Why Is Gratitude So Difficult?

Introduction

Right off the bat, I get that the title of this post probably annoys you. I’m surprised you’re even here, honestly. Something about having our capacity for gratitude challenged is just off-putting. You may well ask, who am I to position myself as some kind of authority on this?

Who am I?

I’ll freely acknowledge that in terms of managing to feel grateful, I’ve got it pretty easy, being a homeowner in the Bay Area. Worldwide, the median annual income (adjusted for local buying power) is about $5,000-$6,000 a year; something like 93-95% of the population lacks a college degree; about 26% lack safe drinking water. Compared to so many, I’ve had a very charmed life, and what suffering I do experience (e.g., via cycling) is voluntarily self-inflected, which seems the height of privilege. That said, in my  experience gratitude doesn’t always track along with good fortune, and even in my relatively upscale community I don’t have to look far to find people who are anxious or uptight.

[Art by Copilot, to try it out.] 

An example

Here is my poster child for the capacity to be tetchy or ill at ease despite advantageous circumstances. Many years ago, I won an award at work that came with a cash bonus. One of my colleagues, though he seemed happy for me, confided that his wife was pretty upset, feeling like he should have won the award. On what grounds she supposed this, being entirely absent from our workplace, I have no idea. Nevertheless, I wanted to make things right, and invited my colleague and his wife to join my wife and me at Chez Panisse, one of the fanciest restaurants in the Bay Area, on me. My colleague reciprocated by bringing a really nice bottle of wine. As the waiter fussed over the bottle, and employed a strange decanter designed to optimize it somehow, and during the long process of letting the wine breathe etc., it looked like a truly splendid evening was unfolding … but my friend’s wife was getting increasingly agitated. The problem was, she admitted, she was worried about the wine. But she didn’t really elaborate. What was this worry? Worried she wouldn’t like it? Worried that it wouldn’t live up to everyone’s expectations? Worried that everyone would like it but her? Whether she feared the wine might reflect badly on her and her husband, or threaten her epicurean cred, or she just hated to be disappointed, or some combination of these and/or something else entirely, I have no idea. But the magnificent wine had practically become a curse.

So what?

This post explores why it’s hard to focus on the positive in our lives. It turns out there are several tangible reasons that we don’t, supported by science and psychology. I’ll describe these, and then explore what we might do about it.

Reason  #1: negativity bias

If our view of the world tends to be less than rosy at times, we can somewhat blame human nature, or to be more specific, the way our species has evolved. In the essay “Negativity bias,” in the great essay collection This Idea Is Brilliant, the columnist Michael Shermer investigates how the negative packs a bigger punch. Here are a few of his examples: negative stimuli command more attention than positive; pain feels worse than no pain feels good; there are more ways to fail than succeed. He provides this theory:

Why is negativity stronger than positivity? Evolution. In the environment of our evolutionary ancestry, there was an asymmetry of payoffs in which the fitness cost of overreacting to a threat was less than the fitness cost of underreacting, so we err on the side of overreaction to negative events. The world was more dangerous in our evolutionary past, so it paid to be risk-averse and highly sensitive to threats, and if things were good, then taking a gamble to improve them a little was not seen as worth the risk.

Obviously, biological evolution cannot keep up with societal progress. Most of us don’t live among warring tribes anymore (bickering political parties, sure, but nobody is sacking our village). It’s up to us to challenge our negative impulses, and to remind ourselves how much progress has been made and how different modern life is than the human experience over the last 300,000 years. But it doesn’t appear we’re very good at transcending our evolutionary instincts.

Reason #2: relative deprivation

Our feelings of satisfaction and happiness don’t really depend on our absolute situation—that is, whether we have basic needs met like food, shelter, and safety. As everyone knows, we evaluate ourselves and our lives based on how we’re doing compared to our neighbor. In general we don’t have to look very far to see people in our communities with nicer stuff, and coworkers who outrank us. The temptation to feel relatively deprived is always with us, and it can be hard to get over it. In the essay “Relative Deprivation” (also in This Idea Is Brilliant), Kurt Gray, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UNC-Chapel Hill, explains this tendency:

The yearning for relative status seems irrational, but it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. We evolved in small groups where relative status determined everything, including how much you could eat and whether you could procreate. Although most Americans can now eat and procreate adequately, we haven’t lost that gnawing sensitivity to status. If anything, our relative status is now more important. Because our basic needs are met, we have a hard time determining whether we’re doing well, so we judge ourselves based on our place in the hierarchy.

Let’s put together these two human tendencies: negativity and relativity. If we have a biological reflex to judge ourselves vs. our neighbors, that’s bad enough—but because of our negativity bias, we focus on the endless array of seemingly higher status people instead of those beneath us, and moreover instead of appreciating how well we do live and how much we’ve achieved in our own right. To put it more succinctly, we’re negative to begin with and will never lack for ways to feel inferior.

Reason #3: emotion contagion

Once again, I’ll cite an essay in This Idea Is Brilliant. (This book contains 205 brief essays, most of them concerned with scientific concepts pertaining to our daily experience.) June Gruber, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at CU Boulder, in “Emotion Contagion,” explains, “Emotions are contagious. They are rapidly, frequently, and even at times automatically transmitted from one person to the next.” She cites Charles Darwin, who pointed out that this contagion is “fundamental to the survival of humans and nonhumans alike in transmitting vital information among group members,” and points out that it’s “in the service of critical processes such as empathy, social connection, and relationship maintenance between close partners.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is, when emotion contagion hops geographies and goes virtual, it is not necessarily in the service of communities anymore, and becomes a less precise social tool. Gruber goes on to say:

Faulty emotion-contagion processes have been linked to affective disturbances. With the rapid proliferation of online social networks as a main forum for emotion expression, we know, too, that emotion contagion can occur without direct interaction between people or when nonverbal emotional cues in the face and body are altogether absent.

What emotions, in our modern smartphone-addled society, would you say are the most likely to spread? I would say envy, pride, and outrage would be in my top five. Sure, some goodwill is shared as well, but remember: we humans have a negativity bias, and a tendency to compare ourselves unfavorably to others … a perfect recipe for feeling bad online. Meanwhile, the algorithms that determine what to show us are geared toward the feelings that are most likely to trigger forwards, comments, etc., so they’re not making any effort to keep things light or positive. Our reactions train the algorithm, and in time it begins to train us, in a cycle of perpetual irritation that doesn’t strike me as conducive to gratitude. Emotion contagion seems to be morphing from a largely healthy community-building trait to a way for tech companies to monetize some of our more annoying tendencies.

I guess I should acknowledge that it’s not just social media at fault here. It’s how we choose to use the Internet, and how we ourselves decide what’s important enough to share. I base this on a cursory examination of my most polemic albertnet posts and which of these have the most page views. Since I don’t imagine all that many people find my posts via Google, most of the traction my posts get is through being forwarded. Here are my top three positive and negative opinion pieces, and the number of page views they’ve notched. Notice how it’s the more negative ones that get forwarded the most:

Positive:

• Election Result: It Will Be OK - 265
• Has Any Good Come From the COVID-19 Pandemic? - 201
• 10 Reasons to Cut Barbie Some Slack - 643

Negative:

• Velominati’s “The Rules” – Brilliance or BS? - 4,145
• The Problem With Soccer - 3,890
• The Case Against Margolis & Liebowitz - 2,088

(Happily, albertnet is not primarily a platform for serious polemics. None of the above is among my top ten posts. Only the first two negative ones are in the top fifteen. None of the others is in the top thirty.)

To make matters worse…

Okay, perhaps you, gentle reader, are not some status-seeking, insecure person who wastes a lot of time on social media and frets over not getting enough likes and comments. You’re the sort of person who looks beyond himself or herself, and worries more about the state of the world and your fellow human. Perhaps you’ve grown frustrated by this essay and how ungenerous my opinion of you seems to be. Well, congratulations: you’re probably in the most difficult position of all.

How’s that? It’s because you may feel a responsibility to educate yourself about what’s going on in the world, and to try to make a difference. And that means you read a lot of news. Unfortunately, the news is not good. I almost wrote “the news right now is not good” but actually, it’s never been good. If it were good, it wouldn’t be news. “EVERYTHING’S JUST PEACHY” read no headline ever.

We don’t even get the headline “MANY THINGS ARE IMPROVING.” That’s the opposite of news, even if it happens to be true. In his excellent book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Hans Rosling, a cofounder of Doctors Without Borders, points out that journalism doesn’t exist to document steady progress. It highlights the negative, exacerbating the pessimistic tendencies I’ve already discussed. Consider this observation by Rosling:

       In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy. Imagine:
       “Flight BAO016 from Sydney arrived in Singapore Changi airport without any problems. And that was today’s news.”
       2016 was the second safest year in aviation history. That is not newsworthy either.

I’ve already blogged about our responsibility to defend ourselves from the onslaught of bad news, bitter perspectives, doomscrolling, etc. Now I’d like to address the growing habit of grousing to our friends and family about all that’s wrong with the world. I suppose that we feel as though we’re doing this to be responsible citizens, to show that we care, and to get the word out that we should all be doing something about these problems. But what, as mere citizens, can we do? Let’s be honest with ourselves: is our grousing always (or even usually) in the service of some specific call to action? I doubt it. I think it’s generally a result of—wait for it—1) our negativity bias, and 2) our desire to elevate our relative status by showcasing our excellent knowledge of the issues.

What is to be done?

To address the central question of this post—why gratitude is so difficult—I think we can find a way forward by having more compassion for ourselves in this realm. If you sometimes struggle to feel grateful, it’s not you—it’s us. We’re hardwired for negativity, and for making comparisons with others that often leave us feeling inadequate; meanwhile, modern vectors for emotion contagion exacerbate the problem.  Beyond compassion, let’s consider how to combat this situation and specifically address these three factors.

For this I’ll turn to yet another essayist: Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … And It’s All Small Stuff. My favorite among his 100 micro-essays is titled “Think of What You Have Instead of What You Want,” and offers this advice:

In over a dozen years as a stress consultant, one of the most pervasive and destructive mental tendencies I’ve seen is that of focusing on what we want instead of what we have. It doesn’t seem to make any difference how much we have; we just keep expanding our list of desires, which guarantees we will remain dissatisfied.

At first blush this seems to be about material possessions, and thus about showing off with, say, a flashy new car to enhance our status. But it’s more than that, because a lot of what we want is for the world to be better, for people to be better, for more social justice, and all kinds of other things that we can never have or at least never bring about. So satisfaction seems impossible if we continue to focus on what we want. Being dissatisfied, we lack gratitude.

So what’s the secret to shifting our focus? As I see it, the critical component of wanting is the human capacity for counterfactuals, which is to say we are very good at imagining a set of circumstances that is different from reality. I mean, sure, my cat can do this, in imagining a full food bowl instead of an empty one, and thus hassles me at mealtime, but this assessment is as unsophisticated as operant conditioning. She feels hunger and knows there’s a way to satisfy it. But she doesn’t dwell on this want; once her belly is full, she’s happy as a clam and goes off to wash and nap. Suffice to say she is not preoccupied with anxious thoughts (have you ever known a cat with insomnia)? But we humans take counterfactuals much further, such that we are constantly—almost as a reflex—measuring the delta between how things are vs. how we think they ought to be.

This continuous assessment  generally does us no good, of course, because it’s informed by our negativity bias and our persistent dread of relative deprivation, and is exacerbated by how enamored our tech-driven society is with data and all the ways it can describe things: how many thumbs-ups, thumbs-downs, likes, re-posts, rankings, ratings, views, impressions, etc. The urge to measure ourselves, our lives, our personas, and our society against some hypothetical perfect version has never been stronger.

Consider dating. You used to meet a single person somewhere somehow, have a reaction to him or her (the real person, not a curated version), and might decide to get to know him or her better, gradually, via a series of dates … a non-targeted exploration. Following this path, you might be surprised to realize you could actually be attracted to a dog person who likes to play cards and eat barbecue, even if you’re a vegan cat person who reads novels. All this is to say, people used to focus on the actual person—i.e., how things are. Online dating, on the other hand, trains people to swiftly evaluate and usually reject an endless stream of candidates based on their profiles—creating a focus on counterfactuals, always imagining a (hypothetically) superior prospect. I suspect (though I’ve never dated online, having met my wife years before the Internet) that online dating is a good example of modern society taking us in the wrong direction—as if evolution hadn’t already caused enough trouble.

To wrap up, I’m proposing that, following Carlson’s “small stuff” advice about focusing on what we have, not what we want, we fight this growing impulse to compare the actual with the ideal. As negatively biased, socially insecure people susceptible to emotion contagion from every corner, we must protect ourselves from the assessment impulse. We need to recognize that negativity is a bias that no longer protects us; that social comparison is bound to cause hard feelings; that a thousand ways to measure something doesn’t always amount to a single good reason do so. So taste the wine with your tongue, not your discernment, and see if you can’t just enjoy it.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Election Result: It Will Be OK

Introduction

This post is not about politics. As I’ve explained before in these pages, I almost never discuss politics, with anybody. It’s pointless. Either you sit around agreeing with one another, in which case the dialogue inevitably drifts toward one-upmanship around who’s more knowledgeable, or you disagree, in which case you feel attacked, your brain goes into limbic override, and you lament even knowing such an ignoramus, much less having to talk to one.

This post is about how to survive this week’s election, regardless of whom you hoped would win. It’s a plea to locate your better mindset and hang on to it for dear life. (If you are not living in the United States, your elections and overall life situation may vary considerably from mine, in which case this post may not have much value to you … but I suppose you could read it anyway if you have Americans in your life.)

Why now?

I am sitting down to write this right now, on the afternoon of Election Day, because I don’t yet have the foggiest idea how the election is going. I am not the type to be glued to the news, riding a roller coaster of emotion as this or that state topples to this or that candidate. I never doomscroll, and especially not today. Thus, this is the perfect time, while my mind is still clear, to try to make some points about the survivability of any outcome, before I run the real risk of having my brain completely saturated in cortisol, and trying to think through the dense fog—actually, smog—which will make self-soothing very difficult later.

Since I am posting this essay ahead of the election returns, you and I will have something topical to read that dates from the Before Times, when it was still possible to take a deep breath and try to reassure ourselves that life will continue to be okay. Naturally, if my preferred candidate wins, and I don’t need to reread this, that would be wonderful. Otherwise, at least I will have something to cling to: the knowledge that a day ago, a week ago, or whenever ago, it was still possible to keep my chin up. And it still is.

What is at stake?

It’s tempting to believe that this election is a way to assess the state of America’s soul. If our strong, honest, virtuous candidate wins, the feeling goes, then we can conclude that our country is in good shape, that we’re still a good people, that the United States still deserves to be a world leader. On the other hand, if the evil, wicked, soulless candidate wins, it’s because America has fallen like Rome, and our people have lost their way, and we might as well be thrown to the wolves. And yet in reality, this is such a close race, it will be decided by tiny fractions of a percent of votes in this or that state, and the bizarre electoral college system, and possibly even by hanging chads or whatever the 2024 equivalent of that is. Whatever happens today (or however long this election takes to be decided), no conclusion can really be drawn about Americans as a whole, unless there’s some massive wave of epiphany that fundamentally alters millions of us overnight. We’ll be the same people next week as we were last week.

To summarize: our national character, I am arguing, is not at stake. Another thing that isn’t at stake is our fundamental quality of life and our liberty in this country. I gather that I may have just pissed you off by asserting this, but I will stand by it, flying in the face of the giant campaigning machines that have been beating us over the head with the fact that nothing less than democracy in America hangs in the balance of this election. I think that’s overstated. Whatever ideals this country was built on, however the Constitution does or doesn’t protect us, our government has a lot of complicated machinery in it, with a bias towards gridlock. There are checks and balances, and the capacity for thunderous disagreements and long, hard, protracted fights before any change gets made, good or bad. Whether the two-party system is lame, or doomed, or fatally flawed, these two sides will not give up easily and are very good at stopping each other from gaining too much ground. Sure, we have seen very important changes in the last eight years, but they were not tectonic. The essence of our experience in this country will not change overnight.

You may beg to differ, you may call me a fool, all of that is fine (and is the reason I so seldom even approach the periphery of politics on this blog). But I think to ignore the differences between the U.S. and, say, Russia or North Korea or China is to be absurdly ungrateful for the strength and resilience of our country.

Crushing leaves

At one point during this century (I won’t be more specific because this is a non-partisan essay), a presidential election went the way I didn’t want it to, and I felt despondent. For the first time in my voting life, the outcome didn’t seem like it could really even be true. I went out for a late afternoon bike ride—my go-to activity for working through stress—and as I pedaled up Monterey Ave, I happened to run over a perfectly dry and crispy leaf. As I’ve blogged before, I love crushing leaves:

Make fun of me if you want—I just love this activity. This is the perfect time of year for it: the sidewalk and street are littered with leaves and on a warm afternoon they’re perfectly crisp and ready for crunching. The sound is almost identical to a cat eating a potato chip, which I’ve been lucky enough to witness. The wind blows the leaves into big piles I can ride through on my bike. I can even feel the crunching, as light as it is. My kids and I dance all over the sidewalk, vying for the perfect leaf. The kids fight occasionally, like two surfers claiming the same wave. Then there is a kind of larger leaf that isn’t crunchable, but rattles along the sidewalk when kicked, like a big weird crustacean.

Out of nowhere, I had the realization that there was absolutely nothing our new president could do to deprive me of this simple pleasure. The U.S. government just doesn’t have that kind of power. (It is true that during China’s “Great Leap Forward” all kinds of dramatic things happened—for example, something like a billion sparrows were slaughtered—but at the end of the day America is still a hog-tied democracy, thank goodness.)

It was a lovely fall day and an abundance of leaves lined the shoulder of the road, and I began steering for them, crushing one after another, getting inordinate joy from the simplicity of this basic act that I was able to do both before and after the election. As my ride continued I began to catalog all the other pleasures available to me: good, clean air that I gulped greedily as I pounded the pedals; smooth roads twisting gracefully through the hills of Tilden Park; robust health; sunshine; a view of the Bay; a pretty sunset; the pleasure of descending swiftly toward home; the satisfaction of having a home to return to. None of this would be taken away just because my candidate lost.

Fun

So: where did that description of crushing leaves come from? It’s a blog post I did ages ago called, “In Defense of Fun.” Why does fun need to be defended? Because we get distracted, and maybe we get guilty, and maybe we’re too depressed to indulge in it, which is a shame. My own appreciation of fun was rekindled by my kids, and that’s what brought about that post. Today I looked back to that post in advance of possible heartbreak tomorrow morning (or whenever I face the music and learn the outcome of this election), to remind myself that it’s okay—in fact, it’s necessary—to seize our capacity to appreciate what we still have, whatever that is, and to enjoy it. We’re not required to be depressed and sullen and spend the next four years crying in our beer.

I’m not saying the solution to political turmoil is to just blow it off and have fun. I’m just taking advantage of having included a list, in my “Defense of Fun” post fifteen years ago, of my top 20 ways to have fun. I went through that list just now to determine how many of these activities will no longer be possible if this election goes the wrong way. Here is the list:

Surprise, surprise: none of these things will suddenly become impossible. Neither candidate promised, “If I am elected, America will no longer have to face the nightmare of people fixing their bikes, snapping photos, drinking beer, and people-watching. My administration will ban the crushing of leaves along with all BS pointless conversations among friends.”

Bigger picture

To be crystal clear: the point here isn’t fun per se. If my “in defense of” post had instead been about soulful connection with family, or the deep richness of decades-long friendships, or the satisfaction we get from improving our minds, or on basically anything that we should be glad for in our lives, we could look at that list instead. The point is, our post-election lives will only be miserable if we let them—if we decide this outcome precludes happiness, whether or not it actually changes the basic facts of our day-to-day lives (which it mostly doesn’t and won’t). Our connection with friends and family is only jeopardized if we blather on angrily or wretchedly about politics and they disagree with us. The United States of America tomorrow will be the same one it was yesterday, with the same dry leaves, the same slanting orange afternoon sun, the same smooth, twisty roads, and the same home to return to; your cat will still nuzzle her snout into the crook of your elbow and/or your dog will still whack your leg repeatedly as he wags his tail. Certainly there will be gradual policy changes based on having one political administration in place instead of another; the winners will have impacts on the country and the world during the time voters have given them. But you don’t need to decide in advance to be miserable about it.

Stay tuned

Keep an eye on albertnet, because I promise next week I’ll return to lighthearted, non-didactic, hopefully humorous prattle instead of this tedious, serious stuff. Maybe I’ll write about A.I…

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Keep Calm & Read These Quotations

Introduction

In a souvenir shop in London some years back, my wife bought a cool mug bearing a likeness of the British “KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON” poster.

This poster was originally created during World War II and was one of “a number of morale boosting posters that would be displayed across the British Isles during the testing times that lay ahead” (Wikipedia).  While two other posters were widely circulated, “the plan in place for this poster was to issue it only upon the invasion of Britain by Germany. As this never happened, the poster was never officially seen by the public.”

For the last few years I’ve noticed this iconic poster popping up all over the place, along with endless variations on it (my favorite being “FREAK OUT AND RUN AMOK”).  Last Christmas, I received a KEEP CALM desk calendar, with a new motivational quotation for each day.

In this post I review the good, the bad, and the ugly among these, so as to alternately uplift, demoralize, and challenge you.  I close with some ruminations on whether words alone can really lift sunken spirits.

Keep calm and mull these over

“It will never rain roses:  when we want to have more roses, we must plant more trees.” —George Eliot

I liked this so much I read it to my wife and older daughter.  They looked at me quizzically and asked, “Since when do roses grow on trees?”  Only then did I think about it.  Of course they don’t.  They grow on bushes.  We even have a word for that:  rosebush.  Didn’t George Eliot have an editor?  What a distraction that “trees” bit is, especially for people better versed in botany than I.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by traffic from both sides.” –Margaret Thatcher

This one is pretty silly.  Getting knocked down by traffic from one side is bad enough and should be avoided.  Moreover, the main problem here is standing in the road. Roads are for moving. Nobody should be standing in the road.  The whole metaphor buckles under its own weight.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“Do.  Or do not.  There is no try.”  —Yoda

This one is great and probably the best line of dialogue from all those Star Wars movies.  I often recite this one for my kids, but this backfires because they beg me to say it in the Yoda voice.  So I do, and then they beg me to say more things in the Yoda voice, and before I know it I’m doing my “Yoda sommelier” routine and my throat gets all sore.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“In most things success depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.” —Montesquieu (French political philosopher)

This is a great point and I have firsthand experience with it.  I almost quit bike racing at the end of 1984, but for some reason stuck with it and the next season finally had my first (albeit small-scale) success.  On the flip side, it’s important to be able to recognize when you’ve tried hard enough and it’s time to quit.  Just look at gambling addicts or rabid Bernie acolytes who stage protests even after the candidate himself has moved on.  Depressing.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“Some people see things that are and ask, Why?  Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not?  Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that shit.” —George Carlin

This strikes me as very true.  If everybody sat around dreaming and asking “what if” all the time, nothing would get done. On the other hand, if everybody is too busy with repetitive tasks to sit back and wonder, innovation will never happen. Surely this double message was Carlin’s intention; once the initial belly-laugh is over we say, “Wait a second….”

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“No matter how tall the mountain, it cannot block out the sun.” —Chinese proverb 

The problem with this notion is that it’s demonstrably false. Even a low ridge of mountains can block out the sun well ahead of when you’d expect the sunset to  occur.  Last spring I was doing an evening mountain bike ride with my daughter, and I’d looked up the sunset and civil twilight times in advance.  But sure enough, the Berkeley hills, though reaching a peak elevation of less than 2,000 feet, blocked out the sun and we had to descend in the near-dark.  For me the metaphorical idea here has been forever sullied.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“Think nothing done while aught remains to do.” —Samuel Rogers, English poet.

This is probably the most demoralizing thing I’ve ever read, because of course something always remains to do.  I have a hard enough time reflecting on my life without this bit of advice.  Imagine thinking of this when you’re on your death bed.  “I guess since I never finished that Master’s degree, it doesn’t matter that I was a good family man.  Damn it fuck it all.”  Thanks a lot, Samuel.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“There are times when words seem empty and only actions seem great.” —Woodrow Wilson

This is not very inspiring to anybody who aspires to be a writer, or makes his living writing. Those poor journalists ... haven’t they suffered enough, without “advice” like this?  Frankly, I think Wilson was speaking mainly for himself.  He was never very good with words, like when he justified America’s refusal to join the war effort by saying, “There’s a such thing as being too proud to fight.”  What the hell does that mean?  You know what?  Just shove it, Wilson.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it.” —Chief Seattle, Duwamish chief

I like this quote, as it can help us to realign our perspective and not overestimate our importance in the cosmos.  My only problem with this quote is that, every time I glimpsed it on my desk calendar, I misread it as “Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely stranded in it.”  That misreading has eclipsed the real quote in memory.  Lately, the idea of being stranded in the web of life has been flashing across my mind a lot.  I can just picture the spider approaching….

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

 “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” —Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet 

I think this is really good advice.  Frankly, I get annoyed when this or that movement gets all excited and says “We’re gonna change the world!”  Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to fix the world, but isn’t it more realistic to do what you can, with limited fanfare, and hope your albeit modest efforts make a noticeable difference?  (It’s not cheating to point out your results, by the way.  I like to tell my kids, “Watch, I’m going to singlehandedly save the planet by composting this teabag.”  They stare back blankly, perhaps thinking something like, “No dad is so dorky that he can block out the sun.”) 

My only issue with this quote is that it brings to mind the Michael Jackson song “Man in the Mirror,” which, though a great song, is just too catchy and gets stuck in my head so before long I’m tweaking the lyrics out of sheer boredom and singing, “If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then bag your face!” and my kids are giving me that look again.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“Know how sublime a thing it is/ To suffer and be strong.” —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 19th-century American poet

I absolutely love this quote.  It reminds us that suffering can improve us.  (No, I’m not going to trot out that famous Nietzsche quote because I think it’s too often completely untrue.  I prefer my inversion of it, “That which does not make you stronger may eventually kill you.”)

Longfellow’s quote here is one of the rare ones that I kind of wish could have come from an athlete, such as the (alas, departed) Mohammed Ali.  As sublime images go, picturing Ali in the ring does a better job than picturing a poet at his desk.   But that isn’t to say poets don’t suffer.  Writing certainly involves suffering (and remember that next time you’re halfway through one of my blog posts and feeling sorry for yourself).

What does Longfellow in particular know of suffering?  Actually, quite a lot.  He was severely burned trying to save Fanny, his second wife, from burning to death, using his own body to smother the flames. Does this action inform the quote above?  Well, not exactly.  He wrote these lines years before trying to rescue Fanny, when he’d just begun his 7-year courtship of her.  The suffering he mentions here may just have been blue balls. ]

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them, the rest of us could not succeed.” —Mark Twain

I like this quote.  It’s less stuffy than “in the kingdom of the blind…” and gives us the smug satisfaction of looking down on fools.  But it’s not very inspirational, is it?  It reminds us that our success is really just a matter of failing less than the next guy, and though we should be reminded of this, I don’t find the thought very comforting.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Another albeit great quote that doesn’t, alas, buck me up very much.  Yes, humans are resilient and adaptable, but I can’t celebrate this idea without thinking of even more adaptable creatures like pigeons and roaches … not the most inspiring role models.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“Where there is doubt, faith;/ Where there is despair, hope;/ Where there is darkness, light;/ Where there is sadness, joy.” —St. Francis of Assisi.

Look, I’ll be the first to grant that St. Francis of Assisi was a great guy.  But this utterance isn’t inspirational or profound. It’s a simple set of contrasts that together mean nothing.  What’s next?  “Where there is less filling; tastes great; / Where there is Dark Side, Force;/ Where there is gremlin, smurf’”?

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” —Colin Powell

Holy shit, this is a frightening notion coming from any military leader.  I won’t comment on Powell’s track record—politics bores me and I have no insight or opinion here—but remember the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, from history class?  This was a textbook case of Groupthink—the tendency of well-meaning team players to appear optimistic despite inner qualms, so that a group will tend to behave far more boldly than it ought to.

I’m reminded of a Kung Fu episode when the old sage hands Grasshopper a pencil and says, “Break this in half,” which he does.  Then he hands him a cluster of 50 pencils and says, “Try now,” and of course Grasshopper can’t do it.  Nice idea, but you ever try to write with 50 pencils at once?  Some forces shouldn’t be multiplied and personally I find nothing inspirational about an idea that scares the shit out of me.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” —Jonathan Safran Foer

This is very wise, I think.  When I first read this, I thought about my wife and how she loves pancakes enough to risk getting undercooked ones.  During our cross-country bike tour, whenever we breakfasted at a diner she’d order pancakes, and 90% of the time they were undercooked and gluey.  Fortunately, I always ordered eggs so I could trade with her.  Ever since that tour, eating undercooked pancakes makes me feel oddly happy.

Of course this is a nice idea when you’re just talking about fricking pancakes, but it’s a lot harder when you’re actually sad.  Foer’s quote doesn’t boost my morale, exactly … I’m reminded to confront my sadness, though I know this won’t necessarily lead to happiness.  To assume that it will is to commit the logical fallacy of converse error, which bright people like you and Foer know better than to do.  So we embrace sadness, but with no guarantee of relief.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“Hope against hope, and ask till ye receive.” —James Montgomery, British educator and poet

I don’t like this one.  Logically, “hope against hope” is a quagmire.  Hope is a feeling, and if we don’t feel it, we can’t simulate it through intellectual gymnastics.  And “ask till ye receive” is so weak and supplicating.  It’s also annoying to the person (and perhaps even the deity) fielding the entreaties.  I rue the day I told my kids “It never hurts to ask.”  I was imagining them asking for a job, or some kind of retail discount.  I wasn’t thinking of them haranguing me for lemonade or something when I’m already shelling out for burgers.  Now I find myself repeating a far more useful saying of my own:  “Volume and repetition are not sound rhetorical techniques.”

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.” —Booker T. Washington, American writer and educator

This is good, but sounds kind of stuffy.  “One” is so formal, and there just seem to be too many words here.  I read this to my teenaged daughter and I’m pretty sure she fell asleep halfway through.  Sensing a teachable moment I discussed the quote with her, and we came up with what I think is a much improved version:  “Success isn’t just where you got in life, but how much gnar you shredded along the way.”

That’s better, I think, but is it inspirational?  The problem is, success doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness.  So many of the most (conventionally) successful people are successful because they’re unhappy.   Their insatiable thirst for success is perhaps rooted in the mistaken belief that happiness will follow success.  To them, this quote might be depressing; they might lash out at Fate for not giving them better obstacles to overcome.  And those of us who acknowledge the disconnect between success and happiness won’t be inspired at all.  Say, for example, we’re feeling sad about death.  How could the idea of success even figure in?

The problem with aphorisms

Where morale is concerned, the problem with quotations is that mere words, delivered on a page (or a screen) to a solitary reader, tend to fall flat.  They’re just advice, given in a disembodied voice and usually lent some cred by an authority figure you’ve never met.  My desk calendar is fine food for thought, but doesn’t achieve the goal of the poster on which it is based.

The idea of the poster campaign, on the other hand, is excellent.  The Brits are a famously stoic people, and stoicism—to a point (cf. Foer)—can be useful, especially when it’s shared.  In that sense, the collective stoicism engendered by the poster campaign is a “force multiplier.”  (There’s no pitfall of Groupthink here because feeling, not strategy, is influenced.)

Just to be clear:  sharing mere words is not the point.  Social media is not a functional conduit for a morale-building campaign because it does not involve actual human contact—it’s just another disembodied delivery mechanism for words.  The British poster campaign works more like this:  you’re a Londoner, and your city is being bombed, and you’re hunkering in a fallout shelter with scores of your countrymen.  It’s terrifying, but you have the solidarity of your mates and the stoicism is infectious.  Before you know it, you’re all singing—yes, actually singing!—and then you catch a glimpse of one of these morale-building posters.  No, the words are not ingenious (indeed, “keep calm and carry on” is less profound than most of the above quotations), but the shared experience imbues the poster with more meaning than it had before—so that the next day, when you’re walking through rubble in your war-torn city, you see one of those posters and are reminded of the camaraderie of the bomb shelter, and maybe this helps just a bit.

Of course you and I are not overcoming this particular obstacle, and most of us aren’t British.  But suppose you’re grieving … I still think there’s special value in, say, sitting with an identically aggrieved friend, sipping good beer, talking a bit but not incessantly, gazing passively across the room at the faintly luminous dial on his 1970s-era stereo tuner, not knowing anything profound but at least knowing you’re not alone.

Postscript

My KEEP CALM desk calendar obviously lasted another five months after this post was written. Here is the sequel: Keep Calm II - The Spawning.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Exercise-Induced Attitude Adjustment

NOTE: This post is rated R for mild strong language and some instances of crude humor.

Introduction

In this post I describe one technique for correcting a bad mood—that is, for turning a dour attitude into something more reasonable. Before I begin, here are some caveats:

• I would never pretend to be an expert on mental health.
• I’ve decided it’s pointless to try to tell somebody to look on the bright side, to be grateful for what you have, etc. If a person could do that, by definition he wouldn’t have a bad attitude.
• I don’t know any way to significantly change your overall attitude or life view, in any macro sense. I’m simply documenting one method that some people, like me, may find useful in cheering themselves up during, say, the course of a day.
• This technique is probably nothing you’ve not heard before—but I’ll describe the process in detail and explain why I think it works.

I freely admit this post is off to a dull start. Bear with me though, I think it’ll get better. It’s based on a single recent case study and I have some funny stuff to report.

What do I mean, “bad attitude”?

As I mentioned above, I think you could divide “bad attitude” into two categories: macro and micro. Some people have an overall dark picture of life, many of them for good reason. If you asked a kid, “Why the sad face?” and he replied, “I work ten hours a day in a factory putting decals on crappy toys for other kids for almost no money and my parents beat me,” an appropriate response might be, “Yeah, I’d be sad too.” But other people, probably most people, are generally pretty happy but nonetheless fall into dark moods from time to time. These moods can last a day, maybe a couple, maybe a week, whatever. They’re like a headache in that they’re bound to go away, but wouldn’t it be nice to speed up that process?

I’m a happy guy. I have more blessings than I ever expected, and probably more than I deserve. I’ve even managed to mellow out over the years. But like so many people, I sometimes feel overwhelmed. No single aspect of my life overwhelms me: I’m pretty good at my job, have a decent work/life balance, am healthy, have a close family, etc. But the sheer number of small challenges I’m faced with can seem insurmountable at times. Picture a guy rolling a boulder up a hill: that’s not so bad. Instead, I feel like a guy at the bottom of a hill trying to stop any number of rocks from rolling down it. The petty trials of life can seem like an avalanche, or a game of Space Invaders.

So it was the other night. My younger daughter had a remarkable amount of homework to do, which she’d put off until the last minute, and which required parent participation. Meanwhile, my older daughter had to finish her science project, which involved me typing stuff and printing photos. By the time it was all over, and I’d set up my bike trainer for a workout the following morning, I had neither the time nor energy for anything else. My day was shot. I’d gone from working all day for the man to toiling away on kid- and household-related stuff, with nothing else in between. And still the dishes weren’t done. So I went to bed with a bad attitude: precisely the type of bad attitude this post addresses.

Standard measures

I suppose there are countless measures by which people try to snap out of a funk. Some self-medicate with booze, drugs, or TV. Some try to count their blessings (which just doesn’t work for me—immediate problems have a way of distracting me from what’s good). Some take the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” tack and try to cheer themselves up my reciting, to themselves, uplifting platitudes like “When the going gets tough, the tough get going!” or “When you reach the end of your rope, make a knot and hang on!” or “Grab the scissors and saws and cut out your livers, gizzards, and balls!” Okay, that last one is not really a typical platitude—I’m just making sure you’re still awake.

For me, the platitudes really don’t work. I don’t even like fortune cookie fortunes because they’re usually too upbeat and not really predictive. Halls cough drops now have little pick-me-up quips on them (e.g., “Turn ‘can do’ into ‘can did!’” and “Bet on yourself”). Will we see this become a trend? Will there be toilet paper printed with peppy little tidbits like “Fold or wad, it’s all good!” or “Have you tried prune juice?” I think the problem with these cheery aphorisms is that a person with a bad attitude is not receptive to anything positive. He cannot resist responding, to his peppier self, “Piss off!” I once went to the apartment of a person who had written uplifting platitudes an 3x5 cards and posted them all over the place. I found this depressing.

Self-medication isn’t my bag either—in fact, I don’t like to drink beer if I’m in a bad mood—but oddly enough, self-medication probably has more in common with my attitude adjustment technique than platitudes do.

The morning after

As I was describing earlier, I went to bed the other evening with a bad attitude: the feeling that not only was life a bitch, but that I myself was life’s bitch. Sometimes a good night’s sleep will correct this and you wake up feeling like Mary Lou Retton. But don’t count on it. After going to bed in a dark mood, I woke up with the same dark mood. First of all, I hadn’t had enough sleep. My bowels woke me up at 5-something, before the alarm I’d set on my smartphone had even gone off. That night I’d dreamed that I got a new smartphone that didn’t have a cracked screen, and when, upon waking, I grabbed my phone to check the time, of course the crack was still there. Worse, my smartphone had bad news for me: an e-mail announcing that the health care flex-spending claim I’d faxed in three days before had just been rejected.

I staggered out of bed, feeling like an old person. My head hurt and my eyes felt puffy. I popped a No-Doz and made my way downstairs. Because misery loves company, and as a service, I phoned my brother to get him out of bed. (If I can ride at this dark hour, so can he.) His phone rang and rang and went to voice-mail. He says the battery is too low for the phone to ring or some such thing; I’m not so sure the phone wasn’t wrapped in a sock and shoved in a drawer. If so, I couldn’t blame him. Riding this early, especially on the stationary trainer, is a real drag. I’d set up the trainer because it won’t stop raining here, and it’s been cold, and I couldn’t bear to once again hope for good riding weather and once again be thwarted.

Before I could ride, I had to log into my flex spending account and find out why my claim was rejected. (Why now, at this early hour? Because this rejected claim was probably part of a devious plot to deny me of my money, and the deadline for submitting 2010 claims was days away, and if they—the mythic, non-specific, evil “they”—could stonewall me for just a little longer they could rip me off.) The website was a monster of metastasizing windows. My claim, it turned out, was denied because my receipt was insufficiently detailed. I’d have to find something else to submit, and fast.

All the while, my limited workout time was dwindling. And, as much of a grind as this workout would be, it would probably end up being the highlight of my day: the only thing I would do, all day, that would be just for me. It was my special Dana Time and it was dribbling away.

The ride

As the astute reader may have guessed, my technique for improving my attitude is based on exercise. You may well have heard the generic advice “Go get some exercise, it’ll improve your mood,” but before you abandon this post, rest assured I’m going to be more specific. I’m going to walk you through an instance of this system working perfectly, against astounding odds.

I never feel very good at the beginning of a trainer workout. My legs, this morning, feel rubbery and lifeless, my breathing is raspy, and I am fighting with my headphones to get my music going. I worry that my second pair of expensive noise-cancelling headphones is finally shot—destroyed, like the first pair, by too much sweat. I futz with the cord awhile until I get the crackling to basically subside and the sound to come through both speakers. The music itself, which I’ve selected for its hard-driving beat and boldness, seems a parody of uplifting platitudes. One of the first songs (they’re sorted by track number) includes this passage: “My main man P-Funk ... Attracts all bitches in Cadillac on dishes, while I roll a Prism with the fuckin’ engine light blinkin’. You know you’re stinkin’ when the same gauge light on for months cause another fuckin’ complication.”

Ten minutes in, my heart rate stubbornly refuses to climb. In cycling parlance, I can’t get it up. My legs are burning but I know I’m not putting out much power; my heart rate, in the 130 beat-per-minute range, is barely within my target zone. So far, the ride has only confirmed what I was already feeling: “Sucks to be me.” But gradually, my legs start to feel better. The caffeine is finally taking effect, and my heart rate starts to climb. Fifteen minutes into the workout, I break 150 bpm and my music starts to sound really good. The current song is dark, but also funny: “Stop the tape! This kid needs to be locked away! (Get him!) Dr. Dre, don’t just stand there, OPERATE! ‘I’m not ready to leave, it’s too scary to die. I’ll have to be carried inside the cemetery and buried alive.’” My mind—which has thus far been absolutely fixated on how tired I was, and how full of hassles my life was—starts to wander.

Soaring

About forty-five minutes into the workout my heart finally busts out above the target zone. It’s now beating at close to 90% of its maximum: I’m fricking hammering. For this to happen, my body needs to produce two magical hormones: adrenaline and endorphin. These stoke my system and alleviate pain. They’re what produce the so-called “runner’s high,” that feeling of euphoria produced by intense exercise. (You don’t get these from playing on the Stairmaster, reading a magazine and supporting your weight on your hands while your legs paddle fruitlessly below. You get these hormones from making yourself suffer.)

The beauty of it is, the harder you hammer, the more of these hormones the body produces, thus the harder you can hammer. The more you give, the more you get. If muscles made noise, they’d have gone from an annoying whine at the beginning of the workout to a powerful roar now. In most ways, an outdoor ride is vastly superior to a trainer ride—you get the fresh air, enjoy some speed, feel like you’ve been somewhere—but in two regards, the trainer is better. One, you can listen to music; and two, when you achieve this level of output you can just hold it there, without a twisty downhill or traffic light to break it up.

As I hammer away, a song comes on that seems a deliberate attempt to re-focus my mind on its life-is-a-grind woes, particularly the healthcare claim rejection: “Pay, pay the price, pay for nothing’s fair. Hey, I’m your life, I’m the one who took you here. Hey, I’m your life and I no longer care.”

But the lyrics cannot bring me down, as my brain has lost the thread of its earlier sturm und drang. Not just the specifics—“I’m so tired,” “I’m so old,” “The healthcare system is rigged to cheat me,” “I have no time”—but in fact the entire feeling that I’m getting beaten down. Thinking alone cannot lead the brain out of such a morass, I’m convinced. You need intense exercise, and adrenaline, and endorphins. And you can’t ride the trainer without music. Would Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” or maybe that “Walking On Sunshine” song, be even better than my dark choices? I doubt it. A good beat and rockin’ intensity are the point. An hour into my workout, I’m rocking out to this: “Whatsoever I’ve feared has come to life. Whatsoever I’ve fought off became my life. Just when everyday seemed to greet me with a smile, sunspots have faded and now I’m doing time.” Sounds like a drag, sure, but it’s somebody else’s problem, innit?

Reflection

Remarkably, the benefit of the ride doesn’t end there. Pedaling a bike indoors doesn’t take much thought—I’m a hamster on a wheel, basically—and neither does the music. So my mind wanders over all kinds of ground. Since at heart I’m a grateful guy, it’s only my occasional obsession with dark thoughts that prevent me from naturally, automatically counting my blessings. Thus, now I reflect on the previous day with a more positive view: Alexa’s science project, though it took us a long time, came out really well. I’m proud of her, and moreover she was stoked with the final product.

My body firing on all cylinders now, my brain begins to revel in all variety of triumphant reflection. I think back to Lindsay’s last soccer game, one of her best yet. At one point, she stole the ball from an opponent, broke free, and tore down the field toward the goal, never losing control of the ball. As she approached the net, I was on pins and needles. There are no goalies in her soccer age group, but all the girls seem to have difficulty scoring. It’s as though there’s an invisible force field protecting the net. (As I ponder this on the trainer, my oxygen-starved brain thinks back to the force-field “transparency” in an old “Star Trek” episode.) Did Lindsay choke and miss the shot, like her dad would surely have done? No, she did not—she drilled it right in. And best of all was her expression right afterward. For a brief moment before breaking into a grin, she stared at that ball in that net with a fearsome, eye-of-the-tiger look, as if to say “Damn right it’s in.” She has the killer instinct I never did. I am so stoked about this, and as I ponder it I pedal even harder.

After the ride

The high energy lasts the rest of the ride, and afterward I’m in remarkably good spirits. My legs know they’ve done some work, but they feel good. I can bound up staircases, and my earlier head congestion is gone. And oddly enough even my vision seems particularly clear, like on a sunny day after a rainstorm. The buzz of the household, as everybody runs around preparing for school, is welcome, not enervating. In fact, much of what I look at seems almost artistic, like a still-life. As I dump my sweat-soaking cycling clothes on the laundry pile I come across a startling platitude on the label of a child’s jacket: “Always follow your herd.” I laugh at loud at this before realizing it actually says, “Always follow your heart.” The whole label is kind of a joke; it provides a black fabric surface on which to write your kid’s name and address, and it spells “address” wrong:

Post-workout, and in the context of this jacket label, my healthcare claim stalemate no longer seems the work of an evil “them” out to steal my money. It’s just the result of normal, widespread human haplessness. Sure, I’m not always on top of things, but then neither is anybody else. Maybe the best we can do is to try to keep a sense of humor about it.

“Alexa!” I call out. “Always follow your herd!”

dana albert blog