These things are not the same as these other things

Today, a couple of similar-ish pieces from Pscyhe I think I can get away with combining into a single post.

The first one is very simple, describing how wanting things and liking things aren't the same. This may well seem obvious : I like Star Wars but don't ever want to become a Jedi Knight, I like reading history but have no desire to actually meet Genghis Khan, and I really like chocolate cake but don't want to stuff my face with it continuously. But I have some sympathy for those who, like the researcher in the article, "thought that liking and wanting were just two words for the same process", because I strongly suspect the second piece is also similarly obvious.

Anyway, the neurological distinction between liking and wanting is interesting, especially as to how this was discovered :

When the neuroscientist Roy Wise blocked dopamine in the brains of rodents, he found that they eventually stopped eating, stopped having sex and stopped socialising, presumably because they lost the pleasure of those rewards... By blocking dopamine in the rats’ brains with a drug, Berridge expected to show how their facial expressions switched from liking to disliking. To his surprise, that’s not what happened. Blocking the rats’ dopamine did strip them of their motivation to eat, but it didn’t alter their liking response when they were fed.

I'm going to leave aside the fascinating nugget here that rats have facial expressions otherwise this will spiral into another post altogether.  

A key part of what dopamine actually does is cause wanting: it’s related to the anticipation of rewards, as opposed to the enjoyment of them. Wanting and liking are both associated with a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, but within this region are two distinct areas: some that are involved in generating pleasure and, others, motivation.

By increasing dopamine, Berridge can even make a rat want something that hurts – like an electrified probe.

You might recall this piece from a few years back on Trump becoming addicted to and damaged by the negative attention from his idiotic tweets. I suspect any psychologist who's familiar with gambling addictions or children acting out for attention wouldn't be surprised that people can want to do things they don't enjoy. And I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of thing was especially common in politicians, who are basically compelled into doing things they personally don't enjoy or want to do*. A demographic study on this would be fascinating. Something something "authentic self", something something...

* There are probably unique factors at work in the Trump case and certainly not all politicians are even remotely like this, however. Still the general tendency might be interesting.

The only other thing I want to mention from this piece is this bit :

There’s an important distinction between the kind of wanting Berridge is talking about and ‘wanting’ in a more aspirational sense. ‘I want to work out more, I want to stop spending so much time on social media, I want to eat healthier – those are cognitive plans,’ Robinson says. This kind of wanting can go along with a more primal want, but it doesn’t have to. It’s the more intense wanting that is affected in addiction.

Well, as before, that's just liking the idea of something, isn't it ? Or liking and wanting the consequences but not the process, not the thing itself. Everyone wants to be fit but lots of people don't enjoy exercise : we want the end result but don't enjoy the process. We might say we want to work out but that's not what we really mean. So there's nothing problematic here, just a bit of nuance about language and the distinction between the ends and the means.

On to the second piece, which is about appreciating things you already have. This one resonates with me. I've long made it a habit, whenever things are pleasantly stable, to a take a moment from time to time to deliberately and actively appreciate that : to realise that things could be much worse, and that because the background level of my daily activity is stable and not a rollercoaster of exciting adventures it's none the worse for that. When things aren't changing, it's easy to miss that you're actually in a very happy place. To deliberately recognise, just occasionally, that you'd miss the things you have if they were ever gone (even those which have really no chance of being lost) is definitely beneficial.

What does this have to do with things that seem similar but aren't the same ? Hold up, I'll get to that. I'm not going to go through the whole "how-to" guide in the essay but there are a few points I want to remark on.

Appreciation, as I use it here, may begin with thankfulness for what you have, but it goes beyond that to a broader understanding of how the world works and what is valuable in that. Appreciation can also lead us to a critical attitude in a way that gratitude does not, because we may recognise that the world and its inhabitants are not cared for as they should be.

A certain kind of appreciation might be thought of as a desire for cultivation and continuity, then. I'm not really sure I agree with the author's characterisation of a human desire for a "boom and bust hedonistic treadmill" – that's probably overstating the case. Still I do think we often want a certain sort of combination of stable novelty, something that's unpredictable but with clear boundaries. As I've said before, this is why socialising with friends is so appealing. We get interactions we like but are never quite the same.

The author then raises the excellent point of how the old adage that you should "be happy with what you've got" can be a declaration of repression. And this is where the article does an excellent job of breaking a distinction I've sort of always been aware of but never been able to properly articulate :

If you’re like me, you might also have some political resistance to the idea of appreciation. The idea that we should ‘appreciate what we have’ can strike one as a ruling-class ideology: ‘You peasants should be grateful we feed you slop at all.’ We shouldn’t appreciate – we should have a revolution! I understand this resistance. But over time, I have come to believe that not appreciating what I have is an even crueller way of looking at the world. It’s like a little voice in your head saying: ‘Not only do you not have enough, but you should also be miserable about it.’ 

Just as we should appreciate things in spite of difficulty, so we should appreciate difficulty in spite of progress. It’s this balance that makes for a productive version of ‘elsewhereism’: seeking a better place, collectively, not because we fail to appreciate where we are, but because we know that the good of our time and place is still not enough.

Yes ! The word the author is looking for here is "satisfied". You can enjoy things but still want more without being greedy. To enjoy the latest game but wish it had extra features is not necessarily to be entitled or ungrateful. You can recognise and appreciate the good in progress and development while simultaneously wanting more, for things to be better than they are. Wishing a game had better graphics but enjoying it anyway isn't greedy, but wanting more than would actually satisfy your hunger is. A desire for continual progress isn't the same as being dissatisfied with the current state of development, though these aren't mutually exclusive either.

Should you be "happy with what you've got", then ? Sure, as long as what you've got meets your material needs and you've got things which are uniquely special to you. Here I think the author falls down a bit by advocating us all to appreciate the stars and public libraries and roads and suchlike – sure, but everyone has those, so it's difficult psychologically to see them as special. More importantly, just because you're happy doesn't mean you don't have a right to wish for improvements. And if you are miserable despite living in material and social luxury, well, maybe that's a you problem.

Elsewhereism is, I think, based on a specific kind of forgetfulness: that is, forgetting that even in the new, better elsewhere, there will still be problems. You will still suffer from accidents, from unrequited love, from natural disasters, from new psychological foibles that will simply emerge. That’s just part of our human condition. To better appreciate what you have isn’t to give up on an elsewhere. It’s to understand that there is no elsewhere that is beyond some degree of difficulty, and that, if you’re not appreciative of what you have now, you never will be.

This I think is important. It especially hits a nerve because there is so, so much journalism which is exclusively and ludicrously negative. If you don't take a moment to recognise when you've reached your goals, if it's all about just setting more and more difficult objectives, you'll never be happy. That's not healthy and I think it's a major source of toxicity in the media. That said, I'd add a caveat to the above quote that this probably only applies if your base needs are already at least met and/or exceeded; if there's something fundamental missing from your life, it's not your lack of appreciation that's the problem. And sometimes a change is as good as a rest. Novelty for novelty's sake can be important, it's just a perpetual hunger for change that can be psychologically damaging. There are things we can continuously appreciate but this is not true of all things.

Two final points. First, a favourite pet point about how awful Stephen Pinker is :

It is good to appreciate, for example, that humans now have longer life expectancies than in the past and that we have the technical capacity to feed everyone alive. Those are amazing accomplishments. But sometimes it’s suggested that such progress means the world’s institutions are basically good and progress is inevitable. In a world where billions of people still live in poverty, this is over-appreciation for the progress we’ve made.

Nailed it. Just because things are better now doesn't mean they're anywhere near as good as they could and should be, especially when the causes largely appear to be insane levels of inequality, corruption, naked greed, entitlement and wilful ignorance. Pinker would have us all believe we should "be happy with what we've got" in the worse and most repressive sense; conversely, the media wallows in perpetual misery despite any and all accomplishments. A better, middle way is possible.

Finally :

Because we are all imperfect in some ways, none of us can claim much superiority over others. By appreciating our own imperfections, we come to see that others’ imperfections are not irreparable flaws, but aspects of what makes them equal and meaningful members of our communities.

This is a bit self-helpy but it's valuable nonetheless. We seem to expect not just perfection but also continuously-varying perfection, not just in our own lives but, perhaps more dangerously, in those of others too. Neil Gaiman's preface to Pratchett's A Stroke of the Pen makes it abundantly clear that Pratchett the man was not the same as Pratchett the legend, as capable of anyone else as being a bit of a grumpy old twit from time to time, and not the all-forgiving, ever-wise public figure that's so (rightly) frequently celebrated. I often wonder what it must be like for celebrities, especially new celebrities, trying to juggle this public demand for a perfect persona with a desire to just do normal people things and not be harangued for it. Surely the advice here to expect everyone to be basically like us, warts and all, is at least a decent starting point.