rss-bridge 2022-01-25T00:20:00+00:00

Minimizing Pain, Maximizing Joy

Life is often filled with hardships and tragedies. For thousands of years, philosophers have come up with strategies to help us cope with such hardship. This week, we revisit a 2020 conversation with philosopher William Irvine about ancient ideas — backed by modern psychology — that can help us manage disappointment and misfortune.

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[A pair of tennis shoes on a child, jumping in a puddle.]

Minimizing Pain, Maximizing Joy

By Hidden Brain Staff

/ January 27, 2022

Additional Resources:

Irvine, William B., “William B. Irvine Literary Website” https://www.williambirvine.com/.

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We've all been there: you park your car in a giant lot, only to come back a few hours later and have no idea where you parked. You wander around, your arms laden with shopping bags, cursing. TV shows like "Seinfeld" milk these situations for laughs.Seinfeld Clip (Jason Alexander, as George Costanza): Where the hell is this car, Kramer?Seinfeld Clip (Jerry Seinfeld): We need a system.Seinfeld Clip (Michael Richards, as Cosmo Kramer): Well, it's got to be here.Seinfeld Clip (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, as Elaine Benes): Why have you been using so many colors? The numbers go up to 40.Seinfeld Clip (Jerry Seinfeld): Maybe it's not on this level.Seinfeld Clip (Jason Alexander, as George Costanza): What?Seinfeld Clip (Jerry Seinfeld): There's four different levels.Shankar Vedantam: When things like this happen in real life, you probably don't laugh. Or take bigger things. You slip on the ice, and you break a wrist. Someone leaves the stove on, and your house catches on fire. Or the world suddenly and inexplicably is gripped by a major pandemic.News Clips: Cases now topping 15 million here in the US, 1.3 million of them in just the past seven days.Shankar Vedantam: Jobs are lost. Lives are lost.News Clips: As hard as it is to fathom the record number of COVID deaths, public health officials are warning tonight that it will likely get worse before the situation improves.Shankar Vedantam: Life is filled with tragedies and hardship. For thousands of years, philosophers have come up with strategies to help us cope with setbacks. This week on Hidden Brain, an ancient philosophy backed by modern psychology shows us how to respond wisely to disappointment and misfortune.Shankar Vedantam: William Irvine is a philosopher at Wright State University. He has spent years studying how we respond to setbacks, and how we might use ideas from philosophy and psychology to respond differently. Bill Irvine, welcome to Hidden Brain.William Irvine: Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.Shankar Vedantam: I want to start with a couple of small examples of the kind of irritants we all experience. You were recently taking a nap and you got woken up by a call from a telemarketer. What happened next?William Irvine: I was enjoying a mid-afternoon nap. The phone rang, and I answered. It was just a robot. Then I pressed the buttons necessary to get to an actual real person. When I got to that person, my sleep-deprived brain, you know I had that kind of fog, and I launched into a verbal attack. I rather surprised myself. I don't remember the details, but I do remember the phrase, "You lying snake," being among them. It's like a part of me emerged from some back corner of my mind and simply took control, and I was along for the ride, watching what happened.Shankar Vedantam: Yeah. So, some years ago you and your wife were on a vacation to Morocco. You were camping in the Sahara. You had scheduled a camel ride across the desert the next day. It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience, once-in-a-lifetime moment. But as you lay in your tent, your mind was filled with intrusive and unpleasant thoughts. What were those thoughts, Bill?William Irvine: Yeah, no it was supposed to be kind of this wonderful dream-like adventure, and this particular trip featured a night in a tent. It was a nice tent. Don't think pup tent, think tent with an internal shower, if you can imagine such a thing.Shankar Vedantam: Oh, wow.William Irvine: And two camel rides, one at sunset and one at sunrise. So I was very much looking forward to it. They served us dinner there in the tent, and then we headed off for bed. I was about to drift off. I was tired. We had done a bunch of traveling that day. Just as I was about to fall asleep, an incident arose. I don't need to go into the details of the incident, but involving someone I knew, and it was an unpleasant incident. I found myself getting angry. I could feel my blood pressure rising, that kind of anger.William Irvine: I thought, "Well, this is really stupid because I have a sunrise camel ride tomorrow. So, I need to get some sleep." So, I rolled over and the voice indeed went away, until just as I was about to drift off to sleep, it came back. It just is this reminder. That's kind of how it went through the night. Then I experienced what I call "Meta Anger". It's a whole other level of anger, about getting angry about something as stupid as what I was getting angry about. I kind of transcended normal anger.Shankar Vedantam: I feel that the stories you are telling are so universal. We all have these experiences. We stew over things, lose our temper, lose sleep over things. I feel I do this all the time. When it happens I tell myself, sometimes this is happening at 3:00 in the morning, "This is so pointless. You're not going to feel rested in the morning. All this fretting is not going to solve anything." You have a wonderful analogy to how these thoughts operate in our minds. Tell me the analogy of the annoying roommate.William Irvine: Yeah, so imagine that you're trapped in an apartment with this roommate. The problem was, he was a very annoying human being. He would basically hang out in the back bedroom playing video games or something, but every now and then he would come out and tell you something you should worry about. As you were falling asleep in your own bedroom, he would come in and tap your shoulder and say, "You know, there's something probably you should be angry about."William Irvine: You would want to eliminate this roommate. You would want to expel him. You might want to do physical violence against him. That's kind of what it's like. That's the human experience. You've got this roommate, he's not in a back bedroom, he lives in a corner of your mind and comes out to make you miserable. That isn't necessarily his goal. He's just thoughtless. It's just what he does. That's the human experience.Shankar Vedantam: Both you and I consider the movie "Groundhog Day" one of our all-time favorites. On the surface, it's just another Hollywood romantic comedy, but I want to spend a moment with the movie since I think it reveals some really interesting philosophical ideas that will inform this conversation. For the people who haven't watched "Groundhog Day", the movie's about Phil Connors. He's a cynical TV weatherman.Groundhog Day Clips: Out in California, they're going to have some warm weather tomorrow, gang wars and some very overpriced real estate. Up in the Pacific Northwest-Shankar Vedantam: He dislikes his colleagues. He hates his job. He's been assigned to cover the Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. It's the middle of winter. Phil thinks this is a boring assignment.Groundhog Day Clips: This is pitiful, 1,000 people freezing their butts off waiting to worship a rat. What a hype.Shankar Vedantam: He can't wait to get it over with. But after he finishes filing this lackluster report, bad weather forces him to stay overnight in town. When he wakes up the next day, he discovers that time has rewou

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