If the response to this question is mostly regrets about things that are outside their control — like not being born rich or beautiful or in another century, you’re probably talking to someone who makes excuses. If they’re mostly regrets about things not done, you’re probably talking to someone with low self-esteem, someone who doesn’t like themselves very much. If they’re mostly regrets about not working harder, you’re probably talking to someone who isn’t very honest with themselves!

Regrets about things not done and about things done are really two sides of the same coin. You only have so much time in your life, and so many choices, and to the extent you choose to do something you also choose not to do something else. My initial list of ‘What I Regret Most’ was almost entirely things I hadn’t done, and then I realized I could re-word each of them into a regret about what I did instead.

The extent to which self-esteem plays into our regrets is fascinating, but also, as the graphic above shows, a little paradoxical. It is almost as if nature furnished us with a self-regulatory ego, to keep us from getting either too full of  ourselves or too down on ourselves.

In listing your regrets, you need to follow one ground-rule. You can only list things you had (or now have) some control over. You may regret not winning the lottery, or that some celebrity you never met didn’t fall in love with you, or that Bill Gates or Bill Clinton didn’t pick you as his successor (or in my case, that I am shy, insensitive and a slow learner), but this is the stuff of daydreams, not regrets. If you confuse the two you will be a very unhappy person. There must be something you can do now that will make up for past wasted time or ignorance or foolishness, and rectify or alleviate or at least mitigate your regret. If it simply might have been, it’s not a regret, it’s a fiction.

In the interests of self-disclosure, of helping my readers to know a little bit more about me, as a self-prompt at this critical juncture in my life, and as a thought-provoker for updating my About the Author bio that you’ll find in the right sidebar, I thought I’d make a list of the ten things in my life I regret most. Here, in rough order of how much I regret these things, is the list:

1. Buying Into Wage Slavery Instead of Living Simpler: I spent over 60% (an average of ten hours a day) of my waking hours for over 60% (thirty years) of my adult life doing meaningless work, and tasks (commuting, driving the kids to the baby-sitter etc.) required by that meaningless work. I had no model of any other way to live, so this was a failure of imagination. In the 1950s and 1960s where I grew up everyone was a wage slave. I rebelled, as most of us did in the 1960s, but when I got hungry and scared it was so easy to fall into the same pattern. You get wage increases, promotions, get a bigger house with a bigger mortgage that costs more to look after, and you set yourself up to have to maintain a certain material standard of living and level of financial ‘security’. That standard is also meaningless, and that security is illusory, but it is highly addictive and tightly tied up with how you are perceived by others, and hence with your self-esteem. Once you’ve been seduced from the Edge to the Centre of the System, they’ve gotcha.
2. Not Making More Friends and Lovers: When I was young I was shy and when I got older I became jaded and picky about the company I chose. There were two brief windows, in the 1960s and later in the 1970s, when I opened up, and those were the happiest times of my life. They were the times I loved, and ached, without limit. They were times when I accepted and loved people for what they were, when my damned judging of people and my damned idealism didn’t get in the way of getting really close to people. I remember caring about friends so deeply that I rejoiced over their successes and cried over their misfortunes as profoundly as if they were my own. I remember a young lady who believed in spending every available minute of every day making love, and I remember the sheer joy of just spending time with her, until her intensity and polyamory openness scared me away.
3. Not Loving Myself More and Not Looking After Myself Better: I’ve spent much of my life as my own worst critic, beating myself up for not doing anything about things that were way outside my control, never giving myself a break. I am in good physical condition now, but for most of my life I have not been, and as a consequence spent much of my life unnecessarily exhausted and depressed. I still have not learned to meditate. I still have not learned yoga, or any other technique to get in touch with my body. For most of my life I ate badly, and I still have not learned to cook well for myself. It is as if I have been an observer of my own life rather than a participant. And a hyper-critical observer at that. As Joni Mitchell put it, “I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes.” Fear will do that to you.
4. Not Spending More Time in Wilderness, in Nature, with Animals and in Play: You can’t reconnect with Gaia, with the natural world, with your senses and your instincts, until and unless you’re comfortable with that world, and that takes some experience and practice. I haven’t had nearly enough practice. And animals can show us how to love. And both animals and children can show us how to really play, where it isn’t about winning, it’s about imagination and being real, here, now, in the moment.
5. Spending Too Much Time on Information and Entertainment Activities that Don’t Matter: Reading, watching and listening to stuff that is not important, not especially interesting, and not actionable. Why do I do this? Because it’s easy, and comfortable. We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, then we do what’s fun. All the time spent in school and university studying things that don’t matter. Almost all the time spent watching TV, and reading newspapers, and reading stuff online. Wasted, because after doing what had to be done I rewarded myself by doing what was easy and fun. Instead of realizing that much of what I thought had to be done didn’t really have to be done.
6. Getting Angry or Upset With Others, or Over Events Over Which I Had No Control: Not only did this sometimes hurt people I loved, it accomplished nothing except to make me, and others, unhappy.
7. Eating Meat: My single greatest, and most easily avoided, contribution to the suffering of, and our society’s continued cruelty to, animals.
8. Not Creating a Natural Enterprise With Others: Since I stopped being a wage slave, I have mostly tried to make a living as a sole proprietor. Understandable, but foolish — the chances of success, and the joys of success, are much higher when you create a more substantial business in partnership with others with complementary skills.
9. Wearing Clothes: Nudity forces you to do several useful and important things: Not take yourself (or others) too seriously, be aware of and look after your body, realize that fashions (of all kinds) are irrelevant, and be more open, more honest, more sensitive, more human (i.e. more animal), more yourself.
10. Not Learning to Be More Self-Sufficient: I have used my lack of manual dexterity and coordination skills as an excuse for not learning a host of critical life skills that would make me more attentive, more creative and more self-sufficient – learning to make and fix things, to draw, to dance, to live in the woods. If most of the world suffers from Learned Helplessness, mine is, ironically, self-imposed.

Things happen the way they do for a reason, and there is a perfectly reasonable explanation why I did, or failed to do, the things that I now regret doing or not doing. There is no going back, and grieving about the past is futile and self-destructive. I became a wage-slave (regret #1) instead of creating a natural enterprise with others (regret #8) because, at the time, I didn’t know better. As a result of that I was too tired and disheartened to take good care of myself (regret #3), or to spend time in nature (regret #4), and therefore got upset easily (regret #6) and indulged in meaningless escapism (regret #5). I didn’t make more friends and lovers (regret #2) because I was shy and insensitive, and learned social graces slowly. I ate meat (regret #7) because I didn’t know better, and I wore clothes all the time (regret #9) because, until recently, I didn’t have the privacy to do anything else. Also until recently, I had failed at everything I tried to do that involved manual dexterity, so I had given up trying to learn self-sufficiency skills (regret #10).

What I need to do, to strike each of these regrets off my list so that, when I die, I can honestly say I did everything I wanted and hoped to do, and had no regrets, is pretty self-evident, once you know why I regret them now. Taking stock of your regrets now, understanding why you regret them, and then resolving to do the obvious things that can put them behind you, can be a useful process. In fact, once you’re aware of the regrets that were/are in your control, and understand why you regret them, you seem to sub-consciously start to make the changes needed to alleviate them.

Alas, it takes a great deal of self-knowledge both to take stock of your regrets and to understand what underlies them. Most of us live such complicated and busy lives that we have neither the self-awareness nor the time to do so. We go through life knowing we’re not really happy but not really knowing why.

Just to be provocative, I’ve also put together a list of three things I don’t regret not doing, because I’m sure they would appear on many people’s Regrets List:

• Not Having (Biological) Children: Even though my son and daughter are not my biological children, I love them every bit as much as if they were (at least, I can’t imagine loving them more). Not for one second have I ever regretted not having children of ‘my own’. Don’t let anyone tell you your life can’t be ‘complete’ unless you’ve brought children into the world.
• Not Traveling More: I’ve been to more than a dozen countries, but never anyplace that exotic, or for very long (nine months was the longest away from ‘home’). As I get older my desire to travel gets less each year, and not because it’s tiring — it’s not. I’m just learning how much there is to explore, to discover, to learn, right here in my own community. I was just so numbed, so blasÈ I didn’t realize it, didn’t notice the wonder all around me.
• Not Saying ‘I Love You’ More: I keep hearing about how important it is to say this often to people you love, in case they’re suddenly gone and you didn’t say it often enough. I don’t get this at all. “I love you” is just a three word phrase. Saying it doesn’t make it so, any more than saying “We had reliable intelligence that Saddam had WMD” makes it true. What’simportant is showing it, with your actions, not saying it.

What would your Regrets List look like? Remember the ground-rule: Only include things that you had (or now have) at least some control over, things that there is something you could do now to rectify, alleviate or mitigate that regret. Do you understand why you regret them? And if so, have you already subconsciously started to change your life to put them behind you?

Unrest in Oaxaca Produces More Police Violence: As Mexico gets closer to a July 2 election that could be won by an anti-imperialist, anti-free-trade candidate Lopez Obrador, there have been a series of violent confrontations in Mexico between protesters and out-of-control police gangs, that some believe have been deliberately orchestrated to engender a sense of fear and lawlessness favourable to the incumbent government’s right-wing law-and-order candidate. Media sympathetic to the protesters have been raided and shut down, women protesters have been reportedly gang-raped in prison, and in the latest protest by teachers in Oaxaca, several people including children have reportedly been gunned down by police.

Scripts for Lists on Your Blog/Website: Lots of ready-to-use scripts to incorporate vertical or horizontal lists, tabs and navigation bars on your site. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.

Opposing Animal Cruelty is Not About Faith: Kevin Cameron at Bastish deconstructs the phony argument that refusal to eat meat from animals raised in cruel and inhumane conditions is a ‘religious’ decision rather than a moral and rational one. “I wonder if it is only with the advent of our modern religions that people have come to believe that disrespect for other living beings is the norm, and that having respect for other living beings constitutes ‘religion’.”

Why Our Food Choices Matter: On a similar theme, Elizabeth at Half Changed World reviews The Way We Eat, Peter Singer’s new book, and links to a recent Salon interview with Singer. Some interesting insight into the thorny choices between locally-grown versus organic, and eating vegan versus eating meat from humanely-raised animals. There’s also some interesting insight on the savagery of kosher slaughter and the ‘disposition’ of hens who no longer lay eggs, on the energy savings of eating vegan versus driving a Prius, and, of course, on the evils of factory farms.

Are All Organized Religions in Decline?: Columnist David Warren argues that the rise of fundamentalism — whether in Christianity or in Islam — is the death-gasp of an organized religion in long-term and permanent decline. Thanks to Good and Happy for the link.

Ayahuasca as Depression Therapy: Cyndy at MouseMusings reviews a National Geographic report on the use of the Brazilian drug ayahuasca, used by some native tribes and attracting increasing attention for its greater effectiveness and lower side-effects than SSRIs in the treatment of depression and anxiety disorders. Add it to the aÁai berry, stevia and hemp in the list of tropical plant products that the big multinational corporations don’t want you to know about.

Great Passages: Here are some of the passages that commenters to my March 1 article suggested as candidates for the Greatest Passage Ever Written:

Regular readers of How to Save the World know that I have been struggling for a couple of years with my novel The Only Life We Know. The novel takes place at the dawn of the 23rd century, a hundred years after a combination of events have conspired to cause our civilization to crash. The human population has reached a stasis level of a few hundred million people after a precipitous collapse. Attempts by the survivors to immediately recreate civilization culture failed for a whole series of reasons revealed through the stories in the novel.

The successive generations, unfamiliar with what pre-crash civilization was about (other from what they can glean from books and digital recordings), are therefore indifferent to it, and therefore go about creating a set of completely new cultures. These new cultures are based on the physical place of the community (so the desert culture in the book is very different from the oceanside culture, and each is appropriate to its place), and based on studying the cultures of wild animal communities native to those places. The young people use animal cultures as their model because they are only models they can see that actually work. They rebel against and ultimately ignore the pleas of the ‘older generation’ of humans, who remember what civilization was, and want the young people to learn from civilization’s lessons and rebuild it. The only thing that the young people can see to learn from in their study of civilization is that it failed, horribly.

One of the theses of the novel is that while there is much we can learn from information media, we can’t really know what it’s like to live in another culture unless we experience it physically. While the immediate survivors of civilization’s collapse struggle to recreate the only life they know, the generations that follow have no tie to, or real appreciation of, such a ‘civilization’ culture, because they have no first-hand experience of it. Some technologies have survived, including books, and hand-crank operated ‘electronic’ information tools, but with the end of oil, the collapse of the energy grid, and the subsequent collapse of social, economic, business, educational and political infrastructure, most of these tools are abandoned, not because they can’t be made to work, but because they no longer ‘make sense’ in the context of a new world with no apparent use or need for them.

So these new generations of humans, using nature as their model, and salvaging whatever tools and information they find intuitively useful from the era of civilization, go about crafting, from the bottom up (there is no ‘top down’ any more), bold new human communities that work for them. Because these communities are far-flung, remote from other communities, and of necessity self-sufficient and tied to the ecology of their physical location, the cultures of these communities end up diverging wildly, and appear to the observer (and the reader) as different from each other as Incan culture was from Inuit culture. This divergence occurs despite the fact there is some cultural exchange and trade, and substantial information exchange between the cultures. A single ‘common’ language evolves, learned by everyone but secondary to each culture’s ‘native’ language, and a basic ‘natural community model’, illustrated above, also emerges, although it manifests itself in very different ways.

This natural community model reflects the fact that, to survive and be good citizens of our communities, we all need to acquire and practice certain indigenous capacities (listed on the right side of the chart) that minimize conflict, enable collaboration and demonstrate respect for others and for Gaia, of which we are (finally and again) an integral part. In addition to these capacities, we also, each individually, find that our strengths and our passions tend to be focused in one or more of the nine competency areas shown in the diamonds on the chart. Deciding how, and who to make a living with, is a matter of assessing how your strengths and passions in these areas dovetail with those of others, and how they collectively provide something of value to the community. Regular readers will recognize this as the ‘sweet spot’ at the intersection of your Gift, your Passion and your Purpose, that I’ve written about often recently, and will recognize the result of finding and working together with those whose collective Gifts and Passions meet a shared Purpose as the model for what I have called The Natural Enterprise.

Here’s a quick overview of the nine competency areas I’ve depicted above, and how they work together (I’ll have more to say about this in a future Natural Enterprise article):

1. Explorers: Scientists, researchers, anthropologists. People whose work is to study, observe, perceive and learn. Their work-product is discovery.
2. Interpreters: Teachers, philosophers, story-tellers, activists. People whose work is to teach, coach, provoke, ‘make sense’ of things, add insight to information. Their work-product is understanding.
3. Inventors: Innovators, writers. People whose work is to imagine, conceive, make stuff up, figure out how stuff might be applied. Their work-product is ideas.
4. Designers: Chefs, jewelers, architects. People whose work is to craft, specify, template, make patterns and recipes. Their work-product is models.
5. Generators: Artists, producers, manufacturers. People whose work is to make useful or enjoyable physical stuff. Their work-product is ‘goods’.
6. Nurturers: Gardeners, guardians, nutritionists, preventative health practitioners. People whose work is to cultivate and help people (and Gaia) do what they do best. Their work-product is well-being.
7. Menders: Doctors, nurses, servicers, repairers, renovators. People whose work is to restore what is damaged. Their work-product is sustenance.
8. Actors: Athletes, entertainers. People whose work is to stimulate, ‘recreate’ and refresh. Their work-product is fun.
9. Connectors: Distributors, travelers, nomads. People whose work is to distribute or redistribute stuff — ‘goods’, information, or ideas. Their work-product is communication. They are the principal physical link between communities.

The first seven competency areas flow, sort of, one to the next. Discoveries are interpreted to produce understanding, which provokes ideas, which are designed into models, which are produced as ‘goods’, which provide well-being, which is sustained by menders.

Young people in these communities are encouraged to try their hand at all of these things, to learn what their real strengths and passions are. They are also encouraged to be Nomads — to travel to and live among other communities in order to find the people they love and would love to make a living with, and to act as Connectors in that capacity.

This model is just an emergent shared framework of community roles, not a taxonomy of roles that, once chosen, defines your position in the community for life. It’s a personal navigation tool, not a pigeon-holing structure. It’s implicit in the way the communities depicted in the book operate, but is not explicit.

The novel is told in the ‘voice’ of a young Nomad recounting her experiences in twelve different communities (the book’s twelve chapters). But she changes her ‘voice’ to reflect the utterly different cultures of these communities as she becomes immersed in and part of each. So the novel is actually a collection of twelve short stories.

The novel aspires to do three things:

1.  First, it portrays the future as a utopia, not a dystopia, both to give people hope that, when civilization does collapse, the life that comes after will not be short, nasty and brutish, but actually quite wonderful, and to explain how and why it will be this way.
2. Secondly, it attempts to entertain and stimulate the imagination by telling credible and interesting stories, one per chapter, set in very different 23rd century communities, each community wildly divergent from the last. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of imagination, perhaps more than I or anyone is capable of. Each story, in addition to describing a different way to live, will also reveal something fundamental about the human condition and human nature, and will hopefully be fun (and provocative) to read as well.
3. Thirdly, the novel as a whole will be a mystery novel, as it reveals through the stories clues as to how and why the crash of civilization occurred and how and why certain surprising events followed the crash. Not just a whodunit with the Earth and modern society as the murder victims, but a mystery about human resilience, the astonishing power of human imagination, and what happens when we do what we must.

At this point I’m not expecting you to ‘buy’ the plot — I haven’t given you enough here to do that. What I’d like from you, dear reader, are two things:

• Your thoughts on the Natural Community model. What’s missing? What essential roles of an egalitarian community of, say, 150 people do not fall into any of these categories? What essential roles in a Natural Enterprise of, say 30 people within a Natural Community do not fall into any of these categories? Is there anything ‘unnatural’ about the model? It’s based on my amateur reading of anthropology and biology books and on my own observations of how things seem to work in nature and (when management permits it) in highly effective businesses.
• Some ideas on characters for the novel. I don’t want heroes. These communities have no need for heroes and not much adversity to overcome. Or perhaps it would be better to say everyone in these communities is in a way a hero. The stories are about relationships, about love, about re-learning to have fun, about sustainability. But they aren’t preachy do-gooder stories. They’re about people discovering what makes sense, and just doing sometimes-crazy stuff that is part of being human. The characters I want are big-as-life, eccentric, charming, in-the-moment, out-on-the-edge people. People who you could not imagine living in this civilization. Don’t worry about their physical appearance — I’ve got that covered (for example, one of my communities has a preponderance of Explorers — scientists — who adorn themselves in face-paint and masksthat react to light, sound, pheromones etc.) I’m looking for personalities. People completely different from anyone else you have ever met, or could imagine. They can be real or made up. They just need to be way out there.

People whose ideas I use will, of course, be acknowledged in the book.

[Posted from Baltimore]  

On the amateur talent ‘Idol’ shows, many of the programs appear 100% devoted to people who deliberately abase and humiliate themselves just to get on TV. Those who survive are subjected to humiliation and torture by self-proclaimed, egomaniacal ‘judges’, and then again by no-talent, preening, smarmy, blathering ‘hosts’ who torture the ‘contestants’ (and the audience) for much of the show by teasing them about whether they have been ‘eliminated’, ‘fired’, ‘kicked off the island’ or whatever loser-humiliation the program wallows in. This isn’t clever people playing the court jester to the clued-out king. This is those with power rubbing it in the face of the powerless, throwing the Christians to the lions stuff.

On a do-it-yourself ‘reality’ show, a celebrity repeatedly berates her ‘apprentice’ candidates, accusing them of being lazy, incompetent, valueless. She says there is no work ethic, no pride in achievement anymore. On another, the celebrity literally screams at the ‘apprentices’ that he is the boss, that they are workers, that anything he says, or his wife says, is to be done immediately without question, and that any “worthless” candidate who doesn’t like it will be unceremoniously kicked out because “there are thousands of others who are dying for the opportunity” to face this obnoxious piece of crap’s abuse.

What is going on here? Why do people watch this garbage?

I considered several theories about this before I decided on one that made sense. Here are four theories that didn’t:

• The Conservative Propaganda Theory: Conservatives rail about the fact that people don’t respect authority anymore, that they don’t appreciate the need and importance of hard work anymore. They will tell you that people are morally debased and inherently sinful: lazy, stupid, uncaring, spoiled, unfocused — and need to be constantly whipped into shape “for their own good”. These programs, by elevating the rich and famous to Godlike status and having them abuse their obsequious underlings, seem to be reinforcing this worldview. But the viewers I spoke to don’t see this moral/class war at all. In fact, they seem to delight in the foolishness, foppishness and excess of the power celebrities as much as that of the ‘contestants’. 
• The Schadenfreude Theory: These programs, like most current comedy series that feature people behaving badly and being punished for it, could be seen to be a means to make people feel better about their own situation by depicting people in a much worse situation. This same grim tendency is also apparent in current horror films, which eschew suspense in favour of gruesome, prolonged and pointless torture of innocent people. The idea is that we vent our anger and frustration by relating to the physical and psychological violence inflicted on others. The fact that the victims are not ‘bad’ people, just innocent people ‘like us’ is precisely the point: They are the sufferers, we are fortunate by contrast, and therefore feel better about our personal situation, horrific as it may be. But the viewers I spoke to actually seem to feel sorry for the losers on these programs, and even relate to them and feel a little outraged at the blatantly unfair treatment they are receiving.
• The Hero Myth Theory: One of civilization’s most enduring myths is that of the ‘average Joe’ who rises to become a hero by overcoming astonishing adversity. Most Disney movies, fables and business biographies are re-tellings of this myth. In reality, success, fame and fortune almost never come to those who overcome great adversity — they are mostly inherited or acquired by extraordinary good luck. But the few exceptions keep the myth alive, which is fortunate because it’s doubtful whether our current economy would survive if people stopped believing in it. The problem with this theory is that the heroes don’t win. The guys who win are the ones who are the most popular, not the most talented, or the ones that overcame the most adversity. The most popular are the cutest or most charming or folksiest. The lesson of the hero myth is not “nice guys finish second”, which seems to be the message of Reality TV. 
• The Attention Deficit Theory: We are so exhausted, distracted and numbed after addressing the needs of the moment and the requirements of our jobs that at the end of the day we don’t want to work hard watching TV. We just want to ‘veg out’. I love mysteries, clever programs and films that require a lot of attention and energy, but I can’t take them every day. I just don’t have the bandwidth left. For the attention-deprived, special effects, graphic violence, and programs that we can follow without watching, or while multi-tasking, are all most people have the attention and energy to handle. The problem with this theory is that if you have a scarcity of something (time, energy and attention) the last thing you want to do is squander it on something stupid and meaningless. You want to spend it doing something that makes you happy (e.g. listening to good music, puttering with your favourite hobby, doing something with people you love, or making love), not something that leaves you worked-up and angry. 

The other day I heard an interview with an award-winning (and very funny) Canadian stand-up comedian who is moving to Europe because he is disgusted with the thinness and cheap vulgarity of his fellow North American stand-ups, and the indifference of our crowds to the quality of comedy. He suggested that this generation has been ‘dumbed down’ and now expects less quality, so those ‘selling it’ need not and do not bother to demand quality. That got me thinking — is this all about lowered expectations, and if so, why?

The theory that answers this question, and does make some sense to me, is the Self-Preservation Theory, and it holds that we are intuitively so pessimistic about our future that we need to insulate and inure ourselves against the sadness and suffering that we are likely to face. A recent study suggests that people who are prepared for pain report it as less intense, when it occurs, than people who are surprised by it. While the average person continues to think his/her life is, and will continue to be, better than average, we are overwhelmed with evidence that this ‘average’ is getting worse and will continue to worsen. Subconsciously, perhaps, we are preparing for the worst, numbing ourselves to anguish by witnessing it happening to others and preparing for it ourselves. It is our nature to lower our expectations when things get bad: During Great Depressions, wars, and in the face of personal tragedy, it takes less to make us happy and more to really make us miserable. We adapt.

Generations X and Y clearly have lower expectations of the future than our boomer generation had at the same age. They are the ones whose behaviours increasingly exhibit signs of anomie, fatalism, thrill-seeking and other tendencies (psychopathies?) illustrated in the lower right corner of the above chart. They are the ones who go to see movies with graphic violence and horror that we fund repulsive. And they are the ones (disproportionately) watching Reality TV. Maybe they’re just steeling for a future that will see even more horrific abuses of power, greater disparity between rich and poor, more suffering and misery for all. 

Or am I just getting old, and just don’t ‘get it’? What do you think? If the amateur talent ‘Idol’ programs only showed the ultimate winners, in glorious concert, and if the ‘apprentice’ competitions only showed hard-working fast-learning novices accomplishing remarkable things by working together, would anyone watch?

Whimsical postscript: Is it just a coincidence that we learned this week that one of Canada’s highest-paid ‘celebrities’ is the teeth-grindingly glib and talentless moron who ‘hosts’ Canadian Idol, who also happens to be the son of a former prime minister who so abused his power that his hundred-year-old political party waswiped out and taken over by a regional fringe party? What better evidence that wealth and power does not come from talent, hard work and integrity? — Oh, I forgot about the POTUS. Never mind.

The book is about why the future we imagine, plan for and work towards ends up so often being both very different from and less satisfying than we expected. This is due in part to not knowing ourselves, and how we are changing, and not knowing what makes us happy and will make us happy:

Gilbert explains why we have the propensity to imagine the future (such thoughts take up about 12% of all out thinking). “Why can’t we just be here now?”, he asks. His answer: “Thinking about the future can be so pleasurable that sometimes we’d rather think about it than get there”. It has practical value, too. Anticipation can mitigate the impact of unpleasant events, and imagining them can motivate us to try to avoid them. We have an innate desire to control our futures, and become unhappy and hopeless when we feel we have lost that ability. But we are terrible at imagining our future, and the happiness it will (or won’t) bring us, because of what Gilbert calls illusions of foresight.

Most of the book is devoted to describing these illusions, which fall into three categories:

• The illusions of realism: “Imagination works so quickly, quietly and effectively that we are insufficiently skeptical of its products.” We idealize the future. We conjure up perfect stereotypes of behaviours and events. We omit details of the future in our future imaginings that will powerfully affect how we will feel. We fail to imagine what won’t happen. We make compound errors both of ‘filling in’ and ‘leaving out’ in our imagined vision of our future selves and future lives. As a result, what we plan and strive for is unreal, a complete fiction. And when we get there, we are bound to be disappointed.
• The illusions of presentism: “Imagination’s products are…well, not particularly imaginative, which is why the imagined future often looks so much like the actual present”. We tend to project the future, and not anticipate or allow for discontinuities. We are rooted in the present, and can’t imagine things (like a post-civilization world without oil) that are very different from the way they are now. And what we love (or loathe) now can diminish through habituation. The future will not be a projection of the present ”only more so”, so our plans based on imagining such a future are bound to be inappropriate, even useless.
• The illusions of rationalization: “Imagination has a hard time telling us how we will think about the future when we get there. If we have trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing how we will see them when they happen”. The ‘future you’ will be different from the ‘present you’, and the job, or love, you dreamed about will likely turn out not to be what the ‘future you’ really wants at all. We are much more resilient than we think, and possess what Gilbert calls a “psychological immune system” which “cooks the facts” (shades of Lakoff) and provides us with comforting illusions about ourselves and our situation. We see ourselves more positively than objectively, and while we do most things subconsciously, we positively rationalize ‘conscious’ reasons for what we do, and don’t do, in order to make ourselves feel better, and more ‘in control’. We regret inactions more than actions. And illogically we view situations that we perceive as inevitable more positively than very similar situations over which we have some choice.

So what can we do about this? How can we ‘see our future’ and anticipate how we will feel about it more accurately?

Gilbert examines and discards several alternatives, including practicing imagining (just retrenches the illusions) and asking others for opinion or coaching (they just reinforce the same myths that cloud our own imaginations). Instead, he advocates finding ‘surrogates’ — people who are now in a situation similar to the one you think you might be in in the future, and asking yourself if you would be happy if you’d done what they did and were doing what they’re doing. Less imagination, and more research. This entails learning more about what the future will probably be like when you get there, so that you have a richer context for understanding what your life might be like, and then searching for people who have already made a similar journey — people whose present is as much as possible like what your future, as objectively as you can imagine, will be like. Then study them, and learn about your future self. In other words, get real.

Gilbert does an interesting job dissecting the argument that we’re all unique, and that no surrogate could possibly teach us about our future or how happy we will be in it. Buy the book to read this, and just for the fun of reading this ‘anti-self-help book’.

In the afterword, Gilbert suggests the ideas in this book have particular application in making the three most important decisions about our future that we make in our lives: Where to live, What to do, and Who to do it with. I suspect his next book will tackle these issues specifically. I hope it will tell us how to go about finding these ‘surrogates’.

So now we have three ‘finding people’ challenges. Finding who to live with, and who to make a living with, two subjects I’ve written a lot about on this blog. And now, who to learn about the ‘future you’ from. Ideally, since the third one has a substantial impact on the first two, we should probably start with it. So much of what I’m learning these days keeps coming back tofinding models to learn from.

Time to go visit some intentional communities, and talk to some people there who are about ten years older and wiser than I am.