Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [21]
Of all the circumstances in life, the time we least need a plan for the future is when we’re already occupied with a valuable activity. So long as the task at hand is clearly necessary or desirable, planning can be postponed without penalty until we’re finished. It’s enough to know that the present moment is well spent in doing this. The future can wait until this is over. There’s nothing we can do about it now anyway. We’re already occupied.
Yet the commonest of all mental traps is to decide what to do next before we’re finished with the task at hand. Driving home from work, we decide what to do about dinner. During dinner, we plan the evening’s television viewing. Watching television, we organize the next morning’s work. At work, we anticipate lunch. At lunch, we cast our thoughts toward the business of the afternoon. In the afternoon, we think about going home … This curious habit may be called one-step anticipation.
Evidently, we suffer from the delusion that we always need to know what’s going to happen next. Without a clear vision of what lies ahead, we feel like a person stumbling in the dark, who may fall over a precipice at any moment. But the analogy is inapt. When we’re already engaged in a valuable activity, it doesn’t matter that the next step is hidden in darkness because we aren’t going anywhere. Things are fine right where we are. The need to know what happens next at all times is like a primitive fear of the night that makes us insist that the ground before us be illuminated even when we have no plans to leave the cave. There’s time enough to look for precipices when we’re ready to step out.
One-step anticipation has consequences that are even more adverse than the usual penalties for anticipation. If we always try to anticipate what happens next, we can never give our undivided attention to the task at hand. The result is that we can never perform the task at hand with maximal efficiency. Immersed in deliberations about our dinner while we’re driving, we fail to see the car that suddenly cuts in front of us. And if the present activity is engaged in for the sake of pleasure, our enjoyment is dimmed by the intrusion of the future. Planning the evening’s work at the dinner table, we don’t notice the taste of our food.
Because their attention is always divided, chronic one-steppers can never function at peak efficiency or experience the higher reaches of delight. This drastic diminution of life is independent of how much of the future they anticipate at a time. There are people who remain perpetually ahead of themselves by only a moment, always casting a sideward glance at the next instant to see what will be happening there. These people might as well be a thousand years away. They’re never fully here, never just doing this. Hence they’re never fully alive.
Divided attention is a trap in its own right which may be fallen into without anticipating. Its origin and consequences will be discussed more fully in a later chapter.
The habit of anticipation often passes for a virtue in our culture. We’ve already met with this curious enthronement of mental inefficiency in our discussion of persistence, and we’ll see it again. According to Benjamin Franklin, it’s imperative that we anticipate everything that can possibly be anticipated. “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today,” urges this mad apologist for the trapped state of mind. If we try to live by this hard saying, we will lead a hellish existence. Having done everything that needs to be done today, we can’t yet afford the luxury of a leisurely bath, a walk in the park, or