Forgoing the Forbidden Fruit and Perceiving Patterns
Pete left me.
For a business trip. Not divorce. But it was for a week. And there were enough time zones separating us, and unreliable enough cell service, that I got a taste of what life as a solo working parent is like. It was rough. Our bedroom smelled like poop. Not from me, not directly. But somehow when Pete empties the diaper pail he also manages to take out the smell too, an elusive skill that I don’t seem to have. Mattie was sick with the flu, and because of that I am certain more food came out of him than went into him. The bed didn’t get made. My sheets felt wet (how?). We broke a lamp. And the vacuum that tried to clean it up.
And I kicked off the first day of my adventures in single parenting with a medical emergency. Mattie and I were playing. He was crawling over me like those goats some people bring with them to hot yoga. Things got weird—weirder even than sweaty zoo animals in exercise class—and Mattie head-butted me. On purpose. In the mouth. My lip split open and swelled to twice its size faster than the speed of sound. I know because I felt it expand even before I recognized the sound of my own yelp. Mattie and I both cried because of all the blood. The day hadn’t started off well.
By the middle of the afternoon, I was so beat that I did something I had never done before. While Mattie napped, I napped too. But not with the feeling of luxury that this rare moment warranted. No. I just sort of listed over, falling onto my side in the living room. I ended up in the fetal position on the hardwood floor. And I decided I’d stay. No pillow. A blanket had fallen on my face and felt like it belonged there. I didn’t have the energy to move to the couch that was close enough to kick if there was reason to. As quickly and easily as I’d toppled over, I also fell asleep. Baby-induced concussion, maybe?
I woke up when Mattie beckoned for my services, crib-side. He used me as a mommy ladder, climbed out, and headed straight for the iPad. I’d wondered what he did with his days when I was away writing this book, and I think I figured it out then. If the Apple Store down the street had a punch-card loyalty program for visits to the Genius Bar, Mattie would have gotten his tenth cup of coffee for free a long while ago. He looked like he’d had lessons, knew what he was doing. Without losing a beat, he woke up his electronic friend, took that chubby little pointer finger he usually reserves for wagging at me when he’s telling me no, and started playing a song. Of the thousands on the menu and with the ability to start the song wherever he wanted, he cued up Frank Sinatra belting out Hoagy Carmichael’s line “I get along without you very well…”
As this day has made very clear to me, no Pete, I do not.
By the end of the week, after schlepping myself and Mattie out of the city and to the country, I collapsed into bed as the night set in. My mind was organizing the ever-growing to-do list. What I had forgotten to do that day kept me awake. What I needed to do far exceeded what I did do each day. Coupled with that, Mattie had made friends with the sunrise and decided that this week of all weeks he wanted to greet each and every one of them personally. So I confess, I didn’t practice drums. I didn’t even see the sticks. I was so tired. I wanted a break.
I knew I wasn’t alone in wanting something other than what I had. And I recognized the problem that this posed for the goals I was working toward—other than keeping Mattie and me alive, healthy, and happy. I went back to read a study I remembered about the struggles of temptation and wanting something else. Researchers found more than two hundred adults from the city of Würzburg, Germany, who agreed to report on the things they wanted during their day. They all received a prototype smartphone. It wasn’t really all that smart, but it could randomly beep and ask some personal questions about every two hours for a week. The main question this intrusive little device posed was whether its owner wanted something at the moment. That something could be anything. If the answer to the question was yes, the device asked for a description of what that something was. And people seemed unabashed about offering that insight into their inner lives. Now, respondents weren’t hooked up to any machines that could document every single want and every shifting desire—despite what the movies might lead us to believe, these kinds of machines don’t yet exist. But because the devices were set up to randomly ask their owner what was going on in their mind so frequently throughout the day, and because people were not shy in answering, the researchers collected a lot of data. In fact, they had more than ten thousand answers to read through, and from this haul they could do a very good job of approximating how often we want things.
And the results were clear. By even the most conservative estimates, people feel like they want something about half the time they are awake. One out of every four times their devices asked them what they wanted, people said food. Followed in frequency by a nap and a drink. People wanted coffee more often than they wanted to watch television, check their Instagram feed, or have sex—though those were still pretty popular cravings.
It’s not bad to want something. Wanting to eat, sleep, and have sex keeps us, as a species, alive, quite literally. But sometimes those things we want right now don’t resonate with the things we want later on. And, in fact, about half of the time people wanted something, they simultaneously said they didn’t want to want it. They said their desires right then conflicted at least somewhat with something else they were working toward. Altogether, these findings imply that during one-quarter of our waking lives we find ourselves pulled toward something we wish, at least in part, wasn’t luring us in that direction.
Temptations can catch our eye and occupy our mental bandwidth. When we see them in front of us or notice them nearby, it can be hard to think about anything else. For example, if we realize that a tray of cookies is sitting against the back wall in a boring meeting, our minds may begin to formulate a plan to excuse ourselves and snag a treat on the way out the door.
In other words, there are times when, if we look myopically, we might act narrow-mindedly. Like chocolates to a dieter, a gin and tonic to an attempted teetotaler, or the splurge to a saver, focus sometimes has us acting like a moth around a flame. The things that capture our attention can lead us to make decisions that seem ideal in the moment but sit at odds with our long-range plans. One candy bar today won’t expand our belly, but one candy bar every afternoon likely could send us shopping for a new pair of pants down the road. Buying an iced cappuccino on the morning commute in and the evening commute out on the same day, once, won’t break the bank, but it could make a significant dent in our net income and savings goals if we kept this up throughout the whole month.
Expanding Our Focus
Remember the pantry attendants stocking the snack areas at Google? Their work demonstrated how a narrow focus might lead us to make the wrong choices based on what’s close at hand. Knowing that employees visit snack stations to get a drink but happen to see the snacks nearby and grab a handful, the scientists decided to separate the food from the beverages. One beverage station was placed six feet from the snacks. Another beverage station was set up seventeen feet away. The scientists recorded all of the drink and snack choices that four hundred employees made over seven workdays.