The Antidote (14 page)

Take, for example, the availability bias. Caring more about those threats that you can picture vividly might, long ago, have made sense: the reason you could picture them vividly, most likely, was because they occurred a few yards away, in the village where you lived, and very recently. They really did pose a more serious risk, so the bias was a useful shortcut for making an accurate threat
assessment. But if the reason that they are mentally ‘available' to you today is that you're in the habit of watching a daily news bulletin, the very purpose of which is to scour the globe for the most lurid scenes of mayhem, you will be misled into focusing your worry on threats you don't actually face. Seeing a television report of a terrorist attack on foreign soil, you might abandon plans for an overseas holiday, in order to hang on to your feeling of safety – when, in truth, spending too much time sitting on the sofa watching television might pose a far greater threat to your survival.

If cognitive biases were the only problem with the quest for safety and security, the solution might be straightforward, if not necessarily easy to implement: it would simply be a matter of bearing the biases in mind, and doing our best to adjust our behaviours accordingly. We would then avoid being misled by our evolved emotional responses; we'd achieve the protection from danger that we had been seeking, and perfect happiness would follow. Needless to say, it isn't that simple. The more radical possibility – the one that takes us to the core of the ‘negative' approach to happiness – is that there might be something more fundamentally problematic about the goal of security; and that real happiness might be dependent on being willing to face, and to tolerate, insecurity and vulnerability.

This is a thorny topic. You'd have to be insane to argue that it was preferable to live in conditions of serious danger, or that a certain basic sense of psychological security isn't a healthy thing to possess. (The terminology creates additional confusion, since you could argue that anyone who is able calmly to tolerate feelings of insecurity and vulnerability must already be, by definition, rather secure to begin with.) But a recurring theme in the study
of happiness is that many of the ways in which we try to feel ‘safe' don't ultimately make us happy. We seek financial security, yet above a certain threshold level, more money doesn't translate into more happiness. We protect ourselves from physical danger by moving to safer neighbourhoods, or even locking ourselves inside gated communities, but the effects of such trends on community life have been demonstrated to have a negative effect on collective levels of happiness. We seek the fulfilment of strong romantic relationships and friendships, yet striving too hard to achieve security in such relationships stifles them; their flourishing depends on a certain degree of not being protected, of being open to experiences both negative and positive. It is possible to be similarly protected from terrorism, as Schneier said, so long as you are happy to shut down the possibility of air travel itself. What all these examples have in common is that achieving perfect security would run counter to our interests. We might think we want security more than anything, but when it comes down to it, we don't.

‘To be vulnerable', argue the psychotherapists Hal and Sidra Stone, ‘is to be without defensive armour, to be authentic and present … when we are able to feel our vulnerability, we are able to experience the full range of our reactions to the world around us.' The point, says Brené Brown, a professor of social work who has studied the psychological benefits of vulnerability, is that ‘you can't selectively numb emotion. You can't say: here's the bad stuff; here's vulnerability, here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment: I don't want these.' In the end, the only way you can achieve protection from the negatives is by achieving protection from the positives, too – whereupon you realise that you didn't really want such protection at all. Or as C.S. Lewis put it, more poetically:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with your hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

Becoming numb to negative emotions, Brown's research illustrates, doesn't even work as a way of protecting yourself from negative emotions themselves – for reasons that the Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton expressed in his autobiography
The Seven Storey Mountain.
‘The truth that many people never understand', he wrote, ‘is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.' Seen this way, it becomes clear that security-chasing is a large part of the problem with the ‘cult of optimism'. Through positive thinking and related approaches, we seek the safety and solid ground of certainty, of knowing how the future will turn out, of a time in the future when we'll be ceaselessly happy, and never have to fear negative emotions again. But in chasing all that, we close down the very faculties that permit the happiness we crave.

For the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, insecurity is the essential nature of reality – and all our distress arises from trying to scramble to solid ground that doesn't actually exist. ‘Becoming a Buddhist', she says, ‘is about becoming homeless.' To turn to face reality is to see that we exist in a condition of ‘fundamental groundlessness'. Yet most of us chronically ‘scramble not
to feel that groundlessness … my whole training [is] that there is no way to tie up those loose ends'. She goes on: ‘You're never going to erase the groundlessness. You're never going to have a neat, sweet little picture with no messiness.' Chödrön's most famous book is entitled
When Things Fall Apart,
which makes it sound as though it might be a manual for getting back on a secure footing when things go catastrophically wrong. In fact, her point is that when things fall apart, however painful the experience, it's a good thing; the collapse of your apparent security represents a confrontation with life as it really is. ‘Things are not permanent, they don't last, there is no final security,' she says. What makes us miserable is not this truth, but our efforts to escape it.

At this point, though, a weighty objection to all this might be troubling you in the same way that it troubled me. It's all very well for those of us who find ourselves in relatively comfortable situations to praise insecurity and vulnerability. We may be fortunate enough to live out our entire lives without encountering insecurity in its most acute forms. But what do you learn about happiness when insecurity really is the unavoidable background condition of your daily life?

It was a Sunday morning in January, cloudless and hot, and many of the residents of Africa's second-largest urban slum were dressed for church: the men in well-pressed suits, the women in dresses of fuschia and bright green, children clutching bibles. Here in the poorest part of Kibera – across the rubbish-strewn railway tracks that divided the slum proper from the rest of Nairobi – it was a challenge to keep your church clothes clean as you picked your way along the muddy paths that passed for roads; in many places, the ground was composed of discarded plastic bags and other
detritus. Between homes made from scraps of sheet metal and mud, chickens and dogs wandered through gullies that flowed with raw sewage.

Most of the churchgoers were heading up the hill to the big Africa Inland church, or across to the main Catholic one. There were numerous other tiny shop-front churches, too, hidden among the homes – dark one-room shacks in which a minister could be seen preaching to an audience of two or three, or playing hymns on a Casio keyboard. But in the opinion of Frankie Otieno, a twenty-two-year-old resident of Kibera who spent his Sundays not worshipping but attending to his various business interests, these smaller churches were essentially scams. ‘In Kibera, a church is a business,' he said, his easy smile tinged with cynicism. He was sitting on a tattered sofa in the shady main room of his mother's house in Kibera, drinking Coke from a glass bottle. ‘A church is the easiest way to get money from the aid organisations. One day, you fill up your church with kids – somebody who's dirty, somebody who's not eating – and then the organisation comes and sees the church is full, and they take photos to show their sponsors, and they give you money.' He chuckled. ‘It's all about the photos, you know?'

In another part of Kibera, reached by pursuing still narrower paths, deeper into the slum, then rounding a bend past a health clinic, three Kiberan men were starting their work day at the goat-bone recycling facility. It was an open-air compound, arranged in straightforward fashion: a pile of newly cleaned goat bones on one side, various saws and grinding implements in the middle, and then, on the other side, the results of their labours: beer-bottle openers, necklaces and other trinkets, waiting to be transported to central Nairobi to be sold to tourists. A chunky battery-powered cassette recorder was playing classic rock, though
if you listened you could hear singing from the church on the hill. The smell of
nyama choma,
or roasted goat meat, sizzling on an open grill nearby, wafted through the workshop, masking the odour of sewage.

Commercially speaking, Sunday in Kibera was no different to any other day, and that meant it was busy. Past the bone workshop, past the street grills, down along an alley covered with blue plastic sheeting, a gateway marked the official entrance to the slum's vast market. But the boundary wasn't obvious, because the whole of Kibera felt like a market. Along every crater-ridden lane, merchants at makeshift tables sold radios, or pineapples, or baby clothes in fluorescent colours; the navigators of wheelbarrows piled with building materials or discarded electronics veered to the left and right to avoid collisions with other people, and other wheelbarrows.

Meanwhile, in an alley leading away from the market, past an establishment showing British Premier League football matches on a satellite television, a man who gave his name as George was at home, working out at the gym he had improvised in his tiny yard. His barbell was a repurposed iron pipe, with concrete poured into cylindrical water vats at each end, in place of weight plates. ‘A hundred and fifty kilograms!' he claimed, when asked how much he was hefting above his massive shoulders, making the veins in his forehead pulse. His children craned their necks out from behind the cloth covering their home's main room, and laughed at him.

By the standards of someone from almost anywhere else, the conditions faced by Kibera's residents – who number anywhere from 170,000 to a million, according to competing population surveys – are almost unimaginably harsh. The slum has no running water, and no electricity, except what its residents ‘borrow' by clipping wires to the cables that run overhead, bringing power
to Nairobi's better-off citizens. Sexual violence is rampant. Car-jackings and opportunistic murders are a weekly occurrence. With no proper sanitation, Kibera's primary means of disposing of human waste is what the slum-dwellers wryly refer to as ‘flying toilets': the practice of defecating into a plastic bag, then flinging it as far from your own home as possible. Flying toilets add diarrhoea and typhoid fever to the neighbourhood's catalogue of woes, which also includes the fact that, according to some estimates, 20 per cent of the population is infected with HIV.

For all these reasons – and also because it is a conveniently short drive from central Nairobi, with its international airport and comfortable business hotels – Kibera has become a world-famous landmark of suffering. Prime ministers and presidents travel there for photo-opportunities; television news crews come regularly to gawp; and the slum has disproportionately become the focus of hundreds of aid groups, many of them religious, mostly from the United States and Europe. Their names reflect the sense of agonised desperation for which the name ‘Kibera' has come to stand: the Fountain of Hope Initiative; Seeds of Hope; Shining Hope for Communities; the Kibera Hope Centre; Kibera In Need.

But ask Norbert Aluku, a lanky young social worker, born and raised in Kibera, if his childhood there was one of misery and suffering, and he will laugh at you in disbelief. ‘Of course not! Because, at the end of the day, it's not about your conditions. It's about taking whatever you have, and using it as best you can, together with your neighbours. In Kibera, it's only with your neighbours that you're going to get by.' Or ask Irene Mueni, who lives there too, and who speaks darkly of traumatising events in her childhood, yet who still says: ‘Happiness is subjective. You can be happy in a slum, unhappy in a city. The things you need for happiness aren't the things you think you need.'

This is the difficult truth that strikes many visitors to Kibera, and they struggle for the words to express it, aware that it is open to misinterpretation. Bluntly, Kiberans just don't seem as unhappy or as depressed as one might have expected. ‘It's clear that poverty has crippled Kibera,' observes Jean-Pierre Larroque, a documentary filmmaker who has spent plenty of time there, ‘but it doesn't exactly induce the pity-inducing cry for help that NGOs, church missions, and charity groups would have you believe.' What you see instead, he notes, are ‘streets bustling with industry'. Kibera feels not so much like a place of despair as a hotbed of entrepreneurialism.

This awkward realisation – that people living in extremely fragile circumstances seem surprisingly high-functioning and non-depressed – isn't only applicable to Kibera, of course. It's so familiar that it has become a cliché, especially regarding sub-Saharan Africa. And it is laden with problems: it coasts close to a number of distasteful generalisations, perhaps even to racism, as well as to poisonous myths about ‘primitive' people, uncorrupted by modernity. It can lead to questionable political conclusions, too: if people who are suffering from severe poverty and poor health are so happy, certain commentators are inclined to suggest, perhaps they don't require outside support. And we cringe, surely rightly, when we hear well-heeled celebrities speak in rapt tones about the simple joys of having nothing – as when, for example, Coleen Rooney, television presenter and footballer's wife, told an interviewer: ‘I find it so inspiring when you see people from poorer countries on TV: they just seem so happy with their lives, despite their lack of material things … in the future, I plan to visit somewhere like Africa.'