Ask most people who are successful, smart, happy, etc. what their secret is, and they'll likely tell you something like "To be honest I don't think I'm doing anything extraordinary..."
The thing is that we all know what we need to do to be happy and successful in our lives. We've been hearing these things for years. Always be honest. Don't study a day before the test, study throughout the semester. Brush your teeth twice a day. Do the extra little things. But we're very good at telling ourselves in the moment that what really makes us happy is something else. We know that we should wake up and take a quick run, but when we the alarm goes off we 'know' that we should get some more sleep because rest is important too.
Essentially, we convince ourselves that easier/more pleasurable=more desirable=what we really want.
The people who are happy and successfull simply do the little things we all know we should do.
Volkswagen's Rolighetsteorin (Theory of Fun) project in Sweden recognizes our natural aversion to the little things, taking the stand that "something as simple as happiness is the absolute easiest way to get people to change. It does not need to be more difficult than making things a bit more fun to make a change for the better."
Pianotrappan Piano Steps - "Can we get more people to take the stairs over the escalator on a normal day in Stockholm, by making it more fun to take the stairs?"
The World's Deepest Dustbin - "Can we get more people to throw rubbish in the bin instead of on the ground by making it more fun?"
[What's that thing you should be doing that you're rationalizing away??]
Can we get more people to throw rubbish in the bin instead of on the ground by making it more fun?
Right now I'm thinking of Kubler-Ross and her set of responses to loss. I'm wondering: do you think that given an awareness and understanding of these states, being aware of any given state you happen to be in diminishes it's importance? What I'm trying to get at applies to anything that progresses in stages, and in the case of Kubler-Ross it's the following question: if you're actively aware of being in the anger phase, is your anger less important knowing that it will eventually subside to acceptance?
In a strange way, I'm reminded of the Free Rider Dilemma that appears in game theory. Here the individual must decide whether or not to contribute a donation to the development of a shared resource, where if the sum of everyone's contributions reaches a certain threshold then everyone benefits from the resource (say, for example, that a community center can be built with the pooled money), but if the sum of everyone's contributions fails to meet that threshold then no one benefits from the resource because it fails to manifest (and individual contributions are lost). Where perfect knowledge exists, the only case where it rationally makes sense to donate is when your donation will tip the scale (see Len Fisher's example matrix here from his book Rock, Paper, Scissors). In other words, the only donation that makes sense is the last one.
When it comes to things that progress in stages, I'm wondering if the same idea applies: the only stage that matters is the last one. Note that in the reality of the Free Rider Dilemma, perfect knowledge almost never exists (every participant knows that their contribution only make sense if theirs is the one that tips the scale, but everyone makes their contribution at the same time, or at least w/o the knowledge of others), but in the case of development in known stages, perfect knowledge is in fact the very problem.
A couple of thoughts come to mind that address the question. First, this analysis is very close to the idea of backward induction that makes rational and logical sense, and is consistently proven mathematically as the best strategy in a number of decision-making games. Backward induction essentially operates with perfect knowledge of the final stage of a process, and works in reverse to determine an optimal strategy. It leads to counterintuitive but mathematically and logically sound strategy of defecting on the first round of the Centipede game (where a pot of money to be split equally is passed back and forth between two players, increasing in value each time passed, but at any point any player with the pot in hand may defect and take a 60% majority) and the similarly sound strategy of asking for the least amount of reimbursement for lost goods in the Traveler's Dilemma.
But these strategies are highly counterintuitive, and not surprisingly are rarely replicated in actual simulations. So the second thing comes to mind is Phillip Zimbardo's thoughts on time-orientation:
In short, he compares the happiness and success of people with varying focuses on the past, present, and future, concluding that there's some optimal blend of sacrificing the rewards of one for the rewards of the others (think: instant vs delayed gratification). And I think that ties a lot of these problems together. Were we all perfectly future orientated, yeah the homo economicus strategies rational game theory predicts would manifest themselves in real life. And knowing that acceptance is inevitable would make things like anger and fear meaningless and even more irrational (read: in more than just the sense that they are emotions, in the even greater sense that they ultimately wouldn't matter).
But clearly that's not really the best path to success/happiness. That path lies in a blend of future, present and past orientations, where things in the present ultimately do matter and should be appreciated, indulged in, loved, hated, and experienced. Focusing solely on the future, simply enough, means overlooking the meaningfulness of the present.
(interestingly problem: it means overlooking the past, too. In fact, this might also be the solution to another problem I've been thinking on: the similarly "sound/rational" strategy of ignoring sunk costs. Another time; too much for one post.)
Monday, October 12, 2009 at 10:08AM