03.25.07

Mad or happy, it’s your choice

Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 5:29 pm by Sarah

Note: still no Irish stories on the ST website so you get the unedited version. But I think no libels in this so safe to publish!

Last Wednesday was the vernal equinox which means that Spring has officially begun. If you are unfamiliar with the astronomical calendar, you cannot have missed Mother Nature’s signals of the new season. The clichés have been unavoidable here in my rural idyll, or surreal midland’s nightmare, depending on which end of the mood spectrum I find myself. The lambs play with each other and are fattening up rather nicely. There are leaves on our whitethorn hedge, the birds are nest-building and as is typical of the season, the manic planning is in full swing.

I took off to the garden centre and bought thyme, oregano and rosemary. I will plant these and cook wonderful dinners with fresh herbs. I’ll get fruit trees and grow lettuce. I’ll get fit and get a tan. I’ll play with my children more and be a good mother. I’ll invite people down on long summer evenings and they will admire my cooking and compliment my herb garden. My life choices will thus be validated and I’ll be happy. Things will be better, definitely, this year.

Summer can be a bit tense as we wait for good weather which rarely materialises, Autumn brings the relief of old routines, Winter is for hibernation. Spring is the happiest of seasons because it’s so full of hope. Alas, while this annual bout of optimism is infectious I am dogged by doubt. I’ve read the research and know the truth. Optimists are technically insane; depressives are the ones who see life clearly.

Two psychologists, Lyn Abramson and Lauren Alloy, did a famous experiment in 1979 with two groups of people, one depressed and one normal. They set up a game where each person sat at a console with lights and a button, with instructions to make a particular light flash as often as possible. Afterwards they interviewed the subjects on the level of control they felt they had in the game. If the normal people did well, they said they had plenty of control; if they did poorly, very little. In other words, the happy people took credit for a high score and deflected the blame for a low score.

The depressed people saw things differently. Whether or not they had done well, they tended to believe that they had no control. They were right – there was no “game”, the flashing lights were completely random. Abramson and Alloy called this phenomenon “depressive realism,” or the “sadder but wiser” effect.

Good mental health is often associated with clear thinking, but it turns out that happiness is characterized by what another psychologist Shelley Taylor calls “positive illusions” : little lies we tell ourselves. As Alloy put it, “when they are not depressed, people are highly vulnerable to illusions, including unrealistic optimism, overestimation of themselves, and an exaggerated sense of their capacity to control events. The same research indicates that depressed people’s perceptions and judgments are often less biased.”

So in other words, in order to be happy, we need to be a little cracked. There’s more – and it’s worse. Taylor said that people who saw their abilities and chances realistically tended to be in a state of depression. But when other psychologists studied her research more closely they said that her depressives were actually too optimistic. Given the way things turn out for them, they were not pessimistic enough : the depressed people weren’t depressed enough. That’s pretty depressing.

So when I’m out in the garden, I feel I have a moral choice : will I indulge the Spring mood and focus on my little projects? Enjoy the lambs, spoil my wonderful children and form plans to make our lives more pleasurable? Or will I look outward and despair at the huge mass of human suffering in the world and the fear that my own children may witness the Armageddon of global warming? The immoral, if pragmatic option, is to put on the blinkers, shut the electric gates and focus on my own house and its occupants, where there is some hope of reaping the rewards of hard work. The moral choice of keeping myself informed of national and international misery isn’t practical, because I am in no position to relieve any of it. You can throw a few quid at a charity and turn your electrical appliances off at night, but other than that, you can’t really do much can you?

Convinced I was turning into a miserable cow, it turns out that my conflicting feelings are actually quite normal. Most people do feel that in their own back yards everything is fine but that globally the golden age is always behind us : never ahead. We all believe our own children are above average, but that they are growing into a world they’ll be lucky to survive.

The good news is that leaving aside its insanity and immorality, it appears that optimism is very beneficial. Optimists live longer than pessimists. Now, those lives may not be as good as they expected, but they’ve still got them long after the pessimists have kicked the bucket. The only conclusion one can draw from this is that optimism, for all its illusions, has some kind of Darwinian advantage : optimism helps you survive by helping people cope with adversity.

The current craze for life coaching also assures us that optimism is self-fulfilling. I can see the sense in goal setting : deciding you want something to happen and planning how you might it make it happen. Though I wouldn’t go as far as lending credibility to cosmic ordering despite the temptation. If you haven’t heard about it, I suppose its worth trying, Did you know you can have anything you want from the “cosmos” by simply writing it down and then asking the universe for it? Some people might call that prayer but I didn’t know I could pray for money and a new watch – which according to cosmic ordering systems I can! Now that really sounds insane, but those who claim success are also pretty happy.

All is not lost for the pessimists though. Other research shows that for thirty years, the people of Denmark have consistently scored higher on life-satisfaction than any other Western nation. Why? Because, say the authors, the Danes are perennial pessimists, assuming the worst will happen in the year to come. They then find themselves pleasantly surprised when things turn out rather better than expected. For my global warming obsession this is very good news. All that talk of Wexford being under the sea within fifty years might result in overwhelming gratitude if only Rosslare succumbs to the melting polar ice caps.

In the meantime, when choosing on a daily basis whether to be happy or sad, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus came up with a formula nearly a century ago that remains the perfect blend of optimism and pessimism: Things are hopeless but not serious. Reading that cheered me up no end.

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