Happier at Home Page 6

  The most ordinary things made me wistful. “Mommy, look at this video of me when I was little!” Eleanor shouted as I walked in the door from a meeting. “Ashley found it on her laptop.” She pulled me toward the kitchen table, where our babysitter Ashley’s laptop sat, glowing. “Come on, watch! I’m wearing my flowered nightgown. Where is it? I want to wear it!”

  “Ah, look,” I answered, as Eleanor, Ashley, and I peered into the screen. “I remember that little nightgown. Ashley, when did you take this?”

  “I think it’s from three years ago,” Ashley said. (Ashley, young and hip, is very tech-savvy; in fact, it was the thrill of seeing pictures on her phone that finally inspired me to start taking pictures with my phone.)

  “Eno, you look so young, but you also look exactly the same. And right, you’re wearing that nightgown you loved.”

  “That’s my favorite,” Eleanor declared, of a garment she hadn’t worn in years. “We still have it, don’t we, Mommy?”

  “Sure,” I fibbed, with the hope that she’d never remember to ask to see it.

  That nightgown had vanished long ago, but some things I would never give up. Eliza’s first pair of glasses, with the bright blue and yellow frames. The “Candyland” shoes that Eleanor had worn so often. The mermaid costume. The girls’ (admittedly only half-finished) baby books. But how would I organize and protect these things? Then it hit me: Start a memory box for each girl.

  Conveniently, as a consequence of an unrelated shelf-by-shelf exercise, I’d just cleared out two plastic storage bins, so I labeled a box for each girl and combed through their rooms for items to add. I expected the boxes would be packed full, but in fact, I chose sparingly. The girls were intrigued with the boxes, which they dubbed their “memorandum boxes,” and they each added a few things.

  While considering whether to keep items as mementos, I noticed that when I consciously permitted myself to save a particular thing, I was able to get rid of more stuff; because I knew I’d saved one Polly Pocket doll and dress so we’d never forget that long era, I was able to get rid of the rest of our hoard. Carefully preserving a few pieces of artwork meant that I didn’t have to keep every drawing. Also, although it usually pained me to relinquish toys and books outgrown by the girls, I was able to surrender them cheerfully if they were going to Jack, my sister’s adorable baby; I sent him two big boxes of board books and the plastic shopping cart, filled with plastic food, that he’d loved during his visit. Knowing that Jack would enjoy these things eased my sense of loss. (But what would I do when Eleanor, like Eliza, outgrew the battered wooden kitchen set that had seen so much use? It certainly wouldn’t fit in a memorandum box or in the mail—but how could I bear to part with it? I’d have to find a way.)

  As I went shelf by shelf, I became increasingly cowed by the power of the “endowment effect.” This psychological phenomenon means that once I own an object, I value it more. I might not have particularly wanted that purple freebie coffee mug, but once the mug was mine, I’d find it hard to give it up. The endowment effect meant that objects I owned—even ones I’d never much liked or used—made a claim on me, and the longer I owned them, the higher I perceived their value to be.

  For that reason, I became more cautious about what I acquired. I turned down conference swag. I ignored bargain-buying opportunities. Fortunately, I never had the urge to do travel shopping; such purchases, I knew from observing my friends, were rarely as enticing at home as they were in a faraway place. The fact is, accumulation is costly at any price. Possessions consume time, space, and energy, which are very precious. And even if I manage to shake off the endowment effect, I then have to figure out how and where to get rid of possessions.

  I told a friend about my shelf-by-shelf exercise and she nodded. “Oh, I know the feeling,” she said. “My apartment is packed with junk.” (True. And I also happened to know that she had storage units in three states: one in the town where she grew up, one where her grandparents had lived, and one forty minutes from her apartment.) “One of these days I just have to get organized.”

  “Oh, don’t get organized!” I said quickly. “Don’t worry about organization at this point!” I stopped myself. I didn’t want to sound rude.

  “What do you mean?” she asked in surprise. “You’ve seen my place! I desperately need to get organized.”

  “Well,” I suggested cautiously, “you might try getting rid of stuff, first. Then you won’t have to organize it.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked in a suspicious tone.

  “If you don’t actually need those papers, you can toss them instead of filing them. If you never wear a lot of your clothes, you can give them to Goodwill, and then you don’t have to find room for them in your closets.” I didn’t mention her storage units. Some depths are better left unplumbed.

  “Oh, I use most of my things,” she assured me. “I don’t need to get rid of much. I just need to buy some supplies so I can have a better system.”

  I didn’t trust myself to answer.

  No surprise, I’ve noticed that it’s the people with the worst clutter problems who have the instinct to run to buy complicated hangers, elaborate drawer compartments, or color-coded plastic boxes. Organizing supplies can be wonderfully helpful—as long as they actually create more order with necessary objects, and don’t merely enable us to jam more clutter into place.

  When I know exactly where to find the things I’m looking for, and I can easily fit a letter into a folder or a towel onto the shelf, I have a comforting (if illusory) sense of being more in control of my life, generally. Eliminating clutter makes the burden of daily life feel lighter, and when a friend confided, “I cleaned out our closets, and I feel as though I lost ten pounds,” I knew exactly how she felt.

  As I went shelf by shelf, I worked through a quick checklist: Do we use it? Do we love it? As I applied the checklist, I recognized the important difference between something that wasn’t used, and something that was useless. Eliza didn’t use her tiny animal ink stamps anymore, and I didn’t use the gorgeously bright vintage paper hats that my mother gave me, and we never used the obsolete slide rule that sat on our bookshelf in its cunning leather case—and yet these things were precious in their way. I wanted my home to be filled with objects of symbolic and sentimental attraction as well as practical value. These things, unlike the (now-departed) heart-shaped pancake mold, kept their place.

  READ THE MANUAL

  While handsome, well-made tools are a joy to use, confusing devices are a drain. Too often, things once easy to operate—TVs, irons, dishwashers, alarm clocks, washing machines—are now humiliatingly challenging.

  Cognitive science professor Donald Norman points out that when we expect that a device—such as a bathroom scale or a hotel room’s light switch—will be fairly easy to operate, but we have trouble with it, we tend to blame ourselves, not the object. One Sunday afternoon, as I was frantically trying to synchronize the data on my laptop with my desktop, I kept getting strange error messages. In desperation, I asked Jamie if he could take a look. “Umm, our Internet service isn’t working,” he announced after fifteen seconds on the computer. I’d assumed I was doing something wrong.

  Somehow, I’d become surrounded by several common household appliances that I hadn’t quite mastered. I was pretty slow with the DVR. I didn’t know how to use the “mute” function on our landline phone. I struggled to upload photos from our camera. I felt powerless in a confrontation with my laptop’s temperamental wireless mouse. I bought from iTunes so rarely that I had to figure it out anew, each time.

  Adding to the complexity was the fact that Jamie was an “incomplete upgrader.” He’d get inspired to replace a device, but he didn’t always take the time to master the replacement, or if he did, he didn’t have the patience to show me, and I didn’t have the patience to figure it out. For instance, to celebrate a big work victory, he bought a coffeemaker that, weeks later, I still couldn’t face. I just made myself tea instead.


  However, I had to admit that I was contributing to my own frustration, because I almost never bothered to read the instruction booklet. I resolved to “Read the manual”; when I acquired a new gizmo, or had trouble with an old gizmo, I’d push myself to learn to operate it.

  First on the list: I mastered the coffeemaker (which wasn’t that hard). Next, I considered our new video camera. When Jamie brought it home, I’d ripped it out of the box, threw away the packaging, flipped through the manual, and started pushing buttons. Now I’d try a different way. I waited until I had some time and patience to spare (several days passed), then pulled out the manual and sat down with the camera in my hand. I read the instructions carefully. I looked at the labeled diagrams and at the camera. I experimented to make sure I knew how to use it. Suddenly, the video camera seemed much less confusing. (However, I still resented the fact that I had to read a manual several times to learn to use a toaster.)

  My First Splendid Truth holds that to be happy, we need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. Even a small step toward growth—such as learning to use a new camera—gives a boost. And eliminating the feelings of frustration and incompetence is a happiness booster, too.

  “Read the manual” was helpful on a metaphorical level, as well, to caution me to make necessary preparations and not to expect instant mastery. Did I have the tools I needed, and did I know how to use them? Was I actually looking for the pull tab or the “tear here” mark that would allow me to open a package easily instead of struggling needlessly? Was I giving myself time to study and learn? Too often I skimped on preparation time, whether designing the online invitations for Eliza’s birthday party or learning a new word-processing trick. “Read the manual” reminded me to take time to prepare.

  I picked up a useful term from the world of cooking: mise en place, French for “everything in its place.” Mise en place describes the preparation done before starting the actual cooking, such as chopping, measuring, and gathering ingredients and implements. Mise en place ensures that once a cook has started, there’s no need to run out to the store or search for a sifter. Mise en place is preparation, but it’s also a state of mind. Nothing is more satisfying than working easily and well.

  Little things, very little—nevertheless, they made a real difference to my comfort with my possessions. The resolutions to “Cultivate a shrine,” “Go shelf by shelf,” and “Read the manual” made me feel both more engaged and more in command of my things.

  Sometimes I felt deafened by the clamor of ads trying to convince me that I’d be happier if I’d buy some more stuff. And I often heard the contrary message, that I’d be happier with less. But September’s efforts had proved to me that happiness is not having less; happiness is not having more; happiness is wanting what I have. And this truth has an important corollary: If I don’t want something, getting it won’t make me happy. I don’t love listening to music, so getting a superb set of earphones won’t add to my happiness.

  Declaring that we’d all be happy with more, or with less, is like saying that every book should be a hundred pages long. Every book has a right length, and people differ in the number of possessions, and the types of possessions, with which they can meaningfully engage. One person is happy living in a sparsely furnished yurt, while another person is happy adding to a collection of fine porcelain. There’s no one right way; I must decide what’s right for me.

  When I told my sister about my newfound respect for the importance of possessions to happiness, Elizabeth said, “It’s kind of ironic that you’re the one making that argument.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because compared to most people, you’re not very interested in possessions. You dislike shopping—”

  “By the way,” I interrupted, “did you know that people shop for an average of six hours each week?” I can never resist supplying a recently learned happiness-related fact.

  “You dislike shopping,” she continued, “you don’t have many clothes, you don’t like fixing up your apartment, buying furniture, that kind of thing. You don’t care about nice jewelry or other things that lots of people love. You don’t collect anything. And you’re on a constant mission to get rid of stuff!”

  “Well, I sort of collect bluebirds.”

  “Maybe, but you’re not going to antiques stores or flea markets, or looking on eBay. People give them to you.”

  “True.”

  “So it’s just funny to me that now you’re the big defender of possessions and happiness.”

  Elizabeth knew me well. I have a lot of room in my closet. I don’t actively collect anything (not even bluebirds). I never shop if I can help it. I have seven pairs of earrings, of which I wear one pair 95 percent of the time. Other people, however, can sustain much higher levels of engagement. A friend has so many cardigans that I feel panicky when I look at her shelves, but she enjoys them all.

  I have a fairly low tolerance for stuff, and I’m happier when my home reflects that—yet possessions play a real role in my happiness. As William James observed, “Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.”

  October

  MARRIAGE

  Prove My Love

  Where Thou art—that—is Home—

  —Emily Dickinson

  - Kiss in the morning, kiss at night

  - Give gold stars

  - Make the positive argument

  - Take driving lessons

  I’d spent the month of September thinking about possessions. Now, although I did believe that the stuff of life was more important than some people conceded, I was ready to turn to something far more significant: my marriage.

  A strong marriage is associated with happiness for two reasons. First, because people who are already happy make better dates and easier spouses, they get married and stay married more easily than do unhappy people; both men and women are attracted to happy partners. At the same time, marriage itself brings happiness, because support and companionship are such important elements to a happy life. To be happy, we need more than casual acquaintances; we need intimate relationships of mutual understanding, love, and support.

  Most marriages exhibit homogamy—that is, partners tend to resemble each other in matters such as age, education, ethnicity, level of attractiveness, and political ideology, and over time, as they influence each other (knowingly or not), spouses become even more alike. Also, in a phenomenon called “health concordance,” partners’ behaviors tend to merge, as they pick up health habits from each other related to eating, exercising, smoking, drinking, and visiting doctors. Sometimes for the better: If one spouse quits smoking, the other is 67 percent less likely to continue. Sometimes for the worse: Married couples are three times more likely both to be obese. It’s even true that couples who didn’t particularly resemble each other when first married come to resemble each other after twenty-five years of marriage—and those who look the most alike report the happiest marriages.

  My relationship with Jamie was one of the most significant factors in my happiness at home. In a sense, Jamie was my home; home was wherever we were, together. I wanted to foster a tender, romantic, lighthearted atmosphere between us, and I wanted Jamie to be happy—and I knew that when I was happier, he was happier, both because he caught that happiness from me (spouses influence each other’s happiness levels) and because he worried if I seemed unhappy.

  Jamie and I met in law school. I still remember the first time I saw him walk into the library—a shock ran through me. He was wearing a rose-colored Patagonia pullover (which I still have). I walked over to a friend and whispered casually, “Who is that guy?”

  Our law school was small, and our social circles started to overlap. One night, we sat next to each other at a dinner party. Then there was that afternoon we ran into each other on the law school staircase in front of the stai
ned-glass windows.

  But he had a girlfriend, and I had a boyfriend. Then he broke up with his girlfriend. (Since our school was small, the news spread fast.) A week later, I broke up with my boyfriend. It happened in the morning, and I went out into the courtyard and made a general announcement of the breakup to a bunch of friends to see what his reaction would be.

  No reaction. Hmmmm, I thought. Maybe I misread this situation. Had I imagined what I thought was between us? After all, the two of us had never talked about anything important, certainly not about “us”; we’d never spent any time alone, only in chaperoned groups (except once, when he’d asked me to breakfast at the Copper Kitchen diner before our Corporations class, an occasion so thrilling to me in prospect that I slept only a few hours the night before); and neither of us had ever made even the smallest romantic overture toward the other.

  But the afternoon of my breakup, he told me he was going to walk to get a soda, and did I want to come? I did. We walked to the store, then back to the law school, and sat on a bench beneath some blooming magnolia trees. He started to say something, then took my hand; this was the first time we ever touched. At that moment, if he’d asked me to marry him, it would have seemed perfectly natural, and I might well have said “Yes.” (We did get engaged several months later.)

  Now, so many years later, is it the same? Yes and no. Yes, because I still love him passionately, and more deeply, because I know him so much better. No, because he pervades my entire life, so now sometimes it’s hard to see him. Married people are so intertwined, so interdependent, that it’s hard to maintain that sense of wonder and excitement.