How should you decide what to do this evening? You could open the mail, call a friend, clean up the hall closet, turn on the television, open a beer—or any of a hundred other activities.
Think of what your emotional state would be at three separate times during the course of any action—let’s say, heading to the gym:
For any event you can feel something beforehand, during, and afterward.
These feelings often don’t match up. If you’re like most people, the anticipation of exercise is not particularly appealing. Ugh, I’d rather do anything else. While you’re there perhaps it isn’t great, but it’s not horrible. Afterward, most people find that they are glad they exercised. If we boil down the complexity of emotion into positives and negatives, the before-during-after sequence is negative-neutral-positive.
What about giving up on the gym and flicking channels on the television instead? It’s powerfully tempting; the television is right there, and it’s so much easier than getting organized to get some exercise. While you’re watching, there’s usually a grinding sense of dissatisfaction. How can there be nothing on? Afterward, there may be the regret of yet another wasted evening. Positive-negative-negative.
What you decide to do depends mainly on which emotion you use as your guide: temptation beforehand, enjoyment during, or satisfaction afterward. If misery is your goal, the answer is simple. Follow your gut. Base your decision on the temptation that you feel ahead of time.
Most things that will elevate your mood bring relatively little anticipatory desire: exercise, eating healthy food, getting to bed on time, returning friends’ messages, saving for retirement, doing your taxes. They feel either a bit flat or outright aversive. If you guide your behavior by this anticipatory feeling, you will put off almost anything that might improve your outlook.
The things that we feel tempted to do are often those that make us feel worse in the long run: turn on the television, drink more, sit at home, spend impulsively, head to the casino, surf the Internet aimlessly, play computer solitaire, get into relationships or sexual encounters that you and everyone else can see are bad ideas. All you need to do is give in to temptation, and misery will knock at the door like a thirty-minute pizza delivery.
Perhaps you disagree. You can think of a few activities that you look forward to, enjoy doing, and are glad to have done: positive-positive-positive. You can also think of a few things, like compulsively hitting your thumb with a hammer, that you would dread, dislike, and regret: negative-negative-negative.
Of course. In those circumstances, it doesn’t really matter whether you decide what to do based on your anticipation, enjoyment, or satisfaction—you’ll make the same decision regardless. But let’s be honest. There are many more things in your life that switch from positive to negative or negative to positive.
Live your life by your anticipatory feelings—your temptations—and you will often find yourself doing things that you regret and that drag you lower. You will never again pay your taxes, exercise, eat unfamiliar food, get out of bed early to go hiking, organize birthday parties for friends, or get to work on time. You will stay in your ever-shrinking comfort zone, you will indulge your worst tendencies, and you will seldom try anything new. As you place a collar around your neck and hand the leash to your temptations, they will grow in power. They will become your master, and you their slave.
After all, what’s the alternative? Doing things you will be glad to have done. But that future emotion is entirely imaginary, isn’t it? You’ll never be certain that you are right. Maybe you’ll agree to make that wedding speech and then vomit in the middle of it. Maybe you’ll sign up for that 5k run and have a heart attack. Maybe you’ll change the oil in the car and find an even worse problem.
Tell yourself that those who follow their future emotions are cold, passionless, overly responsible drones. Tell yourself that if you did the same, you’d have a life of mindless conformity to the standards and expectations of your culture. Ignore the fact that you would be basing your life on your own satisfaction, not someone else’s, and that satisfaction strikes a deeper and more lasting note of enjoyment than temptation does. Tell yourself that you prefer to live by impulse, the life of a hedonist. Don’t think about the fact that those others are more effective hedonists than you are.