Happiness Quotient

 For years a friend has been telling me I ought to go to law school, and for years I replied that I was not ready. "But don't you think you could be achieving much more with your life?" he would ask; "Don't you think you're destined for greatness?" "Well yes," I would reply; "but, greatness is best achieved not through radical changes of course and introducing upheavals into one's plans, but through conscientiously doing the best one can at the task immediately before one." 

All of which saw me through several years of my adult professional life without heeding the siren call of a legal education. But there came a point, this fall, when all that suddenly broke down. I felt the need for an upheaval. A new beginning. "You must change your life!" as the poet says. I decided law school needed to happen. And not just eventually, but this year; as soon as possible. But what about my own prior advice to myself? No matter, chuck it out the window!

And it's just my luck that, no sooner had I reached this dramatic conclusion, than everything I'm reading seems to throw my own earlier and more conservative advice back at me. First, there was Madame Bovary, with its seeming moral that showing constant dissatisfaction and unrest with one's lot will only end in misery (although in fairness, it could be said that the staid unimaginative characters end up just as poorly as the flighty, self-aggrandizing ones at Flaubert's hands.)

Then, even more pointedly, was Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a wholly sui generis book about a fictitious German philosopher of clothes, which happens also to be full of thoughtful career advice. The Scottish sage draws some of his best conclusions straight from his own translation of Goethe's quintessential bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister; but whatever their source, his words were almost eerily reminiscent of my own prior answers to my friend: 

"Do the Duty which lies nearest thee." (As proof that Carlyle's instruction bore no insignificant resemblance to my own earlier self-advice, I offer the following from a post I wrote earlier this summer: "My life has confirmed for me time and again that the best path to achievement is not to abandon what you're already doing, but to focus on the task immediately in front of you and do the best job with it as you possibly can.")

But how, one asks this notoriously stern early-Victorian author, is one to quiet the feelings of restlessness and discontent that beset one and keep one from attending to the duty immediately at hand? His answer: renounce! Accept! Bow before the yoke! To illustrate the rationale for doing which, he offers a mathematical analogy that must have come to his mind during the brief time he spent as a teacher of arithmetic: 

Happiness, Carlyle argues (in the persona of Professor Teufelsdröck, the author of the supposed philosophy of clothes), may be conceived as a kind of fraction, of which the numerator records the amount of pleasure (or power or utility or what-have-you) that we possess; and the denominator registers the amount we feel to be our due. To the extent that the resulting quotient from this division can be increased, we are contented with our lot. 

Most people, in writing their own internal fraction (according to Carlyle), start with a large estimate of what they are owed. And the only way they can think to be happy is to try to increase their numerator of pleasure until it matches it, which often can't be done. But suppose, suggests the writer, we go about it the other way. Suppose we try to reduce our denominator, that is—lower our expectations, our sense of what we deserve. Then, he writes, we might achieve a far higher quotient. 

Indeed, he notes, if the denominator of the fraction could be brought to something close to zero, the result of the division would approach infinity—even were the numerator of the ratio e'er so small. Thus, from the most minuscule iota of utility could be wrung boundless happiness, could one's sense of expectation and desert only be brought close to nothing (a conclusion and recommendation that is not unlike that of the Buddha: for whom peace is to be found by the extinction of desire). 

All of which is good advice. And none of which is potent enough to deter me from what I want to do next anyways, which is still to go to law school. 

One discovers, however, that this type of Stoicism can be helpful guidance nonetheless in navigating the process of applying to law programs, as much as it can be to staying in one's current position. 

After all, when one is wondering how to do the vast, inconceivable thing, as in—ultimately get in where one wants to go—it is best just to start with what is right there waiting to be done (i.e., ask for letters of recommendation; submit transcripts, etc.); just as Carlyle recommends ("Do the Duty which lies nearest thee.")

And as for lowering expectations, I have always been a king at that. If the denominator of the happiness fraction of applying to law school is the weighted prestige of the particular programs we expect to get into, and which we feel we are owed, then I have spent the last few weeks in applying the Carlyle principle by seeking to drop this number as close to nil as possible. Indeed, in the spirit of the Scottish writer, I propose the following mathematical representation of what I have in mind:

H (Happiness with law school admissions outcome) = Po (Prestige of programs that do in fact take you) / P1 (Prestige of programs that you feel ought to take you, based on your obvious merit). 

Many of us, during the admissions process, apply ourselves only to the task of maximizing that numerator, to the best of our ability. Better recs, better grades, better test scores, and so on. I fancy that I am doing some of that, as well as I can on the timeline I have to work with. But I am also heeding Carlyle's advice, and seeing if I can drop that denominator as low as possible. Not because I abandon all hope; but so that whatever the resulting value of Po may be, my resulting happiness may be overflowing!

Though whether it will meet my friend's definition of "greatness" is a worry for another day...