The Chairs Are Where the People Go Read online

  The Doctors Book of Home Remedies is a pretty good source for ailments, by the way, partly because there’s roughly one per page, but also because there tends not to be home remedies for really serious sicknesses, so people aren’t constantly giving each other leukemia, which might be less funny. They’re more likely to be giving each other dandruff or stuttering.

  34. Keeping Away People Who Would Be Disappointed

  The people I might want to attend my classes are exactly those people who might feel nervous about attending my classes. This makes it hard to figure out how to discourage the people who I suspect really will hate the classes. I give out questionnaires beforehand, and I ask things like, Are you okay being in a situation where you’re going to make and listen to a lot of discordant sounds? I also ask people what they expect they’ll get out of the class, and every once in a while someone might write that they’re trying to become a more proficient jazz improviser, or that they’re an improv comedian who wants to get better at making up funny songs. Usually I phone these people and I say, Um, I notice you said you were interested in this—and I want to make sure that this class will provide what you’re looking for. I might point them to one of the videos on YouTube of fifteen people screaming in a room. I usually don’t hear from these people again.

  35. The Happiness Class

  I taught a class on happiness to my friends, and one thing that came up was that the topic was seen as sort of trivial. I found that really weird. It was seen as some sort of sickness of Western consumerist individualism. Happiness seems to me the most untrivial thing to talk about or think about. I think it’s really worthy of investigation. Pretty much everything that people do, in one way or another, is done in the interest of trying to be happy. So it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to spend a bit of one’s time thinking about it.

  You can say, for instance, that environmental damage is a more important issue than happiness, but a huge part of what drives environmental damage is people’s weird consumerist appetites for goods, acquired in the pursuit of happiness, which don’t actually make their lives any happier. Most of history is about people killing each other for things they imagine they want and things they imagine are going to make them happier, which in most cases aren’t the sorts of things that make people happier at all.

  I find it interesting that people spend their whole lives aggressively pursuing things, at great cost, that they imagine will make them happy, when in fact these things don’t. And I think this is a problem for many people.

  * * *

  In the past few years, there has been a lot of research into happiness, and along with that, a lot of press, and a lot of books taking that research and trying to apply it to people’s lives. A couple of years ago, I discovered that there was an undergraduate course at Harvard which had quickly become the most popular undergraduate course in the history of the university. It was a course in how to be happy. I was really delighted by this. I thought it was a great idea, and I was sorry they didn’t have that class when I was there, and I was very excited to know more about it.

  I invited a dozen friends to my house so that we could take it together. The course, famously a comically easy course at Harvard, still involved several hours’ reading a week. So I took on the task of presenting a condensed version of the course to my friends, which involved me watching all the videos and choosing select moments to show and trying to select the most useful readings.

  Every week for a couple of months, we would get together in me and Margaux’s kitchen, which is also our bedroom, and I would set up my laptop and bring in the screen from my desk and set it up on the kitchen table, and we would watch this guy, Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, lecture to something like seven hundred Harvard undergraduates on how to be happy. Then we would talk about it, and I would ask if anybody had done the reading, and no one had ever done the reading. It was great.

  I thought the material in the course was really interesting, and I also really wanted to alter my own immediate social environment. I had all these people around me who were really interesting and kind of eccentric and sort of crazy, and I wanted to establish a common language about what the hell we thought we were trying to do in our lives, and I imagined this would be a good way to do it. And it was. It was really exciting to get people talking about what they were trying to do in their lives and their work, about why or whether they thought this might contribute to their happiness, and to expose the differences that were there, and just to find out what people thought they were up to. It’s funny: you can talk to people for a very, very long time about what they’re doing without ever finding out what they think they’re up to.

  * * *

  Among everybody in the class, there was incredible disagreement about the relationship between difficulty and happiness and work and where pleasure comes from, and the conversations about this were really heated and contentious.

  For Margaux, difficulty is everything. She’s an artist and she thinks that making art is really hard and should be hard. Not to say that there isn’t a great amount of pleasure in it, but part of what it means to do that work is to encounter the difficulty in it. She always seems to be working. When she does stop working, she tidies the house. When she watches TV, she makes a quilt. It’s very hard for her to understand sightseeing if there’s no effort involved. So driving up to the top of a mountain to look at a beautiful view seems to her a completely useless activity, whereas walking up a mountain to look at a view is something that really excites her. This is the reason we have a lot of fights when we go to mountains.

  Almost diametrically opposed is my friend Edward. One of the complicated things in his life is that when he was younger he was in bands. A lot of the people around him are artists and writers and things like that, and he thinks of himself as a creative person and sort of has this fantasy of being an artist, and he maybe feels bad not to be doing that kind of work. He’s a really smart guy and my impression is that he’s super-good at his job designing databases, and he seems to like it. But there’s this part of him that feels he should be doing something more creative. I think he imagines that there’s an emotional place he can be, where he’s inspired to make art and does it because it comes naturally and it’s fun and exciting. I think Edward believes mostly in hedonism. He mostly believes that the trick to life is to do things that are easy and fun, and that it’s possible to avoid things that are difficult. And he’s frustrated when that doesn’t seem to work out. He imagines if things were just a little different, he’d have this easy, inspired, creative life. Yet making art is difficult for people who do that kind of work.

  My friend Mark is working on a book. He wants working on the book to be something fun in his life, so he only works on it when he feels like it, and when he doesn’t feel like it, he doesn’t. Margaux finds this completely outrageous! She thinks you can’t make art by working on it when you feel like it. You have to work on it when you don’t feel like it, partly because otherwise it will never get done, but more important because those times when you don’t feel like it—when you encounter resistance or difficulty—are the times when the really important work happens. She thinks that difficulty is an indication that you’re going somewhere new or challenging.

  Darren O’Donnell, a theater artist we know, thinks that all the difficulty in his life can be traced back to an unjust society. He thinks he’d be much happier if he could spend all of his time at leisure, but capitalism means he can’t, partly because he needs to make money and partly because he feels morally obliged to address an unjust system through his art. His feeling about having to work and having to encounter difficulty in his work is primarily one of resentment, and he spends a lot of time thinking, If only things weren’t like this.

  * * *

  An idea I’ve come across a lot in my reading about happiness is that maybe we’re not really designed to be happy—from an evolutionary standpoint. Maybe happiness is, at best, a temporary state that functions as an incentive to the behavior
s that biology wants from us, and that we’re meant to strive for.

  So we strive and we strive. And a lot of the striving on the face of it can seem meaningless or dumb. Mark sees people around him who work hard so they can have a nice apartment and nice stuff, and Mark thinks that’s silly; why not just have a small crappy apartment and not much stuff and not have to do all that hard work?

  And it’s true: we get caught up striving for things that can seem really important at the time but which don’t actually help us at all. If you step back, it’s easy to see that a lot of this striving is meaningless or pointless. At the same time, to imagine that we could be happy without all this effort is unrealistic. It’s to imagine us as something other than what we are. I think we’re always meant to do some meaningless striving, or at least that we’re not happy without it. It’s a bit of a cosmic joke, I think, but I do think it’s the way we’re built.

  * * *

  You’d think that a good way to be happy would be to maximize the number of things in your life that are pleasurable and easy, and to minimize the number of things in your life that are unpleasurable and difficult. But my own experience doesn’t seem to bear that out, and neither does the research on the subject. A confusing thing about happiness is that hedonism happens not to work. At least not for most people. Certainly not for me.

  So Darren really believes that he would be happy if only the wickedness of society didn’t require him, in all these different ways, to continue to work. You work and work and work, then you get to spend ten minutes lying on the grass, and lying on the grass feels wonderful. And it’s easy to think, Man, if only those fuckers didn’t make me work all the time, I could spend all my time lying on the grass and I’d feel good. But it wouldn’t feel good to lie on the grass all the time.

  I mean, even Buddhist monks, who are sort of the counterexample to all that—they say that maybe you can be happy sitting in one spot, breathing in and breathing out, accepting everything as it is—and it’s a strong point they make, and a pretty shocking one, too, to suggest that maybe the path to happiness is to give up pretty much everything, to not really do anything at all—but even within that, those monks, with their adherence to not striving, they work really hard on that, you know?

  36. The Converge / Diverge Game

  This is a game and also a music piece. Here’s how it works:

  The first step is to ask people to make whatever sounds they want, so the result is a cacophony of everyone making different sounds. Then you instruct people to converge gradually—to come to a point where they are making the same sound. They make that same sound for a while, then gradually diverge from that point until eventually they are making sounds that are very different from each other again. Then you repeat. That’s basically how it works.

  You want the convergence to feel like something that just happens. There shouldn’t be a bunch of hand-waving and signaling; there should just be listening. Most important, it shouldn’t be something where one person dominates and everyone joins that person’s sound. To someone listening to the game, it should sound gradual. A good strategy for players is to start incorporating other people’s sounds into their own, gradually, as they move toward convergence. There’s a strong inclination when people are moving toward a sound to get the details rounded off things, but good players will learn how not to do that. If there are small details over which there is disagreement, players should err on the side of more and sharper detail, paying special attention to things like timbre and emotion. They shouldn’t let those disappear. They should exaggerate them, if necessary.

  When they’re at the point where they have converged and are making the same sound, they should take time to really get the unison as accurate as they possibly can and to listen for points of disagreement and to sharpen details so the unison is really close to perfect. Let the players continue to make this same sound together for a while. People can enjoy this for a lot longer than you might expect. There’s a pretty deep pleasure in that unison, in making the same sound over and over, especially when it took some work to get there.

  Then, when the players start moving apart or diverging, the main challenge is that the divergence should sound very gradual to a listener. If everyone in the group simultaneously makes a small change, it will sound to the listener like an enormous change, so people should start diverging at different times. As an individual player, one way to make the divergence sound gradual is not to diverge at all. As the divergence intensifies, a challenge to the players is to think about different ways to keep components of the converged sound even while moving further out. Finally, for a while, the players can just make their own sounds and listen to each other as they would in a regular improvisation, but before beginning to reconverge they should try to move to a point of even greater divergence than they’re currently at, and the way to do that is for each player to listen to what is going on in the room and try to do the thing that is most opposite to what they hear.

  On one level, it’s a very simple exercise in how you can have tension and resolution in a piece of music without pitch. The resolution is unison and the tension is chaos.

  It also makes you think about how a group can make a collective decision, inching toward it gradually, without a leader, and with most opportunities for communication removed.

  This game really also ties in with ideas about mistakes and their beauty, sometimes. One thing that makes it interesting to listen to as a piece of music can be the way players are failing at it as a game. It’s interesting to hear sounds converge toward each other, but if everyone did it perfectly it wouldn’t be as interesting to listen to. So the sounds of people who in the game are failing or getting it wrong, in the musical piece might be the sounds that are the most interesting and pretty. What are the mistakes from one perspective are the successes from another.

  37. Going to Parties

  I remember having this conversation with someone a while ago, and he wanted to start having regular parties, and he was really vehement about this one point: he was like, These parties aren’t going to be work-networking parties. He said, You go to parties and people are trying to form professional connections, or they’re trying to pick people up, or they’re trying to get some other thing done. He said, Why do parties always have to be like that? My parties are going to be different.

  And I found that absolutely baffling. People want to get things out of parties—that’s important to remember. Anyone who tells you they’re going to a party for no reason, or anyone who tells you they’re throwing parties but don’t want the attendees to feel like they’re trying to get something out of them, is lying, kidding themselves, or dumb.

  Sometimes people want sex. Sometimes people want to get drunk or take drugs. Some people enjoy dancing. Some people are trying to meet new people to make their life better in some way—because they want new friends or new opportunities in their work. Some people want opportunities to behave inappropriately or get into fights.

  If you find you don’t want anything from parties anymore, you should probably stop going. You won’t have any fun.

  Here is some other advice about parties:

  At cocktail parties, you don’t have to talk as much as you might think. No one cares if you’re not talking. You might feel very awkward, but no one really minds. Especially if you want to be thought clever, you don’t have to talk a lot. Just say one or two smart things.

  If you’re actually in a conversation, you can listen. People always appreciate that.

  If you’re standing there not doing anything, you probably feel tremendously awkward, but no one cares. No one’s paying any attention to you. Unfortunately, once you realize this, it takes away a lot of what energizes a party. I think a lot of what energizes a cocktail party is people’s fear of being seen not talking to anyone.

  Also, the last six hours of a party usually aren’t much fun.

  Parties should be fun. They should be gone to out of a desire to get something out of them. C
ertainly you shouldn’t go out of obligation to the host. It’s bad for the party. If you want to express affection for someone, maybe there are ways to do that that are less draining of your soul than going to their party.

  38. Kensington Market

  There’s a neighborhood in Toronto called Kensington Market, which is my favorite neighborhood in Toronto and probably one of my favorite neighborhoods in the world. It’s a really remarkable place. I lived there for six or seven years when I first moved to Toronto, till I was illegally evicted so that a new landlord could charge a higher rent, which is kind of important in terms of my feelings about the place.

  Traditionally, the neighborhood has been an immigrant neighborhood. It’s gone through a lot of stages of different immigrant groups being there over the decades, and all those different groups are sort of layered up in the Market, so there’s evidence of the Jewish population that lived there early in the century, which was followed by the Portuguese and Vietnamese and Caribbean, and also for a long time it’s been a place where a certain number of artists and young people and writers and musicians have lived. It’s really a distinct place in Toronto: little streets and shops—butchers, fruit stands, and that kind of thing. It’s one of the few neighborhoods in Toronto that is not just a long street. Kensington Market is actually a little winding grid of tiny one-way streets.