Forced to be Happy

Ben and Jerry’s doesn’t have ‘liver and onion’ ice cream; and it’s not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, “Yuck”. ~Dan Gilbert

Of course, the reason is no one would buy it, although I suspect they probably did whip some of this up and somewhere in Vermont there’s a daring person who was quite unexpectedly made very happy by it. But the reason most people wouldn’t buy it is because it sounds horrible, and a good guess as to why so many people think this sounds horrible is that most people who might have thought this would taste good are already several million years dead from eating some other thing they thought might taste good – but was actually quite poisonous.

Regardless of one’s view of evolution, if it is true we have co-opted our ‘expectation of safety’ and adapted it for our expectations of happiness, we shouldn’t wonder how we’re so bad at predicting what will make us happy. I already discussed how people will often define themselves as a person who doesn’t do or like something they have never tried; perhaps doing this is just as convenient for maintaining safety as attaining happiness through valid self expression.

But all this might also help explain something I’ve been thinking about for some time – I said before we were married my opinion, my valid but ‘safe’ self expression, was that my wife was wrong about many things but she wouldn’t listen to me. YET, once I gave up trying to change her, change her mind, change her opinion and really started to listening to her (even though I at the time I may have felt helpless and disempowered against the sheer force of what she wanted and the strength of her personality and the power of her sense of self), once I realized I couldn’t ‘play it safe’ anymore, and I had to (read also “felt forced to“) ‘interactively play‘ (see also here and here) with the person that she was, only then did I move out of my ‘safe zone’, get on a path to an uxorious erotic truth and end up happier than I ever thought possible.