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August 8 - September 9, 2015
Yet, because our library is also effectively infinite—no one person can ever read more than a tiny fraction—we face the paradox of abundance: Quantity undermines the quality of our engagement.
Recent research shows that there are some things worth striving for; there are external conditions of life that can make you lastingly happier. One of these conditions is relatedness—the bonds we form, and need to form, with others.
Happiness comes from within, and happiness comes from without. We need the guidance of both ancient wisdom and modern science to get the balance right.
Why do some people find meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in life, but others do not?
The image that I came up with for myself, as I marveled at my weakness, was that I was a rider on the back of an elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.
The metaphor of a rider on an elephant fits Damasio’s findings more closely: Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion (a major part of the elephant) does most of the work.
The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.
The automatic system was shaped by natural selection to trigger quick and reliable action, and it includes parts of the brain that make us feel pleasure and pain (such as the orbitofrontal cortex) and that trigger survival-related motivations (such as the hypothalamus). The automatic system has its finger on the dopamine release button. The controlled system, in contrast, is better seen as an advisor. It’s a rider placed on the elephant’s back to help the elephant make better choices.
the rider is an advisor or servant; not a king, president, or charioteer with a firm grip on the reins.
The rider is Gazzaniga’s interpreter module; it is conscious, controlled thought.
The elephant, in contrast, is everything else. The elephant includes the gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, and intuitions that ...
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It’s hard for the controlled system to beat the automatic system by willpower alone; like a tired muscle,30 the former soon wears down and caves in, but the latter runs automatically, effortlessly, and endlessly.
Moral arguments are much the same: Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other.
When you refute a person’s argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was already made.
If you listen closely to moral arguments, you can sometimes hear something surprising: that it is really the elephant holding the reins, guiding the rider.
we are the whole thing. We are the rider, and we are the elephant. Both have their strengths and special skills.
Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world.
Boethius is finally prepared to absorb the greatest lesson of all, the lesson Buddha and Aurelius had taught centuries earlier: “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”
The rider can’t just decide to change and then order the elephant to go along with the program. Lasting change can come only by retraining the elephant, and that’s hard to do.
Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures. This principle, called “negativity bias,”13 shows up all over psychology.
bad is stronger and faster than good. The elephant reacts before the rider even sees the snake on the path. Although you can tell yourself that you are not afraid of snakes, if your elephant fears them and rears up, you’ll still be thrown.
happiness is one of the most highly heritable aspects of personality.
Depressed people are convinced in their hearts of three related beliefs, known as Beck’s “cognitive triad” of depression. These are: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.”
Cognitive therapy works because it teaches the rider how to train the elephant rather than how to defeat it directly in an argument.
Marcel Proust wrote that “the only true voyage . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.”
Vampire bats, for example, will regurgitate blood from a successful night of bloodsucking into the mouth of an unsuccessful and genetically unrelated peer. Such behavior seems to violate the spirit of Darwinian competition, except that the bats keep track of who has helped them in the past, and in return they share primarily with those bats.11
Vengeful and grateful feelings appear to have evolved precisely because they are such useful tools for helping individuals create cooperative relationships, thereby reaping the gains from non-zero-sum games.13
Tit for tat appears to be built into human nature as a set of moral emotions that make us want to return favor for favor, insult for insult, tooth for tooth, and eye for eye.
Robin Dunbar19 has demonstrated that within a given group of vertebrate species—primates, carnivores, ungulates, birds, reptiles, or fish—the logarithm of the brain size is almost perfectly proportional to the logarithm of the social group size. In other words, all over the animal kingdom, brains grow to manage larger and larger groups. Social animals are smart animals.
Gossip is overwhelmingly critical, and it is primarily about the moral and social violations of others.
People do occasionally tell stories about the good deeds of others, but such stories are only one tenth as common as stories about transgressions.
When people pass along high-quality (“juicy”) gossip, they feel more powerful, they have a better shared sense of what is right and what’s wrong, and they feel more closely connected to their gossip partners.
Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.22
Gossip and reputation make sure that what goes around comes around—a person who is cruel will find that others are cruel back to him, and a person who is kind will find that other others are kind in return.
Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life.
In financial bargaining, too, people who stake out an extreme first position and then move toward the middle end up doing better than those who state a more reasonable first position and then hold fast.27
Reciprocity, like love, reconnects us with others.
The Machiavellian version of tit for tat, for example, is to do all you can to cultivate the reputation of a trustworthy yet vigilant partner, whatever the reality may be.
Curing hypocrisy is much harder because part of the problem is that we don’t believe there’s a problem.
people are skilled at finding reasons to support their gut feelings: The rider acts like a lawyer whom the elephant has hired to represent it in the court of public opinion.
Deanna Kuhn,11 a cognitive psychologist who has studied such everyday reasoning, found that most people readily offered “pseudoevidence” like the anecdote about Aunt Flo. Most people gave no real evidence for their positions, and most made no effort to look for evidence opposing their initial positions.
a one-sided search for supporting evidence only.
Franklin concluded: “So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”
we can easily find ways to explain away our selfish acts and cling to the illusion that we are better than others.
evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities, and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions.20 But such biases can make people feel that they deserve more than they do, thereby setting the stage for endless disputes with other people who feel equally over-entitled.
Studies of such “unconscious overclaiming” show that when husbands and wives estimate the percentage of housework each does, their estimates total more than 120 percent.21
people really are open to information that will predict the behavior of others, but they refuse to adjust their self-assessments.
Naive realism gives us a world full of good and evil, and this brings us to the most disturbing implication of the sages’ advice about hypocrisy: Good and evil do not exist outside of our beliefs about them.
If God is all good and all powerful, either he allows evil to flourish (which means he is not all good), or else he struggles against evil (which means he is not all powerful).
We all commit selfish and shortsighted acts, but our inner lawyer ensures that we do not blame ourselves or our allies for them. We are thus convinced of our own virtue, but quick to see bias, greed, and duplicity in others.
