People who think they are particularly deserving of happiness — and we all know a few of these — are less likely to be able to savour. A 2016 Case Western Reserve University Study found that entitlement — ‘a personality trait driven by exaggerated feelings of deservingness and superiority’ — can lead to an unending cycle of negativity. Lead author Joshua Grubbs said: ‘At extreme levels, entitlement is a toxic narcissistic trait, repeatedly exposing people to the risk of feeling frustrated, unhappy and disappointed with life.’ Narcissists will promote themselves as hugely optimistic, ready to conquer and control, yet when they cannot, they crash. It’s a fragile optimism.
It seems wealth can also be a roadblock to savouring, as a sense of pleasure can be dulled over time by repetition and abundance — even when it comes to enjoying small pleasures like chocolate, which in one study rich people ate more quickly and enjoyed less.
Psychologist Daniel Gilbert coined the term ‘experience stretching’, meaning in one sense, as Jordi Quoidbach puts it, that ‘experiencing the best things in life — such as surfing Oahu’s famous North Shore or dining at Manhattan’s four-star restaurant Daniel — may actually mitigate the delight one experiences in response to the more mundane joys of life, such as sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars.’ You don’t even have to actually go to these places to bring this about — just knowing you can go can dull the savouring: ‘In other words, one need not actually visit the pyramids of Egypt or spend a week at the legendary Banff spas in Canada for one’s savouring ability to be impaired — simply knowing that these peak experiences are readily available may increase one’s tendency to take the small pleasures of daily life for granted.’
ONCE, WHEN I WAS living in America, a women’s magazine asked me to name my two greatest possessions. Missing the cue to cite something more glamorous, I said my pushbike and my teapot. The editors cut it out of the piece. Dwelling in hilly Sydney now instead of flat Philadelphia, I don’t ride bikes often, but I remain deeply committed to my teapots. At work I have three, of different sizes, in orange and spots and swirls of vivid colours; and another at home with Alice in Wonderland perched on the top. Enjoying a freshly brewed pot of tea on my porch, after a swim or a run, is the best thing on Earth. The sun creeps across my feet, cockatoos sweep overhead and even my tyrannical fluffy cat lies serene in the sun. We all have these moments, where we are sated by simple pleasures. Luxuriate in them.
Chapter 18
Ert, or a Sense of Purpose
I HAVE BECOME INCREASINGLY convinced true philosophers don’t wear tweed coats; they wear wetsuits. There is something delightful about people who become pleasantly fixated on tiny occupants or corners of the natural world, like octopuses or sea dragons or even sharks. Which is how I found myself hurtling along the roads that run like veins from Hobart into the surrounding country, with marine biologist Lisa-Ann Gershwin. She sat at the wheel of her red convertible Mazda, drinking chocolate milk as she navigated the purple-shaded hills, cheerily talking to me about jellyfish. My scarf was whipping in the wind, my legs were toasting under the car heater and I could not have been happier.
The American-born marine biologist told me about the time she was stung repeatedly by the tiny but extremely venomous Irukandji box jellyfish and survived; toxic farmlands in China; her favourite jellyfish, the wart-covered translucent Bazibga, which she discovered and was a whole new suborder; her love of the beautifully named ‘long stringy stingy thingy’ (a jellyfish technically called Apolemia uvaria); the period when she says she was bullied in her workplace and ended up in a homeless shelter; her struggles with depression; the growing global recognition of her work; how the invasion of Tasmania by crown-of-thorns starfish occurred; and what it meant to finally be diagnosed with Asperger’s. ‘I finally found where I fit,’ she said, ‘after a lifetime of feeling like I’d parachuted down into medieval Japan!’ She is perfectly charming and unaffected.
I had called her one day after hearing her talk on the radio, where she constantly laughed at herself and spoke with a vital passion about her great love, jellyfish. I had asked if she would meet me for a quick coffee while I was in Tasmania for the Dark Mofo Festival of Dark and Dangerous Thoughts; instead, she picked me up in her car, wild-haired with the roof down, ready to whisk me off on an adventure. We drove for 84 kilometres to the historic village of Oatlands, built by convicts and once home to the longest serving hangman in the British Empire, Solomon Blay, who dispatched more than two hundred people over fifty-one years, and was shunned as a result.
It was not until her late twenties that Gershwin discovered the passion that would upend her life. While in Los Angeles, she decided to visit an aquarium in San Pedro, where she found herself staring at a tall tank shifting with shapes, and fell in love. White moon jellyfish floated in front of her ‘like clouds in the sky, motionless with dangling tentacles’. She was rapt, and almost hypnotised by a sense of reverent wonder. ‘They were the most beautiful things I had ever seen and they just captured my heart,’ she recalled. She volunteered to work there and became a scientist who specialises in jellyfish. As a high-school drop out, she had to take ‘a lot of classes’ just to get to college; then, after much more study, she won a full scholarship for a PhD at University of California Berkeley and a Fulbright Scholarship to come to Australia. She is now one of the foremost jellyfish experts in the world and has discovered more than 200 species.
‘They were magical, these spineless, brainless animals with no visible means of support,’ she said, laughing. ‘I have dated some men like that! They are alive but like aliens, there’s nothing about them we recognise as alive; it’s like ‘Who are you and where did you come from?’
CUTTLEFISH CHANGED MY LIFE in quiet ways, while jellyfish changed Lisa-Ann’s in spectacular ways. Crunching through a plate of liver pâté on toast, she said she had been searching for ‘ert’ — a term she coined, meaning the opposite of inertia — since she was thirteen, and she had only just worked out what it was: purpose. ‘I don’t think it needs to be jellyfish for everybody, but it is for me,’ she had said in her radio interview. ‘It’s having a purpose. It’s finding meaningful employment, it’s finding a meaningful hobby that absorbs your fascination to a place where depression just can’t get in. It just can’t exist when you are in that place. So that’s ert. Find something you love.’
Gershwin’s search reached a climax following a protracted experience of depression after a legal dispute with a former employer, during which she found herself living in a homeless shelter in Launceston. She felt, she told me, ‘an immense inertia that flattened me and held me down like a steamroller. I imagined that if I could figure out what that “thing” was, then it’s opposite would be the thing to release me.’ She wanted something that would make her vertical when she was flat:
I look back now and I know that I was suffering from depression. But I didn’t know it at the time. I only knew that I would sleep for long hours and not get out of bed for days at a time. I wasn’t sad; I was lifeless, flat, grey, numb. I was paralysed by the enormity of something so much bigger than myself. I was acutely aware that life was passing me by, while I was just trying to organise my thoughts enough to make a quesadilla (it’s like an incredibly simple Mexican cheese sandwich: one tortilla, folded in half, with shredded cheese in the middle, microwaved for thirty seconds). Sometimes it took days. So for me, without knowing anything at all about psychology or shrinks or mental illness, I just knew that I had to find a way out of that place. My search for ert became the thread that defined my teens, twenties, thirties and forties. It wove through everything. No matter how good, bad or angsty things got, I had this inner drive to find it that was never very far away.