"I'd just be miserable all the time"

Under a lot of the resistance to this book there's a picture, and it's of a life without remedies as a life of unrelieved discomfort. Grey afternoons with nothing in the drawer. Queues with nothing to look at. A person who's given up every soft thing and is now just sitting there, feeling it.

Two things about that picture. The first is that it assumes the discomfort stays, which is chapter 3's belief again. It doesn't. The waves pass, and once you've watched a few pass you stop dreading the next one, and the afternoon that used to be a series of flickers reached away from becomes an afternoon with a few small feelings in it that come and go. That's not misery. It's what an afternoon is like for people who don't reach.

The second is Kashdan's finding, which cuts the other way from the picture. The people whose policy was to avoid discomfort had fewer positive experiences and fewer positive events over three weeks, not more. Avoidance didn't buy them a more pleasant life. It bought them a narrower one, with less of the good in it as well as less of the bad, because the good things in a day are mostly on the other side of some small discomfort. The conversation that starts awkward. The walk in the cold. The afternoon with nothing planned that turns into something. A person who reaches at every flicker never gets to the other side of any of them.

And there's what comes after a ridden wave. I don't want to oversell this, so I'll say only what I've observed. When a small feeling has risen and fallen and you didn't reach, there's a quiet afterwards that isn't there after a biscuit. Nothing happened. Nothing was used. The afternoon is still yours. The second feeling, the verdict, never arrives, because there's nothing to have a verdict about. That quiet, repeated thirty times a day instead of the second feeling thirty times a day, is most of what people mean when they say they feel better after a few weeks of this.

Keep your pleasures. Keep the wine with dinner and the biscuit with the tea and the jacket you wanted last month. Those aren't remedies and they aren't in the picture. The picture is wrong about what's left when the remedies go, because what's left is the pleasures without the escapes, and that's more, not less.