The .Plan

Daniel Gilbert, happiness researcher extraordinaire, on how to make decisions (if your intent is to maximize happiness):

[Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness] suggests something much more modest: find your dopple-gänger, a person who has done the thing you’re considering doing, and ask if he or she is happy. “If you believe (as I do),” he writes, “that people can generally say how they are feeling at the moment they are asked, then one way to make predictions about our own emotional futures is to find someone who is having the experience we are contemplating and ask them how they feel.”

Thinking of moving from Manhattan to Sun City? Then ask someone who did. Wondering if you should take up yodeling? Talk to a yodeler.

Of course, relying on a sample of one is probably not going to tell you too much, especially when the sample is intrinsically biased. (Instead of talking to a yodeler, why not talk to someone who dropped out of yodeling class?) But this is not the objection Gilbert anticipates. He supposes that we’ll reject the idea of surrogacy on the grounds that “other people are not me” and so our experiences can’t be comparable. According to him, “…we spend so much time searching for, attending to, thinking about, and remembering [individual] differences, we tend to overestimate their magnitude and frequency, and thus end up thinking of people as more varied than they actually are.”

In fact, the growth and popularity of the Internet can be attributed in large measure to its promotion of surrogacy, with sites like Trip Advisor, Amazon, and the Internet Movie Database that let us see what others have to say about the Red Roof Inn at LAX and a Sharp 1.4 cubic foot silver microwave and It Happened One Night…
–Sue Halpern, “Are You Happy?”, New York Review of Books, April 3, 2008

But can we maximize happiness?

The high spots of my life present themselves in retrospect as a series of surprises —happy surprises, from the hand of a very gracious God. Is that unusual? I doubt it. But I also doubt that we dwell on the happy surprises as often and as thoughtfully as we should. There is great wisdom in the elderly children’s chorus, “Count your blessings—name them one by one—and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.”…

Glum Christians who say they have not much to give thanks for are wrong. Some of the specifics of my experience, narrated above, are no doubt peculiar to me, but I cannot believe that the quality of my experience is in any way special. So I say: Look for the happy surprises, for they will help you to keep expressing proper gratitude to God all your days.
–J.I. Packer, “Count Your Surprises”, Christianity Today, March 2008

The Dallas Morning News posts an amazing story about grace and reconciliation in the life of Joshua Hamilton, who in 1999 was the first high schooler to be picked #1 in the baseball draft since Alex Rodriguez:

He started hanging out with the guys from the [tattoo] place, too. He joined them one night at a strip joint. That, Hamilton says, is when he took his first drink and snorted his first line of cocaine.

“It was just a familiar place to go,” Hamilton says. “They weren’t bad people. They just did bad things. But I chose to do it.”…

It began a cycle: There were failed drug tests, suspensions, short rehab trips, stretches of sobriety, reinstatement and, inevitably, relapse…

He married Katie during a sober stretch in 2004, but within six months the marriage was strained. On the day that Katie returned from the hospital following the birth of their daughter, Sierra, she sent Hamilton to pick up prescriptions. A 10-minute errand stretched into something much longer. Katie called a local bar. Josh was there.
–Evan Grant, “Faith brings Texas Rangers’ Hamilton back from the brink”, Dallas Morning News, January 27, 2008

I hear stories like this all the time from my patients. Sometimes their stories of suffering and social isolation can be too much to bear. Most of the time it is hard not to be moved. There are commonalities between their lives, and my life, and perhaps the lives of some of my friends, and sometimes it just seems like a matter of degree and consequence rather than an unbridgeable gulf between me and them.

The stories are often tragic. But every now and then, there is grace:

Hamilton cites a day in the summer of 2005 as his lowest moment. He awoke from a crack binge in a stiflingly hot trailer surrounded by a half-dozen unfamiliar stoned faces. His reaction: He loaned his truck to a dealer to get more crack. When the dealer didn’t return, Hamilton took off on foot, found a pay phone and called his temporarily estranged wife. She picked him up.

He showed up shortly afterwards at his grandmother’s home, gaunt and disheveled. Mary Holt couldn’t turn him away. But it wasn’t until after he used in his grandmother’s home and she confronted him about it that something changed.

“I’m tired of you killing yourself,” she told him in October 2005. “I’m tired of watching you hurt all of these people who care about you.”

I am currently working my way through a book by David Garland and Diana Garland, Flawed Families of the Bible: How God’s Grace Works through Imperfect Relationships. As I read it, I reflect on the ways in which I fail to acknowledge the Christ as the Son of God. Yet sometimes I also cannot help but harbor a deep and abiding hope, knowing that, despite our failures, the Christ makes Himself known to us anyway.

He truly is the author of my life and the editor of my mistakes.

Faith, he regularly testifies, has put him back in baseball after four years of addiction problems so ugly you can’t blame his family for not wanting to relive them. But because of faith, they do — to churches, youth groups and halfway houses.

“God told me he was going to give Josh baseball back, but it wasn’t going to be for baseball,” Katie says. “It was going to be for something much bigger. He was going to give Josh a platform to help others. He is the most beautiful choreographer. It’s not by accident that all the things that have happened in our lives have happened.”

In 2005, Neil Strauss published a book entitled The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists in which he profiled Erik Von Markovik, also known as “Mystery”, apparently one of the most successful pickup artists in the world. Von Markovik went on to write his own book, How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed: The Mystery Method. He now makes a living by helping men do exactly that.

These days, Von Markovik is getting press because he now has his own reality television show on VH1 entitled “The Pick-Up Artist“. Part “The Apprentice”, part “America’s Next Top Model”, and part “Survivor”, this television show follows 8 socially incapacitated men — including the requisite “45 year-old virgin” — who have been given the honor of participating in Von Markovik’s training program on how to pick up women. They are competing for the title of “Master Pickup Artist”.

The first two episodes of this show have been compelling enough to generate repeat viewings. There is just enough character development to make viewers wince when ‘Spoon’ (Stephen Poon) admits to the camera, “I’ve never failed… because I’ve never asked a woman out”. It’s big fun to watch Von Markovik (and his wingmen, ‘J Dog’ and ‘Matador’) teach their tried-and-true methods for bedding beautiful women. And, although the guys are competing against each other for the title of “Master Pickup Artist”, in contrast to many reality television programs these contestants seem to have developed genuine attachments to each other; they find solidarity in their collective ineptness when it comes to picking up women.

Yet, while watching scene after scene of failed pickups can be quite amusing, there is something off-color about what is going on. Something happened to me this weekend to illuminate the underbelly of this humor.

In his book How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed: The Mystery Method, Von Markovik discusses one tactic known as “negging”. In a nutshell, the “neg” is a strategically placed comment that is more or less an insult targeted at a woman in conversation. It is designed to lower her self esteem and make her more vulnerable to the guy’s advances. This is how Von Markovik describes the “neg”:

A “neg” is a concept. A “neg” is a statement or action one would make to briefly disqualify oneself from being considered a potential suitor. It’s not an insult, I’m not putting the girl down. For instance, if I’m in a group of people and I say, perhaps to my girl of interest, “Hey, can you pass me that napkin, please? Thank you.” I go to blow my nose and I look at her and I say, “What, are you gonna watch?” She’ll laugh, of course, and I’ll blow my nose. I’m not insulting her by doing that but I am disqualifying myself as being considered a potential suitor. Her friends know I’m not after her — I’m blowing my nose in front of her!

Then the friends are disarmed and she’s gonna think to herself, “He’s not after me.” If she’s particularly beautiful, she’s gonna wonder why. The only solution to why is either that he’s gay, in which case he’s not threatening, or he’s so accustomed to beauty that he must have beauty in his life. So he must be pretty selective and a hard-wired attraction switch gets triggered.
–Tracy Clark-Flory, “The Artful Seducer”, Salon, August 6, 2007

This weekend at a former classmate’s wedding, I found myself in a situation in which I was interacting with a woman I had just met. At one point during the conversation, right before a photo, I asked her to check my teeth for any pieces of partially chewed vegetable playing peekabo among my incisors. At that instant, I found myself thinking, “hmmm. I guess that could be a ‘neg’” — even though such a maneuver was the farthest thing from my mind, and even though I had harbored not the slightest interest in scoring a ‘pickup’.

So maybe watching the show isn’t such a great idea.

Only several more years and I can qualify to be the 45 year-old on “The Pickup Artist: Bahama Escape!, Vol. 14″. Let us hope I make it that far.

On the plane to and from my apartment-hunting trip, I had the chance to read Timothy Jackson’s book The Priority of Love: Christian Charity and Social Justice. It’s the first book of his that I have read, and I liked it enough that I will probably dig out some of his older journal articles and perhaps his new book.

He has a thorough chapter entitled, “Forgiveness as an Eternal Work of Love”, in which he takes forgiveness to mean “cessation of againstness”. Jackson writes:

My offer of forgiveness wills the good of the other by making his tawdry past no longer exist for me, save in a special (almost impersonal) form of memory. Such a redemption of time requires the inbreaking of eternity, saying to the offender, “It is with me as if you had never transgressed, even as God has forgiven my sin”. This “cessation of againstness” is a teleological suspension of the ethics of merit, an altruism that rises above justice (narrowly defined as suum cuique) without offending against it. “Mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13), but it does not humiliate it. To respond to an infidelity with permanent hostility might be reciprocally fair, for example, but it is not loving. Love would ideally empower another to be self-giving, and thus forgiving, in her turn; but, again, repentance and reform follow, if they follow, only at a distance. Love is not first a technique; it is a presence that serves and suffers. It is a steadfast refusal of ill will characteristic of a sacred heart — but who is capable of this without special grace? Although love does not forget temporal offenses, it recalls them from the point of view of eternity (i.e., in light of God’s mercy and judgment). Not to re-member sin at all is to dis-member time, but to re-member eternally is to re-deem time by seeing all sin (past, present, and future) as already vanquished by Almighty God.

Next up on the reading list: On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.