Once upon a time, Harper’s was my go-to magazine of ideas. Over the past year or two, I’ve found myself skimming it more and reading it less, ho-humming as I set down a story partway through and feeling preemptive (though not preventative) guilt at knowing I’ll never bother reading the rest of it, earnestly important as it may be.
There’s no void in the American glossy-with-a-brain portion of my media diet, however, because over roughly the same period as I’ve drifted away from Harper’s, The Atlantic has quietly (and sometimes not-so-quietly) made itself into the best English-language magazine in the world.1Let’s stipulate that The Walrus is exempt from such discussions in this space, to preserve the appearance of modesty, if nothing else. Let’s also concede that there are plenty of English-language magazines I’ve never read. Somehow, “The best Enligh-language magazine in the world of which I am aware” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
In the November issue2Which introduces a redesign that I quite like, though the sans serif Titling Gothic used for headlines is a little aggressively chunky for my taste. The dots that make up the elipses are squares half the height of a lower case letter, for example, and the little gappy part in the top of the capital A is vanishingly small next to the mighty oaks of its inverted V, if you’ll excuse my designer-unfriendly lexicon., one thing among many that’s worth reading is Paul Bloom’s “First Person Plural,” which outlines a theory of mind that’s a scientific version of Whitman’s “I am large, I contain multitudes”3Dutifully cited by Bloom.
The view I’m interested in … is conservative in that it accepts that brains give rise to selves that last over time, plan for the future, and so on. But it is radical in that it gives up the idea that there is just one self per head. The idea is that instead, within each brain, different selves are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control—bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another.
I’m not sure if the whole of the piece is greater than the sum of the parts—the concluding portion on paternalistic libertarianism seems connected to the buildup by something less than the straight line Bloom seems to hope we see, for instance. Still, it’s a fascinating essay suggesting new ways of thinking of identity, or at least new ways to phrase old literary ideas of identity.4Ideas exceedingly well explored in Michael Winter’s The Architects Are Here, by the way.
But one section really clunked for me concerns parenting.5A subject I am familiar with, as the father of a two year old, and will become increasingly familiar with when my wife gives birth again sometime in the next three weeks or so. and its effects on happiness:
Seeing things this way means we are often mistaken about what makes us happy. Consider again what happens when we have children. Pretty much no matter how you test it, children make us less happy. The evidence isn’t just from diary studies; surveys of marital satisfaction show that couples tend to start off happy, get less happy when they have kids, and become happy again only once the kids leave the house. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert puts it, “Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of ‘empty-nest syndrome’ is increased smiling.” So why do people believe that children give them so much pleasure? Gilbert sees it as an illusion, a failure of affective forecasting. Society’s needs are served when people believe that having children is a good thing, so we are deluged with images and stories about how wonderful kids are. We think they make us happy, though they actually don’t.
The theory of multiple selves offers a different perspective. If struggles over happiness involve clashes between distinct internal selves, we can no longer be so sure that our conflicting judgments over time reflect irrationality or error. There is no inconsistency between someone’s anxiously hiking through the Amazon wishing she were home in a warm bath and, weeks later, feeling good about being the sort of adventurous soul who goes into the rain forest. In an important sense, the person in the Amazon is not the same person as the one back home safely recalling the experience, just as the person who honestly believes that his children are the great joy in his life might not be the same person who finds them terribly annoying when he’s actually with them.
Um, okay. I’m not going to quibble with the neurological research behind this—not that I could if I wanted to—but there is something apparently missing in the basic logic. It seems possible that what’s at work here is not just multiple selves but multiple ideas of what constitutes happiness. The word “happy,” casually, conjures up images of a broad grin and a sense of euphoria. Which, admittedly, is something I associate more with scoring goals and taking drugs than with changing diapers and chasing an energetic toddler into traffic.
And I suspect that if you ask people at various points to report their happiness, they’re likely to give answers based on that Soma-like definition: if they’ve just come to the phone after a quickie on the kitchen floor or dinner out with their friends in a nice restaurant, they will say they’re happy. If they happen to be balancing a screaming child with a dirty diaper on one hip or they’re on their way out to pick up a teenager who’s been arrested for shoplifting, they will not be so likely to say they are happy.
But there’s something else, something different, that we often mean when we say “happy,” and it is the definition implied in big picture uses such as when we speak the phrase “I want a happy life” or invoke the inalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness.” Here, I think, we tend to mean a sense of fulfillment, of general contentment with a life well-lived when we take a step back from the grinding details of daily life to view who we really are and what we’ve accomplished. That is, with what our life means.
Parenting is certainly not the only vista from which to view the vast chasm between these two definitions. It is, however, a position from which it is glaringly obvious that if euphoria and fulfillment6or happiness and happiness, if you will are not mutually exclusive, they don’t always or often overlap.
I’ll admit to having conflicted emotions sometimes—lots of time—about being a dad. It’s something that is painfully hard to admit, as though it carries with it the confession that I’m simply a bad person. But the truth is that all the things dudes running from commitment are afraid of are true: when you have kids, you have less freedom, less money, less fun. Suddenly your time is not your own. Since Colum was born, I have frustrated my family, and sometimes myself, with my dogged refusal to let go of some toehold in bon vivantism. And reading Bloom’s piece, I can see a lot that seems familiar: different parts of me want different things, and at different times of the day or the week, any one of those different parts may be the “me” that’s running the show, making the decisions, hitting the bars or tucking in my son or deciding to buckle down and work hard.
But there’s probably one thing that all of us here in my head can agree on: that while many things can make me laugh or smile or feel compeletly at ease or whatever else qualifies as a good time7Among them, lest I give the wrong impression, playing in the park with Colum, or reading him a book, or singing songs to him or with him… the pleasure that most of those things gives is fleeting. There are even transcendent moments when you’re DJing in a crowded bar, when you’re involved in an excellent conversation at a party, when you’re reading a book or playing hockey or drinking really good wine or having sex. But when those moments pass, they leave behind their absence, a sense of emptiness. It’s an emptiness that many people, with or without children, seek to fill with other projects (writing a novel, running a charity, renovating and rerenovating the house) that give little in the way of smiles or laughs. A life without euphoria might not be a life worth living8Your mileage may vary, of course, but it certainly wouldn’t be very much fun, but no amount of smiling-laughing-euphoric happiness can amount to a purpose, which is the key element of fulfillment happiness.
Being a father to a kid, on the other hand, is probably, day to day, the most tiring, aggravating and stressful thing I’ve ever done. It’s dirty, sometimes it’s painful and it is completely relentless. It has its transcendent moments, but they are few and far between the frenzied, spit-up stained, burdened state that comes to be considered normal. But still. Still. Most parents share the sense that whatever other kind of screw-up or genius they may be, their children represent their greatest achievement, their reason for being. That’s what they mean when they say “everything looks different once you’ve had a baby,” or at least that’s what I meant when I said it. The things that once seemed important seem less so in comparison to the job of taking care of another human being, one you created from scratch, and one who is for several years at least completely dependent on you. The day they arrive, you have a purpose and, most of us, whether we like it or not, are fulfilling that purpose with greater or lesser success and retaining greater or lesser degrees of our sanity.
And I’d hazard that the gap between the reported and actual “happiness” of parents is actually a gap between understandings of what happy means. And the smiling that results from empty-nest syndrome might be the result of more time to focus on yukking it up and less burdensome responsibility and financial strain. But those happy moments might be enhanced by the happy satisfaction of knowing the big job of your life is completed, your purpose to some large degree fulfilled. That your being here will have meant something existentially important to someone (or someones) else.
And maybe then all the variations of yourself inside you brain can relax and be happier.
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(To read Edward’s follow-up post, click here.)
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