The Rawness

From talking to a lot of my friends who are in their 20s and 30s, I’ve seen a common thread in all of us. The need to accumulate experiences and things. The need to travel to as many places as possible. To collect hobbies. Everyone has new resolutions. Learn a new language. Or two. Or three. Skydive. Change jobs. Go back to school and change careers altogether. Learn to play an instrument. We decide to write novels in our free time or take up a new sport. We spend hours in the gym trying to get our body fat percentage into the single digits. We have the time and means and education to pursue careers and hobbies and personal achievement goals that our parents and their parents before them could never have even dreamed of. Isn’t this the American Dream? Isn’t that why many of our ancestors traveled here to begin with? To give us choices and financial security that they themselves never had growing up? Yet we’re a notoriously unfulfilled generation. Many of us are neurotic, directionless, struggling with feelings of inadequacy, still rebelling against our parents, still trying to find ourselves, constantly struggling with existential angst…why?

Why do we have so much already and still have so many opportunities to accumulate more, yet we’re somehow less personally fulfilled than our parents were at our ages? My parents had a fraction of the education I had. Where they lived felt so hopeless they actually felt like they had to switch whole countries and come to America, a place where they barely knew the language. They had a lot less skills and education and had to take whatever jobs they could get and struggle to raise kids. They constantly had to do without to get by. They stayed with their respective employers until retirement. Sure they had some regrets, but they were nowhere near as consuming as those of many of the young (and some would argue spoiled and self-indulgent) people of my generation, who are already complaining about quarterlife crises. Why are our parents and grandparents so much happier and less regretful, even though they grew up with so much more responsiblity so many less toys?

Two speeches from the TED Conferences may shed some light. Before going any further, what exactly is TED? TED is an international conference that brings together a wide range of thinkers every year to talk about a variety of topics. Here’s a description of the TED Conference from their own website:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. Almost 150 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Our mission: Spreading ideas.

You can go to their website or check their video collection on Youtube and see many of the intellectually stimilating speeches they have from some very intense thinkers. But I want to focus on two speeches in particular, which I think fit together well to provide the answers we’re looking for in this case. One speech is by Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, and the other is by Daniel Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness.

Dan Gilbert’s speech is called “Why Are We Happy? Why Aren’t We Happy” and it’s described on the TED website as follows:

Psychologist Dan Gilbert challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel real, enduring happiness, he says, even when things don’t go as planned. He calls this kind of happiness “synthetic happiness,” and he says it’s “every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for.”

What “synthetic happiness” means is that when we don’t get what we want and we resign ourselves to the fact that we won’t get what we want, our mind adapts and we end up being as happy with the unwanted result as we would have been with the originally desired result. What’s important to realize is that these people aren’t simply lying to themselves to make themselves feel better about the disappointing development. These people actually become as happy with the unwanted result as they would have been with the result they originally wanted. But the problem is, this synthetic happiness only works if you’re trapped and have no other choices.

Barry Schwartz’s speech “The Paradox of Choice” touches on the same issues, and is described on the TED website as follows:

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz’s estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.

Think of it like Ramen Cup O’ Noodles in college when you’re broke. When you’re in college, you loved the shit out some Ramen noodles. And it wasn’t a case of you knowing you were eating shitty food but pretending to like it. You weren’t lying to yourself. You actually believed in your heart and mind that you loved that salty, chewy mess. Because you were broke and had absolutely no other choices, your mind actually made you love those noodles. You would sit in class craving that shit and daydreaming about those styrofoam expired noodles and stinky powdered broth and you never thought for once that you were settling for junk. It was gloriously uncomplicated. Once you graduated from school and got your first good job and had serious food choices, though, your mind suddenly realized how shitty Ramen noodles are, even though they taste the same as they did back when you were in college. Same goes for the cafeteria food and the greasy spoon ghetto diners you loved back then too.

Choices fuck you up. Now instead of eating Ramen noodles every night and loving them, you’re a young professional with a real income and an active social life and are surrounded by tons of restaurant choices and a recent Zagat’s guide to help you sift through them and each place has a million affordable entries on its menu to choose from. Now you’re sampling different gourmet cuisines mutiple nights a week and you’re nitpicking them to death, whereas before when you could only afford one shitty food consistently, you really believed you loved it.

And not only do choices fuck you up and make you miserable, but now we’re programmed to gravitate towards them. We choose neighborhoods based on how many different restaurants and bars are around us. And how culturally and financially diverse are social circles will be in those neighborhoods. And how many different clothing stores and supermarkets we’ll have to choose from. And among those restaurants we’ll have a dozen different ethnic cuisines available to us, and each will have a large menu selection. The bars will have 10 different vodkas and 30 different scotches and 40 microbrews to choose from. And the supermarket with have 24 different types of flavored gourmet mayo to choose. And we’ll feel pressured to have our social circles look as diverse as a Benetton ad in order to make sure we’re living an open-minded, full unbigoted life. And our disposable income and leisure time makes us feel pressured to cram hobbies into our lives as well. We not only actively seek choice, the dilemma that causes us our existential angst, but we actually expect it to solve our existential angst, leading to an incredibly vicious circle.

So now it becomes harder to feel fulfilled because now no matter what we choose, we’re convinced there’s something better out there that we’re missing out on. As soon as we get our ideal apartment, we hear about a better complex that’s going up in a better hipper neighborhood. Soon as we order Thai, we think maybe we should have went with the new Italian place with the celebrity chef we read about in New York Magazine last week. We can go to our usual lounge to chill, but it was just okay last time. Let’s try this hot new lounge instead. But once we get there and it’s utterly wack, suddenly we imagine how good a time we’d probably be having if we went with our original plan instead. Of if we tried that other new lounge we heard about. Even when we’re content with our decisions we find ourselves daydreaming about trading up.

Even TV is a big dilemma now. Growing up we only had three major networks and a few cable channels that sucked ass. You chose something from those big networks, went to school or the water cooler, and everyone discussed the same shows because we all watched the same shit. We had no choice.

And that’s why we’re doomed to be less happy than our parents. They had a gloriously uncomplicated life, similar to those long gone Ramen noodle days I described, but they chose to upgrade us to the overstimulating and cluttered life of Zagat’s guides, gourmet supergroceries and megamalls thinking they were doing us a favor. Ironically, while having no choices isn’t always a picnic, having a nonstop of glut of them is turning out to be worse.

Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m no communist. I’m not against competition. I don’t believe striving for upward mobility is anything to feel guilty about. I think rewarding yourself materially now and again is a great thing. I think wanting more for yourself is what drives progress, which is the very engine of capitalism. But do we really need a bar with 200 fucking types of scotch to choose from?!?!

The full speeches are here if you’re curious:

Daniel Gilbert:

Barry Schwartz:

I want to talk about a theory I’ve been working over in my head. I call it the Mystery/Mastery Love Paradox. (I’m generally not good at giving short, catchy names to things, so if you can come up with a pithier name for it, please let me know). It basically states that when people are faced with a mystery, which is an initial challenge they dream of mastering but have no idea how, they will be motivated by a sincere love for it. But once they actually do conquer the challenge and get so good at it that they achieve mastery, they will no longer love it because they have deciphered it, realized it wasn’t as interesting, alluring or mysterious as they originally thought, and then begin to actively disdain it. It’s basically the main reason why once we conquer that impossible challenge that at one point consumed and mystified us, we are rarely as satisfied as we expected to be. It’s the reason why happiness constantly eludes us, even after we get what we thought we wanted. We are driven to conquer things, but destined to get bored with them once we master them, leading us to want new things to conquer, causing the cycle to repeat.

Before I get in-depth with it, let’s start off with a quote (with emphasis added by me) from Neil Strauss’s book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Strauss, a former chump with women, gets himself mentored by the world’s greatest pickup artists, reads a ton of books, compares notes with other pickup artists in training and field tests techniques until he reaches the point that he can not only pick up a woman using a prewritten scripts and stock techniques, but they got it down to such a science that they were able to reduce it all to a teachable routine that even a social misfit could memorize, practice and get results from almost immediately:

On our last day with Papa, we went to a club called Guvernment. I pushed him into sets and watched him repeat, like a robot, the openers, outines, and negs Mystery and I had taught him. And women were responding to him now. It was amazing how effective just a few simple lines could be—and it was also a little depressing. The first thing aspiring standup comics do is develop a tight five-minute routine that can win over any audience. But after seeing hundreds of rooms fill with laughter on cue at he exact same points, they begin to lose respect for their audience for being so easily manipulated. Being a successful pickup artist meant risking the same side effect.

Think about this for a sec. That comedian, the one that you admire so much for being able to make you and everyone else in the room laugh, the one you feel a special connection to, has done this time and time before and in his mind probably finds your reaction predictable, banal and just plain typical. The same probably goes for directors like Steven Spielberg or Alfred Hitchcock who mastered pushing audiences’ different emotion buttons at will. They know all the tricks to make an audience cheer, cry or hang on the edge of its seat, and once they got their craft down audiences weren’t even a challenge for them to manipulate anymore. And like the comedian, once they mastered their particular audience, they lost respect for them. Sure they enjoy the quick ego boost gained by the public adulation and easy successes they achieve, but the lack of challenge also makes them discontent to a degree.

That’s why successful people have to reframe challenges in order to stay interested and motivated. Once they realize that making people laugh is now easy, they look for the challenge of trying to get more money and fame than their fellow comedians. Or maybe they compete to be funnier than their top competitors. Or for the movie director that’s mastered crowd pleasing, he may turn his attention to the stil-unconquered challenge of winning the love and respect of his filmmaking peers by getting an Academy Award. Similarly, in The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, for Strauss and his fellow pickup artists the hookups and sex start becoming almost mundane in comparison to competing with other pickup artists to be the best and innovate the most techniques.

Yet all these people at one point were in absolute awe of the very thing they are now bored by. The stand up comedian, at the point he was just starting out and unsure of himself, probably believed that just figuring out how to make people laugh consistently would be his ultimate dream. He basically put audiences on a pedestal and craved their approval. And once he got it down to a science he probably began losing respect for crowds and finding them boring. Likewise, the film director probably got a rush the first time he screened a movie for an audience and managed to push the right emotional buttons with one of his films and get the reactions he wanted, even if that audience was just his film school class or his family. Similarly in The Game, when Neil Strauss was totally clueless about women he was craving their approval and making them into mysterious goddesses in his mind. Once he cracked the puzzle of what made them tick and mastered it, he found them boring and disappointing. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mystery/Mastery Love Paradox is what drove Michael Jordan to try baseball for a while.

And the Michael Jordan example is fitting because it leads into another aspect of the love paradox: as unchallenging and boring as mastery of something is, the easy rewards and ego boosts can make you become comfortable. So even though the mystery is gone and you don’t have the same fire for the former challenge as you once did, it’s become an easily accessible source of instant validation and ego boost and that’s hard to give up. That’s why people get comfortable in jobs that don’t challenge them. They may crave a challenge and may no longer love and respect the area they mastered, but the thought of risking the comfort and security they have to chase another challenge that they might fail at scares them into staying where they are. I think this is probably what made Michael Jordan come back to basketball eventually. He mastered the game. He mastered the money aspect of the NBA. He beat all his competitors and easily outshone them. He mastered winning championships and All-Star Games. He was probably bored stiff and wanted that rush of conquering something else, of mastering another mystery. But when his new challenge wasn’t going the way he planned, he went back to the safe bet: basketball.

The Mystery/Mastery Love Paradox applies to human relationships too. When someone we date is new and mysterious to us, we have dopamine and a bunch of other hormones flooding our brains, the attraction is peak, we’re trying to unravel who the other person is; they are mysterious, new and exciting to us and we’re turned on like crazy. When someone or something is mysterious to us, it allows us to fill in the blanks by projecting our fantasies and desires onto them. Our grasp on them is tenuous and we fear that we may lose them at any moment if we do anything wrong. They’re too new to take for granted. Yet the more intimately we get to know them, the more the mystery wears off and those former blanks that we filled with wild, exciting fantasies get replaced by mundane, disappointing realities, and eventually people get taken for granted. Some people look for new mysteries to unravel and master, while some are happier with the comfort and security of their current situation, even if the mystery is now gone.

I was telling a friend about this theory to get some feedback on it, and he asked a good question: “I see what you’re saying and there’s some truth to it. But at the end of the day, is it a good thing or a bad thing?” Strangely enough, that question actually never crossed my mind. I never considered if it was a good or bad thing, and I’m not even sure I entirely care. It’s just human nature. It just is what it is, and it’s up to us to deal with it.

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