The expecting

Chapter 5 said the best bit of the day is mostly the wanting, and this chapter is about the wanting, because it's where the daily really lives.

From some point in the afternoon, the treat comes into view. Not as a decision, as a direction. The day starts to lean towards six. Things get done a little faster, or not done at all, because six is coming and six is the point. This is the expecting, and it's pleasant, and it's the part you'd actually miss. Then six comes, and the treat arrives, and the expecting stops, and the stopping feels like pleasure. That's the settling. And here's the thing to notice about it. The settling is the relief of an expectation met. It would feel like pleasure whatever was at the end of it, as long as it was what you'd been expecting.

David Neal, Wendy Wood and colleagues ran a study I find hard to forget. People who habitually ate popcorn at the cinema were given popcorn that was a week old and stale, or fresh, and watched a film. The habitual eaters ate as much of the stale as the fresh. Their hunger and how much they said they liked the popcorn made little difference. People whose cinema-popcorn habit was weaker ate according to how much they liked it. And the habit only ran in the cinema. In a meeting room, with the same popcorn, the strong-habit people ate like everyone else, by taste. The cue was the cinema. The response was eating. Liking had left the building.

That's the daily. The cue is the hour. The response is the treat. Whether you like it tonight has less to do with it than you'd think, and the proof is that you'd have the glass on a night you didn't fancy it, because six o'clock isn't asking whether you fancy it. It's a parcel you've been waiting for all afternoon that's better as a parcel than as whatever's in it.

I'm not saying the treat is stale. I'm saying the settling would feel the same if it were. Which means most of what you'd lose by changing the daily is the expecting, the afternoon's lean, and that's the thing to be honest about. The lean is nice. It's also a lean towards a thing that isn't tasted, and it takes the afternoon with it. When the daily goes, the lean goes, and for a few days that's a loss, and then the afternoon comes back, and it turns out to have been yours all along.