Self-defeating aims

Why do sleep, happiness and spontaneity retreat the harder a person aims at them?

Effort usually helps. Want to run faster, learn Greek, tidy a room — aim at it, apply yourself, and you get closer. The relationship is so reliable that we treat it as what wanting something means.

Then consider lying awake at three in the morning, trying to fall asleep. Every additional unit of effort makes the outcome further away. The same happens to someone told to be spontaneous, to a person working hard at humility, and, John Stuart Mill thought, to happiness itself — ask yourself whether you are happy, he wrote, and you cease to be so. What kind of goal punishes the pursuit of it?

The first temptation is to call this a psychological weakness — as though a sufficiently disciplined person could simply will themselves to sleep. Test that against the structure instead. What is required for sleep to occur? Among other things, the release of vigilance: the mind must stop tracking its own condition. Now ask what trying to fall asleep consists of. It consists of monitoring whether you are asleep yet. The monitoring is itself the state's opposite. Not an obstacle to it — its negation.

Take spontaneity next, because it makes the point in a cleaner way. Suppose you resolve to be spontaneous at dinner and successfully do something unplanned. Was it spontaneous? It was performed because you resolved to, which is the one causal history a spontaneous act cannot have. Notice what this shows: the state is not defined only by how it looks from outside, but partly by where it came from. Two identical-looking remarks differ in kind if one was produced by an intention to produce it.

So there seem to be two mechanisms in play, and they are worth keeping apart. In one, the aiming is constitutively excluded: spontaneity, humility, sincerity, forgetting. A person who is humble in order to be seen as humble, or by themselves, has thereby failed, because the state includes not having that motive. In the other, aiming is not logically excluded but practically displaces the activity that generates the state: absorption in a task produces enjoyment, and attention diverted to checking whether you are enjoying it is attention withdrawn from the task.

Jon Elster's name for these is states that are essentially by-products. Some, he notes, can be induced by another person even though you cannot produce them in yourself — a friend can make you laugh, a therapist can bring about a change you could not decide on — which tells us the barrier is not the impossibility of the state but the self-directed intention.

Where does that leave someone who genuinely wants to sleep? Not helpless, but redirected. If the state cannot be reached by aiming, it can often be reached by arranging its conditions and then attending to something else: a dark room, a regular hour, and a book. Clinicians go further with what is called paradoxical intention — instructing an insomniac to lie in bed and try to stay awake — and the reason it can work is instructive, since it removes the very effort that was generating the arousal.

I should be honest about the limits of the category. It is easy to over-apply: plenty of difficult goals are merely difficult, and calling every stubborn aim self-defeating turns a sharp idea into a shrug. Happiness in particular is only partly of this kind — much of what makes a life go well can be pursued directly. Some psychological work reports that people who place unusually high value on being happy report lower well-being, which fits the picture, though the size and interpretation of that finding are debated.

Two clarifications hold the account together.

First, this is not a trick of language. It would be one if the claim were merely that we use the word "spontaneous" to exclude planned acts. But the claim is causal: the intention enters the process that produces the state and changes what comes out. Vigilance really does prevent sleep; self-monitoring really does interrupt absorption. Change the words and the mechanism stays.

Second, the practical conclusion is not that one must stop caring about these things. It is that wanting the state and aiming at the state come apart. You can want to sleep, and act on that want by choosing a bedtime, a room, and what you do in the hour before — all of them direct actions, none of them aimed at the state itself. The indirect strategy is not resignation; it is applying effort at the only place effort can be applied.

The misconception this corrects is the assumption we began with: that all goals answer to the same relation between trying and getting. For a subset of goals, the trying is an input to the process, and for the states in question it is an input with a negative sign.

• Why paradoxical intention works for insomnia, and where the technique fails.
• Whether the same structure explains why institutions that measure a virtue tend to erode it.

Every term the collection defines is gathered in the glossary.