I was having a bad day today. Unlikely to have time this weekend for something I’d wanted to do. Crappy teaching in a class I’m taking. Ever increasing and complicating responsibilities piling up.
So what did I do? I went out and bought half a cherry pie.
Will that cherry pie make me happy? No. I knew this in advance. Consciously and unconsciously: I had the thought, and no emotion compelled me to do it.
In fact, it seemed like the least-efficacious action: spending some of my limited money, to buy a pie I don’t need, to respond to stress that’s unrelated to pie consumption and is in fact caused by lack of time (that I’m spending on buying and eating pie).
BUT. What buying the pie allowed me to do was tell a different story. To myself and my girlfriend who I was texting with. Now, today can be about how I got some delicious pie.
And I really do feel better. It’s not the pie, nor the walk to the store to buy it. It’s the relief of being able to tell my girlfriend that I bought some delicious cherry pie, and that I’d share it with her if she didn’t live a three-hour drive away. It’s the relief of reflecting on how I dealt with my stress, and seeing a pie-shaped memory at the end of the schoolwork.
If this is a correct model of how this all works, then it suggests a couple things:
This can probably be optimized.
The way I talk about that optimization process will probably affect how well it works. For example, if I then think “what’s the cheapest way to get this effect,” that intuitively doesn’t feel good. I don’t want to be cheap. I need to find the right language, the right story to tell, so that I can explain my “philosophy” to myself and others in a way that gets the response I want.
Is that the darks arts? I don’t think so. I think this is one area of life where the message is the medium.
So the “stupid solutions to problems of life” are not really about improving the life, but about signaling to yourself that… you still have some things under control? (My life may suck, but I can have a cherry pie whenever I want to!)
This would be even more important if the cherry pie would somehow actively make your life worse. For example, if you are trying to lose weight, but at the same time keep eating cherry pie every day in order to improve the story of your day. Or if instead of cherry pie it would be cherry liqueur.
The way I talk about that optimization process will probably affect how well it works.
Just guessing, but it would probably help to choose the story in advance. “If I am doing X, my life is great, and nothing else matters”—and then make X something useful that doesn’t take much time. Even better, have multiple alternatives X, Y, Z, such that doing any of them is a “proof” of life being great.
I do chalk a lot of dysfunction up to this story-centric approach to life. I just suspect it’s something we need to learn to work with, rather than against (or to deny/ignore it entirely).
My sense is that storytelling—to yourself or others—is an art. To get the reaction you want—from self or others—takes some aesthetic sensitivity.
My guess is there’s some low hanging fruit here. People often talk about doing things “for the story,” which they resort to when they’re trying to justify doing something dumb/wasteful/dangerous/futile. Perversely, it often seems that when people talk in detail about their good decisions, it comes of as arrogant. Pointless, tidy philosophical paradoxes seem to get people’s puzzle-solving brains going better than confronting the complexity of the real world.
But maybe we can simply start building habits of expressing gratitude. Finding ways to present good ideas and decisions in ways that are delightful in conversation. Spinning interesting stories out of the best parts of our lives.
We do things so that we can talk about it later.
I was having a bad day today. Unlikely to have time this weekend for something I’d wanted to do. Crappy teaching in a class I’m taking. Ever increasing and complicating responsibilities piling up.
So what did I do? I went out and bought half a cherry pie.
Will that cherry pie make me happy? No. I knew this in advance. Consciously and unconsciously: I had the thought, and no emotion compelled me to do it.
In fact, it seemed like the least-efficacious action: spending some of my limited money, to buy a pie I don’t need, to respond to stress that’s unrelated to pie consumption and is in fact caused by lack of time (that I’m spending on buying and eating pie).
BUT. What buying the pie allowed me to do was tell a different story. To myself and my girlfriend who I was texting with. Now, today can be about how I got some delicious pie.
And I really do feel better. It’s not the pie, nor the walk to the store to buy it. It’s the relief of being able to tell my girlfriend that I bought some delicious cherry pie, and that I’d share it with her if she didn’t live a three-hour drive away. It’s the relief of reflecting on how I dealt with my stress, and seeing a pie-shaped memory at the end of the schoolwork.
If this is a correct model of how this all works, then it suggests a couple things:
This can probably be optimized.
The way I talk about that optimization process will probably affect how well it works. For example, if I then think “what’s the cheapest way to get this effect,” that intuitively doesn’t feel good. I don’t want to be cheap. I need to find the right language, the right story to tell, so that I can explain my “philosophy” to myself and others in a way that gets the response I want.
Is that the darks arts? I don’t think so. I think this is one area of life where the message is the medium.
So the “stupid solutions to problems of life” are not really about improving the life, but about signaling to yourself that… you still have some things under control? (My life may suck, but I can have a cherry pie whenever I want to!)
This would be even more important if the cherry pie would somehow actively make your life worse. For example, if you are trying to lose weight, but at the same time keep eating cherry pie every day in order to improve the story of your day. Or if instead of cherry pie it would be cherry liqueur.
Just guessing, but it would probably help to choose the story in advance. “If I am doing X, my life is great, and nothing else matters”—and then make X something useful that doesn’t take much time. Even better, have multiple alternatives X, Y, Z, such that doing any of them is a “proof” of life being great.
I do chalk a lot of dysfunction up to this story-centric approach to life. I just suspect it’s something we need to learn to work with, rather than against (or to deny/ignore it entirely).
My sense is that storytelling—to yourself or others—is an art. To get the reaction you want—from self or others—takes some aesthetic sensitivity.
My guess is there’s some low hanging fruit here. People often talk about doing things “for the story,” which they resort to when they’re trying to justify doing something dumb/wasteful/dangerous/futile. Perversely, it often seems that when people talk in detail about their good decisions, it comes of as arrogant. Pointless, tidy philosophical paradoxes seem to get people’s puzzle-solving brains going better than confronting the complexity of the real world.
But maybe we can simply start building habits of expressing gratitude. Finding ways to present good ideas and decisions in ways that are delightful in conversation. Spinning interesting stories out of the best parts of our lives.