73 million sunrises

There is a show on cable called “Storage Wars.” Storage containers filled with personal stuff that have been forfeited are put up for auction and several people bid on them. Rules say the bidders cannot move or touch any of the stuff up for auction until after they win the bid. They bid based only on parts they see stacked on top of one another. Sometimes, stuff turn out to be worth more than they bid on it; sometimes, they hold no market value at all. But always and across all bidders is a currency they all hold and it is hope. Hope, that hidden in shelves, drawers and boxes would be something valuable to sell. Hope, for one bidder who is a collector, that at least one singular item will be so unique that he can keep it or sell it to other collectors. It may be a story about container vans but the stuff ends up with the one who hopes the most.

Hope is also what the lottery sells. Surely, you would have to drug all the gods of all religions — past and present, to guarantee that your number will be picked. But even if you are short of bribe money and short of the gods required, you still join the lotto. You do not do this because you want to prove that you will lose. You do it because in a dimension cut off from the laws of probability, you hope to win.

Nature equipped us with an innate facility to cross our mental fingers so we can get through known and unknown obstacles, and reach our life’s “holiday weekends” or at least, a good number of them. This is what Tali Sharot, cognitive neuroscientist, is trying to tell me in her book, “The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain” (Pantheon Books, NY: 2011). She makes the case that to “think positively” is not just a cute slogan but actually wired into our brains.

She pointed to cases where a part of the brain named the hippocampus get into some kind of trouble remembering the past. If this happens, it is not just the “past” you will have trouble recalling, you will also have a problem imagining the future. “Past” and “future” are somehow interlocked in some kind of neural tête-à-tête so that when one goes out of whack, so does the other. This mystery of “memory” as not confined to processing past events clues us in as to the very reasonable possibility that being able to think of the future, particularly a future that we feel good about, is necessary for survival.

Sharot and other experts define optimism in these technical terms — the “tendency to overestimate the probability of positive events and underestimate the probability of negative events.” This means that if you were an optimist, you expect much more than what experience has previously taught you and more, Sharot cited studies showing that you even imagine that expectation in much greater detail than you would imagine an unpleasant future.  

There are so many insights the book offers but my most favorite one is the trail of joy that comes alive when we are looking forward to something special. This is the trail dotted with anticipation. She cited an old TV commercial of Guinness which had a bartender slowly pouring Guinness onto a glass up to the froth and ending with “Good things come to those who wait.” After which, she said, Guinness sales and brand recognition skyrocketed. Stripteases are the same, I think. Human anatomy is no secret at all but there is something about a slow reveal that inflates “hope” in the viewer even more. In fact, the role of “timing” is even more highlighted in a study Sharot named where, given a chance to be kissed by their “favorite celebrity,” people would rather wait (but not indefinitely) rather than have it immediately. We seem to get off from the extra moments of “giddiness” when we know we will have the kiss soon.

Sharot also says that is also why we love Fridays more than Sundays. Friday is the edge of experience where a weekend filled with hope of reigns while Sunday is overcast with looming clouds of experience with what a usual workweek holds.

Hope then does not seem to be simply emotional candy. In fact, not having it could actually make us sick. Tarot cites studies that showed that anticipating an undesirable event places a toll on our mental and physical health and can even sometimes be worse than experiencing the event itself. This actually makes me think if it is always a good idea to have your genes tested to know if you have those that dictate what diseases you will die from? I am sure there are brave souls who can still think clearly and live joyfully after they know and until they fall from those diseases but what about those who are left paralyzed in fear after knowing? Knowledge may not always be liberating.

And when we get down to it, hope is really what we do when we kiss the dawn of a new year. Since modern humans appeared on the planet 200,000 years ago, there have been about 73 million sunrises. I do not know at which point a human elbowed another beside her, as they look at the horizon and utter an ancient version of “Here comes the sun” as an expression of hope. “Hope” might just be the emotion that has gotten our kind to witness 73 million sunrises even when darkness also comes as often.

So, here’s to the next 365 sunrises. May we all enjoy the countdown.

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