There are more than 200 dead bodies on Mount Everest. Some of these frozen corpses – of mountaineers who succumbed to hypoxia or exhaustion, or got caught in blizzards, or fell into ravines – are lying in plain view, and have to be stepped over by later climbers. One calculation suggests that there’s a one in 20 chance that, once you reach the top, you won’t make it back down. Why on earth do people take this risk?
This question – of why people willingly choose danger and suffering in their life – motivates the psychologist Paul Bloom’s new book, The Sweet Spot. It’s not just mountaineering: he also covers more mundane, but still puzzling, choices. Why do people watch films that make them scared and disgusted? Why do people have sexual fantasies – and practices – that involve violence? Why do they have kids?
These are all tricky to explain if you’re a pure hedonist and believe that people merely want to maximise the amount of pleasure they have in their life. Many of the things we find pleasurable involve a large dose of real (or imagined) pain. One way out of this paradox is to say that we value effort: if some outcome, such as climbing Everest, involves a struggle, it has higher value. If you were helicoptered to the summit, it just wouldn’t feel the same (OK, successfully flying a helicopter to the top of Everest is also extremely effortful, but you know what I mean).
Bloom only obliquely references economics, but this discussion is redolent of one of the biggest historical debates in that subject. Is the worth of some product determined by how much work someone puts in to make it? Adam Smith thought so; Karl Marx made it the basis of his theory of capitalism. But modern economists aren’t fans of the labour theory of value: there are too many phenomena it just can’t explain (I’d be willing to pay a great deal for a can opener if I were starving and all I had was a tin of peaches, but not so much if there were already such a tool in my kitchen – the value of things is contextual and subjective).
So too for the effort theory of pleasure. Not only does it fail to shed much light on horror movies or BDSM (for those, Bloom runs through a series of evolutionary-tinged rationales, which he admits are often tenuous – for instance, is watching scary films a kind of “practice” for encountering danger in real life?), but it’s also missing meaning. Meaningful pursuits – such as having children – often bring suffering “along for the ride”, and there’s not much we can do about it.
Even if The Sweet Spot lacks the opinion-changing gravity of Bloom’s previous book, Against Empathy, it still throws up many questions. Bloom has a cheerful writing style that’s impossible to dislike – the opposite of academics who apparently believe in an effort theory that adds value to their impenetrable, jargon-filled texts.
My own form of masochism is reading those academic texts, checking whether the studies cited in popular-psychology books stack up. The Sweet Spot weaves in studies to back up philosophical points, and little of it hinges on this or that result being solid. Nevertheless, there are some references I probably would not have used: the statistics in a study on people’s mood while listening to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring don’t look entirely convincing; and given the absolute pounding it has had over the past decade, I’d probably just keep away from the literature on ego depletion (the idea that willpower is a finite resource).
But this is nitpicking – Bloom is clear that the evidence he cites varies in strength, and is hardly uncritical in general. Indeed, at one point he debunks the entire theory of post-traumatic growth. The idea – that those who suffer can not only bounce back but can improve themselves in unique ways – is both Pollyanna-ish and callous, and Bloom is rightly sceptical. He offers a reductio ad absurdum: would proponents agree we should punish criminals much more harshly, since the trauma might make them into better people? I rather doubt it.
In trying to understand why people risk death by mountaineering, Bloom cites a classic paper by the economist George Loewenstein that lists potential motivations: winning prestige; completing goals; mastering the environment; adding meaning in an indifferent universe. Bloom endorses motivational pluralism: we’re all a tangled mess of complicated drives and enthusiasms, and finding the sweet spot that includes just the right mix of suffering and value and satisfaction is, as the book’s subtitle puts it, the “key to a good life”.
We might, though, have to resign ourselves to never fully understanding people’s motivations: that Loewenstein paper takes as its title the ultimate non-explanatory explanation, given by the doomed George Mallory as to why he’d want to climb Everest: “Because it’s there.”
• Stuart Ritchie is a lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. He is the author of Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science. The Sweet Spot: Suffering, Pleasure and the Key to a Good Life is published by Vintage (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
