Читать книгу Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert - Страница 14

In the late 1960s, a Harvard psychology professor took LSD, resigned his appointment (with some encouragement from the administration), went to India, met a guru and returned to write a popular book called Be Here Now, whose central message was succinctly captured by the injunction of its title.²³ The key to happiness, fulfilment and enlightenment, the ex-professor argued, was to stop thinking so much about the future.

Now, why would anyone go all the way to India and spend his time, money and brain cells just to learn how not to think about the future? Because, as anyone who has ever tried to learn meditation knows, not thinking about the future is much more challenging than being a psychology professor. Not to think about the future requires that we convince our frontal lobe not to do what it was designed to do, and like a heart that is told not to beat, it naturally resists this suggestion. Unlike N.N., most of us do not struggle to think about the future because mental simulations of the future arrive in our consciousness regularly and unbidden, occupying every corner of our mental lives. When people are asked to report how much they think about the past, present and future, they claim to think about the future the most.²⁴ When researchers actually count the items that float along in the average person’s stream of consciousness, they find that about 12 per cent of our daily thoughts are about the future.²⁵ In other words, every eight hours of thinking includes an hour of thinking about things that have yet to happen. If you spent one out of every eight hours living in my state you would be required to pay taxes, which is to say that in some very real sense, each of us is a part-time resident of tomorrow.

Why can’t we just be here now? How come we can’t do something our goldfish find so simple? Why do our brains stubbornly insist on projecting us into the future when there is so much to think about right here today?