Lonely Spirit, Disturbed Mind

[photo by Robb North]

Two of my recent posts have brought my mental condition into question. The one about what to order when someone else is paying for your meal and the one about not giving advice.

In both these posts I can be criticized for giving too much thought to rather trivial decisions and behaviors. To that charge I must plead guilty. I am a person who has struggled to understand human behavior my whole life.

I am socially retarded and unlike Penelope Trunk I can’t blame Asperger’s Syndrome for my condition.

The primary response to “what to eat” was astonishment that I would think about it in the first place (just get whatever you want, duh), and a projected disappointment I would miss the wonderful opportunity to enjoy lunch with friends because I was considering the behavioral economic implications of what I ordered.

Let me assure you, I very much enjoyed the meal and I did not spend much time thinking about it. I probably thought more about it after the fact than I did at the time.

I will admit however, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking (or over thinking depending on who you ask) about things which should seem obvious to me. The reason I say they should be obvious to me is because they are apparently obvious to everyone else.

Better never to have been

It’s probably due to these mental proclivities I particularly enjoyed my recent visit with Dr. David Benatar.

Dr. Benatar is a professor of philosophy and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. For the past year he has been on sabbatical working on his new book at Princeton.

He spent a few days in Annapolis this week and we talked about his last book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. It has a quite provocative title and I wanted to know how he backed up such a bold claim.

For all my personal failures and painful lessons, for all the discomfort I experience with social norms and personal interaction, I have never considered I would have been better off had I not been born.

Let me assure you first of all that Dr. Benatar is brilliant and, so far as I can determine, of sound mind.

The depth of his thought process however, makes my deepest thoughts appear as dips in the kiddie pool. I was amazed at the extent to which he doggedly pursued an intellectual rabbit hole until he eventually found the rabbit.

Better to be delusional

One of the arguments he makes in the book, though not his central argument, is that humans are objectively experiencing more pain, discomfort and unhappiness in life than pleasure, comfort or happiness.

Most people do not believe that because we delude ourselves through several complex mental processes. For example, we remember the past as being better than it was and we interpret discomfort as happiness if someone near us is suffering more than we are.

Not that this is news, the Pollyanna Principle has been well documented and Daniel Gilbert discusses such positivity bias in his book Stumbling on Happiness, which I enjoyed and highly recommend. But based on such a propensity, Dr. Benatar says we can discount any self-assessment of wellbeing.

I asked Dr. Benatar if it’s possible we do experience more instances of pain than pleasure but we value pleasure more than we devalue pain so the result is a net positive.

I found his response amusing. He caused me to answer my own question by offering the following thought experiment:

Suppose you could trade one year of suffering the worst imaginable pain for one year of the most sublime pleasure. Would you make that trade?

My instinctive reaction was, no. Even after he increased the ratio to two years of pleasure to one year of pain I wouldn’t make the trade. Clearly, I had to concede, I did not value pleasure more than pain.

Nevertheless I remain stubbornly unconvinced that it would have been better for me not to have been born.

As I explained to Dr. Benatar, even knowing I’m deluding myself, I still genuinely feel my life is on net more positive than negative. So why not just be happy with that?

Perhaps this is how people feel when they try to convince me I don’t need to I examine the questions of what to eat when someone else is paying or when, if ever, I should offer advice. Don’t over think it.

Dr. Benatar did make me wonder however, if there really are any “objective” criteria we can use to determine if we’re happy or not?