The Last Word On Nothing

I’ve been following Liz Dunn’s happiness research for a while, and now she has co-written a new book, Leave the Lights On: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species (Penguin Random House), about how joy could be the missing weapon in our fight against climate change. Here we sit down for a Q&A about her work.

Jessa: So you and Jiaying Zhao, colleagues at University of British Columbia, have co-written a book. What are your respective research foci and how do they fit together in this collaboration?

Liz: I’m a happiness researcher, and my work focuses on how to optimize our use of resources to maximize happiness. So time, money, technology—I studied AI and smartphones and things like that, and then I got interested in carbon as another one of these. In this case, we don’t want to create too much of it. JZ is one of the world’s leading experts on the behavioural side of climate change. So, how do we change human behaviour in a way that tackles climate change.

Our two specialties are usually on opposite sides of the room—we do not find ourselves next to each other at a cocktail party. But in this case, bringing our almost non-overlapping areas of expertise together has been really powerful. It creates dual lenses so we can find the sweet spot between having a genuine impact on climate change and what makes people happier.

Jessa: One of the concepts in the book that really rang true for me was hedonic adaptation. What people think will make them happy only does up to a point. How does that manifest in our daily lives?

Liz: Yeah, so hedonic adaptation is like the gravity of happiness research—it keeps us from floating away with joy. Whatever happens to us in life, we tend to adapt to it. That’s good because we are pretty good at recovering from bad things, but we also recover from good ones. Somebody from the Renaissance would be blown away by the comforts and conveniences of our daily lives, but we don’t walk around marveling at them. We get used to them.

This is important for thinking about climate change, because it can be tempting to overconsume, ratcheting up our desires and feeling like we need more. The mistake we make is thinking the 10^th pair of designer shoes will give us the same level of pleasure the first one did.

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This first ran September 24, 2015; since then I have stopped going to that coffeeshop and no longer see Larry and John, its chief scientists, and in fact I hardly remember what they looked like and the coffeeshop moved anyway. Time is an illusion, you say? not when so much stuff undeniably happens in it; it’s real and it’s coming after you.

Anyway, this all reminds me of a story I’m working on in which a bunch of more or less ordinary guys track the satellites that the military keeps secret; the guys are out in their backyards or apartment balconies using binoculars and stopwatches. And that reminds me that citizen science is real and flourishing; and that I think people are natively scientists, they’re born scientists, that people do science the way they breathe.

Somewhere in the deep pits of my mind, I still think of “scientists” as remote people whose sentences I won’t understand, and of “science” as an incomprehensible body of knowledge I have to memorize.  This is probably also the public’s image of science.  But if 1000 years as a science writer have taught me nothing else, it’s 1) that science is the way people think when they’re admiring their worlds, when they’re thinking of explanations of their worlds that they can most reliably believe.  And 2) that scientists are just specially-educated versions of the guys in the coffee shops.

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On the way into my usual coffee shop this morning, I looked at the nice crossing guard across the street.  She saw that I looked at her and waved.  I wondered how she knew I was looking at her.  The coffee shop was too noisy to concentrate on my magazines, so I asked John and Larry about the crossing guard. Why can people too far away to see your eyeballs know that you’re looking at them?  John and Larry are regulars who leave right at 8:00; they’re always dressed for the weekend. “Maybe you stop moving your head,” said John, supplying the hypothesis.  “Maybe having your head still and facing one way is noticeable.”  “I think that’s right,” said Larry, supplying possible evidence that could back the hypothesis or not.  “Look at cats.  Look at people looking at something you can’t see but now you want to and you look too.”

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The women in the coffee shop over by the window use their outdoor voices and sitting across the small room from them, I can hear every word they say whether I want to or not and I never want to.  They’re always like this.  My hypothesis: the women are trying to impress each other or are competing so they’re playing for an audience.  I politely wait until the women leave, then I tell Larry and John my hypothesis but they don’t think much of it; they’re not into the psychology of the individual.  Instead they see I have a problem and figure out their own hypothesis: I’m distracted by conversation. John’s office doesn’t have cubicles, he says, it’s open, and “pink noise” works. So he has a theory you could test:  “What hooks you into somebody’s conversation is the rhythms of the sentences,” he says, “and if enough people are talking that the sentences overlap and you don’t hear a rhythm, you can ignore it.”

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One regular is open about the psychoses he lives with.  He knows everybody’s name – “Hello, Ann,” he always says — and seems to appreciate the coffee shop for its company, its social reassurance.  Once when he went off his meds and the counter kids couldn’t figure out how to calm him down and get him help, they called the cops, and the cops came in like thunder, throwing the tables out of the way; and another regular walked in and assessed the scene about to go lethal, and said, “Hey, man! Let’s go to the hospital!” so they quietly did.  A couple weeks later, two game-designers in the coffee shop were talking about this regular.  “He says he’s moving up to Pennsylvania,” says one young game-designer.  “I think he needs a regular community. How is he going to find a regular community like this?” The other game designer didn’t have an answer. But a testable hypothesis, or at least as testable as any social science gets.

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The regulars are amateurs compared to the little neighbor kid, aged 5 or 6, who lives across the street.  She’s walking barefoot on the conglomerate sidewalk, paying attention to every step. “Mama,” she says, “these bumps on the sidewalk. How does my brain know about these bumps in the sidewalk? My toes feel them. But how do my toes tell my brain? How does my brain know what my body is doing?”

And my favorite: a two-year old’s older brother was talking to a neighbor about rocks. The neighbor said she had a piece of lava in her living room, did the boy want to see it? The two-year old, whose speech was just developing and who talked as though he were learning a foreign language, interrupted the neighbor and asked, “Do. You. Have. A. Volcano. In. Your. House?”

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See? A scientific inference based on previous knowledge; scientific questions with evidence and believable answers or not. I’m not saying  these people are doing science, only that they’re thinking like scientists, asking questions and proposing answers that could be turned into science.  I’m saying that if you want to know the origins of science, you can just hang around coffee shops and conglomerate sidewalks and houses that may well have volcanoes in them.

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Photos came from Flickr and the links no longer work and I can’t find them. I apologize to the photographers who obviously take charming pictures of curious people.

I'm so happy to see these guys year after year, so I'm celebrating them again here on LWON.

I don't know why this came out in "verse," but here it is. I'm no poet, but I had fun regardless. And if you read it right, it really does scan! 

Upon my feeder yesterday
A cowbird male did land,
Brown-headed with his body coal
At first glance not too grand.

But then I took the time to learn
The story of his kind,
I peered more closely, read some facts
That truly changed my mind.

Named for chasing cattle herds
To nab bugs in their wake,
They thrive in meadows, grass, and fields
‘cross these United States.

A male’s song’s like a water drop
A female’s more a chatter,
Both voices seem to do the job
When something is the matter.

It seems that in this species
Evolution had her druthers:
The mama doesn’t build a nest
‘stead lays her eggs in others’.

This obligate brood parasite
Her bets she sure does hedge,
Lets others spend their energy
to get her chicks to fledge.

Sounds rude perhaps, but gotta like
this winning strategy,
of passing on one’s DNA
in total secrecy.

Its name suggests a dullish bird
With colors bland as grime,
Females, true, aren’t vibrant birds
But males are sublime.

As sunshine hits one's feathers and
The light upon them plays,
They burst with plums and glossy blues
As if they’re dipped in glaze.

His head's a little nugget
as of creamy choc-o-late,
He holds himself with confidence
that draws him mates, I'll bet.

Mine looked at me, then looked away
That seemed to be the trend,
But when finally he held my gaze
I felt I'd made a friend.

I’ve come to love these common birds
I’m hit by Cupid’s arrow!
What's next to get a second chance?
That boring little sparrow.
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Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash