Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [18]
A peculiar and extreme type of preworking occurs in existential anticipation. We fall into this trap when we make judgments about the nature or quality of life taken as a whole. If we want life to be happy enough or meaningful enough to meet some standard that we’ve set for it, our goal can be neither definitely met nor definitely missed until life itself has come to an end. Our fate may have been dismal until now; but tomorrow may tell a different story. And a present sense of satisfaction may be taken away from us overnight. “Call no man happy until he is dead,” goes an ancient Greek proverb. The final judgment on the quality of our life can’t be made in the midst of life itself. Hence it can never be made. Yet we anticipate it. Here is a flagrant example of tackling a problem before all the information is in.
Since our existential judgments are perpetually liable to being undone, it’s always too soon to make them. If these perpetually premature assessments are favorable, we only waste some time in useless calculations. But if they’re unfavorable, the result can be devastating. Premature negative evaluations of the whole of life are the central feature of chronic depression. In the extreme, they lead to the most anticipatory of all acts: suicide. The suicide looks down the corridor of time to its very end and finds nothing there to make life worth living. What he overlooks is that his information may change. Even if his despair stems from an existential doubt as to the very purpose of human existence, it’s possible that this doubt will be resolved in an unimagined way tomorrow, next year, or twenty years from now. But the suicide decides now that this will never happen. In order to pass such a judgment on the whole of his life and its possibilities, he has to view it from a vantage point beyond his own death. Thus he arrives at the final stage of getting ahead of oneself.
Questions about the nature of life taken as a whole are always premature, because we’re never finished with living. This doesn’t mean that we must always refrain from asking them. They are, after all, fascinating topics for analysis and conjecture. But it’s always too soon to settle on an answer.
The third penalty for anticipation is to have worked in vain because the value of the goal was lost before we reached it. We purchase theater tickets a week in advance even though the theater has been half empty for every performance. And then we’re called out of town on the appointed day, or we fall ill, or read a review so devastating that we lose all desire to attend. Now we’re stuck with worthless tickets. In this instance, it’s neither a matter of having worked harder than necessary to achieve the goal nor a case of needing to do the work over again in order to resecure the goal. What was secured remains in our possession. But its value is lost. There was no need to do anything in the first place. We have worked in vain. If every performance had been sold out, we would have had to take our chances or give up the idea of going right from the start. As it was, we would have risked nothing by delaying our purchase until the last minute. It isn’t having worked in vain by itself that makes our action anticipatory. It’s having increased the risk of working in vain for no purpose.
We often end up having worked in vain because our problems take care of themselves. Having considered what to say to an inattentive waiter if he doesn’t come to our table in five minutes, we find him before us forthwith, all smiles and apologies. Having struggled for years to make ourselves financially independent, we suddenly inherit a fortune. Our considerations and our struggles have been in vain. Like the risk of finding our