Slouching Towards Happiness
The bestseller lists are ablaze with folksy distillations of hard science, and I’m falling for ‘em despite the internal bullshit detector screaming, “Overstuffed New Yorker piece! Save bloated hours for intoxicated viewings of Deadwood, Season 2!” To no avail, internal sensor, to no avail. I’m not sure whom I’m supposed to blame. Malcolm Gladwell? How many Tipping Point Blinks has that afro sold? The Freakonomics nerds? I’m still not sure if that legalized abortion/18-years later reduction in crime theory is valid, but I’d like to believe it is.

If you’ve been paying attention, the glut on the market has been Happiness books, and they’re mostly descriptive to clearly distance themselves from their sad stepsisters on the Self-Help shelves. No prescriptions to be found here, no sir- we just tell it like it is in plain prose laced with quirky humor that’s just hilarious- to mom. Don’t mind those PhD’s after our names- we’re regular folks just like you, but because we have Chairs and Grants and Access, we’ll read those long boring studies and visit those backroom labs, sift out the relevant stuff, break it down into workmanlike prose afresh with aw shucks kickers, and start collecting the talk show gigs and paychecks those fucking academic albatrosses have kept us from (not to mention the fame we so rightly deserve).

And I gobble ‘em up like the sad sob nosed pinned to the glass at the Hard Rock pool party, desperate for that epiphanic nugget that opens the attitudinal doors to the pink clouds that will be my eternal pillow.

Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness has a huge black burb from Malcolm Gladwell on the cover that sports an upside down bowl of cherries: “If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me.” So, for all you swollen sacks of shit sucking on lollipops and the San Francisco Chronicle with no curiosity at all, go ahead and skip this once in a lifetime chance at the inner mysteries of human creation and see how you feel when your enlightened friends are glowing with revelation and dancing each and every moment on their own personalized insight beanbags. Trust me, because I have benefited greatly from desperate seekers before you who have coughed up the 14.95 it now costs for a paperbook book, looking for gems of sagacity or some brilliant sliver of light to help them make sense of the confusion meteors smashing down upon their aching heads. Look, I read every word of Daniel Gilbert’s book, and I woke up this morning with a black heart. My bowl of cherries was squashed and spat upon. I’m pretty sure I understood every word, too. After 250 pages of studies and homespun analysis of said studies, Gilbert says this: If you want to predict how you might feel about something in your future, don’t trust how you think you might feel, ask someone who is living right now your possible future reality. That person knows best, and that is the best advice you can hope for. So, don’t come here looking for the ticket to the happiness kingdom. But, he does sprinkle some diamonds along the way, especially about the way we make memory and how that process can negatively affect our decisions about the future. In plain language, be wary about what you think you remember to guide what you think will make you happy in the future. Your memories ain’t as photographic as you think they are and each day makes them less so, and he provides some compelling reasons for why that’s the case. He’s just not going to make you laugh in the process.
Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open gets a Steven Pinker blurb: “Mind Wide Open is a lucid and engaging travelogue from the frontiers of human brain science.” Now that’s less propagandistic than the Gladwell one, and it’s actually fairly accurate. Johnson visits a different study on neuroscience for each chapter, becomes a guinea pig for said study, relates area of study to his own life, and then closes with what it all means. Johnson’s big idea: we need to recognize the patterns of our minds as just that- patterns, and learning to recognize seratonin’s rejection-insensitivity and social confidence meters, dopamine’s “seeking without pleasure” agencies, oxytocin’s drive to make emotional bonds and adrenaline’s sudden lifts can allow us to nurture our natures, so to speak. The different parts of our brain are competing for our attention. The ego is not torn between two masters, a la Freud, as modern brain science has complicated that power struggle almost beyond recognition. As we begin to become aware of these competing claims, we can begin to make new emotional associations that can free us from the unhealthy conditioning of our past. Thus, get thee to a fMRI scanner, hook up to a neurofeedback machine, or just read a book about brain science (like this one, cheap at 15.00 for all the life-changing info inside its hallowed covers), and start the journey that’s sure to end next year, with my next book.

See you in the Psych section, suckers…