First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

The Perils of Abundance

How many of us here think that it would be good news if you won $20 million in the lottery? Think about it; worries about money, or at least presumably about existing debts would be gone; you could finally have that long-time fantasy splurge - a fabulous vacation, a high performance car, a tummy tuck, a spacious home, college for all the grandkids - you could endow your favorite institutions, indulge your most exquisite tastes in jewels, food, art, clothes, technology, wine, books, philanthropy. How great would that be? Can't you feel the pleasure chemicals starting to circulate in your mind and body, just at the thought?

How many of us here have ever heard a child vow, with every appearance of sincerity, "If you buy me this, I promise I won't ask for anything else!" and fallen for it? What unit of time was the duration of that promise measured in? What do we conclude from this experience; that our children are corrupt, manipulative, soulless little consumers who will say anything to get their way? As we think about the practice of gratitude, and the holiday of Thanksgiving that is close upon us, I want to suggest that these two scenarios have something in common; that we as human beings, young and old, are more at the mercy of our chemical reactions than we may like to think, and that gratitude is something more than a pious platitude, but a practice that may actually affect the physiology of how happy we understand ourselves to be.

Begin with the acknowledgement that happiness is one of those privileged claims; only we ourselves can know how happy or unhappy we are, and all we can know about others is their self-report. If you say, "I am quite happy," regardless of the concrete circumstances, I have no basis on which to say, "No, you're not." And conversely, if you report, "I'm just miserable," no matter how enviable I may find your condition in life, I cannot meaningfully insist, "Oh, you are really happy, if you only knew it!" We must accept our own immediate experience as definitive, and take other people's word for their state of happiness. What is extremely interesting, however, is a spate of recent research which suggests that our ability to gauge our own future happiness emphatically does not carry the same privilege. Indeed, we are very bad predictors of what things will make us happy, how much and for how long - systematically so, in such a way that our miscalculations themselves can be predicted. Human beings almost always over-estimate how much happiness or unhappiness they will derive from external events or choices, and how enduring those feelings will be. There would appear to be good evolutionary reasons for this mis-calibration; the question is how it affects us in the world of today, and what, if anything, we might wish to do about it once we understand it.

Most of us are aware of anecdotal reports in the approximately twenty five years since state lotteries have become widespread, about people in average or difficult circumstances, who won large windfalls of money, and within a fairly short space of time, a year or two perhaps, had managed to completely dissipate the fortune, and found themselves worse off and more miserable than before. (We of course are confident that none of us could be so foolish, but that's not the point here.) Of more interest are the formal studies that began to be conducted with lottery winners, measuring their reported happiness. Whether they ran through the money irresponsibly or not, such studies tended to suggest that within five years, lottery winners were no happier in their lives compared to average people than they had been before their wins, and one 1978 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, showed that lottery winners actually scored below accident victims who were partially or wholly paralyzed by their accidents on their pleasure in day-to-day events.

Now, it is easy to turn these findings into a kind of morality lesson to the effect that see, money does not buy happiness, just like your guru always told you but you didn't really believe it. However, money is not the only premise of happiness where we can see this process at work. In point of fact, it has been shown to be true around other much longed-for purchases and achievements; the perceived satisfaction from finally buying a fancy car or state of the art computer system, from various kinds of romantic success, or from graduating, or achieving tenure or a certain job title, all fade much more quickly than people thought they would when anticipating them. I am not aware that anyone has ever done such a study of those who acquire spiritual enlightenment, but my guess would be that even the charm of that tends to pall sooner than the devotee expects while he or she is eagerly following the path. As the Zen saying goes, before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. The sad truth is that nothing is all that it is cracked up to be, and the source of the disappointment lies not in object of our coveting, but in our heads.

In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwarz suggests that not only are we destined to disappointment because nothing is ever as satisfying as we hope it will be for as long as we expect it to be, but we are also subjected to a novel kind of stress by the variety of options and choices available to us in the modern world. When we only have to decide between vanilla ice cream and chocolate, we may experience a certain regret for whichever flavor we forego, but when there are 31 possibilities, including caramel peanut butter fudge and strawberry cheesecake ripple, it becomes much harder to be confident that the one we chose was the one we really wanted, and this uncertainty magnifies the unavoidable dissatisfaction that accompanies actually getting something that we felt we wanted. Add to this uncertainty the option of changing your mind - "If you don't like it, take it back and get something else..." - and the possibility of experienced satisfaction decreases even further, because now you have to decide at every moment of eating whether you might not rather be eating some other flavor. The result, says Schwarz as well as other authors who have studied this issue, is that the very abundance of possibilities that is supposed to make our lives incredibly more fulfilled than those of our ancestors so constrained by circumstances, actually paralyzes us, and leads to tension, frustration, confusion, and a diminished sense of well-being. As Schwarz writes:

There are those who would argue that the solution to this dilemma is simple; we should all be presented with fewer choices, and we would be better off, but that suggestion doesn't seem to me to solve the real problem. It doesn't address the process of adaptation, by which our psychological equilibrium adjusts itself to each new circumstance as normal, and thus reduces the extent to which changes make us either more or less happy than we ever were. Moreover, my sense of what it means to be a free person stands in fundamental opposition to the concept of having somebody else arbitrarily limit my life - resigning my power a priori into other hands feels like a failure, not a comfort. Still, it is worth noting that some people do find comfort in having their choices narrowed, whether by custom and tradition, or by authoritative leadership, or even by chance. It is not necessarily either ignorance or oppression that forces us to assent to such limits; it may rather be a very practical and indeed satisfaction-enhancing strategy to live in such a way.

But what of those who, like me, are just stubborn enough in our self-determination that we cannot delegate these kinds of responsibilities? If we are not eager to live with fewer freedoms and choices, how shall we live happily in the midst of the endless options that lie before us, and indeed bombard us, in every moment from every side? Our brains are programmed by thousands of generations of evolution to flood us with the chemicals of anticipated gratification or misery whenever we are offered a significant gain, or confronted with danger, thus motivating us to action, making us strive with all our might to seize the reward, or avoid the injury. But once events have unfolded, whether we have grasped the fruit or fallen off the cliff, our survival is enhanced not by continuing to feel either elated or sorry for ourselves, but by returning as promptly as possible to a level state of awareness, ready for the next set of events. Our basic biology is unprepared for limitless choices, nor does it readily abide in a state of pleasantly gratified desire, and yet this is in some sense the position in which our cumulative human cultural success has placed us. As Barry Schwarz observes in his closing chapter, "Here we are, living at the pinnacle of human possibility, awash in material abundance. As a society, we have achieved what our ancestors could, at most, only dream about..."

Certainly, those New England colonists who gathered to give thanks for what remained of their lives and their hopes at that first Thanksgiving feast would behold with astonishment the easy prosperity and enormous life options now enjoyed by their descendants. Yet after a while they might shrewdly observe that we are not all that much happier with our lot than they were in their own day, struggling and constrained though their enterprise was. And they might suggest, properly it seems to me, that in the end happiness and even freedom are actually spiritual rather than material questions. For it is not by throwing away our choices that we live best, but rather by learning to choose with confidence out of a stable structure of values and purpose. The faith traditions of the world have tried to teach this principle; that to be happy is not to have what you want, but to want what you have; that the path to the end of suffering is the cessation of desire; do not attach to outcomes, but pay attention to your wanting; in everything, give thanks.

The practice of gratitude is the simple antidote to adaptation; it can help to keep before us the values by which our choices have been informed and motivated, to call to mind all the ways in which things might have been worse. Any decision can look profoundly disappointing, when we set our creativity to imagining the infinite possibilities of what we might have had instead; that same decision can appear highly satisfying when we recognize all the alternatives that could have been really bad. To practice gratitude also helps us to appreciate our lives the way they are, rather than always seeking the next new, improved, transformational event, whether that is a purchase, an accomplishment, a stroke of luck, or a relational connection. The more attention we pay to the good that is already present in our experience, the less mental and emotional energy we have to devote to our internal grumblings, and the suspicion that things are somehow not what they ought to be. Gratitude does not deny hope that the future holds yet unrealized possibilities, nor that we are not yet all that we might have it within us to become. And yet, perhaps strangely, it is easier to move gracefully into the promise of the future from a position of gratitude than it is from a stressed and anxious suspicion that we have made or are about to make a less than optimal choice.

I remember from my childhood a verse from Robert Louis Stevenson observing that

"The world is so full of a number of things,

I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

The same admonition is echoed in a more mature form by the philosopher Camus, who asks, "What does it matter what we have lost, when what we have left is not used up?"

Of course we know that kings may be among the least happy of people, which is precisely the point; it is not the plethora of things in the world, but rather our appreciation of them that constitutes our happiness; it is not how much we have lost, but the adequacy of what is left, that makes for the fullness of our lives. We are summoned to the practice of gratitude by recollection; by remembering how much less those forbears had who yet with the labor and love of their lives laid the groundwork for our freedoms today; by remembering the abundance by which we are surrounded in contrast to our small disappointments and grievances; by remembering the greatness of the need that is in the world, and the power we have to choose to share, and to live with generosity. I think that our choices need not bewilder us, when they are made with the recognition that the human condition is not built to sustain either joy or desolation over the long term; some part of our biochemistry is always at work adjusting us to the world as it stands at any given moment. Because of this, we can survive more disaster than we think, though the gladness of each new thing we are given only lifts us our spirits for a little while, and never as long as we would suppose. But that's alright, for in the practice of gratitude we may revisit that uplifted moment, and affirm it as the heart's proper orientation, even when we are no longer flushed with the chemistry of elation. After all, who can live every day with a spouse in all the ardor of that high moment at the altar? Who can raise a child in a permanent state of the speechless wonder with which you first held the newborn baby? Thank goodness for the noonday sun of ordinary life; we could not bear the significance of things otherwise!

The perils of abundance are that we become overwhelmed by choices; paralyzed by the very possibilities that we seek in order to make our lives what we want them to be. If we do not know what it is that we want our lives to be, then every decision must be formulated anew, and every unexplored option might have held the secret to lasting happiness. But if, instead, we know that we are committed to certain values, to generosity and gratitude, to authenticity and compassion, and a world of justice and peace, then we may be able to live our choices lightly, to rejoice in what we have rather than ceaselessly pining for more, or growing bitter with regret over all the roads that we could not take. The celebration of Thanksgiving summons us again to the recollection of those values, to the remembrance of how much we owe to the past, to the practice of gratitude that finds in our choices finally not a burden, but an expression of the holy creativity at the heart of life. In that recognition may we rejoice, and be renewed.

from The Paradox of Choice Barry Schwartz

Most modern Americans live in a bountiful world. While we don't get to do and to have everything we want, no other people on earth have ever had such control over their lives, such material abundance, and such freedom of choice.

[But] because a ubiquitous feature of human psychology, very little in life turns out quite as good as we expect it will be. You're [always] hit with a double whammy - regret about what you didn't choose, and disappointment with what you did. This ubiquitous feature of human psychology is a process known as adaptation. Simply put, we get used to things, and then we start to take them for granted.

Because of adaptation, enthusiasm about positive experiences doesn't sustain itself. And what's worse, people seem generally unable to anticipate that this process of adaptation will take place. The waning of pleasure or enjoyment over time always seems to come as an unpleasant surprise.

We could go a long way toward improving the experienced well-being of people in our society if we could find a way to stop the process of adaptation. But adaptation is so fundamental and universal a feature of our responses to events in the world - it is so much a "hardwired" property of our nervous systems - that there is very little we can do to mitigate it directly.

However, simply by being aware of the process we can anticipate its effects, and therefore be less disappointed when it comes. This means that when we are making decisions, we should think about how each of the options will feel not just tomorrow, but months or even years later. Factoring in adaptation to the decision-making process may make differences that seem large at the moment of choice feel much smaller. Factoring in adaptation may help us be satisfied with choices that are good enough rather than "the best," and this in turn will reduce the time and effort we devote to making those choices. Finally, we can remind ourselves to be grateful for what we have. This may seem trite, the sort of thing one hears from parents or ministers, and then ignores. But individuals who regularly experience and express gratitude are physically healthier, more optimistic about the future, and feel better about their lives than those who do not. Individuals who experience gratitude are more alert, enthusiastic, and energetic than those who do not, and the are more likely to achieve personal goals.

And unlike adaptation, the experience of gratitude is something we can affect directly. Experiencing and expressing gratitude actually get easier with practice. By causing us to focus on how much better our lives are than they could have been, or were before, the disappointment that adaptation brings in its wake can be blunted.