A few years ago, in a survey conducted by an accident prevention charity, 80% of respondents admitted to going through life on autopilot: arriving at the end of a car journey with no memory of driving there, buying the same item twice without realising, even turning up at the office on a day off. The other 20% must have been lying or deluded. (Or just answering the survey on autopilot, perhaps?) To an unnerving extent made clearer by ongoing research we're all creatures of habit, spending our days acting out ingrained behaviours and responses over which we exert no control. This has many advantages: if our brains weren't built to convert as many actions as possible into automatic routines, we would seize up trying to breathe or walk, let alone drive a car. But it's also frightening. Treading the well-worn paths of habit, we easily get mired in jobs, relationships or ways of thinking that make us miserable, in lives we'd never have consciously chosen. "Here you are, here we all are, semi-automated creatures in our tram-track worlds, running through the paths of least resistance," as Vincent Deary puts it, in one of two new books on how we get stuck and on finding the will to forge new paths when life demands it.
Paul Dolan, an LSE economist and government well-being adviser a man who knows his way around the Nudge Unit has written the more businesslike of the two. The "science of happiness", he starts by pointing out, is full of bizarre and contradictory findings. Parents report that parenting makes life much more meaningful, yet seem to experience no more pleasure than non-parents; more money doesn't lead to more happiness, unless you frame the question differently, in which case it does. One problem, he argues, is that psychologists simply try to find out which "inputs" income, work, marital status, age, religiosity and so on are correlated with the "output" of happiness. But in fact happiness also depends on how we allocate attention to those things. Imagine two biscuit factories, one run well, the other incompetently: they might have identical inputs (sugar, flour, labour, electricity) yet produce very different quantities of biscuits, depending on their production processes. The same goes for manufacturing happiness. Attention, Dolan writes, "acts as a production process that converts stimuli into happiness". Attention is a scarce resource: give it to one thing, and by definition you can't give it to something else. If you're not as happy as you could be, "you must be misallocating your attention".
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