13

THE POWER OF PERSPECTIVE

THE BRAIN IS the central switchboard for good feelings. Unfortunately, it has a tendency to twist and turn in ways that sometimes prevent our being as happy as we could be. We accept these sleights-of-mind not because they’re useful, but because we aren’t aware of them.

Though we’re almost incapable, for example, of imagining the effect of an unfamiliar situation on our mood, the brain vastly exaggerates the consequences of both positive and negative expectations. Ask yourself, for example, whether you would fare better if a) you won the jackpot in the lottery, or b) (may this never happen) you had an accident and were confined to a wheelchair.

Presumably, like almost everyone else, you’d prefer to be a millionaire. Some people would even say they’d rather be dead than paraplegic. But, as American scientists have shown, such conjecturing has little to do with the real feelings that people have in the years after an accident. In a study that has become a classic of social research,1 the investigators polled people who had nothing directly at stake, but they also asked real lottery winners and accident victims about their life-satisfaction. They discovered how well people adapt—to both the good and the bad. Winning a million dollars does not ensure lasting happiness, and the life-satisfaction of paraplegics is much greater than one might expect. For a few weeks, of course, the lottery winner is on cloud nine, while the paralyzed person mourns his lost freedom of movement. But soon everything seems the same as ever. The newly rich don’t feel better off, since in the meantime driving a Mercedes instead of an old Chevy has become normal. The difference is that they now dream of a Ferrari. The person in the wheelchair, on the other hand, has gotten used to the help of others. After a time of depression, most regain their emotional vitality almost completely, and their level of satisfaction is on average not much lower than that of healthy people. Whether accident victim or lottery winner—if you accepted your life beforehand, you will do so now. And a complainer remains a complainer.

This applies even more to less drastic changes in life. We make investments in the expectation that they will make us richer and thus happier. We change jobs, because we think we’ll derive more satisfaction from the new one. We move in the hope that we’ll feel more at home in a new neighborhood. But at the end of the day life goes on as it always has.

Not that change is unimportant. But we often overestimate its effect on our life satisfaction. Because we get accustomed to both positive and negative changes very quickly, external circumstances affect our sense of well-being much less than we would think. (There are exceptions, such as certain chronic pains like arthritis, and noise—which many people never get used to.2 People who are sensitive to noise should never believe the real estate agent who says that before long you’ll hardly hear the racket coming up from the street under the window.)

When we judge our lives, we often make the mistake of confusing satisfaction with happiness. What’s the difference? Happiness is what we feel at the same moment in which we have an experience. It exists only in the present. Satisfaction is that which remains in the mind. It is created in retrospect, like a newspaper review evaluating a film in a few lines.

Someone asking us whether we’re happy in our new apartment will probably get an answer that addresses our satisfaction, since it’s not likely that we’ll first go over every minute since we moved in. In general, people who frequently experience moments of happiness are, all in all, satisfied. Nevertheless, it’s quite possible to be satisfied without being happy. By the same token, there are people who feel happy but nurse a sense of dissatisfaction. This might not sound so tragic, but confusing the two concepts can lead to bad decisions and take a significant toll on our well-being.

TRAP #1: SELF-DECEPTION

We spend more time at work than with family and friends. No wonder people put so much emphasis on having a suitable occupation and working in a compatible environment.

If you were a teacher, for example, you’d probably assume that teaching in a good school would be more fun and more satisfying than teaching in a bad one, especially in the United States, where a bad school can mean metal detectors screening for weapons in backpacks, fewer books, vandalized classrooms, drug dealers on the neighboring streets, and gang attacks on teachers.

In the classrooms of good schools, on the other hand, the children of lawyers, doctors, and businesspeople are nurtured for success, much as they are at home. Parents pay high fees, and classrooms are equipped with the newest PCs and connected to the Internet. Kids with problems have ready access to tutors and psychologists. Compared to the poor areas, the work in these schools is easy, and success is more or less assured.

But the teachers see it differently. To learn about the impact of the work environment on satisfaction, the sociologist Norbert Schwarz gave teachers in Houston, Texas—200 at good schools and 200 at bad ones—questionnaires about their day that they filled out every evening. They were asked whether the work was satisfying, whether they felt happy, and how satisfying their lives were in general. The astonishing results: inner-city teachers and suburban teachers responded the same. Were they really immune to their daily failures and fears?3

Schwarz wanted more precise answers. He equipped the teachers with Palm organizers that would give off an hourly signal. When the teachers heard the beep, they were supposed to register their level of happiness into the PDA. (Those teachers who didn’t want to be interrupted could enter the information after class.) These statistics showed a rather different picture. The teachers in the good schools were in great spirits in the morning. When they went home at lunch, their mood fell to an average level. Those who taught in the inner city showed the exact opposite: during the hours that they had to be in the classroom, the happiness levels were low, but once school was over, they improved.

That’s how poorly people assess their own lives. The teachers in the run-down neighborhoods weren’t aware of the degree to which they were affected by the blighted environment in which they worked. And their colleagues in the good schools underestimated how much they enjoyed their jobs. Both groups are hurt by their distorted views: it doesn’t occur to the teachers in the poor schools to look for a better job or to fight for better conditions, while the others don’t realize how good they’ve got it, and are less satisfied than they might be.

What went wrong? The teachers’ memories played a trick on them. Instead of remembering their emotions as they really were, they measured them against the norm they’d gotten used to. Asked in the evening how happy they were, those in the bad schools determined that their day was like any other—by that standard, okay. They didn’t realize how they really felt at work. The same process (but the other way around) took place in the minds of their privileged colleagues.

Both groups of teachers confused happiness and satisfaction. The one was happy, the other unhappy, although both were reasonably satisfied. Both completely deceived themselves about what gave them a sense of well-being. Sometimes we don’t know our own lives.

What, you ask, is the harm? Plenty. Emotions like fear and depression cause stress, even when we don’t consciously perceive them. And, as many studies have shown, stress makes people sick, weakens the immune system, and increases the risk of suffering from heart and circulatory ailments, among other illnesses.

TRAP #2: BAD TIMING

You’ve had a great evening, but when you’re ready to leave the party and put on your coat, an old friend squeezes by without even saying hi. Now the evening is ruined. That’s how lax memory is in its grasp of reality—sometimes a few seconds count more than a few hours.

The mind shades reality in its own color, and sometimes it even turns truth into its opposite. And it’s no wonder. As I’ve described in chapter 4, every external stimulus causes more than several million signals in the brain to be set off. The brain has more than enough opportunities to manipulate reality, and it makes generous use of them.

In falsifying memories of our own feelings, we’re engaged in a mental act that resembles a perfect and unsolvable crime: we’ve covered our tracks. There’s no measure by which we can objectively test what we really felt at any given moment. While emotions can be read from the reactions of the body, feelings are a purely private matter that exist only in the brain, and if the brain has erased its tracks, only indirect clues remain—if that.

The Nobel Prize–winning Princeton University social psychologist Daniel Kahneman found a way to catch these deceptions and uncover the rules behind them. He asked patients who had to undergo an unpleasant medical examination to note their pain on a scale of one to ten, minute by minute. The total score yielded a quantifiable indicator of their discomfort.

But the treatment varied for the two groups. One was treated according to the standard method, in which the pain increases during the course of the procedure and ends abruptly. With the other group the doctors prolonged the exam for a few moments, so that the pain diminished gradually before the exam was over. The patients in the second group had to endure discomfort for longer and their scores were correspondingly “higher.”

But when asked later, it was the second group that reported less pain. That they suffered more both objectively (a longer time in treatment) and subjectively (higher score) no longer seemed to count. The patients were more satisfied with the process that caused them discomfort longer and were even willing to be subjected to a second exam (thus justifying the longer exam, although it was unnecessary for the diagnosis).

In this case, too, people were tricked by their memory, which is indifferent to the duration of a feeling—a finding that Kahneman could corroborate with other experiments. The brain stores the memory of the feeling only at its most intense and in its final moments. The moment of greatest discomfort was the same in both diagnostic procedures, but the final minutes of the longer exam were less unpleasant, which is why the patients preferred it. The last impression sticks. Our brains want a happy ending.4

We can put this automatic distortion mechanism to use in daily life. Leaving a party at its liveliest is smart, because it’s the last experience that counts. And it’s worth trying to emulate people who know how to enjoy short moments of intense happiness, because the memory always retains these high points.

TRAP #3: FALSE EXPECTATIONS

Our expectations distort our feelings and emotions even more than our memories do. Also-rans can tell a story or two about this one. Winning a silver medal at the Olympic Games brings glory, but a bronze makes people happier. While the runners-up imagine themselves on the top step and are upset, having missed their goal by a few tenths of a second, the bronze medal winners feel terrific, as the social psychologist Victoria Medcec discovered at the Barcelona games in 1992. Those in third place were happy that they won a medal at all and made it into the record books, whereas the silver winners were mainly aware of what they’d just missed.5 “For there is nothing either good nor bad, but thinking makes it so,” says Hamlet.

Could it be that pessimists are more satisfied because reality has only pleasant surprises in store for them? This claim is often made. The social psychologist Allen Parducci has even developed a whole theory of happiness based on the idea that well-being is a consequence of mid-level hopes. He also believes that sporadic moments of happiness make people unhappy because they raise expectations. He writes, “If the best can come only rarely, it is better not to include it in the range of experiences at all.”6 The secret to happiness, claims Parducci, is to have had many bad experiences: expecting the worst, we’re then pleasantly surprised that life hasn’t done us a bad turn after all.

Parducci is wrong. His experiments are based on manipulated games of chance that aren’t applicable to everyday, complicated lives. Pessimism nourishes excessive worry and anxiety, which already diminish the capacity for happiness. Moreover, it often prevents positive experiences, for whether we hope for the best or fear the worst determines our attitude in confronting a situation. Discouragement is not a good motivator.

A student who thinks he has no chance of passing a test is just as happy not to study in the first place. Optimism is an indispensable motivator. As many studies show, people who are optimistic are not just happier but they’re more successful students, athletes, and salespeople.7 In matters that are at least partly under our control, realistic hopefulness is helpful. Only someone with an exaggeratedly rosy view of the future is likely to be disappointed. A smart student expects a good grade, not an A+.

TRAP #4: SIDEWAYS GLANCES

Who among us hasn’t envied neighbors and colleagues who always seem to be doing better than we are? But envy is mutual. It turns out that those whom we envy are the very ones who look at us in disapproving admiration, casting a sideways glance at our happiness—an effect that the American social psychologist Ed Diener has shown statistically.8 One of the two must be wrong. Or perhaps both?

There is no objective norm for satisfaction. Our hopes and fears provide the measure with which we evaluate reality. Often we have to compare ourselves to others in order to decide whether we’re kings and queens or losers. “If people just wanted to be happy, it wouldn’t be so hard, but they want to be happier than others—and that is almost always difficult because we imagine others to be happier than they really are,” wrote the philosopher Montaigne.9

People who compare, lose. Casting sideways glances not only makes us dependent on others but leads to bad decisions. With what subtlety and scant awareness we trick ourselves has been shown by Norbert Schwarz. He looked at satisfaction in the lives of people who are partners—something that we would expect to have little relation to the neighbors’ love lives.

But this isn’t the case. Schwarz asked male students who were living with a woman about their sex lives. Among all kinds of diversionary questions, he wanted to know how often the young men masturbated. The answers were to be entered anonymously into a questionnaire, of which there were two versions. One group was given a scale that ranged from “less than once a week” to “several times a day.” Most of them marked once or twice a week (i.e., in the middle of the scale), which, according to most research, is the answer one would expect. The possibilities given to the other group ranged from “never” to “several times a week,” placing the average response at the upper end of the scale and thus suggesting something abnormal. The students could only draw the conclusion that they were masturbating excessively—a worrying thought, especially since the question about frequency of sex with one’s partner was also gauged to manipulated scales. These students might well ask: could something be wrong with their relationship?

Schwarz determined that after taking the survey, the students in the second group were indeed plagued by such doubts and expressed more discontent than average about their current relationship. And these men also indicated that they would be much more likely to have an affair. Thus do arbitrary and often unconscious judgments affect our lives.10

Everyone experiences such situations almost daily, though it’s not usually devious experiments that make us dissatisfied and lead us to mistaken conclusions. There are entire armies of models who would have us believe that an ideal figure and flawless complexion are completely normal. The stories we hear from other children’s mothers make our own kids look like brats and failures. And those of us who read in the business pages about supersuccessful CEOs might regard our own lives as wasted. Unlike the participants in Schwarz’s experiment, who were ultimately told about the deception, in daily life we have to remind ourselves how badly the habit of comparison can lead us astray.

TRAP #5: ENVY

“What makes someone with a hunchback happy?—When he sees a hunchback that’s still bigger,” claims a Yiddish proverb. Pleasure in the misfortune of others—schadenfreude—can be satisfying because such moments throw our happiness into positive relief. And psychological experiments have confirmed the sad truth that merely seeing someone in a wheelchair raises the spirits of most people and results in high satisfaction values on questionnaires.11

But it’s a temporary comfort. It’s easy to find people who are worse off, but we’ll also always find someone whom we can envy. Even the most successful of us are vulnerable. “If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon. But Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I dare say, envied Hercules, who never existed,” as Bertrand Russell wrote.12

Evolutionary psychologists have tried to explain the seeming tenacity of envy as a Darwinian survival of the fittest: when everyone in nature is competing with everyone else, it isn’t enough to have enough—only those will survive who are better and have more than others. Which is why we’re programmed for envy.

Whether this is really the case is as hard to prove as it is to disprove. Envy might have an evolutionary purpose, but that doesn’t mean it’s inborn. Nonetheless, it is true that people will be envious, even when it’s harmful to themselves—as long as the harm to the other person is still greater. During a conflict over wages in an English aeronautical turbine plant, for example, the workers were willing to sacrifice some of their income as long as the group of competing workers earned less. Such absurdity surprised even the social psychologists who studied the case.13 The workers knew, of course, that the position they took was directed against fellow union members, but in their mind it was a question of justice.

Envy often makes no sense, even when it’s superficially understandable. Very often we’re envying someone who isn’t nearly as well off as we think: we see the pluses, but not the minuses. We’re annoyed by the success of others and often don’t recognize the price they had to pay for it. For this kind of thinking the Stoic philosopher Epictitus found a nice example and some biting words two thousand years ago: “Someone was favored over you? You weren’t invited to the dinner? But you didn’t have to pay the price the host demands; he’ll invite you in exchange for praise, for favors. If you think it’s worth it, pay the price. If you want the meal without having to pay the price, then you’re as shameless as you are stupid.”14

We don’t have to judge as harshly as Epictetus. Maybe we really are born with the tendency to be envious, in which case it would be an emotion that is hard to get rid of. But with a little clear thinking, envy could be channeled into more sensible paths and help us to better recognize our own wishes.

TRAP #6: THE RAT RACE

With an ad declaring that you’re spending money badly if it doesn’t make you happy, Lexus marketed its luxury limos—driven by Bill Gates, among others. Money really can be wonderful. If you have enough of it, you can ride home in a taxi, while everyone else waits in the rain for the bus. With money we can be attractive and sexy, because nice clothes and a good haircut are expensive. Money gives us freedom—it pays for the babysitter when Mom and Dad want to go out in the evening. People who not only earn well but are actually wealthy are independent and can live their dreams. Instead of being jerked around by your boss and having to get by on two weeks’ vacation, you’re free to travel, start your own company, initiate a charitable project.

“I’ve been poor, and I’ve been rich, and I can tell you: rich is better,” said the singer Sophie Tucker. Who wouldn’t agree? In 2004, the American Freshman Study, a national survey by the University of California at Los Angeles, 78 percent considered it “very important” or “essential” to become “very well off financially.” The bourgeois Marxist Bertolt Brecht articulated a similar point of view: “You live comfortably only if you live prosperously.”

Nonetheless, there’s surprisingly little to be seen of money’s effect when people are asked about their satisfaction. Whether money increases happiness is a central question in all capitalist societies, and social scientists have gone to considerable lengths to answer it. Exactly 154 large surveys were undertaken after World War II, in Europe, the United States, and many other countries that address just this topic.

They all came to the same conclusion: money brings satisfaction, but the effect is minimal. Adding a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars more to your paycheck is like drinking vintage champagne instead of ordinary champagne: you’ll hardly notice the difference. Even with the superrich, money’s effect is hardly measurable. The psychologist Ed Diener determined in interviews that the level of life satisfaction of the fifty richest Americans (valued at more than a hundred million dollars each) was barely more than average.15 And most multimillionaires agree with the thesis that money can make people happy or unhappy—a situation that the psychotherapist Jense Corssen taps into by offering seminars for the children of entrepreneurs in which they’re taught how to live with their inheritance. Being wealthy doesn’t have to hurt, he promises. “I teach the young people how to be happy in spite of their wealth.”16

Factors other than the size of our bank account clearly weigh far more in determining our satisfaction. Only at the bottom end of the income scale does more money yield a clear improvement.17 If a single mother working the night shift has to stand over greasy french fries all night, earning just enough for herself and her children to squeak by, then every dollar will improve her life noticeably. She can work a job with a better schedule and spend more time with her children, and she doesn’t have to torment herself for not being able to give them the cash they need for class trips. A minimally satisfactory income is determined not only by the most elementary needs like housing and food. Poverty is also defined by the income standard of the people around us. The more expensively her children’s classmates are dressed, the more an impoverished mother has to spend on her own children’s clothes so that they won’t be teased.

But as soon as income exceeds this poverty threshold, the relation between wealth and well-being disappears. When we get a raise, our happiness lasts only as long as the higher standard of living feels new. If you earn thirty thousand dollars, someone earning three times as much seems wealthy. But she sees it quite differently. “What would you do if you suddenly had a million marks?” the German banker Josef Abs was once asked. His answer: “I’d really have to cut way back.”

Enthusiasm over access to better restaurants, a beautiful car, and a bigger apartment wanes quickly. The same adaptive mechanisms are at work as with the monkeys who soon stopped enjoying even the raisins. “The treadmill of hedonism” is what the social psychologist Donald Campbell called this fruitless struggle.18

And worse: chasing after fame and money diminishes life satisfaction. Several recent studies make ambition look like a real instrument of torture. As the American social psychologists Richard Ryan and Tim Kasser and their German colleague Peter Schmuck discovered in large-scale international surveys, people for whom money, success, fame, and good looks are especially important are less satisfied than those who strive for good relationships with others, develop their talents, and are active in social causes. The rat race—the chase after recognition for money and status—doesn’t pay. Not even the fulfillment of their wishes can compensate the ambitious: wealth and influence bring them no happiness, because as soon as they’ve attained their heart’s desire, they set their sights on a new one.19

According to these studies, big ambitions have a more than average likelihood of being accompanied by anxiety and depression. It isn’t clear if chasing after success is a cause or consequence of emotional instability. Probably the two go hand in hand. If you want to rise, you often have to defer the reward. Instead of a vacation in Hawaii, you hear the lure of those overtime hours at your desk. And not even that guarantees success: whether we attain our professional ambitions depends at least as much on coincidence and the goodwill of others as on our own achievements. And this can give rise to feelings of helplessness and dependency—paving the way for fear and depression.

THE ANSWER: KNOW YOURSELF

We all have illusions about what’s good for us. But it’s easy to avoid these mistakes and become more aware of what makes us happy and unhappy. What’s important is to have a good perspective and to choose the right moment.

Seeing our own lives from another person’s point of view is usually not especially helpful. We humans experience fear and joy, and sadness and anger similarly, but our emotions are triggered differently. Although emotions are inborn, most preferences and dislikes are acquired. The culture of our environment, our upbringing, and our personal life histories help determine who likes opera and who likes rock. Further, small genetic differences can affect our interests: someone born with a poor visual/spatial sense is unlikely to have a good time playing Ping-Pong or volleyball.

Someone who tries to model himself too closely on others is therefore unlikely to find either happiness or satisfaction. The demand that we lead our own lives may sound trivial, but it runs counter to all we’ve experienced. Parents do their best to instill their values in their children from day one. In school, all children are supposed to learn by the same method, although we’ve long known that people differ in their strengths and talents.

It’s possible to avoid a lot of unhappiness if we know how we respond to a given situation. How do we learn to listen to the brain? It doesn’t help much to think about our experiences, because memory manipulates our memory. Instead, we need to be more attentive in the moment than we usually are.

When we notice emotions as soon as they happen, they’re not yet distorted by comparisons, thoughts, and memories. In this moment feelings can be signals for our inborn preferences and dislikes. An instant suffices in which to become conscious of an emotion. More than that isn’t necessary, and dwelling on negative emotions can even be harmful. When a heedless driver makes us angry, it helps to be aware that we feel we’re being treated with disrespect. We’re spared a tantrum, and it becomes easier to keep a cool head and turn to other matters.

Positive feelings, on the other hand, should be savored. Though—wrongly—we’re willing to yield to our anger and sadness, we often take pleasant feelings—the kind we have when we’re sitting across from someone we like and trust—for granted. If everything is going well, our mind quickly begins to wander, and our thoughts turn to something that’s troubling us. When this happens, we lose a lot. When we’re only dimly aware of our happiness, we not only forfeit the happiness, but also the knowledge about what it is that we like and what helps us.

HAPPINESS DIARIES

It isn’t enough to be happy. We have to be aware of our happiness. This is also the credo of the Italian psychiatrist Giovanni Fava. He has developed a treatment called “Well-Being Therapy” that helps people who want to cultivate positive feelings and enjoy them more.

The idea came to him while working with depressed patients who were getting better. Fava noticed that their widespread reluctance to acknowledge their happiness deferred the healing. These people are usually very dissatisfied, but often much less so than they think. In order to counteract this, Fava invented a simple procedure: the patients were to keep happiness diaries. If you keep track of your good moments, your attention will be drawn like a searchlight to everything that you respond to positively. And because the happy moments are put down in black and white, the brain can’t talk itself out of them later on.

Fava reported that his patients, many of them still very “down,” often balked at his suggestion. They were afraid to appear before the doctor with empty notebooks. He encouraged them to try it nonetheless, and they almost always came back with full pages: there are good moments even in periods of greatest depression and dissatisfaction.

When Fava’s patients consciously experienced a sunny moment, they were to describe it in detail, as well as their own feelings, and score their well-being on a scale of 1 to 100. And thus they discovered that their lives were much better than they’d thought. Moreover, they learned what does them good.

In a second round, Fava wanted the patients to figure just how they’d been able to be so dismissive of the happiness that they had, in fact, experienced. One patient, for example, reported a positive moment when he was warmly greeted by nephews he was visiting. But this was immediately followed by the thought: “They’re only happy because I brought them a present.” Being aware of the ways in which the brain ambushes us keeps us better grounded in reality. After ten weeks, the people who tried Fava’s method were freed from their deep depressions. They were less fearful, and more satisfied with their lives than before.20

Above all, they saw that it isn’t the one big change that turns lives around. Satisfaction is like a mosaic created out of many happy moments. To be aware of these moments of happiness is a sure means of leaving misery behind you.

Just what it is that makes people happy is something we each have to discover for ourselves. Life is not a hundred-yard dash in which we all take off from the same starting line and finish in the same home stretch.