The Mindful Geek: Secular Meditation for Smart Skeptics by Michael Taft

Author:Michael Taft [Taft, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cephalopod Rex
Published: 2015-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Where There’s a Positive…

Seeing emotions in their evolutionary context can really help you to understand how to work with them in your daily life. For example, a guidance system is useless if it is stuck on one setting. Imagine a compass needle that couldn’t turn, or a maps app that only told you to turn right at every intersection. You need both north and south, right and left, as well as straight ahead, for a guidance system to function.

The same thing is true of your emotional guidance system. It won’t work unless it has both a positive and a negative with which to motivate and direct you. Do this; don’t do that. In other words, both pleasant and unpleasant emotions are absolutely necessary if the system is going to function. Having a clear understanding that both positive and negative feelings are natural, adaptive, and useful will go a long way toward engendering a sense of acceptance toward them.

This is bad news, if you were under the impression that—if you just made all the right decisions—someday you’d feel good all the time. This misconception is ubiquitous, and has been peddled from every corner of the ideological spectrum. Many people believe that it’s possible and desirable for them to feel good all the time. Some religious beliefs around meditation claim that with enough practice you’ll experience constant bliss and never feel bad. Some pharmacological corporations would like you to believe that if you take the right psych meds, you’ll only ever feel happy. Even certain positive psychology systems sell the idea that, with the right combinations of thinking and imagining, you’ll always feel just great.

If I were impolite, I would suggest that the idea that you were going to someday feel good all the time is a childish fantasy, which even the slightest scrutiny by a reasonable adult would reveal to be utterly non-viable. There are at least two problems with the glittering dream of permanent joy: (1) it couldn’t work, and (2) you wouldn’t like it if it did.

It’s impossible to be permanently happy because the system always corrects itself. No matter how far you push the needle away from zero into the realm of super happiness, your biology will adjust and make that place the new zero. It’s a self-adjusting, homeostatic system, and its tendency to return to a set-point is called “hedonic adaptation,” or the “hedonic treadmill.” (Hedonic, comes from the same root as “hedonism,” and means to pursue pleasure.)

There are many examples of this phenomenon. One famous study concerns the happiness levels people from the two ends of the spectrum: lottery winners and victims of tragic accidents.84 It would seem obvious that lottery winners would be happier than most people, and accident victims who lost the use of their limbs would be less happy than average. While both of these ideas were true for the first year or so after their life-changing events, after that their happiness level returns to whatever it was before the event.

Half of the study examined the fate of 22 lottery winners.

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