getting their patients out of the house and into the community. At least, this what some doctors in Britain and Canada are doing. They are writing prescriptions for free admissions to museums, as well as recommending things like dance classes and chess clubs as treatments for people whose low moods are the product of disengagement from meaningful activities.

The idea that the world around us can be used as a tool for well-being shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. But social prescribing does tell us something about the ways professionals are thinking about happiness.

Why does this matter?

Although a person’s context has always been seen as important to their happiness,* for a long time happiness was categorized as a psychological phenomenon. Your mood could be managed in one-on-one psychotherapy sessions or in private with your journal. And this means that the broader sociological or cultural environment wasn’t viewed as particularly significant.

And that opens the door to many other ways to deal with issues around happiness, and allows people to combine philosophies and schools of thought in the way they handle them.

If context matters for happiness, then how, exactly, did it become something  handled psychologically in the first place? A small slice of the answer might have to do with the notion of baseline happiness (see the footnote below). But there’s much more to it than that. The answer to that question is long and complicated – and best saved for another time.

* To some extent. Some theories of happiness involve a version of the notion of baseline happiness, the idea that people are biologically engineered to return to their typical level of happiness after a major change. Those theories suggest that, in the long run, your level happiness is unrelated to the world around you. Myself, I don’t buy this. I’ve experienced happier and less happy periods in my life as my circumstances changed, and that doesn’t seem to be at all unusual. It also suggests that, since it can’t be changed, as a society, we hold no responsibility for the happiness of others. So this isn’t just wrong. As I’ve been arguing throughout this blog, it’s pretty irresponsible as well.

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Is Mindfulness Bad for the Workplace, or is the Workplace Bad for Mindfulness?

The relationship between happiness and work came up again this week - and some new research gives is a particular slant: mindfulness and work, they say, don't go together.

There's a new editorial in the New York Times about mindfulness in the workplace. When employees meditation, apparently, it's not actually good for business. "Meditation was correlated with reduced thoughts about the future and greater feelings of calm and serenity — states seemingly not conducive to wanting to tackle a work project," researchers Katherine Vohs and Andrew Hafenbrack explain in their essay, "Hey, Boss, You Don't Want Your Employees to Meditate."

Authors often have no say over the titles their articles are given, and this one sends a message that might be a little too clear: the article itself (here – you can read the abstract before you smack into the paywall) is a whole lot more ambiguous in its conclusions.

In it, they argue that meditation reduces people's motivation to engage in tedious and meaningless tasks. People didn't perform any worse, though, possibly because they weren't distracted by other thoughts or worries.
Happiness in the workplace in the US is a serious issue, and one that's gotten a good deal of thought.

What I'd Like to Ask These Business Experts

The research itself, with its appropriate level of nuance, doesn't bother me – but some of the assumptions the authors make about work do., The quote up there in the second paragraph should raise some big questions about the ways businesses think about their work environments.

1. All things being equal – and since mindfulness didn't effect productivity – why wouldn't businesses want employees experiencing "greater feelings of calm and serenity?"

2. In the research article, the authors explain, "While not tested here, it is possible that being in a mindful state made people realize how unimportant the experimental tasks were to them." They seem to be suggesting that this applies to the workplace as well as the lab. Why is the focus here on getting workers motivated to do things they don't care about, rather than finding ways to engage them?

The take-away from this seems to be that an anxious, un-self-actualized employee is, in some ways, better than one who's living life with a comfortable, mindful fullness. There was a time when employee satisfaction was taken as an important goal by many corporations. That time is, quite obviously, no longer here. There's been a subtle trade. Americans have exchanged satisfaction with life at work for the  money to buy satisfaction outside of work. (And then gave up the a lot of the money, too.)

So: is the problem with the mindful worker, or with the job she finds herself in?

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Been to Paradise

I've written a bunch about work, money and time – but what about what people do with their time and money when they're not working? A recent trip to Hawaii got me thinking about the nature of vacationing. Now that summer's coming, it's time to consider what you want out of your time off. Just how helpful is escape? And what makes someplace "paradise?" Check out Paradise: Lost and Found for some answers.

The writing style is a little different here: a bit less fact-based than, say, the last article on time, and a bit more personal.

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Impractically Busy

This site has kept me busy. It has kept me so busy, in fact, that it looks like I haven't actually been working on it all. That's just how busy it's kept me.

If you look around, you'll notice some new things. They may be small, but they took an inordinately large amount of time to develop.

My dive into history continues – reading up on the history of emotions. Here's a comment on the rather unique history of Dandyism. Many dandies, apparently, were in the British military:

[T]he Duke of Wellington's officers, whilst maintaining a commendable sang-froid in the face of danger, even to the extent of being able to react to the loss of a leg as if it were hardly worth mentioning, were so concerned about maintaining their uniforms in immaculate condition as to want to meet the enemy carrying umbrellas."[i]

Bigger and Better

 

You may notice a line of buttons down the left side of the page, tastefully coordinated with the color scheme around the title, which will make it easier for you to pass what you find here on to anyone who might find it interesting.

You'll also find a few new articles.

I wrote Fifty Ways to be Happy as a way to help with emotional literacy. It defines and describes the different terms we have for happiness in English. There are a few more than fifty on the list, actually. In what ways are you happy? Take a look and give it a think.

You'll also find a review of a television show, Once Upon a Time which, of course, is bookended by "happily ever after." The program has an interesting take on happiness as being determined by morality. Although it looks Disneyfied on the surface, it actually reflects an old, deep set of American preoccupations – old enough to predate the Grimm fairytales and their Romantic-era sensibility.

I've also been busy making myself visible on social media – not something a private person is especially good at. But you can find and follow me now on Twitter (s_g_carlisle) and, as everyone else is shutting down their accounts, I've opened one on Facebook, which is very good to follow because it'll alert you when there's something new to learn about here.

And there's been a lot of the work done search-engine optimization, adding little bits of data behind the scenes to make the articles and reviews more appealing to Google and that one guy searching for "happiness" on Bing.

And that is something you shouldn't notice at all.

 

[i] Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, p. 165

 

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Demanding Ideas from the Past

I’ve spent the last few weeks delving into history. Some of the ideas about happiness from the past, it turns out, were very demanding – and went far beyond the world of ordinary experience. I’ve added two new pages recently, both of which deal with issues that transcend life as we usually know it.

To the Reviews page I’ve added an article about Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although the Romantic movement never really caught on in the US, his work as a Transcendentalist (an American spin-off of that school of thought) has helped shape contemporary ideas about happiness, especially the ones relating to the idea of authenticity. Have you become the sort of person who can perceive God? Emerson tries to describe the state of mind you’d need to do this – and the sort of person you’d have to be.

I’ve also added an essay about Nietzsche’s conception of the Eternal Return of the Same. (That’s the latest entry in Happiness HQ, my little encyclopedia of happiness.) Would you be willing  to live your life over and over again, exactly as it was, is, and will be? Because, Nietzsche suggests, you might have to. If not, what would get you to that point of self-acceptance? This is at the heart of Nietzsche’s thinking about the Eternal Return.

I’m still working through the Transcendentalist period. I’m not really looking forward to Walden; it looks like it’s about 15 hours on LibriVox,  but that’s next on my list.

Anything you think I should read? Let me know.

-Steve

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Looking for Fairness in a Luck-Bound World

I'm still trying to figure out the best way to format this site. Where should I put these articles? While I try to work this out, I'll be posting two copies of this one: the one here, which will start off at the top and work its way down toward obscurity, and a copy on the Impractical in Practice page, with a few more bells, whistles and thrilling formatting options, which I can arrange by importance and topic instead of by date. But since you're here now, please enjoy this report on the meaning of meritocracy.

I came across a review article today that's either profoundly heartening or deeply depressing, depending. "The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized," the title announces, and the article itself goes on to discuss a number of studies that show just that. For those of us who think of success as an important component of happiness – and that's most of the people I know – this has important ramifications.

It appears that a vast and varied hodgepodge of researchers – including physicists, psychologists, risk analysts and investment strategists – have all been looking into talent and luck as they relate success. Smarter, more creative, more emotionally intelligent people are able to make better use of their opportunities, but simply having those traits isn't enough for a person to get ahead. Author and researcher Scott Barry Kaufman explains that "more talented people are going to be more likely to get the most 'bang for their buck' out of a given opportunity," but that it takes a good deal of luck to get the cycle moving in the first place. And often, Kaufman explains, less talented people are able to go farther just because they get a lucky break.

Success breeds success, as they say. Once someone has been recognized as successful, they are more likely to be rewarded for that success again – being given a better job offer, or another grant, or some other award that then becomes a stepping stone toward the next success.

A pair of physicists and an economist developed a simple simulation to measure the importance of talent against luck. Success, as it turns out, was not all that closely associated with talent. At the end of the simulation game, just 2% of the simulated people ended up with 44% of the accolades. All-in-all, Kaufman explains, "mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals."

These results are actually a good thing.

...and why is that?

It's possible that someone will find this very depressing. But come on – didn't most readers actually suspect this was the case before it all got quantified? The extremes of inequality might be a bit of a surprise, but in a world in which (as Kaufman points out) the richest eight people own as much as the poorest 3.6 billion, give or take a million here and there, this can't be too unexpected. What studies like these do is to shed light on that suspicion, and make it something people can point to as at least potentially true.

I find this quite heartening. As the data builds up, it gives more heft to a different conversation than the one about luck and talent. It lets people talk more intelligently about fairness, equality, and opportunity - and happiness.

When they're built on ideas about success, American theories of happiness start with an assumption: that the US is a working meritocracy. This is an old assumption, as deeply embedded in certain ways of thinking about American identity as it is in ideas about happiness. Show a little gumption and it will be rewarded, Ralph Waldo Emerson announced in 1841:

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it.

Emerson wasn't the first or the last to express this. Setting Emerson next to Kaufman here is important because there's a conflict that suddenly comes into focus, between the overt, proudly-proclaimed myth of meritocracy, and a subtler underlying disquiet about it – Is this really how it works? Is life really fair? And when uneasy feelings come into conflict with a national mythical ethos, the myth wins out. But setting myth against research makes it a cleaner fight.

So for generations, Americans by the millions (if I had to guess) have been living unhappily and feeling like failures while blaming themselves, when it's entirely possible that what often gets dismissed as bitter rationalization may actually be true. (Like Ripley, and her knack for showing up where the aliens are, being in the wrong place at the wrong time can be really detrimental to one's professional prospects.[1]) So this is a bit of a win for the underdogs among us. I'm not suggesting reparations here, but at least they deserve a little vindication.

But there is another point to remember here. In the US, an economic system that promotes inequality thrives because people believe, or imagine, or like to imagine, that it's a meritocracy: people who do well do well because they deserve it.

But if we were all a little more modest about success and its relationship to luck, we could begin heading toward a better world for everyone. Those physicists who teamed up with the economist did another simulation, this time looking at what happens when scientific research gets funded in more and less equal ways. If groups that fund research want to get more significant results out of their investments, then distributing money randomly among scientists would be more effective than some of the models at work today. The worst results came when people who were already receiving healthy funding were given even more. What produced the best results? Funding everyone evenly.

So at least hypothetically, when it comes to science, being modest about merit and treating all comers equally turns out to be better for everyone.

And we can take this a step further. As Wilkinson and Pickett argue in The Spirit Level, equalitarian societies – societies in which there is relatively little distance between the richest and the poorest – are happier than societies with great inequality.[2] This isn't just because there are fewer poor people, they explain. Even the wealthy are happier, even if they have less money, when the people around them are more equal. In those societies, social problems are alleviated, segregation reduced, and, as a result, the level of general social disconnection goes down, leaving everyone better off.

The notion that success leads to happiness still works pretty well, but its concomitant idea, that we earn happiness through success, falls further and further out of date. It seems that each generation has its own way of questioning the value of the American meritocracy. But now there's good reason to begin talking about – and wondering about – its very existence.

 

 

[1] Yes, Ripley does eventually become something like a corporate consultant about the aliens, but I don't think this is where she wanted her career to go.

[2] Wilkinson, Richard and Kate Pickett

2010 The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

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What you want the most is the hardest to find

Why is it hard for so many people to control their appetites? I came across an interesting theory, proposing that it's the result of natural selection.[1] What we want the most, the theory goes, is what's hardest to find. Those earlier hominids that went for the big calories and rare nutrients like fats and salts instead of low-cal, common veggies when they had the chance, were more likely to live to fight another day, and also have sex later, and pass those proclivities on to the next generation. So when you're looking through the pantry, an ancient voice in the back of your brain, passed down through the long eons before the rise of Nabisco, whispers, There will always be broccoli, but this may be the last Oreo you ever see… The traits we want the most in ourselves are the hardest to find.

The same, I think, is true of empathy, and calm, and many other things: what we want the most is the hardest to find – in ourselves and in others, too.

I was reminded of this recently. Someone I know seemed to be working really hard to pick a fight with me, and it pissed me off enough that I was just about to give it to him.

My friend Benton kicked my butt about it. "What do you think he's going through?" he demanded.

Yes. Right. Like I said, empathy is hardest to find when you need to find it the most. And failing that, mellowness.

This is one of the realizations that spills over the side when someone practices meditation.

One sultry night in Bangkok many years ago, just before the turn of the millennium, I was hanging out with the sister of a friend of mine, and his young nephew. My friend – let's not mince words here – couldn't be trusted. Still, she kept him on at her shop, selling trinkets and little statues at the market down by the Jao Praya River.

"He steals from me," she told me.

"Then why is he still working for you?"

Yes, why? Continue reading...

"To teach me Odtoan," she said.

Sensing my confusion, she whispered to her little son, "Pretend to annoy me."

The boy danced around her and made little mocking gestures while trying not to giggle.

Awn closed her eyes and held up her hand in the gesture that, in the US, means "stop." It means "stop" in Thai Buddhist iconography, too – but, as a gesture of the Buddha's, in a much deeper, longer-lasting sense.

Odtoan: patience, forbearance, endurance, tolerance. Important virtues if one wants to find peace, as Buddhists think of it.

How she measured the value of patience against the loss of merchandise I don't know. (After I returned to the US, she did send her brother to a monastery for a season, to improve himself.) But the emotions and states of mind that loosen tensions require practice.

It wasn't until I'd been meditating for several years that that revelation spilled into awareness. I began to see how much discipline it takes to not get angry, to make use of empathy and calmness to defuse tense situations – to be care-free. It can take more discipline than a person can muster sometimes.

And because the currents of our culture push us so quickly toward individualism and taking personal responsibility, it can be hard to ask for those things from others.

But I think Awn was right, in a round-about way: we do inherit these feelings - empathy, mellowness, anger, frustration, and many others - from the people around us. (I hesitate to say learn – these are often nothing other than emotional reactions.) Sometimes it's an intentional response to an irresponsible brother, but often we also experience them by mirroring the way others feel. This is all part of an environment of circulating feelings

What people want the most can be the hardest to find in those environments - but sometimes practice does help.

 

Notes:

[1] This comes from a secondary source I taught in my days at UCSD, a book called Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect, by Paul Ehrlich (published Penguin Books in 2002), p. 287.

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Happiness When Times are Tight – or Just Feel That Way

In David Brook’s column earlier this week, he talks about the emergence of a “scarcity mentality” in Donald Trump’s Republican party. Scarcity mentalities are non-starters, he writes. It
“seems like a shift in philosophy. But it’s really a shift from a philosophy to an anti-philosophy. The scarcity mind-set is an acid that destroys every belief system it touches.”
Historically, though, those philosophies have existed, and they worked pretty well – Trump’s handling of them aside.
This got me to thinking about the metaphors that people use to figure out the path to well-being. In times when economic resources are scarce, there seems to be a tendency toward thinking that psychic resources are scarce, too. People took what they knew about the world, and applied it to the mind as well. Scarcity in the 19th century lead to beliefs that seem odd today, like the idea that the emotional exhaustion of a failed love affair could destroy your health, and the notion that children should be kept away from excitement if they were going to grow up strong.
By the early 20th century, though, the metaphor had changed: as the economy began to expand as a result of more efficient human work – aided by the advances of the industrial revolution – and so the idea that minds worked that way as well came into vogue: exertion was suddenly good for you. You could work your way to happiness.
So if ideas about minds are reflections of our worlds – adaptations of the metaphors that appear in our cultural environments – where are we today in our thinking about happiness? Are we wrapped up in computer metaphors, or something else? Is the outside-in approach, where you “fake it ’til you make it” actually the Facebook model of happiness, where you present your ideal life and hope it trickles down?
I’ve given those historical ideas a better exploration in today’s article, which you can find here.
What do you think?

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I’ve got a new bathroom

At least, parts of it are new. And it’s much, much better than the one I had before.

That got me thinking about a classic happiness problem: Why do we like the things we like?

Thinkers like the philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno argue it’s because we associate nice things with being “classy” in a very literal sense – because the things we own tell us who we are, and that comes with a social class label.

For several hundred years, people have been pursuing the American dream – and conspicuous consumption has been a part of that. Why? One argument explains it by saying that consumption tells other people – and ourselves as well – what we’re worth.

The modern minimalism movement rebels against that: you don’t need good things to convince yourself that you’re a good person. (Or, rather, if you do then you’ve got bigger problems to deal with than storing your shoe collection.) In this, they’re following after Adorno – but there’s a difference.

People in the 21st century still succumb to the desire to keep up with the Jonses, but it’s easier to get yourself out of that head-space because there are more points of view you can look at our culture from, if you’re willing to seek them out.

I’ve got this new bathroom, and I’m trying to figure out what, from Adorno’s point of view, it’s saying about me.

And I’m not sure that it matters. I explore this question in greater depth in an essay I’ll post soon.

Owning nice things can feel good in a lot of different ways. Are some ways better than others? Let me know what you think.