I am more and more convinced that our happiness or our unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.
—Wilhelm von Humboldt
Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.
—Epictetus
It’s easy to imagine that our emotions—including misery—are produced by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The phone rings, and we feel anxious. The bills drop through the mail slot, and we feel discouraged.
If we failed to notice the phone or the mail, however, we would not have either of these reactions. Although we cultivate a convincing illusion of the real world, we really have only a passing familiarity with it. Our emotions and our behavior depend not on the events of our lives, but on our perception and evaluation of those events.
We do not stand on a hilltop with an unobstructed view of the real world. Instead, we spend our entire lives within an inner cinema—one with multiple screens lining the walls. One screen shows a series of historical dramas reminiscing about our own past. Another displays speculative fiction about our imagined future. A third shows a documentary of the present moment as it passes just beyond the confines of the theater—a feed of the input from our senses. A fourth sensationalizes and fictionalizes that feed, making wild interpretations of the events it portrays.
The straight documentary is usually the least exciting film on offer. It shows the contours of the furniture around us, the pattern of dust motes in a sunbeam, the sounds of traffic outside, the voices of others, the slow shift of leaves in a breeze, the movement of our hands as we complete a simple task. It is distinguished not by its drama, but by the fact that it portrays the only moment that actually exists: the present one. It is the only nonfiction feature in the cinema.
Because the documentary is less eventful than the other films, we constantly find ourselves distracted by the alternatives. We watch the heavily colorized interpretation screen (That man walking past right now—he hates you!), or a humiliating blooper reel from our past (Remember the time you fell on your face at your sister’s wedding?), or a horror film about the future (I’m sorry, but the tests reveal you have only a month to live—and by the way, you’ve been fired). Our time spent in the pure present is measured in snippets and moments. At times, we find the other screens so distracting that the pure sensory feed seems not to exist at all.
Even when we pay attention to the present, we watch only a tiny portion of the screen. At every moment we receive a vast amount of sensory information, but we process only a fraction of it. For example, notice the sensations of your right foot. Really. Right now. These sensations were available to you before you read that suggestion, but in all probability, you were not focused on them. We react only to the bits of perceptible reality to which we pay attention. Your spouse just thanked you for taking the car in for an oil change—but you don’t experience the appreciation unless you pay attention and register that it has been offered.
Further, we slide automatically into interpretation. Ahead of you in the line at the bank, a disheveled man is reaching into his coat pocket. Is he going for his wallet or a gun? Your boss frowns; is she displeased with your monthly report, or did she overeat at lunchtime? The emotions you feel depend on the interpretations you make.
Misery often develops as a result of the screens we choose to watch in the cranial multiplex—and the films we load into the projectors. We are often such adept projectionists that we do not realize we have selected one storyline over the others, and we mistake the stories for objective reality.
In this section, we examine some of the ways we can deliberately manipulate the mind to produce unhappiness. By carefully choosing the targets of our attention and maximizing the negative evaluations we make, we can turn any summery day into a winter of discontent.