The Budapest Question
Do you stay at the airport and watch Netflix on your laptop? 💻 Or explore the city in extremely cold weather? 🥶
Happy Friday!
And a warm welcome from the blue-sky rustle of bamboo outside our cabin door.
For those of you new around these parts, welcome 👋 My name is David and I’m a writer, outdoor instructor, cyclist-at-large with Thighs of Steel and, from next Monday, Expeditions Manager at the British Exploring Society.
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I go on holiday. (Prizes for guessing where…)
The Budapest Question
You have a 6-hour layover at Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport.
Do you either:
(a) Stay at the airport and watch Netflix on your laptop? 💻
or:
(b) Explore the city in extremely cold weather? 🥶
You Chose To Explore, Didn’t You?
I came across the Budapest Question in a book called The Sweet Spot by psychologist Paul Bloom, which is all about the role suffering has to play in living a good life.
(Side note: The Sweet Spot gets meh reviews, but I’m getting a lot out of it.)
The Budapest question was one of several posed by researchers Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz in their 2010 paper, Productivity Orientation and the Consumption of Collectable Experiences.
What they found was that, although most people (66%) predicted that staying at the airport and watching films would be more pleasurable, the overwhelming majority (77%) would actually choose to explore Budapest in the freezing rain — the more memorable experience.
Humans are weird.
Follow The Story
It’s worth saying that there are no wrong answers in this quiz — there’s nothing wrong with choosing Netflix.
Sometimes we humans really do choose what makes us happiest in the moment; sometimes we choose pleasure for now.
But more often we choose to make memories, in full knowledge that making memories often comes with a dose of suffering — the infamous Type 2 fun that explorers tell stories about.
And what is a memory but a story we tell ourselves?
But the art of storytelling is not simply the warehousing of memories, preserving them in amber for our ancestors. Storytelling does so much more than that.
Storytelling is what transmutes our memories into meaningful experiences. A meaningful experience, almost by definition, is one you can tell a story about.
And that’s why we choose Budapest in the rain.
Instinctively, we follow the story and construct for ourselves a meaningful experience.
What Do We Mean By Meaningful?
Meaningful activities have a goal, a purpose, that impacts on the world, yourself and probably other people.
There is often struggle or conflict. Sometimes a crisis, even tragedy — our psychological immune systems have a marvellous capacity for turning misery into meaning.
Above all, you will come out the other end of a meaningful experience transformed, changed, even if only in some small way.
And this still applies even when the experience is totally benign and passive: a father will tell the story of watching his son being born as one of the most meaningful moments of his entire life.
The Life Of The Optimist
The Budapest Question has real implications for the way we live our lives.
Even if you chose to stay in the airport, you understand that pleasure isn’t correlated with memory, story or meaning — and that realisation sets us free.
It is impossible to always choose what will make us happy or what will give us most pleasure.
Sometimes we don’t know what will make us happy. Sometimes what makes us happy makes other people miserable (and vice versa). Sometimes life gives you lemons.
It is, however, very possible to always choose the most memorable, meaningful or story worthy path.
A life guided by story embraces suffering. It is, therefore, the life of the realist — but, equally, by turning memory into meaning, it is also the life of the optimist.
Delete The Internet [🚀UPDATE]
I still don’t have a browser on my phone. Nothing bad continues to happen.
And I’ve survived over two weeks without Whatsapp on my phone. It’s really nice.
One thing I was worried about was whether deleting Whatsapp on my phone would simply push me to use the app on my computer instead.
Happily, comparing Whatsapp desktop usage from the last two weeks with data from the month before, the answer is no. If anything, it’s slightly declined, from 2h40 per week before I deleted the app from my phone to 2h25 since.
Phew!
⚠Slight Wrinkle Alert! After 16 days, the Whatsapp desktop app logged out and asked me to reconnect to my phone. This meant all of five minutes’ work re-installing the app on my phone.
I don’t think I missed any messages in that time, but, in order to protect end-to-end encryption, my chat history is not currently available. I have a backup from pre-deletion, but still: mildly annoying that it hasn’t reappeared automatically.
Thank you for sharing your own stories of disconnection — I love ‘em! My inbox (or the comments section) is always open for your nuggets of inspiration. 🤗
Three Tiny Big Things
1. Fossil Fuelled Cars Sold In Norway Last Month
2. Wine Isn’t Good For You. At All.
Sorry to be the waiter of bad news, but, from the Slate, this is ‘the boozy story of how we decided alcohol was a health boon in the ’90s—and how it all fell apart’.
Now, 25 years later, you’re likely feeling a fair bit of whiplash. According to new guidelines released in recent months by the World Health Organization, the World Heart Federation, and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction, the safest level of drinking is — brace yourself — not a single drop.
3. The Great Transformation (Redux)
Political economist Karl Polanyi is having A Moment.
80 years after its first publication, Polanyi’s magnum opus, The Great Transformation, is back at the printers. As Penguin editor Hana Teraie-Wood explained in the Guardian:
Polanyi is the most important thinker you’ve never heard of. He was one of the first heterodox economists and one of the first — perhaps even one of the founding —environmental economists.
Meanwhile, The Conversation takes a stab at why Polanyi is back in business:
The social pathologies that we witness — social inequality, geopolitical volatility, virulent nationalism and conspiracy fantasies — are all reminiscent of processes that [Polanyi] analysed in The Great Transformation. […]
As in Polanyi’s time, the prospect of dramatic change in the global order no longer seems far-fetched.
Thank You
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
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As always, thank you for your eyeballs and thanks for your support.
Big love,
dc:
That last paragraph in the 'Life of the Optimist' section is brilliant. I love the idea of almost always being able to choose the most story-worthy path, even when we can't be sure of what'll make us happy. You've written a great summation of some vague subconscious hunch I think I've had for a while. Awesome stuff!
Big congratulations too on getting the job - expeditions manager is one of the coolest job titles I've ever heard!