Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [169]
If excessive accuracy in our self-image and worldview is correlated with depression, the opposite is true, too. Sometimes, being wrong makes us happy. Think of Don Quixote, that exemplary knight errant, who lent his name to the condition of being pleasantly deluded. Ugly, he thinks he is handsome; common, he thinks he is knightly; getting on in age, he thinks he is youthful. A plain farm girl is his lady love, a dimwitted neighbor his loyal squire, a lowly inn his castle, windmills his worthy adversaries. This quixotic version of Quixote is happy. It is only at the conclusion of the novel, when he is stripped of his illusions and forced to confront reality unvarnished, that he falls into melancholy and death.
Michel Foucault once proposed that Quixote represents an extreme version of us all—of “the imaginary relations [man in general] maintains with himself.” Like Quixote, most of us think we are a bit younger, better-looking, and more important than strict realism might suggest. Most of us see a little extra loveliness in our loved ones, a little extra grandeur in our homes, a little extra heroism in our contests and quests. And thank God for that. These beliefs might skew the truth, but they stave off depression, give meaning to our lives, and make us and those we love happy.
These kinds of beneficial self-deceptions can be sweeping and existential in nature—as when we ignore or deny the fact that we have only limited control over the course of our lives, and none at all over the inevitability of death. Yet such delusions also get us through life in countless more mundane ways. Here, for instance, is a friend of mine talking about a kind of wrongness that I bet will sound familiar to every reader. Once, this friend told me, back when he was in college, “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to read all of Ulysses over Christmas break.’ And then I read maybe twenty pages of Ulysses and ate a lot of chocolate. That’s what I did over Christmas break.” Nor, he continued, have his powers of accurately forecasting his own actions improved with age: “I still look at a book in the morning and think, I’m going to finish that book by tonight. I could just say to myself, ‘I’m going to finish the preface by tonight,’ and then I might be almost right. But instead I go on letting myself think I’ll read the whole thing.”
Believing that this time we will succeed where in the past we have failed, or failed to try; believing the best of ourselves even when we are intimately familiar with the worst and the merely average; believing that everything in us that is well-intentioned will triumph over all that is lazy or fickle or indifferent or unkind: this is wrongness as optimism—an endlessly renewable, overextended faith in our own potential. Wrongness as optimism is why my friend thought he would read one of the world’s longest and hardest works of literature during a four-week holiday, and why my neighbor swears that he just smoked his last cigarette, and why I thought this book would be done a year and a half ago. As I can tell you from that last example, this kind of wrongness gets us started and keeps us going. Take away our willingness to overestimate ourselves, and we wouldn’t dare to undertake half the things we do.
In this sense, all wrongness is optimism. We err because we believe, above all, in ourselves: no matter how often we have gotten things wrong in the past, we evince an abiding and touching faith in our own stories and theories. Traditionally, we are anxious to deny that those stories and theories are stories and theories—that we must rely on our own imperfect representations to make sense of the world, and are therefore destined to err. But, to risk a bit of blasphemy, stories and theories may be all we have that God does not. They are the hallmark of two of our highest human endeavors, art and science, and through