A vivid imagination can let you explore life in ways otherwise impossible, but is it keeping you from experiencing the real thing?
The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman said that he never allowed himself to dream of winning the Nobel, because as a child, growing up during World War II, “he’d cultivated an active fantasy life.” He would play out elaborate scenes with himself at the center of them. He imagined himself single-handedly winning the war and ending it, for example.
“He established this private rule for his imagination, once he realized that, after he had fantasized about something that might actually happen, he lost his drive to make it happen. His fantasies were so vivid that ‘it was as if you actually had it,’ and if you actually had it, why would you bother to work hard to get it?”¹
I don’t think I have that problem, at least not to the extent that I need to make a rule out of it, but I have written in the past about my ability to immerse myself so completely in a topic that I burn myself out thinking about it, to the point I no longer feel the need to actually do it. This has applied to everything from hobbies to vacations, and even meals. If I spend enough time on it mentally, I’ve already done, seen, and tasted everything I wanted to, and there really isn’t much point in carrying on.
But this also applies to real-life activities. I’m a curious person by nature, but once I’ve exhausted my curiosity, I’m often no longer intrigued and therefore no longer interested.
This happens to me a lot with people. I’m initially curious about just about anyone. I’m good with strangers. I ask questions and listen to the answers. But once we get past a certain level of intimacy, I’m usually done. Personal relationships are too much work.
When you romanticize something, it’s all golden. But once you begin to get into the details, reality sets in, and it will never be just a dream again. Sometimes the fantasy is more fulfilling and satisfying than any reality will ever be. I wrote about this in a story called “Wasting Time.” The gist of which was that many of the hobbies I enjoy, I do so virtually or at least vicariously. These are intellectual fantasies rather than physical activities.
There is a scene in the 1997 movie “Good Will Hunting,” where Sean Maguire (played by Robin Williams) is talking to Will Hunting (Matt Damon). Sean, a psychologist, explains to Will the difference between merely reading about something and the actual experience, and he gives Will a series of examples.
“So if I asked you about art,” Sean says, “you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the Pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I’ll bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that.”³
Later in the movie, they’re discussing Will’s fear of intimacy and why he hasn’t pursued a girl he very clearly likes.
“So, Christ, call her up,” Sean says.
“Why?” Will says. “So I can realize she’s not so smart. That she’s boring. Right now she’s perfect, I don’t want to ruin that.”⁴
I’m enamored by the idea of things. I like the idea of people, for instance, but not so much the real thing. People are messy, and needy, and never do what you want them to — or even expect them to. I like the idea of religion, but little about the practice makes sense to me, and no one even follows their own rules, and there doesn’t seem to be much benefit to it outside some of the batshit crazy idea of eternal punishment for not following the rules that I’m told don’t count anymore since they crucified God.
For instance, I like the idea of Christmas, but like Tim Minchin, “I have all of the usual objections to consumerism, the commercialization of an ancient religion, to the westernization of a dead Palestinian, press-ganged into selling Playstations and beer, but I still really like it.”
I enjoy the fantasy of most things far more than the real thing. Which is better, watching the last fifteen minutes of “A River Runs Through It” or traveling to Montana to fly fish on a river where your feet are freezing while your back sweats and bugs eat you as you try to catch a fish you’re going to let go once you catch it? Plus, no cool soundtrack, and Robert Redford won’t be narrating it.
Just saying.
Presumably, it’s all about the journey and always was, so anticipation is the point, not the thing. Just like it’s the journey, not the destination. It’s the buying and giving the gifts, not the receiving of them. It’s making Thanksgiving dinner and getting ready for it, not the six minutes it takes everyone to eat a meal. All of it, surprising to no one.
As the court jester once said, “Everything is amazing, and everyone is miserable.”
How often do we refrain from real-life experiences, either because we think we already know what we can expect or because we are afraid that they will not live up to expectations?
When I quit smoking, the thing that helped me the most was the realization that so much more than smoking, the thing I loved the most, was the idea of smoking. I loved the thought of it, the anticipation, but often not the reality. To this day, the thought of having a cigarette far outweighs any possible reality to the pleasure I might get from actually smoking one.
I loved the anticipation, the pageantry, the paraphernalia, the rituals. It was glorious. The actual smoking part was, let’s face it, kind of a drag, and no pun intended. Dirty and smelly, frustrating and shameful, especially once we were no longer allowed to smoke indoors. Then it became like trying to find a place to masturbate in public.
After I had quit drinking for nine months, I began to feel the same way about booze. Sure, the buzz was great; it wasn’t all fictitious, or at least I don’t think it was. But was it? Because then what happened? Nothing really. Just another drink.
Drinking has the strange self-fulfilling result of more drinking. There really wasn’t ever a goal for me, except to have another, and getting drunk was never the goal. What I liked was the idea of it. That first sip, like putting a flame to the end of the cigarette and inhaling, the anticipation of it all. But then it was over. That was the best part.
At the end of “The Undoing Project,” Michael Lewis’s book about Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky, Lewis writes:
“Danny had not allowed himself to imagine what he would do if he were ever given a Nobel Prize. Which was just as well, as the phone didn’t ring. At some point, his wife Anne got up and said, a bit sadly, ‘Oh well.’
“Every year, there were disappointed people. Every year there were old people waiting by phones. Anne went off to exercise and left Danny alone. He’d always been good at preparing himself for not getting what he wanted, and in the grand scheme of things, this was not a hard blow. He was fine with who he was and what he had done. He could now safely imagine what he would have done had he won the Nobel Prize.
“He would have brought Amos’s wife and children with him. He would have appended to his Nobel lecture his eulogy of Amos. He would have carried Amos to Stockholm with him. He would have done for Amos what Amos could never do for him. There were many things Danny would have done, but now he had things to do. He went back to writing his enthusiastic reference for Terry Odean.
“Then the phone rang.”⁵
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