it anyway. Indeed, I am going to spend the rest of this book mentioning it because it will probably take more than a few mentions to convince you that what looks like an obvious idea is, in fact, the surprisingly wrong answer to our question. We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain–not because the boat won’t respond, and not because we can’t find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope. Just as we experience illusions of eyesight (‘Isn’t it strange how one queue looks longer than the other even though it isn’t?’) and illusions of hindsight (‘Isn’t it strange how I can’t remember taking out the garbage even though I did?’), so too do we experience illusions of foresight–and all three types of illusion are explained by the same basic principles of human psychology.
Onward
To be perfectly honest, I won’t just be mentioning the surprisingly wrong answer; I’ll be pounding and pummelling it until it gives up and goes home. The surprisingly wrong answer is apparently so sensible and so widely believed that only a protracted thrashing has any hope of expunging it from our conventional wisdom. So before the grudge match begins, let me share with you my plan of attack.
• In Part II, ‘Subjectivity’, I will tell you about the science of happiness. We all steer ourselves toward the futures that we think will make us happy, but what does that word really mean? And how can we ever hope to achieve solid, scientific answers to questions about something as gossamer as a feeling?
• We use our eyes to look into space and our imaginations to look into time. Just as our eyes sometimes lead us to see things as they are not, our imaginations sometimes lead us to foresee things as they will not be. Imagination suffers from three shortcomings that give rise to the illusions of foresight with which this book is chiefly concerned. In Part III, ‘Realism’, I will tell you about the first shortcoming: imagination works so quickly, quietly, and effectively that we are insufficiently sceptical of its products.
• In Part IV, ‘Presentism’, I will tell you about the second shortcoming: Imagination’s products are…well, not particularly imaginative, which is why the imagined future often looks so much like the actual present.
• In Part V, ‘Rationalization’, I will tell you about the third shortcoming: imagination has a hard time telling us how we will think about the future when we get there. If we have trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing how we will see them when they happen.
• Finally, in Part VI, ‘Corrigibility’, I will tell you why illusions of foresight are not easily remedied by personal experience or by the wisdom we inherit from our grandmothers. I will conclude by telling you about a simple remedy for these illusions that you will almost certainly not accept.
By the time you finish these chapters, I hope you will understand why most of us spend so much of our lives turning rudders and hoisting sails, only to find that Shangri-la isn’t what and where we thought it would be.
subjectivity (sub•dzėk•ti-v
CHAPTER 2 The View from in Here
But, O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!
Shakespeare, As You Like It
LORI AND REBA SCHAPPEL may be twins, but they are very different people. Reba is a somewhat shy teetotaler who has recorded an award-winning album of country music. Lori, who is outgoing, wisecracking and rather fond of strawberry daiquiris, works in a hospital and wants someday to marry and have children. They occasionally argue, as sisters do, but most of the time they get on well, complimenting each other, teasing each other and finishing each other’s sentences. In fact, there are just two unusual things about Lori and Reba. The first is that they share a blood supply, part of a skull, and some brain tissue, having been joined at the forehead since birth. One side of Lori’s forehead is attached to one side of Reba’s, and they have spent every moment of their lives locked together, face-to-face. The second unusual thing about Lori and Reba is that they are happy–not merely resigned or contented, but joyful, playful and optimistic.1 Their unusual life presents many challenges, of course, but as they often note, whose doesn’t? When asked about the possibility of undergoing surgical separation, Reba speaks for both of them: ‘Our point of view is no, straight out no. Why would you want to do that? For all the money in China, why? You’d be ruining two lives in the process.’2
So here’s the question: if this were your life rather than theirs, how would you feel? If you said, ‘Joyful, playful and optimistic,’ then you are not playing the game and I am going to give you another chance. Try to be honest instead of correct. The honest answer is ‘Despondent, desperate and depressed’. Indeed, it seems clear that no right-minded person could really be happy under such circumstances, which is why the conventional medical wisdom has it that conjoined twins should be separated at birth, even at the risk of killing one or both. As a prominent medical historian wrote: ‘Many singletons, especially surgeons, find it inconceivable that life is worth living as a conjoined twin, inconceivable that one would not be willing to risk all–mobility, reproductive ability, the life of one or both twins–to try for separation.’3 In other words, not only does everyone know that conjoined twins will be dramatically less happy than normal people, but everyone also knows that conjoined lives are so utterly worthless that dangerous separation surgeries are an ethical imperative. And yet, standing against the backdrop of our certainty about these matters are the twins themselves. When we ask Lori and Reba how they feel about their situation, they tell us that they wouldn’t have it any other way. In an exhaustive search of the medical literature, the same medical historian found the ‘desire to remain together to be so widespread among communicating conjoined twins as to be practically universal’.4 Something is terribly wrong here. But what?
There seem to be just two possibilities. Someone–either Lori and Reba, or everyone else in the world–is making a dreadful mistake when they talk about happiness. Because we are the everyone else in question, it is only natural that we should be attracted to the former conclusion, dismissing the twins’ claim to happiness with offhand rejoinders such as ‘Oh, they’re just saying that’ or ‘They may think they’re happy, but they’re not’ or the ever popular ‘They don’t know what happiness really is’ (usually spoken as if we do). Fair enough. But like the claims they dismiss, these rejoinders are also claims–scientific claims and philosophical claims–that presume answers to questions that have vexed scientists and philosophers for millennia. What are we all talking about when we make such claims about happiness?
Dancing About Architecture
There are thousands of books on happiness, and most of them start by asking what happiness really is. As readers quickly learn, this is approximately equivalent to beginning a pilgrimage by marching directly into the first available tar pit, because happiness really is nothing more or less than a word that we word makers can use to indicate anything we please. The problem is that people seem
