The Antidote (8 page)

One of the most obvious objections to non-attachment as a way of life is that it seems so passive. Granted, it might be a way of becoming more chilled out, but wouldn't it mean never getting anything done? The Buddhist monk spending decades in
meditation might be at one with the universe, but it's not clear that the rest of us should want to emulate him. Attachment, this argument runs, is the only thing that motivates anyone to accomplish anything worthwhile in the first place. If you weren't attached to things being a certain way, rather than another way – and to feeling certain emotions, rather than others – why would you ever attempt to thrive professionally, to better your material circumstances, to raise children, or to change the world? There's a persuasive retort to this, though. Just as the Stoic notion of acceptance need not entail resignation, Buddhist non-attachment can be a rigorously practical way of accomplishing worthwhile activities. To understand why, consider the most ubiquitous and frustrating barrier to getting things done: the near-universal curse of procrastination.

You are probably already much too familiar with the truth that most anti-procrastination advice just doesn't work, or at least not for very long. Motivational books, tapes and seminars might leave you feeling briefly excited, but that feeling soon fades. Ambitious lists of goals and systems of rewards seem like a great idea when you construct them, but feel stale the next morning; inspiring mottos on posters and coffee-mugs swiftly lose their ability to inspire. Procrastination sets in again, sometimes deeper than before. Which is, a cynic might suggest, how motivational speakers and self-help authors guarantee themselves a reliable income: if their products delivered lasting change, they would have much less repeat custom.

The problem with all these motivational tips and tricks is that they aren't really about ‘how to get things done' at all. They're about how to feel in the mood for getting things done. ‘If we get the right emotion, we can get ourselves to do
anything!'
says Tony Robbins, author of
Awaken the Giant Within,
whose books and speeches
fixate on this theme. (At Robbins's motivational seminars, participants are invited to pump themselves up by walking barefoot across hot coals.) As we've seen, though, the ideas that self-help gurus express so hyperbolically are often only extreme versions of how the rest of us think. The most common response to procrastination is indeed to try to ‘get the right emotion': to try to motivate yourself to feel like getting on with the job.

The problem is that
feeling like
acting and
actually
acting are two different things. A person mired deep in procrastination might claim he is unable to work, but what he really means is that he is unable to make himself feel like working. The author Julie Fast, who writes about the psychology of depression, points out that even when a person is so depressed that she is unable to get out of bed in the morning – something Fast has experienced for herself – it's more accurate to say that she's unable to
feel like
getting out of bed. This isn't meant to imply that procrastinators, or the severely depressed, should simply pull their socks up and get over it. Rather, it highlights the way that we tend to confuse acting with feeling like acting, and how most motivational techniques are really designed to change how you
feel.
They're built, in other words, on a form of attachment – on strengthening your investment in a specific kind of emotion.

Sometimes, that can help. But sometimes you simply can't make yourself feel like acting. And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you can act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal. The subtext is that if you can't make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can't get down to work.

Taking a non-attached stance towards procrastination, by contrast, starts from a different question: who says you need to wait until you ‘feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated, or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings, and act anyway.

It is illuminating to note, here, how the daily rituals and working routines of prolific authors and artists – people who really do get a lot done – very rarely include techniques for ‘getting motivated' or ‘feeling inspired'. Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasise the mechanics of the working process, focusing not on generating the right mood, but on accomplishing certain physical actions, regardless of mood. Anthony Trollope wrote for three hours each morning, before leaving to go to his job as an executive at the post office; if he finished a novel within a three-hour period, he simply moved on to the next. (He wrote forty-seven novels over the course of his life.) The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasise specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. ‘Inspiration is for amateurs,' the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.'

No approach to psychology better expresses the pragmatic
benefits of non-attachment than Morita Therapy, the school founded by the early twentieth-century Japanese psychologist Shoma Morita. The head of psychiatry at Jikei University School of Medicine in Tokyo, Morita was heavily influenced by Buddhism, and especially its perspective on thoughts and emotions as mental weather – as things that happen to us, and with which we can coexist in peace. ‘People … think that they should always like what they do, and that their lives should be trouble-free,' Maria wrote. ‘Consequently, their mental energy is wasted by their impossible attempts to avoid feelings of displeasure or boredom.' One contemporary practitioner of Morita Therapy, James Hill, expresses this distinctive approach as follows: ‘Many western therapeutic methods focus on trying to successfully manage or modify our feeling-states. The underlying assumption is that if our feelings can be altered [or] reduced, we will be more able to live meaningful and effective lives; that it is our feelings that hold us back… [But] is it accurate to assume that we must “overcome” fear to jump off the high dive at the pool, or increase our confidence before we ask someone out on a date? If it was, most of us would still be waiting to do these things. Our life experience teaches that it is not necessary to change our feelings in order to take action … Once we learn to accept our feelings, we find that we can take action without changing our feeling-states.' We can feel the fear, and do it anyway.

By the end of the fourth day at the Insight Meditation Society, things were much improved. The bearded man's breathing had ceased to annoy. All of us seemed to have settled into the timetable that governed our waking, sleeping, meditating and eating; where before it had felt rigid and militaristic, now it cradled us through
the day. I was actually starting to enjoy meditating – even the walking meditation, which involved moving at a glacial pace across the meditation hall, trying to divide the sensations of each footstep into the component parts of ‘lifting', ‘moving' and ‘placing', and which I had initially concluded was a waste of time. When, during occasional breaks, I managed to sneak out onto the forest paths behind the meditation centre, I found I had become hyperattuned to my environment; every crackle of every twig underfoot registered like a splintering diamond. Meanwhile, the vegetarian food we were served in the dining room – nondescript lentil stews, peanut butter on rye crackers, that sort of thing – had started to taste extraordinary. I discovered subtle sub-flavours in peanut butter I'd never have imagined might be hiding there. The Massachusetts winter sunset, viewed from the building's main porch, was often so beautiful as to be almost painful. At night, I was sleeping more deeply than I could remember.

And then it all went wrong. Without my noticing the precise moment of transition, the silence of the meditation hall became a combination of courtroom and torture chamber. For hours, I was attacked by barrages of negative thoughts and their associated emotions – anxious ones, guilty ones, worried ones, hostile, bored, impatient and even terrified ones – as if they had all been gathering, just out of sight, for years, waiting for this moment to pounce. Above all, they were self-critical. I was suddenly aware – and somehow all at once – of countless occasions in my life on which I had behaved badly towards other people: my parents, my sister, friends, girlfriends, or colleagues. Many of these infractions were relatively small in the scheme of things – harsh words spoken, relationships insufficiently nurtured – but they filled me with sorrow. Months afterwards, I would encounter Buddhist writings suggesting that this was a well-recognised early step on the
‘progress of insight', the stages through which a meditator is traditionally held to pass: it was called ‘knowledge of cause and effect', and had to do with perceiving afresh how one's actions always had consequences. The sorrow that accompanied these realisations, from a Buddhist point of view, is a good thing; it is the fertile soil in which compassion can take root.

After about a day of this, though, I began to notice something. The situation in my mind was far from quiet or relaxed. And yet my constant efforts to return to focusing on my breath – to avoid becoming attached to thoughts or emotions – seemed to be having an effect. My vantage point on my mental activity had altered subtly, as if I'd climbed two rungs up a stepladder in order to observe it from above. I was less enmeshed in it all. As Shoma Morita might have put it, I was beginning to see it all as mere mental events, to be non-judgmentally noticed. Much of my thinking concerned the past or the future, but I was no longer being yanked off into daydreams or unpleasant memories; I was absolutely present, there on the cushion, watching the performance with something less like panic and more like interest. In some monasteries in the Zen tradition, a monk is charged with creeping up behind his fellow monks, and hitting them with a thin wooden stick, or
keisaku,
in order to snap them into exactly this kind of utter presence. They didn't hit people with sticks at the Insight Meditation Society, but I felt like someone had. I was watching my own mind with total alertness.

The strangest part, though, and the part that is hardest to put into words, was the question of where I was watching all this
from.
If I'd stepped away from being enmeshed in my thoughts, where was this point of observation? Nowhere? Everywhere? I felt as if I had stepped into a void. I recalled my conversation with Adina in the taxi, and Pema Chödrön's advice about ‘relaxing into
the groundlessness of our situation'. It was suddenly apparent to me that I spent my regular life in a state of desperate clinging to thinking, to trying to avoid falling into the void that lay behind thoughts. Except now I was in the void, and it wasn't terrifying at all. By the time the retreat drew to a close, I found to my surprise that I didn't want it to end; I could easily have stayed another week. Moreover, I felt as if I were among friends. Even though I had never exchanged words with most of the other retreatants – and wouldn't have recognised them in the street, given that we'd been keeping our eyes downcast – a tangible sense of community had arisen in the meditation hall. When the gong rang to indicate that we could speak again, small talk felt scratchy and awkward; it seemed to interfere with the companionship.

‘Well, that was … ‘ said Adina, trailing into silence, when I encountered her on the porch as we made our preparations to leave. Encapsulating the week in a few words seemed futile.

‘I know what you mean,' I replied.

By the time I made it onto the train back to New York, I had a throbbing headache: the normal noises of the non-meditating world were too much for my silence-adapted mind. Discovering the number of emails waiting in my inbox didn't help. But the stressed-out thoughts did slide away more swiftly than before. It seemed I could live with a little bad weather.

All this is only one small part of Buddhism's radical perspective on psychology. But the point is central to any ‘negative' approach to happiness: it is rarely wise to struggle to change the weather. ‘Clear mind is like the full moon in the sky,' Seung Sahn, a Korean Zen master of the old school, who carried a hitting-stick, told one audience in America in the 1970s. ‘Sometimes clouds come and cover it, but the moon is always behind them. Clouds go away, then the moon shines brightly. So don't worry about clear
mind; it is always there. When thinking comes, behind it is clear mind. When thinking goes, there is only clear mind. Thinking comes and goes, comes and goes. You must not be attached to the coming and going.' And if that wasn't sufficient to jolt his listeners into the realisation that they did not need to be attached to their mental storylines, that they could choose to observe their thoughts and feelings non-judgmentally, and thus find peace behind the pandemonium? ‘Then,' Seung Sahn was fond of saying, ‘I hit you thirty times with my stick!'

Future,
n.
That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

– Ambrose Bierce,
The Devil's Dictionary

I
N
1996,
A TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD
from Indiana named Christopher Kayes signed up with an adventure travel company to go trekking in the Himalayas. His intention, though it would prove ironic in hindsight, was to take a relaxing break. A punishing career as a stockbroker, and then as a corporate consultant, had left him burned out. Kayes had always been interested in the psychology of the business world, and so he had decided to pursue a doctorate in organisational behaviour instead. But first he needed time off, and when he saw an advertisement in a travel magazine for a group hiking expedition to Nepal, it seemed like the perfect answer. As the plane descended into Kathmandu, he recalled later, he was looking forward to ‘a refreshing immersion in Nepalese culture', surrounded by the beauty of the Himalayas. But what Kayes encountered in the mountains was a troubling psychological puzzle that was to dominate his life for years to come.

While Kayes and his fellow hikers were exploring the foothills of Mount Everest, camping at night in tents, a disaster of historical proportions was unfolding near the mountain's peak. Fifteen climbers died on Everest during that year's climbing season, eight of them during a single twenty-four hour period that has since entered mountaineering lore, thanks largely to the bestselling book
Into Thin Air,
by the climber and journalist Jon Krakauer, who was among those on the mountain at the time. Kayes himself encountered some of the climbers and rescue workers who had been involved – exhausted men, emerging dazed into the foothills, struggling to make sense of what had happened.

Even in the modern era of commercial Everest expeditions, when anyone with sufficient money and some climbing skills can pay to be escorted to the summit, it's still not that unusual for people to die in the attempt. What made the 1996 disaster so chilling – apart from the sheer number of dead – was the fact that it seemed uniquely inexplicable. The weather on the peak was not more perilous than usual. There were no sudden avalanches during the period when most of the climbers perished. The paying customers were all sufficiently skilled for the undertaking.
Into Thin Air,
controversially, attributed the tragedy in part to the stubbornness and arrogance of Anatoli Boukreev, a Kazakhstani climbing guide. There is some evidence for this, but it is ultimately dissatisfying as an explanation, too. Mountaineers, as a group, tend towards stubbornness and arrogance. Yet disasters on the scale of Everest in 1996 are mercifully rare.

In the end, what happened that year looked more like an outbreak of mass irrationality – an episode that reached its apogee around noon on 10 May at the Hillary Step, a wall of rock just 720 feet from the summit, in an event that has since become known as ‘the traffic jam'. Teams from New Zealand, the United
States and Taiwan – thirty-four climbers in total – were all attempting the final stage of the ascent that day, from Camp Four, at 26,000 feet, to the summit, at 29,000 feet. The Americans and New Zealanders had co-ordinated their efforts, so as to ensure a smooth progression up and down the mountain. But the Taiwanese climbers were reneging on an agreement not to climb the same day, and an advance team of guides had failed to secure safety ropes at the Hillary Step according to plan, with the result that the smooth progression soon turned into a bottleneck.

Timing is one of the most important variables in any assault on Everest, and so climbers generally observe strict ‘turnaround times'. Leaving Camp Four at midnight, a climber can hope to reach the summit by midday, or soon after. But if he or she fails to make it there by the pre-arranged turnaround time – which might be anywhere from noon until two in the afternoon, depending on weather conditions, and the team leader's attitude to risk – it becomes essential to call off the attempt and turn back. Failure to do so means the climber risks running out of bottled oxygen and facing Everest's most dangerous weather in the dark. Yet confronted with the traffic jam at the Hillary Step, the teams pushed on, disregarding their turnaround times. Back at Camp Four, the American mountaineer Ed Viesturs watched the climbers' slow progress through a telescope, and found it hard to believe what he was seeing. ‘They've already been climbing for hours, and they still aren't on the summit,' he remembered thinking to himself, with rising alarm. ‘Why haven't they turned around?'

Members of all three teams continued arriving at the summit for two hours after two o'clock, the latest safe turnaround time. Doug Hansen, a postal service worker from Washington state who was a paying client of the New Zealand group, was the last to do
so, at the astonishingly late time of just after four o'clock. He had ascended Everest the year before, but had been forced to turn back a few hundred feet from the top. This time, he never made it back down. Like seven others, he was caught in intense blizzards as darkness fell, which made navigation of the mountain impossible, and sent temperatures plunging to −40°F. They lay dying, unreached by the frantic rescue attempts that saved several other climbers' lives. Years after climbing Everest had become a feasible project for amateurs as well as professionals, 1996 saw the highest recorded death toll in the mountain's history. And even today, nobody clearly understands why.

Except, just possibly, Chris Kayes. A former stockbroker turned expert on organisational behaviour might seem to have little to contribute to the post-mortem of a mountaineering disaster. But the more Kayes learned of what had happened, and as he continued to follow the case after returning home, the more it reminded him of a phenomenon he had witnessed all too frequently among businesspeople. The Everest climbers, Kayes suspected, had been ‘lured into destruction by their passion for goals'. His hypothesis was that the more they fixated on the endpoint – a successful summiting of the mountain – the more that goal became not just an external target but a part of their own identities, of their senses of themselves as accomplished guides or high-achieving amateurs. If his hunch about the climbers was right, it would have become progressively more difficult for them to sacrifice their goal, despite accumulating evidence that it was becoming a suicidal one. Indeed, that accumulating evidence, Kayes was convinced, would have
hardened
the climbers' determination not to turn back. The climb would have become a struggle not merely to reach the summit, but to preserve their sense of identity. In theology, the term ‘theodicy' refers to
the effort to maintain belief in a benevolent god, despite the prevalence of evil in the world; the phrase is occasionally used to describe the effort to maintain any belief in the face of contradictory evidence. Borrowing that language, Chris Kayes termed the syndrome he had identified ‘goalodicy'.

During his years in the corporate world, Kayes had been troubled to watch goalsetting achieve the status of religious dogma among his colleagues. The situation hasn't changed much today. The hallmark of a visionary leader, it is widely held, is the willingness to set big, audacious goals for his or her organisation, and then to focus every resource on achieving them. Individual employees, meanwhile, are encouraged, and sometimes obliged, to define their own personal work objectives, frequently in the form of ‘SMART' goals. (The acronym stands for ‘specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bounded'.) Numerous self-help books advocate ambitious and highly specific goals as the master key to a successful and satisfying life: ‘By this time next year, I will be married to the woman of my dreams/sitting on the balcony of my beach house/earning £10,000 per month!' One of the practice's most passionate evangelists, Brian Tracy, in his book
Goals! How to Get Everything You Want – Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible,
insists that ‘Living without clear goals is like driving in a thick fog … Clear goals enable you to step on the accelerator of your own life, and race ahead rapidly.'

Yet Kayes couldn't help but notice that it frequently didn't work out that way. A business goal would be set, announced, and generally greeted with enthusiasm. But then evidence would begin to emerge that it had been an unwise one – and goalodicy would kick in as a response. The negative evidence would be reinterpreted as a reason to invest
more
effort and resources in pursuit of the goal. And so things would, not surprisingly, go
even more wrong. Kayes believed that a similar thing had happened on Everest in 1996.

Chris Kayes is now a professor of management science at George Washington University, in Washington DC, and as he has travelled the lecture circuit in recent years, using Everest as a metaphor for all that is wrong with our obsession with goals, he has frequently found himself giving offence. ‘A businessperson should not study topics filled with such great tragedy and emotion,' one Russian student lectured him curtly by email. ‘Questions of tragedy and the dilemmas of human existence should be left to the poet, the novelist, and the playwright. These topics have nothing to do with why we study leadership in organisations.' But Kayes couldn't let it drop. ‘It would be accurate to say that I think about the Everest disaster probably every day,' he told me. ‘Almost like it was a death in my own family. “Haunted” would definitely be the right word.' And there is persuasive evidence for Kayes's hypothesis about what happened on the mountain, hidden away in a largely forgotten psychology study that was conducted in 1963. The study's participants were professional mountaineers, undertaking an expedition to Everest.

That year, seventeen climbers were attempting to become the first Americans to reach the summit, and a psychologist named James Lester realised that the expedition presented an ideal opportunity to investigate what drove people to attempt such ambitious and dangerous feats. With funding provided by the United States Navy, Lester and a handful of colleagues gathered the mountaineers in Berkeley, California, where they administered a series of personality tests. Then – demonstrating an unusual degree of commitment to his research – Lester left sunny California for Mount Everest, accompanying the climbers as far as Camp Two, at 21,000 feet. There, he administered further tests on the climbers
and their Sherpa guides. In his book
Destructive Goal Pursuit: The Mount Everest Disaster,
Chris Kayes relates Lester's basic finding about the typical Everest climber: he was someone who demonstrated ‘considerable restlessness, dislike for routine, desire for autonomy, tendency to be dominant in personal relations, and a lack of interest in social interaction for its own sake. Their felt need for achievement and independence was very high.' No surprises there: Lester had confirmed the truism that climbers tend to be domineering loners with little regard for social convention. But more intriguing findings were to emerge from the daily diaries that Lester asked the climbers to keep for the duration of the three-month period they spent preparing for, then carrying out, their trek to the mountain's summit.

En route to base camp, the American team had split into two dissenting groups, each with a very different idea of how best to reach the top. The larger group favoured the well-established route via the South Col, a mountain pass ravaged by high winds, leaving it relatively free of snow. But a smaller group wanted to approach via the remote and never previously attempted West Ridge. (Even today, in a morbid statistical oddity, the fatality rate for the West Ridge is higher than 100 per cent, meaning that more people have died there than have reached the summit that way.) Noting the difference of opinion among the climbers, Lester made sure that their diaries included regular updates on how optimistic or pessimistic they were feeling about their chosen route.

Subsequent analysis of the diaries revealed an unexpected pattern. As the day of the summit attempt neared, the West Ridge group's optimism began to fade rapidly, replaced by a gnawing sense of uncertainty. That was only to be expected, given that their route was untried. But as the climbers' uncertainty and pessimism about the West Ridge option increased, the diaries
revealed, so did their commitment to it. ‘The more uncertain climbers felt about their possible success in reaching the summit,' as Kayes puts it, ‘the more likely they were to invest in their particular strategy.' A bizarre and self-reinforcing loop took hold: team members would actively seek out negative information about their goal – looking for evidence of weather patterns, for example, that might render the West Ridge approach even more risky than usual – which would increase their feelings of uncertainty. But then, in an effort to extinguish that uncertainty, the climbers would increase their emotional investment in their decision. The goal, it seemed, had become a part of their identity, and so their uncertainty about the goal no longer merely threatened the plan; it threatened them as individuals. They were so eager to eliminate these feelings of uncertainty that they clung ever harder to a clear, firm and specific plan that provided them with a sense of certainty about the future – even though that plan was looking increasingly reckless. They were firmly in the grip of goalodicy.

The happy conclusion of the 1963 expedition – much as it spoils the neatness of Kayes's argument – is that the West Ridge climbers went ahead with their dangerous plan, and survived. Too many of the relevant participants in the 1996 drama perished, meanwhile, for us ever to know with confidence exactly how far the same thought processes were to blame. But Beck Weathers, a paying client that year who was twice left for dead on the mountain – he lost his nose and several fingers to frostbite, having dragged himself back to camp – testified to the plausibility of the notion. ‘You can overpursue goals,' he reflected afterwards. ‘You can become obsessed with goals.'