Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

* Music that is either purely predictable or completely unpredictable is generally considered unpleasant — tedious when it's too predictable, discordant when it's too unpredictable. Composers like John Cage have, of course played, with that balance, but few people derive the same pleasure from Cage's quasi-random ("aleatoric") compositions that they do from music with a more traditional balance between the predictable and the surprising — a fact that holds true in genres ranging from classical to jazz and rock. (The art of improvisation is to invent what in hindsight seems surprising yet inevitable.)

effect" (mentioned earlier, in the context of belief). And in playing musical instruments (and in singing), we get a sense of mastery and control. When we listen to the blues, we do so, at least in part, so we won't feel alone; even the most angst-ridden teenager gets some pleasure in knowing that his or her pain is shared.

Forms of entertainment like music, movies, and video games might be thought of as what Steven Pinker calls "pleasure technologies" — cultural inventions that maximize the responses of our reward system. We enjoy such things not because they propagate our genes or because they conveyed specific advantages to our ancestors, but because they have been culturally selected for — precisely to the extent that they manage to tap into loopholes in our preexisting pleasure-seeking machinery.

The bottom line is this: our pleasure center consists not of some set of mechanisms perfectly tuned to promote the survival of the species, but a grab bag of crude mechanisms that are easily (and pleasurably) outwitted. Pleasure is only loosely correlated with what evolutionary biologists call "reproductive fitness" — and for that, we should be grateful.

Given how much we do to orient ourselves to the pursuit of pleasure, you'd expect us to be pretty good at assessing what's likely to make us happy and what's not. Here again, evolution holds some surprises.

A simple problem is that much of what makes us happy doesn't last long. Candy bars make us happy — for an instant — but we soon return to the state of mind we experienced before we had one. The same holds (or can hold) for sex, for movies, for television shows, and for rock concerts. Many of our most intense pleasures are shortlived.

But there's a deeper issue, which shows up in how we set our long-term goals; although we behave as if we want to maximize our long-term happiness, we frequently are remarkably poor at anticipating what will genuinely make us happy. As the psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert have shown, predicting our own happiness can be a bit like forecasting the weather: a pretty inexact science. Their textbook case,* which should give pause to assistant professors everywhere, concerns the young faculty member's inevitable quest for tenure. Virtually every major U.S. institution promises to its finest, most successful young professors a lifetime of academic freedom and guaranteed employment. Slog through graduate school, a postdoc or two, and five or six years of defining your very own academic niche, and if you succeed (as measured by the length of your rיsumי), you will gain tenure and be set for life.

The flip slide (rarely mentioned) is the slog that fails. Five to ten years spent working on a Ph.D., the postdocs, the half-decade of teaching, unappreciative undergraduates, the interminable faculty meetings, the struggle for grant money — and for what? Without a publication record, you're out of a job. Any professor can tell you that tenure is fantastic, and not getting tenure is miserable.

Or so we believe. In reality, neither outcome makes nearly as much difference to overall happiness as people generally assume. People who get tenure tend to be relieved, and initially ecstatic, but their happiness doesn't linger; they soon move on to worrying about other things. By the same token, people who don't get tenure are indeed often initially miserable, but their misery is usually short-lived. Instead, after the initial shock, people generally adapt to their circumstances. Some realize that the academic rat race isn't for them; others start new careers that they actually enjoy more.