Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

things not because they propagate our genes or because they conveyed specific advantages to our ancestors, but because they have been culturally selected for — precisely to the extent that they manage to tap into loopholes in our preexisting pleasure-seeking machinery.

The bottom line is this: our pleasure center consists not of some set of mechanisms perfectly tuned to promote the survival of the species, but a grab bag of crude mechanisms that are easily (and pleasurably) outwitted. Pleasure is only loosely correlated with what evolutionary biologists call “reproductive fitness” — and for that, we should be grateful.

Given how much we do to orient ourselves to the pursuit of pleasure, you’d expect us to be pretty good at assessing what’s likely to make us happy and what’s not. Here again, evolution holds some surprises.

A simple problem is that much of what makes us happy doesn’t last long. Candy bars make us happy — for an instant — but we soon return to the state of mind we experienced before we had one. The same holds (or can hold) for sex, for movies, for television shows, and for rock concerts. Many of our most intense pleasures are shortlived.

But there’s a deeper issue, which shows up in how we set our long-term goals; although we behave as if we want to maximize our long-term happiness, we frequently are remarkably poor at anticipating what will genuinely make us happy. As the psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert have shown, predicting our own happiness can be a bit like forecasting the weather: a pretty inexact science. Their textbook case,[45] which should give pause to assistant professors everywhere, concerns the young faculty member’s inevitable quest for tenure. Virtually every major U.S. institution promises to its finest, most successful young professors a lifetime of academic freedom and guaranteed employment. Slog through graduate school, a postdoc or two, and five or six years of defining your very own academic niche, and if you succeed (as measured by the length of your resume), you will gain tenure and be set for life.

The flip slide (rarely mentioned) is the slog that fails. Five to ten years spent working on a Ph.D., the postdocs, the half-decade of teaching, unappreciative undergraduates, the interminable faculty meetings, the struggle for grant money — and for what? Without a publication record, you’re out of a job. Any professor can tell you that tenure is fantastic, and not getting tenure is miserable.

Or so we believe. In reality, neither outcome makes nearly as much difference to overall happiness as people generally assume. People who get tenure tend to be relieved, and initially ecstatic, but their happiness doesn’t linger; they soon move on to worrying about other things. By the same token, people who don’t get tenure are indeed often initially miserable, but their misery is usually short-lived. Instead, after the initial shock, people generally adapt to their circumstances. Some realize that the academic rat race isn’t for them; others start new careers that they actually enjoy more.

Aspiring assistant professors who think that their future happiness hinges on getting tenure often fail to take into account one of the most deeply hard-wired properties of the mind: the tendency to get used to whatever’s going on. The technical term for that is adaptation. [46] For example, the sound of rumbling trucks outside your office may annoy you at first, but over time you learn to block it out — that’s adaptation. Similarly, we can adapt to even more serious annoyances, especially those that are predictable, which is why a boss who acts like a jerk every day can actually be less irritating than a boss who acts like a jerk less often, but at random intervals. As long as something is a constant, we can learn to live with it. Our circumstances do matter, but psychological adaptation means that they often matter less than we might expect.

This is true at both ends of the spectrum. Lottery winners get used to their newfound wealth, and others, people like the late Christopher Reeve, find ways of coping with circumstances most of us would find unimaginable. Don’t get me wrong — I’d like to win the lottery and hope that I will never be seriously injured. But as a psychologist I know that winning the lottery wouldn’t really change my life. Not only would I have to fend off all the long-lost “friends” who would come out of the woodwork, but also I’d face the inevitable fact of adaptation: the initial rush couldn’t last because the brain won’t allow it to.

The power of adaptation is one reason why money matters a lot less than most people think. According to literary legend, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said to Ernest Hemingway, “The rich are not like us.” Hemingway allegedly brushed him off with the reply “Yes, they have more money,” implying that wealth alone might make little difference. Hemingway was right. People above the poverty line are

happier than people below the poverty line, but the truly wealthy aren’t that much happier than the merely rich. One recent study, for example, showed that people making over $90,000 a year were no happier than those in the $50,000–$89,999 bracket. A recent New York Times article described a support group for multimillionaires. Another study reported that although average family income in Japan increased by a factor of five from 1958 to 1987, people’s self-reports of happiness didn’t change at all; all that extra income, but no extra happiness. Similar increases in the standard of living have occurred in the United States, again, with little effect on overall happiness. Study after study has shown that wealth predicts happiness only to a small degree. New material goods often bring tremendous initial pleasure, but we soon get used to them; that new Audi may be a blast to drive at first, but like any other vehicle, eventually it’s just transportation.

Ironically, what really seems to matter is not absolute wealth, but relative income. Most people would rather make $70,000 at a job where their co-workers average $60,000 than $80,000 at a job where co-workers average $90,000. As a community’s overall wealth increases, individual expectations expand; we don’t just want to be rich, we want to be richer (than our neighbors). The net result is that many of us seem to be on a happiness treadmill, working harder and harder to maintain essentially the same level of happiness.

One of the most surprising things about happiness is just how poor we are at measuring it. It’s not just that no brain scanner or dopamine counter can do a good job, but that we often just don’t know — yet another hint of how klugey the whole apparatus of happiness really is.

Are you happy right now, at this very moment, reading this very book? Seriously, how would you rate the experience, on a scale of 1 (“I’d rather being doing the dishes”) to 7 (“If this were any more fun, it would be illegal!”)? You probably feel that you just “know” or can “intuit” the answer — that you can directly assess how happy you are, in the same way that you can determine whether you’re too hot or too cold. But a number of studies suggest that our impression of direct intuition is an illusion.

Think back to that study of undergraduates who answered the question “How happy are you?” after first recounting their recent dating history. We’re no different from them. Asking people about their overall happiness just after inquiring into the state of their marriage or their health has a similar effect. These studies tell us that people often don’t really know how happy they are. Our subjective sense of happiness is, like so many of our beliefs, fluid, and greatly dependent on context.

Perhaps for that reason, the more we think about how we happy we are, the less happy we become. People who ruminate less upon their own circumstances tend to be happier than those who think about them more, just as Woody Allen implied in Annie Hall. When two attractive yet vacant-looking pedestrians walk by, Allen’s character asks them to reveal the secret of their happiness. The woman answers first: “I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say,” to which her handsome boyfriend adds, “And I’m exactly the same way.” The two stride gaily away. In other words, to paraphrase Mark Twain, dissecting our own happiness may be like dissecting frogs: both tend to die in the process.

Our lack of self-understanding may seem startling at first, but in hindsight it should scarcely seem surprising. Evolution doesn’t “care” whether we understand our own internal operations, or even whether we are happy. Happiness, or more properly, the opportunity to pursue it, is little more than a motor that moves us. The happiness treadmill keeps us going: alive, reproducing, taking care of children, surviving for another day. Evolution didn’t evolve us to be happy, it evolved us to pursue happiness.

In the battle between us and our genes, the kicker is this: to the extent that we see pleasure as a compass (albeit a flawed one) that tells us where we should be headed, and to the extent that we see happiness as a thermometer that tells us how we are doing, those instruments should, by rights, be instruments we cant fool with. Had our brains been built from scratch, the instruments that evaluated our mental state would no doubt behave a little like the meters electric companies use, which are instruments that we can inspect but not tinker with. No sensible person would buy a thermometer that displayed only the temperature that its owner wanted, rather than the actual temperature. But humans routinely try to outwit their instruments. Not just by seeking new ways of getting pleasure, but by lying to ourselves when we don’t like what our happy-o-meter tells us. We “acquire” tastes (in an effort to override our pleasure compass), and, more significantly, when things