I distinctly remember that day. I was walking the streets of New York, where I had recently moved after landing an amazing job. By my slow pace and distracted walk, constantly looking up at the skyscrapers in awe, one could clearly see I was new to the city.
A couple of months later, I felt I had more or less settled in. Gradually, I became used to the asphalt landscape, the subway wasn’t stressful anymore and streets, faces and places felt familiar. Then suddenly a thought popped up in my mind, completely out of the blue: is this it?
When I say the thought came completely out of the blue, I mean it. I do not remember feeling sad or melancholic. In many ways, I loved my life, but I could not but admit that in spite of all, I felt nothing or at least nothing like what I had imagined I would.
I didn’t want to look blase, so I didn’t share this with anyone at the time. Instead, I faked a super-excited, life-is-awesome face each time anyone asked, since at an intellectual level, I was still aware of how lucky I was. With time, however, several friends have come to me with similar experiences. Apparently if you live long enough, it seems inevitable to feel underwhelmed by jobs, relationships, family, friends and/or things.
One may argue, and probably rightly so, that such feelings come from a lack of awareness, a lack of gratitude for what life brings. But gratitude does not come easily or immediately. Gratitude is a practice, a long negotiation between life and yourself, reality and expectations. This is why in the midst of this melancholic, disappointed, sometimes angry feeling, an imposed gratefulness can feel like a lame, fake consolation.
But we still want to be happy, therefore, what can we do to avoid the is- this-it-feeling?
Expectations, expectations, expectations
“The future is a memory”. I think if I had come up with that phrase myself, I could die now and have no regrets. Actually it is a quote from Antonio Damasio’s book Descartes’ Error, that I highly recommend.
Think about it: when you imagine the future, what is that projection based on? the only thing we have: our own experience, our memories. When you picture yourself landing that amazing job or finding the love of your life, the feeling you imagine is a reproduction of the most intense feeling of happiness you have ever experienced. You may remember other times when you were happy, let’s say, when you fell in love for the first time, and replay that feeling in your mind every time you picture that amazing man or woman.
Seen from this perspective, it is easy to see why we seldom feel as happy as we imagine. Firstly, because we are not the same person that we were when we had the experiences that are the main ingredient of our future projections. The impression that love makes for the first time, on a young and naïve mind is not the same that love will make on a more experienced self. If we expect a similar feeling, we are probably going to be disappointed.
Secondly, there is a reason why past experience can be a bad yardstick for future happiness: pleasure diminishes with repetition. In other words, we get used to things and as we do, feelings lose their intensity. But we tend to forget this, and often end up trapped in a cycle where we look to repeat similar experiences in search of the same emotions, only to realize that what we need now may be something different. As the song goes, “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try some time, you’ll find you get what you need”.
Can surprise be the solution?
Surprises cannot be controlled, otherwise they wouldn’t surprise us, but let’s admit it: many of us are control freaks. We want to be masters of our fate and our vision is tunneled towards what we can control, forgetting the role that the unexpected can play in our lives. In this sense, for many of us the pandemic has been a stark, brutal reminder of how mistaken we were.
All this made me think that when we feel underwhelmed by life, maybe the solution lies in factoring in the unexpected. We may not feel as happy as we thought, but are we open to another type of happiness, one that goes beyond what our limited human experience can imagine?
