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Page 1 of 8 The Sound of a Numerator Clapping
If you make no self-comparisons, you will feel no sadness; that's the point of this chapter in a nutshell. A recent body of research0.1 confirms that this is so. There is much evidence that increased attention to yourself, in contrast to increased attention to the people, objects, and events around you, is generally associated with more signs of depressed feeling.
Some people are forever checking their Life Report to see how they rate. They want to know the score after every point in ping-pong, they examine their reflections in every mirror they pass, they know at every moment what their grades are in each course in school, and they constantly update their estimates of their bosses' opinions of them. Other people pay much less attention to their evaluations of themselves.
Evaluating yourself can give you pleasure if your actual state stands favorably with respect to your benchmark comparison state. But if you have a propensity to evaluate yourself unfavorably, then each such evaluation is a source of pain and sadness for you. For such people, the frequency of self- evaluation determines the amount of pain and sadness, and the depth of depression. We depressives not only have a propensity to make negative self-evaluations, but we also have a tendency to make them frequently.
Some evaluations of how you are doing are crucial in keeping you on the right course of action. If you don't check how well you are doing when you are engaged in any productive activity, you have no way of directing your actions so that they will be fruitful. "How am I doing, Ma?" may be a funny line at times, but getting feedback evaluation from others and from yourself is crucial in keeping you from walking onto dangerous thin ice, and it is necessary in making a living. If you have an independent income and no responsibilities to others, you can afford to enter a monastery or a private world in which you refrain from evaluations of your activities. Yet most of us--and especially depressives--can afford to reduce the extent of self-evaluation very considerably without much (if any) loss of useful direction.
The title for this chapter comes from the Zen question, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" That question (like all the rest of Zen) aims at making no self-comparisons at all, which is the subject of this chapter. Ceasing to make comparisons is a key element in much of Western religion, too, as well as in many secular psychological approaches to mental suffering.
Jean Piaget taught us that as a baby grows from earliest infancy, it develops the striving abilities in order to survive. When you strive you classify, abstract, and especially evaluate. The act of evaluating is central to all survival and achievement --the evaluation of this path rather than that one, which tactic will produce the desired result, whether a pile of blocks will hold one's weight, and so on.
The importance of the distinction between the mode of experiencing and the mode of evaluating and comparing was long ago noted by philosophers. According to John Dewey, evaluation ("criticism" is his term)
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occurs whenever a moment is devoted to looking to see what sort of value is present; whenever instead of accepting a value-object wholeheartedly, being rapt by it, we raise even a shadow of a question about its worth, or modify our sense of it by even a passing estimate of its probable future.... There is a constant rhythm of "perchings and flights" (to borrow James' terms) characteristic of alternate emphasis upon the immediate and mediate, the consummatory and instrumental, phases of all conscious experience.(1)
A stimulus to action--for a baby, hunger or a painful jab of a pin: for an older child or an adult, an insult or a challenge or a neg-comp --puts you into the active survival mode. And if the stimulus is painful, the non-depressive's first reaction is take steps to get rid of the cause of the pain. If, however, it seems to you as if you cannot manage to get rid of the painful stimulus, the mood turns to anger, and then to aggression against the actual or imagined source of the pain. And if you come to think that you are helpless to escape or prevent the painful stimulus (2), however, the rage becomes sadness.
Ways To Avoid Making Comparisons
Stop Thinking About Yourself
Bertrand Russell once wrote that the secret of attaining happiness and avoiding unhappiness is not to think about yourself.
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"I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide.... Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life...with every year that passes I enjoy it more....Very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself."(3)
By itself, not thinking about yourself does not seem to be a clear or sensible prescription. But let us re-interpret Russell as saying that one should get into the habit of avoiding comparisons of the self with counterfactuals, which is a common form of "thinking about oneself."
Non-depressives usually have well-developed skills for shifting their attention away from situations that might produce unnecessary negative self-comparisons. In a report on more than three decades of life histories of a hundred Harvard students, starting before World War II, George Vaillant tells the story of a man who shifted dimensions effectively:
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A California hematologist developed a hobby of cultivating living cells in test tubes. In a recent interview, he described with special interest and animation an unusually interesting culture that he had grown from a tissue biopsy from his mother. Only toward the end of the interview did he casually reveal that his mother had died from a stroke only three weeks previously. His mention of her death was as bland as his description of the still-living tissue culture had been effectively colored. Ingeniously and unconsciously, he had used his hobby and his special skills as a physician to mitigate temporarily the pain of his loss. Although his mother was no longer alive, by shifting his attention he was still able to care for her. There was nothing morbid in the way he told the story; and because ego mechanisms are unconscious, he had no idea of his defensive behavior. Many of the healthiest men in the Study used similar kinds of attention shifts.(4)
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