The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [95]
One thing that should tip us off that happiness research about the body may have some flaws is that the results are so often rejected by real people living real lives. The disjuncture between our beliefs and our actions is usually explained by saying that scientists have discovered what would make us happy, and that we are too lazy and self-indulgent to do what we are told is best. I don’t believe it. We are not lazy and self-indulgent: most of us wake up every morning and go to school or work and/or feed the kids and the pets. Some of us even return phone calls. We are smart, industrious people who make happiness choices based on a lot of information, and we often choose against scientific advice. Science tells us that we would be happy if we took a brisk walk and then ate a meal of baked trout, cauliflower, spinach, and whole wheat bread, but instead we sit on the couch with our kids and eat Kentucky Fried Chicken. It is wondrous that we devote so much of our collective resources to empirical sciences of diet and exercise and then don’t obey their findings. There is a big difference between the value of longevity in our rhetoric and the value we give it when we make a thousand little decisions over the course of our years.
You might decide you want to take a walk every day, but that might leave you only once a week for meditating. If you enjoy staying up late and waking up early, and you are also a fan of getting enough sleep, you are going to have to make some choices. It should not be, as Jerry Seinfeld once put it, a feud between Morning Guy and Night Guy, with your best interests represented by Morning Guy and all the power held by Night Guy: “The only thing Morning Guy can do is try to oversleep often enough so that Day Guy looses his job and Night Guy has no money to go out anymore.” Most of us manage to keep Night Guy sufficiently under control so we can keep our jobs, but perhaps not much more. To wake up fifteen minutes early makes a real difference in your morning; you feel relaxed and expansive, but it means going to bed fifteen minutes earlier, and that means missing a whole half-hour show, because if you start watching, it is difficult to stop. Rather than seeing yourself as split, and having to listen to yourself lecture yourself all the sleepy day long, you might as well cop to the fact that, de facto, this is what you choose, these are your priorities. To my mind, this makes it easier to deal with our priorities: either change them or accept them.
In this section I pay some attention to happiness advice regarding health, throughout the ages, with two main goals. The first is to tease out some of the secret messages hidden in such advice. How does happiness work, that it could be associated with such diametrically opposed messages as “Live in purity and abstinence” and “Satisfy your bodily desires”? Notice that whatever is the content of our conversation about the body, we certainly seem to like talking about the body. The universe and our emotive internal lives are both vast and vague and very hard to alter. Between outer galaxies and inner dreams there exists a fleshy thing that you can really get your hands on, observe, fathom, and manipulate. That what we do with the body may be less of a science and more of a particular cultural dance should not stop us from admiring the aesthetic features of the dance, nor argue against the joy of dancing. The second major goal is to encourage happiness through historical