Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

by Lulu Miller

So starting in the 1970s, a wave of researchers began running experiments to see if it was true. And time and time again they found that, indeed, mentally healthy people rated themselves as more attractive than they were, more helpful, more intelligent, more in control of chance events (like rolling dice or picking winning lottery numbers) than they possibly could be. When they looked into their past, they remembered their successes with more ease than their failures. When they looked into their future, they voted themselves as more likely to succeed than their friends and classmates. Those people, on the other hand, with that oh-so-hailed virtue of accurate perception? Ding ding ding, you guessed it: clinically depressed. They struggled in their lives, found it harder to recoup after setbacks, often had more trouble in work and relationships. So a few modifications were made in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. A few traits slid from the proverbial unhealthy column to the healthy one. The term “delusions” was neutered to “positive illusions.” And by the late 1980s, largely because of a seminal paper by psychologists Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown that reviewed over two hundred studies that had shown a range of benefits of living with a positively warped worldview, it became widely accepted that a dash of self-deception… was good for the bones.