Too Much Of A Good Thing
This is known as an inverted-U curve:
In their paper, Too Much of a Good Thing, the psychologists Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz reveal the inverted-U-shaped relationship between nearly everything of consequence. Rooted in the ancient philosopher Aristotle’s famous concept of “the golden mean”—“happiness and success are a function of cultivating virtues that exist at the mean between the extremes of deficiency and excess”—Grant and Schwartz document the pervasiveness of the inverted U in all areas of life, concluding that it “may be a fundamental and ubiquitous psychological principle: there is no such as an unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels begin to outweigh their benefits.”
This fundamental and ubiquitous principle is the theme of this SIX at 6…
Happiness Is Not Pleasure. I Kill Pleasure.
In a conversation with the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, the philosopher Simon Critchley began to define happiness as synonymous with pleasure. “I have to say,” Hoffman intervened, “you’re starting to define happiness in a way that pertains to pleasure. But I would definitely say that pleasure is not happiness. Because I kill pleasure, do you know what I mean? Like I take too much of it in and therefore make it unpleasurable. Too much coffee and you’re miserable. And I do that to pleasure often. There is no pleasure that I haven’t made myself sick on.”
The Goldilocks Zone
One lesson of the inverted-U curve is that it can take less time or effort than you might think to get the benefits of, for instance, exercise. A team of cardiologists analyzed all of the relevant studies on exercise, synthesizing the key takeaways in a paper titled, The Goldilocks Zone for Exercise: Not Too Little, Not Too Much. (If you need a refresher, as I did—in the story of Goldilocks And The Three Bears, Goldilocks wanders into the home of three bears while they’re gone. There’s three bowls of porridge on the table—Papa Bear’s porridge is too hot, Mama Bear’s porridge is too cold, Baby Bear’s porridge is just right, so Goldilocks eats it all. She then tries sitting in their chairs—Papa Bear’s chair is too hard, Mama Bear’s chair is too soft, Baby Bear’s chair is just right, so Goldilocks sits in it. She walks upstairs to the bedrooms—Papa Bear’s bed is too big and hard, Mama Bear’s bed is too small and soft, Baby Bear’s bed is just right, so Goldilocks falls asleep in it.) The body of research evidence, the team writes in The Goldilocks Zone for Exercise, “indicates U-shaped curves whereby low doses and moderate doses of physical activity significantly reduce long-term risks for both total mortality and cardiovascular mortality, however, at very high doses of chronic strenuous exercise much of the protection against early mortality and cardiovascular disease is lost.” Exercise can be thought of as a medicine, they write. “As with any powerful drug, establishing the ideal therapeutic window is of crucial importance. An ineffectively low dose will not impart full benefits, whereas the adverse effects stemming from an excessively high dose may overshadow potential benefits and introduce detriments.” The optimal dose? The Goldilocks zone? “150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise or 75 minutes per week of vigorous-intensity aerobic activity.”
It’s A Small Amount Of Too Much
After the ninth season of Seinfeld in 1998, the show was so valuable to the television network that they offered Jerry Seinfeld $110 million to write another season. Seinfeld turned down the money and walked away from the most popular show on television. “The love affair,” Seinfeld explained, “between the people that were making the show and the audience was so intense, it was so white hot, I had to respect that. I could not go to that point where it starts to age and wither. And it doesn’t take long—for example, you go see a comedian and at an hour and ten minutes, you love the guy. At an hour and thirty, it’s like, ‘eh, I thought he was never gonna finish. And all [because of that extra twenty minutes], you walk out with a whole different feeling. It’s a small amount of too much.” It’s too much of a good thing—“too much cake, too much coffee, too much anything changes the whole feeling about [the experience]. So we had this wonderful, intense love affair, and I wanted it to end with a fireworks burst of, ‘it never was bad.’ … I didn’t want, ‘it was good, but it did go on a bit longer than it should have.’”
Immigrants To Wealth
In his book Strangers In Paradise, the psychologist James Grubman uses the phrase “immigrants to wealth” to describe people who transition from modest economic circumstances to the unusual world of great wealth. Like the person moving to a foreign country, the immigrant to wealth faces all kinds of psychological and emotional complexities and conflicts. The leap to wealth impacts identity, relationships, norms, values, behaviors, expectations, the balancing of ingrained beliefs with the realities of their new financial status.
Three years after the Broadway success of his play The Glass Menagerie made him rich and famous, in 1947, the playwright Tennessee Williams wrote an essay titled, The Catastrophe of Success, all about the havoc that money creates for the immigrant to wealth.
“The sort of life that I had lived previous to popular success,” Williams writes, “was the sort of life for which the human organism is created.”
It was a hard life, somewhere on the left half of the satisfaction-income graph above: Williams worked menial jobs—as a factory worker, a theater usher, an elevator operator, and a manual laborer—making minimum wage, “which covered my [rent] and left me seven dollars for meals,” and writing stories and plays in the margins of his days.
“I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed,” he writes. When the struggles were removed and replaced with the luxuries of lavish hotel suites, expensive restaurants, and a constant stream of people offering to do things for him—Williams found himself feeling empty and depressed. He grew distant from family and friends, distrustful of people’s motives, and disconnected from his work, resenting it for bringing him fame and fortune.
Without the vital efforts that defined his earlier life, Williams writes that he came to “fully apprehend” that “the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation [“a state in which things essential for human well-being are scarce or lacking”] but luxury is the wolf at the door, and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to.”
The Knowledge That I’ve Got Enough
The writers Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller were once at a party hosted by a billionaire, the kind of rich person who doesn’t just collect money and objects—they “collect people” (celebrities, pro athletes, famous writers, etc.) too, Vonnegut said. Standing there in the billionaire’s mansion on Shelter Island, Vonnegut turned to Heller—“I said, ‘Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch-22 has earned in its entire history?’ And Joe said, ‘I’ve got something he can never have.’ And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?’ And Joe said, ‘The knowledge that I’ve got enough.’”