Enough
Apparently the tolerance phenomena I mentioned the other day has a proper psycho-sociological term. It’s called the Hawthorne Effect and is named after a study of an American factory where it was discovered that no matter what change was made by consultants (more light, less light, various reward schemes), productivity levels always went up before returning to ‘normal’ levels after a few weeks. It wasn’t that the changes were especially effective or ineffective, rather it was the change plus the belief that the change would have a markedly positive effect that made the difference. This explains why I felt great after a couple of juices and sublime after only checking my email once per day — I believed it would work and thus it did.
I read about the Hawthorne Effect in John Naish’s enjoyable book Enough. He argues that rather than perpetuating the cycle of continual novelty in the hope of a short-term boosts we should push through the dip. He uses the examples of meditation and yoga, which both begin as revelations but soon become chores; we should push on through that dip until they become . . . well, he doesn’t explain what they become after they are chores, but presumably it is something good.
There was another book published recently called Enough by the environmentalist Bill McKibben, which argued that we should stop the upcoming genetic arms race between parents (where no cognitive or physical enhancement will ever be enough) and avoid the limitless post-human future envisioned by Ray Kurzweil. Unless we do so, we won’t enjoy running anymore (McKibben goes on a lot about his running). For John Naish (who goes on about meditation and not having a TV or a mobile), Enough means evolving a new human that no longer desires more and more stuff, in order that the Earth from becoming a denuded husk. Both books interpose the figure of the author in that cutesy (and quite unnecessary) modern way.
Ultimately, Naish’s Enough is a call for mindfulness: not watching TV whilst eating, not straying to shopping sites every time you go on the internet, and definitely not buying more useless gadgets (he has set-up a prize for the worst one). Unfortunately, we seem to be hardwired to buy more stuff: if you were a hoarder of food in the Pleistocene era you had more chance of survival than the equivalent of the declutterer or life laundrist. The elephant in the room is the capitalist dilemma: what would happen if people decided enough was enough and the economy stopped growing? Would we go back to the dark ages?