I have a hangover today. It’s my partner’s birthday Monday, so we had good friends over Saturday. Work week, kids, you know. It was nice.
Since my partner’s known these friends most of her adult life, but I’ve only known them for a couple of years, I usually anticipate the possibility of drinking too much. A little social anxiety, a little feeling like it takes a bit of work to fit in, and before you know it I’m a little tipsy, but once I’ma little tipsy, I’m not worrying about social anxiety and not fitting in anymore. I think that’s how alcohol works, right?
These friends are great wine lovers, and I’m very much not a wine drinker. In fact, I know that I can have exactly 4 beers and not have to worry about what the next day will look like, but if I have any amount of wine, tomorrow will certainly be a wash. We toasted with a glass of champagne. How could I resist? When someone poured me a glass of Chablis, I thought to myself, “okay, this is it or else you’re going to be hung over tomorrow.” And then trying the red I told myself, what the hell, it’s my partner’s birthday, who cares.
As I’m writing this with the cotton-headed, soft-brained general malaise of too many and too much, I wonder what it means to tell yourself, “I don’t care if I feel terrible tomorrow?” After all, if you were hammering nails and had the choice to not hit your fingers, it wouldn’t even feel like a choice. You just wouldn’t do it. And yet, under the rubric of celebration, or guests, or whatever, I made a deliberate choice to do something that, rationally, functionally, would only result in pain.
It’s a very interesting self-deception to choose it with the bent that it’s somehow inevitable. “I don’t care if I feel terrible tomorrow, I’m making a choice to do it even though I won’t have any more fun and it won’t make any difference to anyone if I don’t, but definitely will make a difference to me tomorrow if I do?” I’m wondering whether it’s some self-destruction based on some unremembered trauma, or perhaps poorly considered and ill-advised optimism. Maybe just plain old desire to fit in and do what everyone else it doing, or seems to be doing?
The interesting thing about introspection and rational choice is sometimes you come up with surprising observations about what you don’t pay attention to. We rarely examine the beliefs that underlie much of our behaviors, what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1, meaning the emotional and instinctive experiences that drive un- and subconscious decision making. Often we only apply System 2, the more rational and deliberate of Kahneman’s systems, when there’s an event of significance or out of the ordinary. When there’s time, or because something’s off, say.
Normalization however is the conversion of unexpected events we analyze – so System 2 – to things we’ve judged and now have feelings about, and thus no longer have to think much about – System 1. If you think about this process a lot, and happen to notice that you’ve normalized ways to make yourself feel bad with 100% certainty, it’s probably a good idea to move that thing back to System 2 and figure out what’s going on there.
Which I guess is what I’m doing here. I don’t yet have any great reading of it yet, but the thought that crossed my mind just now that there’s some beer left over from last night in the fridge. Whether or not I’d like to have one is a decision I’ll be paying a bit more scrutiny today than usual.