Daniel Kahneman

September 4, 2017

The Need for Escape

The sense of being trapped may be a universal experience. Think of the small child who tries to wrestle out of his parent’s protective arms. The teen who hates curfew. The high school grad who can’t wait to leave home.

Other examples come to mind:

  • The suffocating boyfriend from whom you must free yourself.
  • The hated boss.
  • The stifling career.
  • The moribund marriage.
  • A restrictive religion and its too many rules.

Why are we so offended by the stickiness of things, of being like a fly on flypaper? Why do fences shout “Jump”? What is it about walls that beg us to climb, even as recreation?

  • Our ancient ancestors, the hunters and gatherers, needed to keep moving to find food and shelter. They profited by sensing and staying away from those animals and humans who menaced them. We inherited their survival tendencies. The complacent and trusting souls who acted otherwise and perished didn’t pass on their genes.
  • The instinctive man inside of us habituates quickly: he gets used to things, becomes restless, gets bored. Dissatisfaction is built into our nature, the better to thrive and survive. Were we satisfied by a single meal, with no recurring hunger, we’d starve. If sex so “blissed-out” cave-dwellers after one or two couplings, you and I would not exist.
  • The passage of time creates urgency. We don’t lead infinite lives. Want to be an Olympic star? Don’t wait until 30 to start practicing. The desire for love, too, means you must dive into the swim while your sparkle still can catch the eye of another aquatic creature.

The grass always being greener, where to? When? The five-year-old doesn’t run away because he can’t make a life on his own. The abused spouse with the ground-to-bits self-image holds her hopeless spot for fear worse awaits her elsewhere. The dissatisfied employee stays put in an economic depression. We all know out-of-love couples who remain married for the children, the worry of being vilified by co-religionists, and the thought of owning one dollar, where they used to count two.

We sometimes stay when we should escape and leave when we should hesitate. I’ve done both. How do you tell whether flight is best or portends even worse? A few things to consider:

  • Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman states, “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.”
  • Psychologists remind us that experiences, not things, have more lasting value internally and are more positively remembered than buying one more material object.
  • We cannot escape ourselves entirely. One’s innate temperament makes a significant contribution to happiness.
  • What we choose to focus on and whether we set impossible goals also factor into our sense of satisfaction. These are within our control. The long-term practice of mindfulness meditation has been associated with happiness, as well.
  • Research suggests Midwesterners who believe life will be better in California simply because of the weather tend to discover fair weather, like almost everything else, gets absorbed into the background. Not only climate, of course, is subject to habituation: think money, a new car, and today’s Christmas toy – the new delight turned stale; closeted before the weather warms. In the absence of other factors that might sustain a sense of well-being, we return to our set point, a basic and more or less enduring emotional state.
  • A richer neighbor will always be a happiness-wrecker if $$ are the measure you crave. Above $75,000 per year, your moment-to-moment, experienced well-being doesn’t improve much.
  • On the other hand, more money does tend to increase life satisfaction: your opinion of your life when you stop and think about it. And, up to about $75,000 yearly income, moment-to-moment happiness does increase.
  • Ask yourself what is your default tendency. If you tend to change jobs quickly, for example, then the next question becomes, how is that working? If you are prone to stasis when dissatisfied, the same question must be answered.
  • Are other lives involved in your decision? Maybe moving to a new house is best for you, but will it work for the spouse and kids?
  • Try to predict how you will feel about your choice in five months or five years. We tend to be poor at “affective forecasting,” the ability to gauge the emotional consequences of our actions. Still, an attempt is required.
  • A 2017 paper by Blanchflower and Oswald suggests we reach a low point to our happiness in midlife (around the early 50s). Thereafter, in general, we rebound – major life change or not.
  • You will do better to know where you are going, than just the situation from which you flee.
  • Those prone to anxiety and worry tend to exaggerate the danger of taking a risk. Judgment is questionable when angry. If you can, wait for a cool moment to make a decision.
  • Who are you? What are your values? How do these translate into life as it is lived?
  • Is there more than one way to achieve the result you want?
  • You might ask yourself whether your internal life requires attention. The externals – other people, your job, your living conditions – are less in your control.
  • If you expect utter and permanent transformation following your leap from a stuck place – well – you could be expecting too much. Remember, though, nothing in life is permanent and one can do worse than reach for the beguiling flowers still in bloom.

One last thought: we get no free lunch. Staying and going – except in extreme circumstances where life depends on it – each have a cost. Sometimes the decision is easy, often we struggle. Some doors remain open a while, others close with a rush. None of us get this right every time. Indeed, even knowing whether there is a “right” road can be challenging, since we only know with certainty the chosen path, while the other avenue lives in an idealized state within our imagination.

We’ve all read stories about the courage of people real or imagined, and the fixedness and quiet desperation of others. Those lives may provide guidance, but making choices presents a challenge unless you are an inveterate risk-taker or so frozen in place that no heat wave can de-ice and free you.

We each have only this one life. Try not to die with too many regrets.

—

The top image is the Vatican Museum Staircase as photographed by Andreas Tille. Next is James Jowers’s L.E. Side. These were sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Finally comes a Space Escape Grunge Sign, created by Nicolas Raymond and available from: www.freestock.ca

December 13, 2015

The Five Biggest Regrets and Why They Might Not Apply to You

512px-Mooddisorder

My mother used to say, “Regret is a painkiller for fools.” Her early life was tragic and her words were — I think — a way to justify her decision never to look back. But mom’s aphorism does raise a question: how much attention must one pay to those who tell us about their poor life choices as they reflect on their past? Are we smart to use their experience — what they wish they did or didn’t do — to change our plans?

Not necessarily.

Here is an example of the kind of “wisdom” I’m talking about. A palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, wrote, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.* Her list comes from her work with those near death:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Let’s look at these and see if we agree.

I’ll combine regrets 1, 3, and 5. The courage to take risks is the link among them. Indeed, the word courage appears in two of the three regrets I’m talking about.

Ware heard patients lament giving-in to others, doing what was expected, and failing to push back when pushed around. In order to be true to yourself you must take charge of your life and disappoint or anger some others. True, “the courage to express (our) feelings” is dangerous, since most of us find disapproval unpleasant, and vulnerability an invitation to attack. The reward, however, can be great. As to letting yourself “be happier,” Ware observed that many of her patients — only too late — recognized the need to break out of safe routines and travel outside of their zone of comfort. This, they believed, was the road not taken: the path to happiness.

Oscar Wilde’s witticism encapsulates much of the last paragraph: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

I applaud Ware’s odd-numbered reminders to lead a courageous, assertive life. I’m less sure, however, about regret #2: “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”

Here is what she wrote:

This (regret) came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.”

One important consideration eludes nurse Ware: regrets can also pertain to a less work-driven life: “Gee, I should have accomplished more. I ought to have been a better provider for my family. I might have made a name for myself.”

Marlon Brando said something similar in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront, playing a washed-up boxer:

I could’a had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody — instead of a bum — which is what I am.

Rational or not, men, in particular, live with the genetic drive to make their way in the world. Many do regret having worked too much, too hard, too long — regret the loss of time with spouse and children. A different life, however, might have caused them not only end-of-life regrets, but disappointment in themselves for most of the preceding years.

Ware’s last item describes the elderly who told her, “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

Philosophers as far back as Aristotle would say Ware hit the target here, and are supported by psychological research on what brings life satisfaction. Nonetheless, maintaining friends is a time-consuming task: making phone calls, writing email, traveling to those chums who don’t live nearby, remembering work buddies when you leave the job, and sending birthday cards. Your vocation, as well as the spouse, children, and laundry contend for the hours available on the clock. We are never permitted more than the usual 24.

A couple of additional considerations: Bronnie Ware’s dying patients were living in a different body with a different agenda than their younger selves. The seniors looked back and judged from a once-in-a-lifetime perspective — literally. When they weighed their life experience on the equivalent of a bathroom scale, did they get an accurate result?

Here is what Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote on how we think about past experiences when we reflect on our memories of those experiences: “Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion … The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living … ”

Kahneman gives an illustration of this phenomenon:

(A man) told (me) of listening raptly to a long symphony on a disc that was (damaged) near the end, producing a shocking sound, and he reported that the bad ending ‘ruined the whole experience.’ But the experience was not actually ruined, only the memory of it. The experiencing self had had an experience that was almost entirely good, and the bad end could not undo it, because it had already happened. My questioner had assigned the entire episode a failing grade because it had ended badly, but that grade effectively ignored 40 minutes of musical bliss. Does the actual experience count for nothing?

Which self should count? The self who lived the experience or the one who recalls the events through the imperfect, sometimes warped lens of time?

You can answer Kahneman’s question for yourself. To me, the notion of 25-year-olds being subjected to the “wisdom” of 75-year-olds cannot always result in proper guidance for the young. The same caution applies if the 25-year-old and the 75-year-old are different versions of one person. Your 75-year-old judgment cannot do justice to your 25-year-old’s life choices any more than your 25-year-old self can anticipate the manner in which he will judge his life at 75. If you are in life’s first half, then you must live by what counts as wisdom for the body you inhabit, the instincts you have, the great ideas you’ve read about, and the thoughtfulness only someone in your life-situation can possess.

Among the most perceptive observations about the human experience comes from the Stoic philosopher Seneca in his treatise, On the Shortness of Life:

Small is the part of life that we really live. All that remains of our existence is not actually life but merely time.

If Seneca is right then the best advice is easy: live.

—

*Thanks to my wise buddy John Kain for calling Bronnie Ware’s work to my attention. The top photo is called Mood Disorder, by Specialtoyoutoyou. It is sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

March 15, 2014

What Money Can Do to You and for You

bag of money

Is a preoccupation with money like a religion? The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines religion in three ways:

1. The belief in a god or in a group of gods.

2. An organized system of beliefs, ceremonies, and rules used to worship a god or a group of gods.

3. An interest, a belief, or an activity that is very important to a person or group.

The last of these competes for our attention with the organized and historic religions. Some people even state that those of us in the West worship the dollar. Lots of sayings display the long shadow that money throws over human existence:

    • “Money makes the world go round.” (Others say it is love that makes the world go round).
    • “When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life: now that I’m old I know that it is.” (Oscar Wilde)
    • “The lack of money is the root of all evil.” (Mark Twain)
    • “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” (Timothy 6:10)
    • “The only thing money gives you is the freedom of not worrying about money.” (Johnny Carson)

Of these, I think perhaps Johnny Carson (the long time host of the Tonight Show before Jay Leno) is the most intriguing. Carson enjoyed being a wealthy man, but recognized that it didn’t guarantee a happy life. All the problems with relationships, alcohol, broken marriages, infidelity, an even an ever-present bit of anxiety before every comedy monologue he ever gave — all these were well-known to him. He appears to have enjoyed being a rich man, but equally seems not to have been a very happy one.

Carson’s comment only deals with the problem of having lots of money. No, his worry was not the same as the person who wonders if he has enough for a room and a good meal or how to put his daughter through college. In his short story, Under New Management, Joseph Epstein expresses a different perspective in the voice of his character Artie Abrams, Marty Abrams’ son. Marty was a father who became wealthy in middle-age or, as his son put it:

I had to wait until my twenties to acquire a father like everyone else’s: a man distracted, concentrated on moneymaking, with less and less sense of the everyday adventurousness of life.

Artie blamed his father’s second wife for this. Artie’s mom had died of cancer some years before the new Mrs. Abrams transformed her husband into a money machine. And what did Marty himself think of the “magnificence” of his own wealth? He told his son exactly what he thought:

Some magnificence. It’s just about money, and money isn’t always magnificent. Sometimes it isn’t even a lot of fun. You always have to be watching over the goddamn stuff, making sure it’s producing on its own, that someone isn’t making a tenth of  a percentage point more than you, which leaves you feeling like a schmuck. This is not a problem I expected to have.

Most people would call it a happy problem, Dad.

But for Marty and Artie there was a bigger problem. Marty had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. As Johnny Carson said, “The only thing money gives you is the freedom of not worrying about money.”

Beyond the necessity of money in order to purchase life’s necessities, it is almost like a projective psychological test that all of us take without giving our permission. A dollar bill is the same in anyone’s hands: it looks the same, it feels the same, it smells the same, but from one person to another it doesn’t mean the same thing.

What do I mean by this? I’m talking about why it might be important to you beyond the essential things like purchasing food. Think of some of the possible meanings money has for people:

  • a sense of financial security
  • public status
  • making a living
  • helping out your kids
  • a way to improve the lives of others by giving it away
  • a way to make yourself feel good by giving it away
  • the necessary ingredient to obtain the permanent sexual partner of your dreams, who might otherwise not give you the time of day
  • a way of measuring how you are doing in life in comparison to your business competitors or friends
  • a method of exerting influence over the political direction of the country (think of the Koch Brothers or George Soros)
  • a way of boosting your private level of self-esteem
  • the ability to see a ballgame or concert of your choice from a good seat
  • what you are willing to do in order to get more of it (get a good education, work hard, cheat, put in long hours away from your family, etc.)

For those who hope to alter their self-esteem by making lots of money, I’ve got some news for you: there are limits here, too. In my therapy practice, I saw a great many people who had made lots of money. Many of them suffered from low self-esteem, nonetheless. Some felt that they were frauds. The looked good on the outside — fancy clothes, nice home — but the money hadn’t changed what they felt on the inside.

Too many had believed that lots of money would solve all their problems and discovered what Johnny Carson knew, even if they’d never read the quote I mentioned. For most of us, the purchase of a new, fancy, expensive car feels good for only a while. As the “new car smell” fades, so does the emotional boost it gives us.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning psychologist, has some important things to say about money. First he defines two kinds of happiness. There is the happiness that comes from thinking about (evaluating) your life. This is called “life satisfaction.” Then there is the happiness or well-being that you experience from moment-to-moment. He cites a Gallup world poll to draw some lessons about money:

  • “The conclusion (of the Gallup research) is that being poor makes one miserable and that being rich may enhance one’s life satisfaction, but does not (on average) improve experienced well-being (the second definition above).”
  • “The satiation level beyond which experienced well-being no longer increases was a household income of about $75,000 in high-cost areas (it could be less in areas where the cost of living was lower). The average increase of experienced well-being associated with incomes beyond that level was precisely zero.”
  • “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.”*

Put all this together and one comes to realize that the American Dream to which so many aspire, is something quite imperfect. If you are looking for happiness in making tons of money, you may be searching in the wrong place. The legend of King Midas, whose every touch made objects into gold, was a cautionary tale.

It is a fine and necessary thing to have money. It is not so fine for the money to have you.

—

The money bag pictured above is the work of Barbara Lock and sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Joseph Epstein’s short story, Under New Management, can be found in The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff and Other Stories published in 2010.

*The quotations from Daniel Kahneman come from his 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

October 12, 2012

A Step Toward Happiness: Learning How to Lose Without Being a “Loser”

Imagine a beautiful, wealthy young woman. She falls in love with a man named Compeyson, who cares only to make off with some of her money. On her wedding day she discovers the fraud and is left at the altar. From that day forward, she lives in a state of mourning, continuing to wear her wedding dress as a badge of her perpetual sense of victimization. The cake is left on her dining room table uneaten.

Perhaps you recognize that I’ve just described Miss Havisham, an important character in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. A wasted life, I expect you would say. A mistake never to get over the lost love and the humiliation. Surely people aren’t like that, are they?

Yes, I’m afraid, some are. Their dysfunction is less obvious without the yellowed wedding dress and the uneaten cake, but it is still there.

Another example: imagine a man who wants a career in high finance, a tough and competitive road to travel successfully. He’d trained for it and worked hard to get to the top. For a time he was making his way up the administrative ladder within an important bank in a big city. Then an economic downturn and a change in management caused a corporate reshuffling. His career never recovered and he never again worked in his chosen field. While he made an acceptable living, his mind always returned to “what might have been.” It remained hard to feel satisfied with the remainder of his work or his life.

The unfortunate path I’ve just described is real enough, but it rests on some shaky assumptions:

  1. That life would have been great if only the man could have achieved success in his chosen profession.
  2. That life cannot be satisfying for him in any other field of endeavor or by any other means.

Psychologists who do research on what makes for happiness might disagree. And, in fact, that research tends to support the idea that the flush of excitement and happiness that comes with winning the race, new romance, or a major achievement doesn’t last nearly as long as people expect it to.

We humans tend to be pretty poor at estimating the accuracy and durability of what will make us happy. For example, Daniel Kahneman and David Schkade took a look at what effect living in a nice climate might have on life satisfaction. Students living in California and the Midwest were recruited for this experiment. In general, regardless of where they were going to school, the college students tended to think people would be happier living in California. But, in fact, there was no difference in the life satisfaction of those who lived in the harder climate conditions of the Midwest than in the milder ones associated with the West Coast.

In part, it would appear, we are prone to focus on items like climate that we will become accustomed to as time passes. Similarly, you might be delighted over the terrific new car or new house you just bought, but it is likely to recede into the background of your life as you get some distance from the moment you acquired it. Put differently, going out with Brad Pitt or Marilyn Monroe might be terrific for a while, but in a few years the dazzle and novelty tend to wear off.

It turns out that life satisfaction and the happiness we experience along the way are strongly influenced by our inherited temperament. You can be fantastically wealthy and unhappy — or relatively modest in your level of success and affluence and be happy. Of course, this issue is much more complex than I am suggesting. But, if I were to prescribe a brief recipe for happiness, it would have to do with making a decent enough living at labor you deem worthwhile to live modestly but well (research says that a household income of $75,000 is usually enough) and having people in your life who you love and who love you back, both friends and relatives.

One other thing: to some extent, happiness depends on what you are paying attention to. Kahneman suggests that misery can often be traced to having goals that are especially hard to achieve. A laser focus on obtaining great success in a performing art like music or dance or theater is almost a guarantee of continuing disappointment (since so few make it to the top). The danger is that those who aim for triumph in fields such as these tend to unconsciously make their entire happiness dependent on their level of achievement, to the exclusion of other factors that might contribute to a satisfying life.

Of course, it needn’t be just an attempted career in the arts that frustrates a person. Athletic accomplishment at the highest level is only attained by the few. Nor are Nobel Prizes given out at the bingo parlor. If you pin your happiness on writing the “Great American Novel,” becoming the next Steve Jobs, or being a scientist whose name will still be in bold relief in the next century’s text books, you have almost certainly guaranteed a significant level of displeasure.

What then does this say about all the rest of us? Especially in our attempt to get over the failures and rejections by employers and lovers that are the commonplace experiences of life?

The disappointed banker I mentioned earlier would have to reorient his thinking, get over his defeat, and “invest” himself in some new line of work or another facet of his life — like family, community, friends or hobbies. The same might be said of the baseball player who never becomes a Major League star or a physics professor who never produces the scientific breakthrough he was hoping for and continues to work at it into his old age, never giving up or accepting that he didn’t become the man he hoped to be; never satisfied by the work itself as opposed to the glory he hopes will come from it.

Chemutai Rionotukei Running in the 2007 St. Silvestre Road Race in Sao Paulo, Brazil

What is preventing these men from feeling happier about their lives? Perhaps it is their belief that a satisfactory life amounts to winning a figurative pot of gold at the rainbow’s end of their career, as in the top image; not necessarily money, but a kind of vocational or social jackpot. In part, this self-imposed requirement makes it harder to grieve their losses. They continue to focus on what might have been or what might still be. The failed banker is looking back on the career he wished he had and re-running the same old movie of his life with the same old unhappy ending, even before that life is over. The physics professor is still trying to produce the next major scientific discovery, not willing to accept that his colleagues have already rendered their verdict on his work.

The former individual replays the lost ballgame of his life 10 years or more after it ended, while the scientist continues to play the game into extra innings without progress, even after the fans have left the stadium and the lights have been turned off. The tyranny of “what might have been” can be the equal of “what might yet be” in its capacity to diminish those lives that might be good in every other way. The mistake of giving up too late or not at all on a fruitless pursuit is just as costly as “giving up too soon” on one that would have been profitable with more persistence.

You needn’t be a great man or woman in order to have a satisfying life. If you must become a financial wizard or a Nobel Prize winning scientist, then you have probably overestimated the importance of these endeavors and undervalued the other possibilities in your life, including the things you might already have:  interesting work, health, love, and some amount of admiration by others, even if the latter quality isn’t as much as you wanted.

Miss Havisham, the failed banker, and the perpetually striving scientist have all made the mistake of believing that their happiness depended upon a particular thing; and by failing to grieve when that thing wasn’t achieved. They have idealized what a life with that thing would be like (be it a particular spouse, money and status, or scientific achievement and glory). Each one remains stuck in a state of bitterness (Miss Havisham), disappointment (the banker), or longing and frustration (the scientist). Others, with less fixed goals and more intellectual and emotional flexibility, would  be unhappy only temporarily, eventually withdrawing their emotional investment in what they never had; moving on to find some other focus of their attention and effort.

As the title of this essay suggests, it is important in life to learn how to lose; how to give things up and set them aside. In fact, I’d argue that this is more important to life satisfaction than victory in the game of romance or your chosen profession, which, unless you are Einstein, will probably be pretty modest. I suppose that my suggestions here would result in fewer scientific breakthroughs and fewer great violinists. On the other hand, there would be more happy people.

Even on the day after you take home the Nobel Prize, should you be a genuinely great man and a lucky winner, you must deal with the fact that there is still the laundry to do. Even after winning the fair maiden, there are still bills to pay, children to raise, and differences over which movie to attend (and worse). Most of us frequently misunderstand that the object we are chasing usually doesn’t make that much difference to the rest of your life, even if it seems desperately important at the moment. Unless of course, you think it really does make all the difference; which means that the problem resides in how you think about it.

If you must be a big-deal banker or a Nobel Prize winner, then I guess you will keep gnawing on the meatless bone of your failure or pursuing the miniscule possibility of a late success. No, you shouldn’t be a bum and automatically give up some admirable goal, especially if you are young. But, I am here to tell you that the goal you have believed all your life to be essential to achieve, just might take you off course and your chance of satisfaction with it.

Sometimes only by accepting your losses can you make your life into a winning proposition.

The End of the Norfolk Relay 2006 at the Athletics Track, Lynnsport.

—

The top image is called Pot of Gold in Arkengarthdale by Andy Waddington. Next comes a photo of Men Running in a Chariot Race at the Piha Surf Club Carnival in New Zealand, ca. 1938 sourced from the National Library, NZ. The picture of Chemutai Rionotukei is the work of Ricard from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Finally, the relay race photo was taken by Katy Walters. All are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

September 14, 2012

Do You Have a Bad Attitude?

Life is difficult enough without making yourself miserable. Those who begin with a negative, “can’t do” point of view often justify themselves by saying that they don’t want to get their hopes up; that the world is unfair and one should be prepared for it. But in so doing they can create their own misery and bring down the mood of those who are close by.

I’ll discuss below a few variations on this theme — different forms of “bad attitude” along with some potential solutions:

1. Focusing on the past. While I am a firm believer in learning from the past, one must remember that it is yesterday’s news. Short of daydreaming about a happier time in your life or doing the essential work of grieving, it can fuel sadness without compensating benefits. The past holds too many unfulfilled hopes, failures, and broken romances. It is the storehouse of betrayals — about “what might have been.” It is the place where things that went wrong can fill your mind and heart with regret. It is a wasteland of missed opportunities, lost beauty, and a nostalgia that is no more satisfying than trying to fill your stomach with the photo of a past meal. Visit the past, but don’t live there.

2. Living in a frightening future. An exclusive focus on the future can be as deadly as a preoccupation with the past. The twin dangers of living in the future are worry/anxiety and make-believe daydreaming. Most who live in the future usually live a life of dread, overpredicting catastrophe and underestimating their ability to survive misfortune.

The only thing we have in life with any certainty is the present. Any chance of happiness depends upon one’s ability to find a way to live in the moment and find satisfaction there, experiencing it and whatever it brings, accepting life on its terms. Plan for the future but be careful not to live in that future any more than you live in the past.

The goal ahead might be very worthwhile, but try to enjoy the journey to get there. Mindfulness meditation, Stoic philosophy, the Zen tradition, and ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) can help reorient you to determining what is important in life; setting aside what is inessential, distracting, or worrisome; and living according to those principles in the present moment.

3. Pessimism or the self-fulfilling prophecy. Pessimism is a close cousin to worry and anxiety over events that may never happen. It smothers spontaneity, joy, and drains energy. It renders defeat in the game of life even before the game has begun. It anticipates a guilty verdict from the jury that causes one not even to show up for the trial. Pessimism destroys motivation and generates avoidance of challenges or half-hearted effort, at best. Depression and pessimism drink from the same poisoned well.

4. Throwing a wet blanket on the happiness of others. Don’t be a buzz-killer, a kill-joy, or a party pooper. Avoid raining on someone else’s parade. Don’t be an emotional suicide bomber, someone who brings down oneself and all those around you. A bad attitude can consist of always seeing the single dark cloud on a glorious sun-lit day, especially if the sun is shining on someone else. It is the “yes, but” response to the other’s good fortune, her excitement, and her dreams. It attempts to make others suffer as much as you are. This attitude masquerades as attempting to “be helpful” or “realistic” or trying to prevent the friend or child “from being hurt.” Perhaps. But it is a cautionary or negative/critical message at the wrong time, in the wrong place, to the wrong person.

5. Rejecting the encouragement or helpfulness of others. Most people want to ease your suffering, to offer you some encouragement or hope or solace. But if you have a bad attitude, you will reject all of this. You will say “I’ve thought of that already” when you are offered a suggestion or “I’ve already tried that” or “That won’t work because…” Instead, your bad attitude may isolate you from those who only wish to offer their presence and show their affection for you; their simple desire to hold your hand in a difficult moment. In the worst case you will drive such people away, thereby increasing your sense of separation from the world and guaranteeing a solitary misfortune.

6. Perfectionism or the belief that things can always be better. Some of us can’t accept a grade of 99% on the test, simply because we could have done better. Short of performing brain surgery, it is useful to be able to accept the imperfect nature of life and ourselves. Do your best, prepare for the race, study hard; but realize that perfection (if it is to be found at all) resides only in the works of Mozart, Rembrandt, Shakespeare, and a few others. If you punish yourself for falling short of that ideal, you have misunderstood the nature of life on earth and guaranteed that you will be joyless.

7. Whining and complaining. Worse than those who see only the dark side of life are those who not only see it, but won’t let you get away from them before they tell you about it in malcontented detail. They tend not to focus on abstractions. Rather, their concern is not the unfairness of life, but the unfairness of their life. There is no surer way of driving people away than to adopt this particular version of a bad attitude.

8. Fighting every battle. Some people seem perpetually aggrieved and angry. They live with a chip on each shoulder, daring life to knock the wood off. Life will knock it off, but not in the way that they expect. Their anger will breed anger in others. And in fighting perpetually, they will miss any sense of contentment or joy.

No one can take on all the battles worth joining, let alone those that will produce nothing of value. As an antidote to rage, gratitude for the things in life too easily taken for granted can be coupled with acceptance of the things that you can’t change. Ideally, these two abilities will usually counterbalance the frustrations and resentments of life without robbing you of the capacity to fight the good fight when necessary. Telling the difference between those skirmishes that need you and those you should pass is crucial. If you are too angry too often, seek counseling.

9. Refusing to take life seriously. If you’ve been paying attention, there is a relatively new popular expression among teens and a few others. It is called YOLO or “you only live once.” It justifies mindless foolishness; not just ill-considered behavior, but action that is not considered at all. It can be an excuse for doing whatever you want or refusing to do whatever someone else might advise. YOLO suggests that you are not living in the future, not living in the past, and not living in any really mindful present. If you were, the thought of driving 60 miles an hour down a side street in a school zone would never be translated into actually doing it. We seem to make enough mistakes in life without adopting a philosophy of life that virtually guarantees it.

10. Too much realism. While it helps to see the world as it is, there is the risk of it being too much of a good thing. The world as it is today (or most any day) includes poverty, genocide, and betrayal; infirmity, disease, and heartbreak; stress, cruelty, and the big one: death. Everyone you know will die and that also includes you. Focus on all of this just enough to make the most of your precious and too short life. Focus on it just a little more and you will be so depressed that you won’t want to get out of bed.

—

If you have any of the bad attitudes I’ve described, your first response will usually be to justify it; perhaps even to see it as a strength. But I would ask you if you are satisfied with your life as it is? If not, then you may need to investigate that same attitude, especially those aspects that actually could be making the problem worse. Ask friends and family what they see in you that needs to change — if they have enough courage and love of you to tell you the truth (and you have the guts to take it). Looking in the mirror — seeing yourself as others see you — is brutally hard, but can be a first step to enlightenment and a better life.

Read Czikszentmihalyi about “flow” and those wonderous moments when one is so involved in a productive/creative action that one loses all sense of time and self. Read Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, Martin Seligman, Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow) and other “positive” (hedonic) psychologists about what makes for happiness and how to get there.

It can be helpful to make a list of those things for which you are grateful. Indeed, it may be of assistance to look back at the day to find what it can teach you or what was good (even on a bad day). Yes, I know that plenty that is bad does happen and has happened and will happen. But we humans must not live in these moments of misery for too long without grieving our losses and moving on, learning to accept the nature of life, and learning that the very best times are unreflecting, unself-conscious, utterly spontaneous experiences that we don’t think about, we simply are living them.

In part, our job is to pull our head out of its backward look, out of its forward glance, and play the game that is exactly where we are — right here, right now. That ultimately means more action, more experiment, more risk and less thought — swimming in the pool of life without regard to getting wet. It matters not if you start in the shallow end of the pool because most of us do — just don’t stay there.

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Harper knew more than a little about the water and about the voyage. She put the idea of living your life with a good (rather than a bad) attitude very well:

A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for. Sail out to sea and do new things.

—

The top image is Emotions X by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783) downloaded by access. The second is Messerschmidt’s The Constipated, dowloaded by Sailko. Both are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.