The book 1984 is famous (infamous?) for many things, but chief among them is reinforcing a particular vision of freedom. You could call it optimistic, but it is rooted in an almost pessimistic way of viewing people in societies.
That vision of freedom? It’s the vision that—no matter how many restrictions are placed on a person from the outside, we are always free to think and feel anything. If you manage to give that up, you’re no longer free.
And it is, indeed, possible to give up that freedom. In fact, we do it partially all the time.
We used to define freedom in physical terms, because life was largely physical for most people. These days, life is largely mental (cognitive and emotional) for most people. For most of us, basic physical needs are no longer the focal point of each day. By and large, we have food, water, and shelter.
So the mental time and space that used to be taken up by pursuing basic sustenance and security is now free to be occupied by other needs—or at least things we think are needs.
And this is where the idea of modern freedom gets sketchy. It’s where the ways we think we’re more free than any of our modern ancestors might actually be ways that we’re less free. It might turn out that we’re just in more luxurious chains.
“Happiness is a Choice?!”
Just over 12 years ago, my wife and I went to Jamaica for our Honeymoon. While at the fancy resort hotel, we met a man in the lobby who was drawing portraits for money. We happily paid him for the chance to get a hand-crafted memento. We still have that picture; it’s pretty good.
The artist was young, but somewhat world-weary. He had a calm presence about him—as many folks we met did. This was despite the fact that he’d run into some pretty tough times over the past several years. I’m talking about genuine misfortunes—which at that time, he was still working through.
I asked how he managed to stay upbeat through it all. He said that when he was a kid, his grandfather told him something that’s helped him through any number of tough times “happiness is a choice.” He explained that you can’t change what’s already happened. Things are the way they are.
Given that, you’re left with a choice of what your focus will be. You can focus on the things that have already happened – which you can’t change. Or you can focus on the future — which you can. And the only sure way to change things for the better is to be positive about what’s possible in the future.
So why focus on the stuff you can’t change? Why bring bad feelings into the future?
Why indeed.
And yet, we make it all the time, don’t we?
Of course, it’s not as simple as that 4 word sentence above. You can’t really choose to either be happy or unhappy. That’s an oversimplification.
But you do make choices every day that set up how many barriers there are to being happy. You choose to either create dependencies for your happiness, or make your happiness more or less independent.
You either make your happiness dependent on how certain things outside of your control turn out, or you choose to let most of that go. You commit to focus on skillfully controlling what you’re able to, and letting the rest go.
The Switcheroo
We end up making the choice to be unhappy as a series of smaller mistakes we make—due to an almost unconscious switcheroo. It’s more of a conflation, really.
When we conflate a desire with a need, we give up a part of our freedom. You see, a need has more emotional weight than a mere want. A need has more power behind it—more urgency—and thus, it pushes and pulls quite strongly.
In the back of our minds, we know this. We know that if we believe we need something, we’re pushed much more strongly to pursue it. The feeling is stronger. It’s more exhilarating. It gives us purpose—even if it’s the short term purpose of fulfilling that desire—and even if it’s only temporarily.
But this merry-go-round of adopting desires and transforming them into what we think are needs—it’s not an entirely conscious process. It happens over time when we let that hunter/gatherer part of ourselves run wild. When we really were chasing life-or-death needs every day, the successes were extremely fulfilling, and the failures were extremely catastrophic. Those highs and lows drove us as humans for tens of thousands of years.
But things have changed in our environment. For 95% of us, there isn’t constant uncertainty about our food and water for the day—or about how we’ll avoid getting eaten by a predator.
With no more worry over the next meal or some hungry predator chasing us—the energy of this inner hunter/gatherer can now go toward other pursuits. And rather than become okay with not having that life-or-death pursuit, we allow that hunter/gatherer to latch onto to something not life-or-death. And we put all that energy and anxiety into the cascade of new “needs” available to pursue and stress about.
The Solution?
The more we repeat the word “need” to describe something we could live fairly well without—the more we unnecessarily shackle ourselves to any number of forces outside of our control. We make ourselves less free.
That’s our modern condition. We’ve ditched the many freedoms our progress has afforded us. We’ve traded them for a series of more luxurious chains. We have come to convince ourselves—and each other—that many mere wants are actually needs. As a result, we unnecessarily place ourselves at the mercy of the weight and force of needs.
So what is the solution? Do we just reject all these wants, sell our belongings, and live in a tent on public land? Of course not.
The solution has to happen much like the problem happened: internally. A change in mindset allowed us to fool ourselves into believing that so many desires were needs. So a change in mindset is the most effective way to correct that .
Gratitude (as cliché as it sounds) is a large part of this. Understanding that the things we think are needs are not actually necessary. Then we come to really appreciate what it’s like to have the things we do. That’s the mindset. As you view more things in this way, your inner hunter/gatherer will stop pursuing these things in the same way.
And as that happens, you’ll stop feeling that really low low when you don’t get that desire met. Without all those ups and downs pulling at your mood, your energy will become different—more consistent. And without all that noise from the past in your mindset, you might be surprised at how much you can end up influencing your future.