Stumbling on Happiness. Daniel Gilbert

       Fig. 6. The language-squishing hypothesis suggests that when given a birthday cake, Lori and Reba feel exactly as you feel but talk about it differently.

      Squishing Language

      The nice things about this language-squishing hypothesis are (a) it suggests that everyone everywhere has the same subjective experience when they receive a birthday cake even if they describe that experience differently, which makes the world a rather simple place to live and bake; and (b) it allows us to go on believing that despite what they say about themselves, Lori and Reba aren’t really happy after all, and thus we are perfectly justified in preferring our lives to theirs. The less nice things about this hypothesis are numerous, and if we worry that Lori and Reba use the eight-word language differently than we do because they have never enjoyed the thrill of a cartwheel, then we had better worry about a few other matters too. For instance, we had better worry that we have never felt the overwhelming sense of peace and security that comes from knowing that a beloved sibling is always by our side, that we will never lose her friendship no matter what kind of crummy stuff we may say or do on a bad day, that there will always be someone who knows us as well as we know ourselves, shares our hopes, worries our worries, and so on. If they haven’t had our experiences, then we haven’t had theirs either, and it is entirely possible that we are the ones with the squished language–that when we say we feel overjoyed, we have no idea what we are talking about because we have never experienced the companionate love, the blissful union, the unadulterated agape that Lori and Reba have. And all of us–you, me, Lori, Reba–had better worry that there are experiences far better than those we have had so far–the experience of flying without a plane, of seeing our children win Academy Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, of meeting God and learning the secret handshake–and that everyone’s use of the eight-word language is defective and that no one knows what happiness really is. By that reasoning, we should all follow Solon’s advice and never say we are happy until we are dead because otherwise, if the real thing ever does come along, we will have used up the word and won’t have any way to tell the newspapers about it.

      But these are just the preliminary worries. There are more. If we wanted to do a thought experiment whose results would demonstrate once and for all that Lori and Reba just don’t know what happiness really is, perhaps we should imagine that with a wave of a magic wand we could split them apart and allow them to experience life as singletons. If after a few weeks on their own they came to us, repudiated their former claims and begged not to be changed back to their former state, shouldn’t that convince us, as it has apparently convinced them, that they were previously confusing their fours and eights? We’ve all known someone who had a religious conversion, went through a divorce or survived a heart attack and now claims that her eyes are open for the very first time–that despite what she thought and said in her previous incarnation, she was never really happy until now. Are the people who have undergone such marvellous metamorphoses to be taken at their word?

      Not necessarily. Consider a study in which volunteers were shown some quiz-show questions and asked to estimate the likelihood that they could answer them correctly. Some volunteers were shown only the questions (the question-only group), while others were shown both the questions and the answers (the question-and-answer group). Volunteers in the question-only group thought the questions were quite difficult, while those in the question-and-answer group–who saw both the questions (‘What did Philo T. Farnsworth invent?’) and the answers (‘The television set’)–believed that they could have answered the questions easily had they never seen the answers at all. Apparently, once volunteers knew the answers, the questions seemed simple (‘Of course it was the television–everyone knows that!’), and the volunteers were no longer able to judge how difficult the questions would seem to someone who did not share their knowledge of the answers.²⁸

      Studies such as these demonstrate that once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened. To the judge’s dismay, the jury cannot disregard the prosecutor’s snide remarks. Our experiences instantly become part of the lens through which we view our entire past, present and future, and like any lens, they shape and distort what we see. This lens is not like a pair of spectacles that we can set on the nightstand when we find it convenient to do so but like a pair of contacts that are forever affixed to our eyeballs with superglue. Once we learn to read, we can never again see letters as mere inky squiggles. Once we learn about free jazz, we can never again hear Ornette Coleman’s saxophone as a source of noise. Once we learn that van Gogh was a mental patient, or that Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite, we can never again view their art in the same way. If Lori and Reba were separated for a few weeks, and if they told us that they were happier now than they used to be, they might be right. But they might not. They might just be telling us that the singletons they had become now viewed being conjoined with as much distress as those of us who have always been singletons do. Even if they could remember what they thought, said and did as conjoined twins, we would expect their more recent experience as singletons to colour their evaluation of the conjoined experience, leaving them unable to say with certainty how conjoined twins who had never been singletons actually feel. In a sense, the experience of separation would make them us, and thus they would be in the same difficult position that we are in when we try to imagine the experience of being conjoined. Becoming singletons would affect their views of the past in ways that they could not simply set aside. All of this means that when people have new experiences that lead them to claim that their language was squished–that they were not really happy even though they said so and thought so at the time–they can be mistaken. In other words, people can be wrong in the present when they say they were wrong in the past.

      Stretching Experience

      Lori and Reba have not done many of the things that for the rest of us give rise to feelings near the top of the happiness scale–cartwheels, scuba diving, name your poison–and surely this must make a difference. If impoverished experiential backgrounds don’t necessarily squish language, then what do they do instead? Let’s assume that Lori and Reba really do have an impoverished experiential background against which to evaluate something as simple as, say, the dutiful presentation of a chocolate cake on their birthday. One possibility is that their impoverished experiential background would squish their language. But another possibility is that their impoverished experiential background would not squish their language so much as it would stretch their experience–that is, when they say eight they mean exactly the same thing we mean when we say eight because when they receive a birthday cake they feel exactly the same way that the rest of us feel when we do underwater cartwheels along the Great Barrier Reef. Figure 7 illustrates the experience-stretching hypothesis.