Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [33]
Now and then we may be unable to decide which of two activities is the more pressing. In that case, we should select one of them arbitrarily. For either order is preferable to a mixed stream of both at the same time. Forget about finances and enjoy the conversation. Or kick out the guests and return to the accounts. It doesn’t matter which option you choose. Just don’t get stuck in the middle.
In a previous chapter we saw that mental traps cause the amount of unfinished business in our life to be always on the increase. The world is always presenting us with new problems, but we’re never quite finished with the old. We persist at tasks that have lost their meaning, amplify molehills into literally infinite mountains, revert to issues that are over and done with, and so on. As a result, there’s always something to take our attention away from the task at hand. Every time we sit down to read a book, we’re attacked by hordes of extraneous ideas relating to other times and other places. There are bills to be paid, children’s teeth to be straightened, raises to be asked for, letters to write, ancient injuries to avenge, retirement plans to finalize … How can we simply sit and read when there’s so much else happening at the same time?
We may live for years—even for a lifetime— in such a state of chronic division, always trying to hold all our unresolved problems in consciousness simultaneously instead of setting the burden down and picking up one item at a time. The penalty for chronic division is severe. Our skills and aptitudes are curtailed as surely as if we suffered brain damage—and we cease to experience pleasure.
A folk remedy for the ills of division is the habit of saving the best for last. As children, we ate the less favored sandwich crusts first, so that we might savor the soft middle portion without interruption. Now we open our mail in reverse order of interest—first the bills and advertising circulars, then the business letters, finally the personal correspondence. We put all our free hours at the end of the day, after all the chores are done, instead of taking a long break in the middle. Perhaps we design our whole life along this plan, deferring travels and adventures, the profound study of the saxophone, the cultivation of a garden—whatever truly attracts us—until after we’ve made ourselves financially secure.
The motive for this policy is very clear. If we live the best parts of life before the worst, our pleasure in them will be diminished by worries about what comes next. Better to get the sandwich crusts out of the way and not have them hanging over our head like a cloud! This is perfectly sound advice as far as it goes. If our pleasure in the best will be diminished by intrusions from the worst-to-come, it’s better to get the worst over with first. But to permit such intrusions is already to fall into the trap of division. The situation is reminiscent of New Year’s resolutions, discussed earlier. These are not themselves traps, but their usefulness is contingent on our having fallen into traps. Similarly, saving the best for last is not itself a trap. So long as we divide, we must defer our pleasures in order to enjoy them fully. But it’s better not to divide in the first place. When we cease to divide, we no longer have a reason to save the best for last. We can take our pleasures any time we like.
Note that the technique of saving the best for last is ineffective in cases of chronic division. The chronic divider always has something preying on his mind that has to be settled before he can enjoy himself. The house is never perfectly clean, the future never totally secure. The attempt to get everything settled before enjoying the best of life results in the perpetual postponement of pleasure. And that surely is a trap. It’s unwise to save the middle portion of the sandwich for the end when the crusts are infinitely long.
Another attempt to recapture the pleasure lost by division is to cancel all competing activities. We