This and That (5)

Is your life a comedy or a tragedy?

1.

My regular talk with Bob Wright just came out. Good discussion of metaphysics in the middle!

2.

An interesting and well-written article (free to download) was just published.

Folk and Dunn are only interested here in what people can do to become happier, and so they have nothing to say about factors that are out of one’s control, such as genes and age. They only look at experiments, not correlational or longitudinal studies. And they don’t review all experiments, only those that are preregistered—where the hypotheses and data analyses are set out ahead of time, forcing more stringent statistical tests and lowering the odds of false positives.

Here are their conclusions about what works and what doesn’t. (Their paragraph, my bolding)

Our review of preregistered experiments points to the value of expressing gratitude, being more sociable, acting happy, and spending money on others. In contrast, we found surprisingly little support for many commonly recommended strategies for promoting happiness, including practicing meditation, doing random acts of kindness, or engaging in volunteer work. Most happiness research has focused on practices that individuals can add to their lives, but some recent studies provide hints that removing some of our daily habits could also improve happiness; specifically, individuals may benefit from giving up social media use for an extended period or buying themselves out of unpleasant daily tasks.

They find as well that even when interventions work, they are rather weak—you need to test hundreds of subjects to see an effect.

This last part is bad news for those who want to be happier. But perhaps some of these interventions lead to a real improvement—just for a small minority. This is consistent with the weak overall findings. If practicing meditation, say, leads to a big increase in the happiness of 1 in 10 people but leaves the other nine unaffected, your typical psychology study will conclude that it’s useless.

If this is right, then one project for anyone interested in becoming happier is to shop around: Try different techniques and see what works. (I’m curious what happiness mavens think about this suggestion.)

3.

In my last This and That, I talked about fictions within fictions. One example is the comedy Stranger Than Fiction, starring Will Ferrell.

From Wikipedia:

The main plot follows Harold Crick (Ferrell), an IRS agent who begins hearing a disembodied voice narrating his life as it happens – seemingly the text of a novel in which it is stated that he, the main character, will soon die – and he frantically seeks to somehow prevent that ending.

Knowing that he is a fictional character, he becomes desperate to find out what sort of fiction he’s in. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? At one point, he consults a literature professor, Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) for advice:

What about your life? To make things more manageable, focus on the last year. Comedy or tragedy? Romance? Fantasy? Romantasy? (This is apparently a real category.) Police procedural? (Hope not.) Legal drama? (Hope not.) Horror? (Really hope not!).

This might seem silly. Reality doesn’t have genres. But many people do impose a story-like structure on their lives. Here is the philosopher Galen Strawson quoting different versions of the view:

Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.’ And: ‘In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives.’ Or a fellow American psychologist, Dan P McAdams: ‘We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell.’ And here’s the American moral philosopher J David Velleman: ‘We invent ourselves… but we really are the characters we invent.’ …. Daniel Dennett: ‘we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behaviour… and we always put the best “faces” on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the centre of that autobiography is one’s self.’

If we see ourselves as characters in a narrative, then asking about the genre is reasonable.

Now, people differ here—Strawson’s article is titled “I am not a Story.” I don’t see my own life as a story either. I see it as containing stories. Ask me how I became a psych professor, and I can tell you something with a pleasing narrative arc. But my whole life? Not really. It’s just been one thing after another, without any overall structure. (I’m not complaining—a lot of these things were and are good things.)

Exposure to fiction might influence how we think about our lives. When we read a book or watch a movie, we learn things, such as how to talk to one another, what to wear, and how to act. A couple of years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the movie The Godfather, the New York Times ran this article:

It’s not just mobsters. In your job and your relationships, how much are you unconsciously mimicking what you’ve learned from fiction?

Our expectations of how real-world events take place might be similarly influenced by the conventions of the stories we absorb: The bad guy will get his comeuppance. If you see a gun in the first act, it’ll go off before the story ends. An attractive couple whose faces are close will kiss—though often, just as their lips are about to meet, someone will barge in, and they’ll pull away from each other. Husband spending a lot of time at work? Affair. Someone knocks on your door with an orange vest and says he’s from the city and has to check the gas line? Serial killer.

I was with someone a little while ago and she had a coughing fit. We then had the following dialogue:

Me: Are you ok?
Her: {Waves me away] Yes, fine.
Me: You’ve been coughing a lot
Her: It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.

Uh oh. When someone coughs in fiction, it’s never nothing.

Which expectations should you have about your life? To answer that question, you have to know: Comedy or tragedy?