Averted vision

Happiness in retrospect

I’m just sharing a quick scrawl this week, as I recover from a big weekend of hiking in Colorado and gear-up for my birthday next week (hint: no karaoke this year). I’m planning to resume sharing longer, weekly notes with you all in the fall, post graduate school applications.

I recently re-listened to Tim Kreider’s thought-provoking series of essays, We Learn Nothing. In the final chapter, he recalls one of his life’s happiest memories: sitting in Tompkins Square park, eating a Hawaiian pizza, and waiting for Raiders of the Lost Ark to kick-off on the outdoor projector. Paradoxically, he notes, this extremely happy memory occurred during the most miserable summer of his life—as he slogged through a romantic implosion.

Kreider makes the observation that we often experience happiness in retrospect, sometimes months or years afterwards. This makes it difficult to actively “create” happy moments, because they are often merely lagged after-effects you don’t necessarily appreciate in the present moment.

I look back to my senior year of high school and recall happy memories of driving to Nudy’s Cafe after cross country practice to grab a quick breakfast with my team. At the time, I probably didn’t find those excursions exceptionally “happy”. I was preoccupied with my college applications, my class schedule, my plans for the homecoming dance.

In this way, Kreider notes that retrospective happiness resembles the astronomical concept of averted vision. As he writes:

“Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight—and that any deliberate attempt to achieve it is so misguided—is that it isn’t an obtainable goal in itself, but only an after effect. It’s a consequence of having lived the way we’re supposed to. […] In this respect, it resembles averted vision, a phenomenon familiar to backyard astronomers whereby in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it. If you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see, are not the real stars, those blinding cataclysms in the present, but always only, the light of the untouchable past.”

Thanks for reading! I love when these thoughts lead to conversations with readers. Did you find anything interesting or surprising? Reply to me and let me know.