David Foster Wallace wrote a pretty interesting essay a while back called "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." He goes on a cruise ship for a week, a luxury five-star deal, and writes about the experience in sometimes excruciating detail for Harper's or the Atlantic Monthly or something. It's very entertaining if you can take DFW's style, which at the time I read it I really dug.
But besides being funny I found the article pretty insightful. He writes about the cruise ship brochure's promise that "you will be pampered in every way," and the deliberate selling point of having a week where every need or want is anticipated. He notes that "Pampers" and "pampered" are pretty closely connected and thinks about the infantilization of the customer in an environment deliberately controlled and constructed around removing all responsibilities and anticipating every need to eat, sleep, and play. He thinks a little about the marketing of such a fantasy, the place that fantasy holds in our psyche, and what living it does to a person. He writes about what happens to him on the cruise -- as he gets used to the experience of having thick, fluffy towels handed to him when he arrives on a deck to sit beside a pool, or having his room cleaned and straightened each time he leaves for more than half an hour, his perception of needs and wants adjusts accordingly. So he finds fault with small things -- the fruit basket, for example. He grows cranky and restless and irritable in a place that is as flawlessly deliciously relaxing as any he's been.
I just read a book that I liked a lot called How To Want What You Have. It's the same kind of idea as what David Foster Wallace was writing about, the gist of the article How Not To Buy Happiness, and from what I gather the idea behind The Progress Paradox. Basically, that our wants are insatiable and instinctive and the sense that if only we could have just a little bit more, or adjust things to our liking a little bit, we'd finally be happy. Which of course never happens. We're doomed to be a little bit infantile, we're built to want and to long for things. What I like about How To Want What You Have is that his tone in the book is pretty straightforward -- neither too spiritual or new agey, nor too slanted toward science and evolutionary psychology. He's thoughtful and pragmatic and writes about the cognitive and behavioral habits that help live a sensitive, compassionate, attentive life full of gratitude and joy, even when doing so is swimming upstream against our hard-wired and most infantile yearnings for more more more.
(This post takes the place of an earlier post I started to draft that I recognized was written in that infantile voice, dissatisfied and longing, restless for something just a little more than what I have right now. It's really hard to avoid being pulled around by these yearnings.)
There are probably a lot of quotes along these lines, but the one I remember is Garrison Keillor:
"Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known."
Posted by: pjm | September 29, 2004 at 01:10 PM