There are few aspects of modern life more irritating than people who go on and on about the aspects of modern life they find really irritating. Is the over-loud use of mobile phones on trains, for example, genuinely more annoying than the very existence of the BBC TV series Grumpy Old Men, where the phenomenon is moaned about incessantly? Is walking into a greengrocer’s and seeing a misplaced apostrophe really worse than walking into a bookshop and not being able to breathe for copies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves? And what about the book Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? (‘Or is it just this book?’, as the writer Bill Bryson once superbly put it in a newspaper interview.) And, yes, I realise this paragraph constitutes precisely the sort of list of annoyances that I’m professing to hate. I irritate myself all the time, believe me.
There’s a kernel of useful truth in all this whining, however, which is this: it really is the tiny things that seem to provoke the most anger. Psychologists call these ‘background stressors’, the small but unremitting factors that build up and may even trigger or exacerbate illness – or shooting sprees in Midwestern shopping malls, for that matter – as surely as bigger and more obviously traumatic experiences.98 The fact that they’re so small, of course, doubles their power of irritation: you get to be infuriated by your upstairs neighbour’s creaky floorboard and, additionally, infuriated that you’re getting infuriated by something so minor.
A lot of this we simply have to tolerate. (In your working life, it has been demonstrated, you’ll suffer from background stressors in proportion to how little control you have over your environment, which is why waiters and drivers experience their ill-effects infinitely more than, say, the well-off talking heads on Grumpy Old Men.99) But we can change some things. One obvious but fantastically useful exercise is as follows: take a sheet of paper and a pen. Walk through your home or workplace, making a note of the physical things that cause you a few seconds’ annoyance on a daily basis (a loose door-handle; not having enough socks; the bag of clothes you’ve been meaning to take to the charity shop for months). Choose the most annoying one. Fix it now. That’s the end of the exercise. The investment, in terms of time, is tiny; the payoff, in terms of serenity, is huge.
Of course, a good Buddhist would chime in here and observe that true serenity is about remaining calm in the midst of daily irritations, not trying to control your surroundings to the point where the irritations don’t exist. ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re given, [whether] it’s life in a madhouse or life in the middle of a peaceful, silent desert,’ writes the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. ‘Whatever you’re given can wake you up or put you to sleep.’ The way to think about the idiot on the train who’s talking too loudly on his mobile phone, from this perspective, is that he’s generously providing you with an opportunity to learn to become less irritable. Well, it’s something to aim for.
The United States Census periodically issues reports on a category of workers it labels ‘extreme commuters’, which brings to mind images of eccentric Americans paragliding to the office, but which really means, less thrillingly, that they spend three hours or more travelling between work and home. (Presumably there are a few who paraglide to the office, though; one imagines they live on the west coast, work at Google and use the word ‘dude’ a lot.) Extreme commuting is on the rise, and not just in the US: one survey not long ago found 10 per cent of Britons spending two or more hours a day on the road.100 This is one of commuting’s vicious ironies: if you live somewhere big and spread-out, it’ll take you ages to get to work; but if you live somewhere small and crowded, it’ll take you ages, too, albeit for different reasons.
Another irony: people commute reluctantly, when they have no choice, because they can’t afford to live closer to work – yet if they get rich, they’re liable to do it to an even greater degree, presumably because they think living in the countryside, or quasi-countryside, will make them happier. The former kind of commuter won’t be remotely surprised to learn that it often doesn’t: numerous studies have shown commuting to be among the most misery-inducing of daily activities, highly correlated with stress and social isolation, often far outweighing the benefits.101
The Swiss economists Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey call this the ‘commuter’s paradox’, though really it’s less of a paradox than a cognitive mistake: people chronically underestimate the downsides of a long commute, while overestimating the upsides of (say) a bigger house. The average one-hour-each-way commuter, they concluded, would need 40 per cent more pay to declare him or herself as ‘satisfied’ as a non-commuter.102 The neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer suggests that this may be partly because commuting, especially in car traffic, is unpredictable, so we never get used to it. The brain’s capacity for adapting to the predictable usually seems like a disadvantage: it explains the ‘hedonic treadmill’, whereby the thrill of a new car, or some other longed-for benefit, soon fades. But it also means that if you must have aggravations, it’s best if they’re as regular as clockwork. We imagine a long commute will be a slightly tiresome ritual. Instead, it’s a fresh challenge every day.
Non-commuters needn’t feel smug, though, because freely chosen long commutes are surely an example of a thinking error we all make in other contexts. You might call it the ‘best of both worlds’ fallacy: faced with opposing choices, we struggle to combine the benefits of each, yet ignore the costs – in time, money and energy – of doing the combining. Commuters do this, but so does your annoying friend who tries to pack three social events into a single evening, spending almost no time at each, and leaving everyone involved mildly irritated. Even the serene-sounding notion of a ‘balanced life’, which we’re always being exhorted to attain, often seems to compound the problem: if the very act of balancing work, family, friends, hobbies, relaxation and travel wears you out, perhaps an unbalanced life isn’t such a bad idea after all.
Of course, there are those who seem to relish commuting – to appreciate the quiet isolation of the car or the iPod buds, or the sense of transition between work and non-work. But there are people who like death metal, too, and Cherry Coke. It’s an odd world.
You probably didn’t need researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden to tell you that Sunday is the most depressing day of the week. Few emotions are as instantly familiar as that deflating, edgy-yet-lethargic feeling seared into our psyches in childhood, and in Britain often accompanied by memories of bygone BBC programming, usually classic adaptations of Charles Dickens novels. Still, to rub it in, the Swedes analysed interviews with thousands of people – Germans, as it happens – so the folk wisdom about Sundays is now, in the language of media headlines, ‘official’. There were nuances: married people experienced the Sunday mood-plunge more than the unmarried, and former west Germans felt it more than former east Germans (though they were gloomier to start with). But, overall, Sundays were saddest.103 And they don’t show many BBC classic serials in Germany, so that can’t be the reason.
At first glance, the real explanation seems unmysterious: it’s the day before work or school restarts. These are the last hours of freedom, suffused with anticipation of unwilling toil. But there’s more to it than that: the modern Sunday, I think, is a lesson in how not to structure your life – or society – for maximum happiness.
The first hint that Sunday gloom isn’t simply a rational response to returning to work comes from remembering what happens when we actually get to work: many of us, as has frequently been observed, tend to enjoy the structure and goal-focus of our jobs. (In his book The Labour of Leisure, for example, the sociologist Chris Rojek argues that free time takes as much effort as ‘unfree’ work.) But Sunday carries more meaning than ‘the day before work’: it’s meant to be (historically) an especially spiritually edifying day, or (nowadays) an especially relaxing, convivial one. And so it ignores two key rules of happiness. First, as soon as you label any period as ‘specially’ enjoyable, you’ll become so self-conscious, monitoring its specialness, that enjoyment is near-impossible. And second, in a culture that’s no longer mono-religious, being told which day to set aside triggers an inevitable rebelliousness. I rarely want to go supermarket shopping on a Sunday evening until I remember that in Britain it’s essentially forbidden. Add to all this Sunday’s role as a temporal punctuation mark – ‘Reading the papers, drinking tea, ironing, a few more hours, and another week gone,’ as Jimmy Porter puts it in Look Back in Anger – and it’s a bust. You couldn’t invent a more dispiriting day if you tried.
Which explains why campaigns to ‘keep Sunday special’ seem doomed, on their own terms, and leaving aside their Christian bias: you can’t impose specialness. Perhaps we need strong laws to protect shopworkers’ hours, but that’s a separate matter. Meanwhile, stopping people doing what they want on Sunday won’t automatically prompt them to do something more enjoyable, let alone more worthwhile. The United Kingdom’s ‘Keep Sunday Special’ campaign doesn’t even have the courage of its convictions: it lobbies to protect the current compromise of limited Sunday trading hours, which creates neither a shopping-free nor a frustration-free day.
Back in Germany, responding to a complaint from the churches, a court declared that relaxing Sunday trading laws would be unconstitutional on the grounds that Sundays should be for ‘spiritual elevation’. Maybe they should; I’m no free-market extremist or hardcore atheist. But court-ordered spiritual elevation? Good luck with that.
Everyone knows that it takes 28 days to develop a new habit, or perhaps 21, or 18, depending on who you ask; anyway, the point is that it’s a specific number, which makes it sound scientific and thus indisputably true. We probably owe this particular example of pop-psychology wisdom to Maxwell Maltz, the plastic surgeon who wrote the 1960s bestseller Psycho-Cybernetics. He claimed to have observed that amputees took an average of only 21 days to adjust to the loss of a limb. Therefore, he reasoned – deploying the copper-bottomed logic we’ve come to expect from self-help – the same must be true of all big changes. And therefore it must take 21 days to change a habit, maybe, perhaps!
This is, of course, poppycock and horsefeathers, as a new study by the University College London psychologist Phillippa Lally and her colleagues helps confirm.104 On average, her subjects, who were trying to learn new habits such as eating fruit daily or going jogging, took a depressing 66 days before reporting that the behaviour had become unchangingly automatic. Individuals ranged widely – some took 18 days, others 245 – and some habits, unsurprisingly, were harder than others to make stick: one especially silly implication of the 28-or 21-day rule is that it may be just as easy to start eating a few more apples as to start finding five hours a week to study Chinese. (Another myth undermined by the study is the idea that when forming a new habit, you can’t miss a day or all is lost: missing a day made no difference. Indeed, believing this myth may be actively unhelpful, making it harder to restart once you fall off the wagon.)
Self-help culture clings to the fiction of the 28-day rule, presumably, because it makes habit-change sound plausibly difficult enough, but basically easy. The first problem with this is dispiritingly simple: changing habits is hard. We’re all ‘cognitive misers’, our brains designed to take short cuts, rendering as many behaviours as possible automatic. ‘Really,’ asks the psychologist Ian Newby-Clark, on the website of Psychology Today, ‘what would be the point of having a habit that didn’t free up your mind to crunch on more pressing matters?’ Habits are meant to be difficult to change.
The subtler problem is that we tend to think about habit-change wrongly. (I’m not talking about physiological addictions here, which need a different kind of approach.) We get trapped in a paradox: we want to, say, stop watching so much TV, but on the other hand, demonstrably, we also want to watch lots of TV – after all, we keep doing it – so what we really want, it seems, is to stop wanting. We’re mired deep in what the Greeks called ‘akrasia’: deciding on the best course of action, then doing something else. The way round this, say Newby-Clark and others, is to see that habits are responses to needs. This sounds obvious, but countless efforts at habit-change ignore its implications. If you eat badly, you might resolve to start eating well, but if you’re eating burgers and ice-cream to feel comforted, relaxed and happy, trying to replace them with broccoli and carrot juice is like dealing with a leaky bathroom tap by repainting the kitchen. What’s required isn’t a better diet, but an alternative way to feel comforted and relaxed. ‘The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken,’ Dr Johnson observed gloomily, but maybe by looking at the problem differently we can still, Houdini-like, slip out of them.
The Reverend Will Bowen is the pastor of Christ Church Unity in Kansas City, Missouri. It’s conceivable that not everybody reading this will leap to take advice from a Christian minister in a conservative American state. It probably doesn’t help, either, that Bowen has written a book, and launched a global phenomenon, challenging people to stop complaining for 21 days straight. The title, A Complaint-Free World, smacks of self-help’s conformist bias: who wants to be a compliant cog in the machine anyhow? Besides, perhaps you enjoy complaining. I like few things better than firing off witheringly pompous letters to utilities companies who treat me with contempt and incompetence. I understand that this may strike you as pitiful.
‘I’m not a good little cog,’ Bowen told me before I tried his challenge, which involves wearing a purple plastic wrist-band and switching it from wrist to wrist when you catch yourself complaining. ‘I learned this British term: whingeing. Dissatisfaction is the first step to positive change. But I’m saying take more control, make the change you want; don’t just whinge.’
What began as a local project has mushroomed, and now millions of purple bracelets have been distributed through complaintfreeworld.org. Out of self-consciousness, I switched mine from pocket to pocket, not wrist to wrist, but as Bowen readily accepts, you don’t really need one at all – you can use any small object. This is a venerable behavioural therapy trick for inculcating any new habit.
Complaining, Bowen says, doesn’t include neutrally telling someone they’re doing something wrong, let alone speaking up against abusive treatment; he’s talking, specifically, about the kind of moaning that just makes us feel worse – and which we vent, mostly, on friends who can’t do anything about it, rather than the person or institution we want to change. On average, Bowen says, it takes five to seven months for people to reach twenty-one complaint-free days; I haven’t made it past two. And, as the process made horribly clear, I don’t spend much of my life getting righteously angry about economic injustice or warfare: I spend it whingeing about people, or about tasks that end up taking less time than the whingeing. And, unscientifically, I’d say I felt far better when I wasn’t whingeing. Talking about problems is often important, but sometimes, not talking helps.
Bowen ropes in an old joke to illustrate his point that we complain not to change things but as an alternative to doing so. Two builders eat their packed lunches together. Day after day, one finds he’s got meatloaf sandwiches and complains – ‘Another meatloaf sandwich?’ – until finally his colleague can’t contain himself. ‘Why don’t you just ask your wife to make you something else?’ he suggests. ‘What are you talking about?’ his friend says. ‘I make my own lunch.’
Reading an excessive number of self-help books inevitably causes one to internalise some of their outlook on life, and this has been causing me difficulties with regard to the current economic crisis. I haven’t reached the stage of screaming, ‘You’re poor because you chose to be poor!’ at homeless people. (I refer you to the obnoxious Larry Winget, author of You’re Broke Because You Want to Be – although Winget’s obnoxiousness is a pose, and, to be fair, he’s only making explicit an attitude that’s implicit in many other books: if you’re not super-rich, you’re not trying hard enough.) On the other hand, I’ve evidently absorbed enough positive thinking to find myself growing impatient during conversations in which friends – usually friends who aren’t at imminent risk of penury – try to outdo each other with gloomy predictions. It’s not that the economic situation isn’t extremely serious. It’s just that all this competitive upsetting doesn’t seem, particularly, to help.
So I’ve been delighted to discover a handful of blogs dedicated to the topic of frugality that take things seriously yet not fatalistically, thereby managing – against all odds – to make the process of not spending money actively enjoyable. (I’m aware that frugal behaviour may make matters worse, on a macroeconomic scale, but if you’re reading this book for macroeconomic wisdom, God help you.) The best of these sites, including thesimpledollar.com and getrichslowly.org, apply the phenomenon of ‘lifehacking’ – simple tricks for happier and more productive living – to money management, thereby transforming it from a chore to a geeky project, which people like me find fun.
The frugality-hackers’ key insight is that, while everyone knows humans are irrational about money, most personal finance advice assumes we’re rational. Tried keeping to a personal budget recently? As with any solution dependent on self-discipline, the constant vigilance is exhausting. Instead, argues Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar, you have to find ways to make it more convenient not to spend money than to spend it, which might involve something as basic as leaving your credit card at home. Of course, if you can possibly afford it, you should be spiriting a portion of your pay-cheque into a hard-to-access account. Most of us live up to our means; tricking your brain into believing your means are smaller than they are is the least painful way to save.
Or take debt. If you have multiple debts, conventional wisdom dictates paying off the one with the highest interest rate, where possible; otherwise, you’re bleeding money. But lifehackers prefer the ‘debt snowball’: regardless of interest rates, start with the smallest balance, then the next, etcetera. It doesn’t make mathematical sense. But the psychological boost that comes from quickly eliminating a debt, then another, will provide momentum to keep going. Everyone’s irrational, to some degree. The challenge is to work with your irrationality, not against it.
Should you need further evidence that we’re not logical about money, by the way, consider the American study in which people responded much more favourably to an offer of receiving 300 cents than 3 dollars.105 Sometimes, one despairs.
In the 1980s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram sent 130 researchers into New York with a simple mission: queue-jumping. Milgram is better known for his studies on obedience, in which ordinary people were induced to give dangerous electric shocks – or so they believed – to unseen victims. Perhaps his queue-jumping experiment wasn’t so controversial, but it was provocative enough: researchers were told to find a queue, enter it between the third and fourth person with the words, ‘Excuse me, I’d like to get in here’, and see what happened. What happened was this: half the time, no one said a thing; only 10 per cent of the time was there a serious confrontation.106 Milgram speculated that this wasn’t just because people fear conflict, but because every member of a queue has an interest in keeping it orderly: better to absorb a solitary rulebreaker in silence than to lose your place to admonish the culprit, or risk a fight that slows everyone down or triggers the collapse of the queue. Respect for this firm-but-flexible orderliness must be why the British love queues, since it surely can’t be that we’re a nation of sheep who enjoy delays because they give us something to moan about.
Queues aren’t just a microcosm of the unspoken rules governing human interaction. For many of us, they’re also the context in which we most often confront impatience and frustration, those ubiquitous, low-level obstacles to a happy life. Companies know this, and deploy numerous tactics to make the time pass more quickly. Indefinite waits seem longer than defined ones, writes the business guru David Maister in his paper ‘The Psychology of Waiting Lines’, which is why Disney theme parks use complex formulae to calculate and display wait-times.107 ‘Pre-process’ waits seem longer than ‘in-process’ waits, which is why restaurants will seat you before they’re ready to serve you. Customers are happier when queues are acknowledged: when a supermarket calls ‘all staff to the checkouts’, it’s as much about you hearing it as about staffing. And occupied time passes faster than unoccupied time: mirrored walls are especially effective, apparently because most people love looking at themselves.
If you’re in the mood for self-improvement, queues are also the perfect opportunity to develop what the psychotherapist Albert Ellis called ‘high frustration tolerance’ – observing our thoughts and learning to distinguish preferences (‘I’d like to get served soon’) from the absolutist ‘musts’ that cause negative emotions (‘I must get served soon, and this waiting is intolerable!’). And queues bring sharply into focus how much of our lives we spend in a queue-like state of mind, leaning into the future, absorbed in thoughts about later, wanting it not to be now. Can you, as Eckhart Tolle suggests, relax into the waiting instead, treating it as an oasis, a pause in the rush of events?
Yeah, me, neither. But it’s worth a try: figure out how to find enjoyment in a queue, and you’ll be able to find it in almost anything.
I’m surprised how frequently I encounter the idea – from writers on happiness, but also sometimes from friends – that a good way to improve your life is to stop consuming news. (CNN, some of these people like to joke, stands for ‘Constant Negative News’.) As a news junkie, I’ve always bridled at this: don’t we have a moral obligation to know what’s going on in the world? I realise this may seem self-interested, since I spend much of my life writing articles for newspapers, but that’s not the case. Or, more precisely, it is the case – but it’s one of those occasions when my morals align with my self-interest. In short: if you ever encounter a newspaper in which I have written an article, it’s your duty, as an educated citizen of a democracy, to buy a copy. Several, actually.
Still, the arguments of the no-news advocates aren’t unconvincing. ‘The only reason for making news daily,’ claims John Somerville in How the News Makes Us Dumb, ‘is to create an information industry’: news organisations have a vested interest in encouraging a sense of the world as ‘jumpy and scattered’, as he puts it, and constantly changing. News is biased: not primarily politically, though that’s sometimes true, but in favour of crises, which combine novelty with negativity. And for what? Few of us respond by travelling to help suffering people, and most of the time we don’t even give money. Instead, we just feel worse. (There are ‘good news’ websites to counteract this, but I can’t take them seriously: ‘Milkman Still Delivering’ was the lead headline when I visited happynews.com, above a story about a jovial gent resisting the decline of his trade.)
Nor is feeling bad the only effect. The maverick economist Nassim Taleb once told me (in an interview for a newspaper, no less) that he shuns newspapers in the belief that they actively make you stupid. Each day they must generate fresh stories, so what an engineer would call their ‘signal to noise’ ratio is poor: you have to wait weeks, even years, to see which of the events they presented as significant really turned out to be so.
What finally tipped me into trying a news-fast was the suggestion, made by the evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett, that news might be a ‘supernormal stimulus’. Since we’ve evolved to respond to certain stimuli, this theory goes, artificial versions of those stimuli can trick us. Some songbirds, she explains, prefer to sit on lurid, oversized, fake versions of their real eggs. An obvious human parallel is pornography, which exploits a sort of evolutionary deception, since being attracted to pictures of bodies – as opposed to real ones – clearly isn’t a great way to replicate your genes. What if news works like this too? In prehistoric times, it made sense to be hungry for information that might affect our survival, and fascinated by new events that might signal danger or opportunity. But ‘combing the planet for the largest, most dramatic disasters,’ Barrett writes in her book Supernormal Stimuli, exploits that hunger while bringing us little advantage.
And so I tried. Only for six days (for professional reasons). Over the first two days, the phrase ‘news junkie’ took on new meaning. I felt like recovering addicts must. I watched my hand creep to the mouse button or the radio on-switch, and didn’t always intercept it in time. Then things got noticeably more peaceful. I met a friend in a bar; he mentioned a news story I hadn’t heard, but it didn’t impede our conversation. Later, a long magazine profile that I wanted to read presented a dilemma: was it news? I decided to be strict, and deem that it was.
Like I say, this didn’t last. I continue to think basic familiarity with the news is important. But as with many exercises in renunciation, the real benefit wasn’t in eradicating something from my life; it was in becoming more conscious of what I let in. I still want to know there’s been an earthquake in the Pacific or a new financial crisis in the Eurozone. I may even want to know the details. But I want to make that decision, not have my instincts make it for me. And I almost certainly don’t need to know that Lindsay Lohan has been released from jail, or that Russell Crowe has thrown a telephone at someone. ‘There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant,’ observed Ralph Waldo Emerson. Which is, as it happens, exactly my attitude towards the vast majority of Lohan-and Crowe-related developments.
The last thing anybody who suffers from insomnia needed to hear was the finding, from sleep scientists at the universities of Warwick and Naples, that consistently getting fewer than six hours’ sleep a night may lead to an early death.108 Well, thanks a bunch: what news could be more likely to induce sleeplessness? Now, instead of just spending the small, silent hours contemplating death in the manner of Philip Larkin (‘Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare’), insomniacs get to chew over the possibility that their very wakefulness might be hastening the death they’re contemplating. How ironically hilarious! Apart from the bit where you die.
As the persistently sleep-deprived won’t need telling, such ironies run deep in insomnia, which is victim to what the Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner calls ‘ironic processes of mental control’: trying to get to sleep is a sure-fire way to fail. And this is only one example: efforts to suppress negative thoughts or to eliminate anxiety are all prone, Wegner argues, to the same devilish mechanism. You try to control your own mind in some way, but can’t help triggering an internal monitoring process that watches to see if you’re succeeding – and that disrupts the whole business. You grow hyper-alert about not being asleep, anxious about your anxiety, upset about failing to think happy thoughts. (The classic experiment involves asking participants not to think of a white bear. Try it for 60 seconds, starting … now. Failed already, right?) Trying deliberately to stay awake seems a possible solution, and can work for a while, but then you remember you’re doing it only to achieve its opposite, whereupon self-monitoring kicks back in and all is lost.
Should we even be trying, though? As a rather mild sufferer, I’m on thin ice suggesting to hardcore insomniacs that there might be something in their condition worth not hating, or at least getting curious about. But don’t take it from me: take it from the Romanian philosopher-insomniac E.M. Cioran, who saw in sleeplessness something essentially human. ‘The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep,’ he once wrote. There is ‘not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot’.
During those sleepless night stretches, when for most insomniacs everyday worries take on giant proportions right when we can do least about them, Cioran felt himself to be encountering truth, existence in the raw, even the meaning of life. ‘He ultimately understood his long journeys into the sickly morning light as both crushing him and yet shaping his sensibilities,’ observes the Cioran scholar Gordon Marino in a New York Times essay. ‘What rich or strange idea,’ Cioran asks, ‘was ever the work of a sleeper?’ In those weird hours, out of sync with the rest of the world, his singular creativity flourished. The experience wasn’t much fun, but it was real.
Perhaps that’s extreme: almost nobody these days is best advised to get less sleep. But at least Cioran reminds us that special atmospheres attach to those parts of the 24-hour cycle decoupled from the world’s routine. Getting up at 4 a.m. can feel magical, if it’s voluntary; medieval peasants often slept in two phases, ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’, with a much-valued period of peaceful half-wakefulness between. Being awake at night has its upsides. Though if you truly come to believe that, you’ll probably find you can’t do it.
‘The goal of all inanimate objects,’ the author Russell Baker famously once declared, ‘is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.’ This philosophy – first aired in The Spectator in 1948, where it was labelled ‘resistentialism’ – is described by Wikipedia as a ‘jocular theory’. Well, perhaps. But one rarely feels jocular when confronted by it. For example, I defy anyone to use a Nokia 6500 phone handset (yes, that’s the one that sometimes takes a photograph while you’re sending a text message, thereby deleting the message – welcome to my life) and remain jocular for long. Besides, the conspiracy of objects is well organised. If the Nokia doesn’t get you, one of its associates will: the toe-stubbing floorboard, the self-assembly bookshelf, the unopenable jar.
Of course, our emotional relationships with objects aren’t characterised solely by paranoia. They’re as varied as our feelings about people. What I feel for my bathroom shower is a sort of low-level contempt: it’s a slacker; it doesn’t put in sufficient effort. What I feel for my Moleskine hardback notebooks, meanwhile, is genuine warmth. Such emotions, if not usually very intense, are pervasive: you almost certainly spend more time, overall, in the company of your mobile phone than your spouse, children or friends, and how you feel about it will surely impact on your happiness. ‘The principles for designing pleasurable, effective interaction between people and products,’ writes the designer Donald Norman in his superb book Emotional Design, ‘are the very same ones that support pleasurable and effective interaction between individuals.’
Marketers love to blather about the importance of emotion, but they’re talking about what Norman calls the ‘reflective’ level of design – the brand you’re buying into when you purchase, say, an iPod, and what that says about you. Norman’s focus is on the ‘visceral’ level, which is deeply physical, sensual, and probably entrenched in us thanks to evolution. A solid, well-built, well-proportioned table just feels right, regardless of what statement you’re making by owning it. More complex electronic devices, by contrast, seem reserved and inscrutable, shielding their inner workings from view. ‘One side-effect of today’s technologically advanced world,’ Norman notes, ‘is that it is not uncommon to hate the things we interact with.’
These are all just dumb objects, a rationalist might protest. Why get invested? But we do, and, as Norman explains, this instinctive anthropomorphising is not that odd. After all, we attribute intentional behaviour to a phone or a shower by inferring its attitude towards us from its outward behaviour – which is, ultimately, all we can do with humans, too. Think of the person you’re closest to in the world: how weird is it to realise that, in fact, you’ve never known anything about the content of his or her mind, except what you’ve inferred from their movements and the sounds they make with their vocal cords?
If we can’t fight this anthropomorphising, we might as well nurture it wisely, and make sure we’re surrounded, as far as possible, by objects that make us happy. Perhaps that sounds indulgent – but friendly and attractive objects needn’t be expensive ones. In fact, in my experience, expensive things are more likely to have a bad attitude. They act as if they’re entitled. My lazy shower wasn’t cheap; it just can’t be bothered. One of these days, it’s going to find itself getting replaced.
I feel slightly sorry for Suzy Welch, the self-help guru behind the book 10–10–10: A Life-Transforming Idea. Welch’s ‘10–10–10’ method for taking decisions is genuinely wise. When faced with any dilemma, she advises, ask yourself: what will the consequences be in ten minutes, ten months and ten years? This process ‘surfaces our unconscious agendas’, Welch claims, though what it most obviously does is properly balance short-and long-term perspectives, avoiding both hedonistic impulsiveness and a grim-faced fixation with the future. ‘Sound simple? Not quite,’ warns the book’s publicity material. Actually, though, it is simple. That’s its strength – but it also means that, unsportingly, I’ve now told you everything important in the book. That I can do this so briefly is surely, sales-wise, a problem.
Yet decision-making tricks such as 10-10-10 ought to be ridiculously simple, because we need them most when it comes to addressing the countless minor dilemmas that crowd our days. Momentous life-choices, by contrast, can be dwelt on and discussed with friends. But it’s a curious fact that many people seem to find the insignificant choices at least as paralysing as the big ones – a truth I’ve had many opportunities to ponder while waiting for my father, not an indecisive man on the macro-level, to agonise over toppings in pizza restaurants. Here are three more shortcuts for taking everyday decisions:
A dependable tactic for two people choosing a restaurant or movie: one person picks five options, the other narrows the field to three, then the first person selects one. This ‘has saved me and my girlfriend from starving to death on more than one occasion’, writes one grateful commenter at Ask Metafilter (ask.metafilter.com). (Hint: couples should agree in advance to use this rule, so that ‘whether or not to use 5–3–1’ doesn’t become a dilemma itself.)
‘Satisficing’, coined by the economist Herbert Simon, essentially means not letting the best be the enemy of the good, but it’s more rigorous than that. Rather than trying to pick the best bed-and-breakfast, for example, decide first on the criteria that matter most – ‘near woodland’, ‘serves a great breakfast’ and ‘in Wales’, perhaps – then select the very first one you encounter that ticks all the boxes. This is far less exhausting, and may actually bring you closer to the ‘best’, by focusing your mind on what matters, rather than on alluring advertising or other distractions.
This is for sequential choices, where each option must be accepted or rejected in turn – as in flat-hunting, where an option may vanish if you hesitate, or, say, choosing where to picnic while hiking (assuming you don’t want to retrace your steps). Provided you can estimate the total number of options – the number of flats you’re prepared to look at, the number of potential picnic spots – it’s a weird mathematical truth that your best bet is to reject the first 37 per cent of them, then pick the first one that’s better than any of those first 37 per cent. (If none is, pick the final one instead.) According to an article in Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, this can be applied to choosing a mate, too.109 But maybe that publication’s not the greatest place to look for romantic advice.
One day, perhaps when it comes up in a pub quiz, or a particularly obscure edition of Trivial Pursuit, you’ll thank me for sharing the following piece of information: the legendary disc jockey and eccentric television personality Jimmy Savile travels everywhere with only one pair of underpants. (He washes them every night, according to an interview he gave in 2000.) I do not recommend this course of action, in line with my overall policy of not recommending that people model their lives on Jimmy Savile’s. But you can’t fault the man for not travelling light.
I thought of Jimmy Savile’s underpants (much as I try not to) when I came across onebag.com, an extraordinary website written by a marketing executive, Doug Dyment, whose urbane and friendly tone belies the steely single-mindedness of his ambition, which is never to travel anywhere with more than a single carry-on bag, and to persuade anybody who’ll listen to do the same. Dyment’s approach is intensely practical but, taken along with other sites and books on the topic, you can begin to perceive the outlines of a Zen-like philosophy of travel, according to which lightweight physical baggage is not just a metaphor for, but a cause of, a calm and happy mind.
Dyment quotes Frank Lloyd Wright: ‘To know what to leave out and what to put in; just where and just how, ah, that is to have been educated in the knowledge of simplicity.’ The most useful part of his site is the ‘just how’ – specifically, an idiosyncratic technique called ‘bundle wrapping’, which involves wrapping your clothes around each other to eliminate air pockets, prevent creasing, and fit far more into a small space. You’ll need to consult his diagrams to try it for yourself and, if travelling with a companion, you’ll also need to learn to withstand withering looks as you unpeel your shirts from your jeans. But it works. ‘People overpack because of timidity and fear of the unknown, both largely results of inexperience,’ argues Dyment, who also provides numerous tips for reducing the number of items carried, including doing laundry en route, complete with retractable washing line.
Draconian restrictions on cabin baggage in our acutely security-conscious era – no liquids except in tiny quantities a small transparent bag, etcetera – do not make any of this easier, though perhaps they do at least encourage the kind of minimalism of which OneBag approves. And anyone travelling by air still has to contend with the fact that your bag will be accepted as small enough to take on board, or rejected as too large, depending entirely on which side of the bed your check-in agent got up. But since a light and well-packed bag engenders a calm mind, you won’t get angry. You’ll good-temperedly hand over your bag to be stowed in the hold. And when the airline ends up routing it to Bratislava by mistake, you’ll merely reflect that the ultimate way to travel light, after all, is to travel with no bags whatsoever. You can always just wash the underpants you’re wearing. Jimmy Savile does.
An uncharitable observer might argue that I’m obsessed with noise. I’ve spent countless hours searching for the perfect earplug. I’ve bought, then returned, several pairs of expensive noise-cancelling headphones. Sometimes, to stifle keyboard-hammering colleagues in offices, I’ve listened through headphones to recordings of white noise. I covet a noise-masking machine called the Marpac SoundScreen 980A, and once considered buying a pair of ‘noise-cancelling earmuffs’ designed for use on construction sites, an environment in which I spend approximately none of my time. I own a CD called Relaxing Sounds of Nature, which has helped combat the Enraging Sounds of Neighbours. In my defence, I like quoting Schopenhauer, from his essay On Noise: ‘There are people [who] are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art … The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality.’
I’ve learnt two things from all this. On the one hand, I’ve actually discovered the perfect earplug: it’s the Howard Leight Max, an orange foam number that I buy in boxes of 200 pairs. (The secret, you’ll be fascinated to learn, lies in the shape of the flange.) On the other, I’ve had to confront the paradox of the quest for silence: the more you focus on trying to achieve quiet, the more you are bothered by noise; and the quieter you succeed in making things, the more disruptive any remaining noise becomes. I fear for the wellbeing of people behind groups such as Britain’s Noise Abatement Society: they must be eternally on edge.
We know that too much noise – at levels worse than anything I’ve had to endure – has serious psychological consequences, especially in children. At one New York school, pupils in classrooms facing an overground subway track fell a year behind pupils elsewhere in the building; similar effects have been linked to noise from Heathrow Airport in London.110 After 1992, when Munich closed its old airport and opened a new one, academic performance rose at schools near the old site and fell near the new facility, while pupils’ stress hormone levels went in the opposite direction.111 And that’s not to mention other possible effects on physical health, which may include increased risk of heart attacks.112
Yet not all noise, obviously, is bad: natural sounds, like waves on the shore, are almost universally experienced as restorative. And naturalness doesn’t seem to be key: white noise, too steady to sound truly natural, lulls babies to sleep even when it’s not masking other noises. What my earplug-hunt was about, I finally realised, wasn’t the absence of all noise, or even all non-natural noise, but the absence of noise I hadn’t chosen, couldn’t control, and that seemed to imply the noisemaker’s contempt for me. I’ve lived beneath two sets of noisy neighbours in my life, but one cared about the problem, while the other didn’t. The difference in my irritation levels was enormous.
On one occasion, I spent several days in the pine forests of Massachusetts. On being shown to my room, I heard a constant, loud roar from outside. Briefly I feared I’d been placed next to a busy freeway, and I prepared to get angry. Then I opened the blind: it was the wind in the pines. Suddenly, it was an entirely wonderful sound.
98 Brooks Gump and Karen Matthews, ‘Do background stressors influence reactivity to and recovery from acute stressors?’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology 29 (2006): 469–494.
99 Andrew Baum, Jerome Singer and Carlene Baum, ‘Stress and the environment’, in Gary W. Evans, ed, Environmental Stress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
100 ‘The case for smarter commuting’, Citrix Online, November 2009, available online at www.workshifting.com/Commute SmartWhitepaper.pdf.
101 For example, Alois Stutzer, ‘Commuting and happiness’, presentation to the AGS Annual Meeting 2009, available online at www.cces.ethz.ch/agsam2009/panels/AGSAM2009_ panel_mobility_Stutzer.pdf.
102 Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey, ‘Stress that doesn’t pay: the commuting paradox’, Scandinavian Journal of Economics 110 (2008): 339–366.
103 Alpaslan Akay and Peter Martinsson, ‘Sundays are blue: aren’t they? The day-of-the-week effect on subjective well-being and socio-economic Status’, IZA Discussion Paper 4563 (2009).
104 Phillippa Lally et al, ‘How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world’, European Journal of Social Psychology, published online July 2009. See www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122513384/abstract.
105 Ellen Furlong and John Opfner, ‘Cognitive constraints on how economic rewards affect cooperation’, Psychological Science 20 (2009): 11–16.
106 Stanley Milgram et al, ‘Response to intrusion into waiting lines’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51 (1986): 683–689.
107 David Maister, ‘The psychology of waiting lines’, in J.A. Czepiel et al, eds, The Service Encounter: Managing Employee–Customer Interaction in Service Businesses (Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1985).
108 Francesco Cappuccio et al, ‘Sleep duration and all-cause mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies’, Sleep 33 (2010): 585–592.
109 P.M. Todd, ‘Searching for the next best mate’, in R. Conte et al, eds, Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1997): 419–436.
110 Arline Bronzaft, ‘Beware: noise is hazardous to our children’s development’, Hearing Rehabilitation Quarterly 22 (1997) and M.M. Haines et al, ‘Multilevel modelling of aircraft noise on performance tests in schools around Heathrow airport, London’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 56 (2002): 139– 144.
111 Staffan Hygge et al, ‘The Munich airport noise study: cognitive effects on children from before to after the changeover of airports’, in Noise Control – The Next 25 Years (Inter Noise 96 Conference), F.A. Hill and R. Lawrence eds, 5 (1996): 2189–2192, and Gary Evans et al, ‘Chronic noise exposure and physiological response: a prospective study of children living under environmental stress’, Psychological Science 9 (1998): 75–77.
112 Stefan Willich et al, ‘Noise burden and the risk of myocardial infarction’, European Heart Journal 27 (2006): 276–282.