Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [16]
The definition of disappointment is radically arbitrary. By fiat, we label certain desirable non-occurrences as things we lack, and ignore an infinite number of other desirable non-occurrences. We may consider ourselves unfortunate when our stock market investments fail to make us any money. Yet at the same time we didn’t find any money in the street, no stranger came to us with a gift of money, a wad of bills didn’t suddenly materialize in our pocket. All these non-occurrences come to the same thing in the end. But we call only one of them a disappointment.
Since disappointments are both painful and arbitrarily defined, why don’t we arbitrarily define them out of existence? The non-visit from a friend and the non-windfall on the stock market have exactly the same status as the non-existence of fairy godmothers. They’re games with words. What we call a disappointment is no more than a part of the present conditions under which we must act. Not having made money on the market is the same as not having invested. Losing money is the same as never having had it in the first place. What does it matter how we came to be where we are? Here we are.
Unless we cease to think in the past conditional tense, it’s only a matter of time before we are swallowed up by perpetual regret. Our stock of irremediable failures can never be diminished by a single one. It’s therefore a mathematical certainty that the opportunities for reversion will increase as the years go by. By the time we’re old, we will find ourselves wholly absorbed in the urgent contemplation of an ever more abundant fund of might-have-beens and should-have-dones. If only we’d gone to medical school! If only we’d married! If only we’d lived in California! If only we hadn’t wasted so much time in regret!
n all the traps discussed so far, we fall into the error of working too hard. When we persist, we work on a goal that has lost its value; when we amplify, we work harder than necessary to achieve the goal; in fixation, we work on our goal when there’s nothing that needs to be done; and in reversion, we work on a goal that’s already beyond reach. But working too hard is only one of four cardinal errors. Whatever we undertake, we may do either too much or too little, and we may do it too late or too soon. Only two of these errors are generally recognized in our culture: too little and too late. We seem to make the tacit assumption that the more we work on our projects and the sooner we start, the better will be the outcome. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Anticipation is the trap of starting too soon. It’s true that if we start too late, we may not have enough time to finish. But there are also penalties for starting too soon. When we anticipate, we render ourselves liable to overworking, preworking, and working in vain.
We overwork if we act now when the same result can more easily be attained at a later time. Here is a contrived example that clearly delineates the nature of this trap. Expecting a letter of acceptance or rejection, we compose two replies—one for each possibility. Had we waited until the letter was received, we would have needed to do only half as much work, and the result would have been the same. Hence we overworked. In this case the overwork is so transparent that only the most severely trapped would engage in it. But many of us would be unable to resist giving an occasional thought to each reply in the course of the day. Half of these thoughts are destined to prove useless.
Of course the results are not always the same if we delay. Later on, there may not be enough time to finish the job properly. It’s not a trap to act now if a later start would jeopardize the outcome. But much of what we do from day to day can just as well be done at another time. We can just as well mail a letter on Monday morning as on Sunday if there’s no weekend postal