Ulysses Contract

I honestly can’t remember the last time I gave something up for lent. I clearly remember other people around me agonizing about what they ought to do or give up, but I don’t remember this being a particular feature of my own Lenten experience. Probably thanks to the most recent Radiolab, this year I decided to try it out. At the New Year I blogged about how I thought New Year’s resolutions were unnecessary from an abstract perspective, but useful as one of many times throughout the year when we’re supposed to reflect on how we can improve ourselves. I said my main resolution was to reflect more, which I stuck with pretty well for a few days, stuck with more or less for a few weeks, and then pretty much forgot. Fortunately for me, we’re already at another season to reflect on self-betterment.

The episode of Radiolab I mentioned earlier was really pretty interesting. The show is made up of three stories, and it’s the first one that stands out to me: a woman who smokes two packs a day for decades, after many unsuccessful attempts to quit and feeling harassed by her friend, suddenly declares, “If I smoke one more cigarette, I’m giving $5,000 to the KKK.” She made the vow, and she took it seriously enough that she never smoked again: she’d wake up in the night, reach for a smoke, and say, “hold it, no way.” The hosts of Radiolab broke down the psychology of it by saying that normally our short-term impulses outweigh our long-term desires simply because they’re more immediate—but by creating a situation where we face immediate emotional pulls as strong as the impulses, we can override this natural state of things. They compared it to Ulysses binding himself to the mast of his ship on the way past the sirens in the Odessy, telling his crew not to untie him no matter what happened. This method can be used in a physical way, like tying yourself to a ship, but it can also be less concrete, as in making a vow to give to a cause that you find reprehensible, and it can also be as simple as making a decision (instead of recounting the whole Radiolab episode, I recommend you go listen to it: in one of the stories, a man changes the path of his whole life based on a ‘coin flip’).

For Lent, I decided that I wanted to cut down on my use of Facebook and news sites. I didn't give them up entirely because they both serve an important role for me (keeping in touch with friends and what’s going on in the world). That being said, Facebook, The New York Times, and Huffington Post are my also main sources of procrastination, and are so much of a habit that I’ll sometimes be about to do something productive and find myself on Facebook before I even process that I’m doing it. I’ve found that limiting myself to once a day for these sites has been extremely useful for my productivity. Sure, sometimes I just find another way to procrastinate, but I’m now more selective about when I use Facebook and which news stories I read. As evidence: I’m blogging for the first time in two months.

Returning to the idea of the Ulysses contract, I wanted to say a few words about trying to live an ethical life in a world of easy consumption. I occasionally find myself wondering if my efforts not to negatively impact others around me in fairly removed ways (e.g., not eating meat, not buying clothes from sweatshops, recycling) is just an indication that there’s something wrong with me: Do I have some source of deep-seated psychological guilt? Do I have some form of OCD that amounts to an inability to stop thinking about how I’m affecting other people? But I think what’s really going on can be explained by the same phenomenon that explains how the woman I mentioned above quit smoking: the way I think about living in a world with other people makes the ways that most people contribute to harming others immediate to me. Yes, a hamburger looks tasty and would be satisfying in an immediate sense, but eating it would also be distressing in an immediate sense: I’d know that by consuming it I would be supporting a meat industry that hurts people (I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about how exactly eating meat hurts people in a previous post, so I won’t go over that again here). Buying a shirt produced in a sweatshop might be gratifying in some way, but it would also be paying to support institutions that keep people from having fulfilling lives. For me, in the short term, the negative impulses for these sorts of actions outweigh the positive.

The real question that remains is why I feel this so acutely for some issues: is it just habit? Is it because I spend time reading about the effects of our society’s way of life? Surely there are other ways that I negatively impact people that I don’t feel as bad about, or causes that other people feel in a strong and immediate sense that I don’t respond to at all. Are all of these reactions ways that we bind ourselves, or do they have some other source?