Tags
Ambrose, Barry Schwartz, Calvin Trillin, Christopher Peterson, Dr. Seuss, Four Noble Truths, Hebrew Bible, Herbert Simon, New York City, Penelope Trunk
[EDIT: Image of New York City removed at copyright holder’s request.]
This weekend I went to New York City with friends so they could attend a bridal shower. I love New York – but I’m also wary of it. Happiness researcher Christopher Peterson ran an online happiness questionnaire and analyzed the results by zip code – and found that the most miserable zip codes of all were found in midtown Manhattan. Peterson himself cautions that this is not a controlled or rigorous experiment, and even if it were, it would still be measuring happiness by the questionable measure of self-report.
Still, in many respects these results are exactly what I would expect. I found this happiness data from Penelope Trunk, who nails the problem with living in New York exactly. If you are (like me) the kind of person who loves city life, then in New York you really do have the best of everything, at least on this continent and in some cases anywhere: the best food, the best entertainment, the best shopping for almost any goods you could want, the best access to transportation, the best art. But that’s exactly the problem. On one hand, you’re competing with everyone else to have access to the best of everything, so everything is very expensive, so you have to work much harder to make more money. (A little like Dr. Seuss’s Solla Sollew, where they have no troubles except for the fact that you can’t actually live there.) On the other hand, and more insidiously, if you live in New York, it’s probably because you are the kind of person who tries to have access to the best of everything.
That is to say that New Yorkers, by and large, are maximizers rather than satisficers. The distinction comes from the economist Herbert Simon, and was recently popularized by positive psychologist Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice. In brief: maximizers try to weigh every option and ensure that every choice is the best they can make, to get the best result. Satisficers, on the other hand, make choices quickly and don’t mind the idea that their choice might not have been the best.
I notice this problem in particular with respect to food. I love international food, and to me that’s the most wonderful thing of all about New York – it has a wider variety of food choices than just about anywhere else in the world. New York has Surinamese and Bajan and Xinjiang restaurants; in Manhattan you can get Burmese and Senegalese food delivered to your door, often 24 hours a day. Food writer Calvin Trillin lives in the food paradise of lower Manhattan, in some respects for exactly this reason. But in Trillin’s work one finds little gratitude for this extraordinary and unprecedented variety. Instead he maintains a list of all the food he can’t get in Manhattan, and calls it his “Register of Frustration and Deprivation.” Trillin, in other words, is a maximizer, who will never have enough and never be satisfied – and that seems to me characteristic of New York life. Even when you have the best in the world – maybe especially when you have the best in the world – it’s still not going to be good enough.
In many respects this was the lesson I learned in my youth in Thailand. What makes you unhappy is not that you don’t have enough, it’s the desire for more, itself. The Second Noble Truth again: suffering comes from craving. To live in New York seems to feed that craving.
New York makes me think of the myth of Eden – and the view, going back to St. Ambrose, that the fall from Eden made us better off (“O felix culpa.”) While there are perhaps few places in the world that are less like the Garden of Eden in a literal sense, New York shares with Eden the feeling of being a place where all desires can be satisfied. It seems to me that, if there ever had been an Eden, Adam and Eve would not actually have been happy there – they would have found ways to want more. (Indeed why else would the fall have happened?) At least for a city-lover like me, choosing to live outside of Eden, or outside of New York, is accepting and living with the fact that you can’t always get what you want – even within Eden.
There is indeed a similarity between Eden and NY, insofar as the fall from Eden is usually described as due to the desire to *know* (not to possess –although you might argue that knowledge is also something one can long for as if it were a material thing) more. And the satisficers (if I interpret correctly) are indeed people who are not just happy with what they have, but also with what they *know*. They do not want to know about a cheaper supermarket, a better restaurant, etc.
But this is also the point: one can agree about the ethical need to be happy with what one has, but isn’t there an ethical requirement to *know* more? Would we justify someone who lived in the Fourties in Germany and was just satisfied with the few news he received from the Government?
As for the satisficers/maximizers: should not one be happy with what one has, though/because one knows about other possible options? One knows that there are other possible men/women (you know, family is my favourite example), but because one has long thought about that, one is happy with one’s partner. The opposite case, that is, one is faithful to one’s partner just because one does not even think about someone else, i.e. “by default”, is possibly not ideal for the partner.
Excellent points, Elisa. I used to see happiness in some sense as the only intrinsic good, first in a simple utilitarian sense of pleasure and then in a more Aristotelian sense of flourishing; this post addresses some of the reasons I moved away from that. Truth seems like it must be valuable for its own sake; the point might extend to knowledge. Penelope Trunk herself makes a related point: despite noticing that New Yorkers are less happy, she wants to be in New York anyway because she decided she’d rather have an interesting life than a happy one. So, while moving to New York may be a bad decision if happiness is the highest priority, that doesn’t necessarily mean nobody should try to live in New York.
I wonder about your example on partners as well. I think a problem may be that if you think too much about the available options, you may eventually find someone whose characteristics in total look better than your partner’s, and start desiring to be away from the partner (especially if this happens at a time when things with the partner are not going particularly well)! Sure, the earlier on it is in a relationship, the more you need to consider whether it’s right for you – but surely as well, there comes a time where you need to say you’ve made the decision and it’s time to stop looking around.
Had not ever thought about cities and collective culture in terms of Simon’s distinction, but it makes a kind of prima facie sense, & certainly in the case of NY. My understanding, though, is that the same people can be maximizers & satisficers in different regions of their lives. Also, note that the maximizer, if his decision goes awry, tends (according to Schwartz, I think), to blame themselves, whereas, as you say, satisficers sort of shrug these things off.
If I understand you, you’re suggesting that Eden was the maximizer’s ideal smorgasbord. I rather think that Eden would be more of the satisficer’s mental state. A subjective circumstance, rather than an objective one.
Hmm… I can see Eden being interpreted in two very different ways here, ways which would likely reflect much larger theological differences – including one’s own endorsement of satisficing vs. maximizing. (But both take the felix culpa view that the Fall was a good thing.)
I suspect you’re putting forth an interpretation coherent with a maximizer’s view: Eden is the Epicurean garden, satisfying enough needs that humans are capable of being content – but chose not to be. And that choice was well made: it gives us a chance to build a world much better than a quiet garden, a just world.
Whereas in my interpretation above, Eden is a place overflowing with the objects of desire, but continually leaving people unsatisfied, as New York does. So it’s not that the choice to leave Eden was well made – it wasn’t, really – but it needed to happen, because only outside Eden could we be spiritually developed enough to become satisfied.
I love seeing the big differences in worldview that can come out of small differences in interpretation.