Why Does a Safe Life Feel Flat?

Leena and Ashok have everything they planned for. The flat is paid off. Both children are settled. Thursday is idli night, and every December they go to the same hotel in Goa and ask for the same room.

On their twenty-second anniversary Ashok raised his glass. “We did it all right,” he said.

Leena heard herself answer before she had decided to. “Then why am I so bored I could scream?”

The puzzle of the dark room

There is a puzzle in brain science that bears on Leena’s question. Andy Clark sets it out in Surfing Uncertainty. If a brain’s basic business is to predict what happens next and to avoid being surprised, the ideal home would be a dark, silent, empty room. Nothing there would ever catch it out. So why does no healthy creature choose one?

He gives part of an answer. Animals like us seem built to seek a certain amount of the unexpected. He quotes an old finding that people shut in a dark room will press buttons to make patterns of coloured light appear, and that they prefer the most varied and least predictable sequences. He cites a study of babies of seven and eight months. They looked longest at events that were neither too predictable nor too chaotic, and looked away from both extremes. The researchers named it the Goldilocks effect.

Clark’s phrase for what we go looking for is “just-novel-enough”. He admits it is a large subject that he can only touch on, and he lists it among the theory’s open problems.

Paying for a chance

Nathan and Susannah Furr come at the same appetite from a different direction, in The Upside of Uncertainty. The head of a large gambling business told them what his industry sells. He called it reverse insurance. Ordinary insurance protects you against something happening. His customers pay for the chance that something might.

He described his ideal customer as someone of forty-five who wakes to a job they hate and a relationship they hate, and sees that life will always be the same.

The Furrs add a survey of sixteen thousand people who changed fields in the middle of their careers. Most had not left for money or to escape a bad boss. They were bored.

Their argument is that we work so hard at making life certain that we forget we need the opposite as well. Every certainty we nail down, they write, closes off other possibilities.

What the boredom is telling you

So Leena is not ungrateful, and nothing need be wrong with Ashok. She has what the plan promised, and the plan had no room in it for surprise.

I take the gambling story as a warning as well as an explanation. The appetite does not go away when it is ignored. It finds something, and what it finds may be costly.

Three zones

The Furrs borrow a simple map of three zones: comfort, learning and panic. In comfort, nothing is asked of you and nothing grows. In panic, there is too much unknown to cope with. Learning lies between.

They are clear that too much uncertainty is overwhelming, and they are not telling anyone to blow up a good life. Their observation is about people who have been comfortable for a long time. A small unknown ruffles them, and they hurry back to safety before finding out where it led.

They suggest a question for that moment. Is this really panic, or is it the ordinary discomfort of learning something?

Add it on purpose, and together

The same hotel room every December is a lovely thing. It may be one certainty too many.

The remedy is small. It is something whose outcome neither of you can predict, done side by side. A class in which you are both beginners. A town chosen the night before. A question you have never asked each other, after twenty-two years of assuming the answer.