Life in the matrix

On travel, happiness, and 2x2 matrices

A 2x2 matrix by strangestloop

Hey y’all,

I laughed when I saw this 2x2 matrix by @strangestloop on Twitter. It reminded me of one of my favorite lines from Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592): “Anyone who is afraid of suffering suffers already of being afraid.”¹

In The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control, Katherine Morgan Schafler² talks about how both stress and happiness are experienced in three stages: anticipation, event, and recall. There’s the anticipation that leads up to the event: dreaming about an upcoming vacation or dreading a scheduled meeting. There’s the event itself: the vacation or the meeting, which usually doesn’t last very long. Then there’s the recall: looking through the beach photos or replaying the meeting in your brain.

I really love this “AER” model — although I prefer thinking of it as anticipation, experience, and remembering — and I’ve been playing around with it this summer to stretch out the fun of things I like doing, like going on vacation, and to minimize the stress of stuff I don’t like doing, like writing book proposals.

Let’s start with stuff I don’t want to do, like writing a book proposal. Worrying about writing is actually more painful than writing, so what I try to do is not think about writing unless I’m writing. (This is impossible, because I write in my head a lot, but I try.) What I did for most of May and June: I simply told myself I was going to sit for an hour every morning and write before I did anything else in the studio and when the hour was up I was going to stop wherever I was in the document and get up and do something else. I did my best for the rest of the day not to think about the proposal until I sat back down for my hour the next morning. And what do you know? A book proposal got written. (Still with anguish, of course, but less anguish.)

For fun stuff, like vacation, I’ve taken the opposite approach: I’ve tried to really enjoy researching and dreaming about our upcoming trips, to read a lot and make a lot of lists, and generally fill up on a lot of information. Then, when we go on the trip, I try to forget all that stuff and just be in the experience of it all, soak it up, while also taking a lot of photos. On the plane home, I like to scribble in my diary, and look through all the photos, and sometimes even write a whole newsletter based on the trip. Stretching out the trip this way extends the pleasure of it.