What the scan costs you

I've been arguing about accuracy, and I think that argument is enough. But it's worth being plain about what the habit costs, because you're paying, and some of the bill lands on you.

The first cost is that you live in a house made of faults. If the fine is invisible and the faults ring, then the home you come back to each evening is, to your attention, a list of things that are wrong with it. Not because it is. Because that's all your attention shows you. People with this habit often describe their home, or their job, or their relationship as tiring in a way they can't account for, and I think part of the tiredness is that they're only ever shown the broken parts.

The second is mood, and here the notebook studies do speak. The most reliable effect of deliberately noticing the fine was on positive mood. Turn that around. A person who deliberately, if unknowingly, notices only faults is running the hassles condition of that experiment, every day, for years. I wouldn't put a number on what that does, but I'd expect the sign to be negative.

The third is what it does to how you see the people closest to you. Lambert's study found that expressing thanks raised the expresser's own sense of the relationship's strength. Run that in reverse. Years of expressing only faults, to a partner or a friend, and never expressing the fine, and you'd expect the expresser's sense of the relationship to sink, whatever the other person was actually doing. You'd come to see your partner as someone who leaves pans out, because that's the only thing you've ever said about them. They'd become, in your account of them, the sum of the commentary.

The fourth is the fading in chapter 10. If the fine goes invisible unless it's appreciated, and you never appreciate it, then you've lost it. The good things in your life are still happening and you've stopped being able to feel them. Sheldon and Lyubomirsky's students who didn't keep appreciating the change lost most of what it gave them within three months. You've had longer.

The fifth is that people stop trying. Not all of them and not at once. But a person whose fine is never seen will, sooner or later, stop producing it for you. The colleague who used to send drafts early, so you could look at them, now sends them at the deadline, because early only ever bought them an earlier list of faults. Your daughter shows her homework to the other parent. Your partner does the table, still, but doesn't mention it, and one day doesn't do it, and you notice that, of course.

And the last is the version of you they know. You know yourself as someone with standards who cares. They know a person who notices what's wrong. That's the version at the dinner table and at the meeting and in your daughter's memory of being ten, and it's the version that will be described when you're not there. It isn't who you are. It's who the commentary has been, and the commentary is the only part of you they can hear.