Fear + Wonder = Joy

I'm not a biblical scholar, but I have always loved the phrase "...I am fearfully and wonderfully made..." (Psalm 14:8). To me, it gives huge insight into who we are. We are simultaneously scared of our ugliness and amazed at our own beauty, and we are designed to be this way. It seems to me that this balance between fear and wonder -- fearfulness and wonderfulness -- is critical not just to our own survival, but to living a joyful life.

If we only focus on our fearfulness, we will be discouraged from ever leaving our homes and going into the world. We may even not be able to get out of bed. The paralysis of reasonable fears as well as irrational ones will overtake us. Beyond that extreme problem, there is a more subtle one. Even if we manage to leave the house and go about our daily routines, if we are only afraid, we will not feel alive. Being able to see our own wonderfulness is essential to feeling authentically present.

On the other hand, if we are only aware of our wonderfulness, we will be oblivious to the negative effects we can have on other people and ourselves. These effects occur through the course of living, often by mistake but sometimes on purpose. We will damage ourselves by taking adventurous steps on a grandiose journey that does not benefit from the wisdom of appropriate fears.

There's a general thrust in popular culture and especially pop psychology that suggests we should find ways to ignore or remove the fear and to focus only on wonder or beauty. The belief seems to be that this positive focus will bring us joy. But what really brings us joy? What is the central essence of joy?

Joy or happiness is not a product. It's not even a service. It seems to me that joy is the result of being connected to all parts of ourselves. Including our fear, including our wonder. Clinical psychologists know that integrating all that there is inside of us -- balancing fear and wonder and everything else -- is one very important key to joyfulness.

It seems to me that the scientific process can point toward one way to integrate all this. To do proper science, scientists have to become aware of any internal biases -- any fears or blind spots -- we may have about our object of wonder. We need to hold both cards, the wonder card and the fear card. The way we do that is by asking questions of ourselves even as we ask questions of nature. Did I think this up, or is this real? Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing? What are the data telling me?

The questions, regardless of the answers, put us on a path that includes both fear and wonder, because questioning allows everything to come up in answer to the questions. Nothing is sure, so everything can be seen. The questions are the great integrators. Ask questions, I say, and you get joy as an answer.

When does changing strategy make sense?

One of my areas of study is in how people make decisions about future events. Lately I’ve been thinking about this in the context of baseball and the rest of life.

If you’re pitching in a baseball game and your fastball is working wonders, you aren’t likely to change your strategy. You’ll keep pitching the fastball, because it’s working. But if three batters in a row have turned your fastballs into runs, you’ll consider trying something new for the next batter. This strategy, which I call “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it — but if it is broken, fix it!” seems reasonable enough for baseball pitches.

But what about when the amount of influence you have over a situation isn’t so clear? Like in the rest of our daily life?

For instance, you might do great during a job interview. You ask all the right questions, you give all the right answers. But you don’t get the job. Then it happens again, and again. Is this job interview situation like pitching, in which case you should change something about your interview strategy? Or is this situation more like playing roulette, where you have almost no control over the outcome regardless of what you do?

If it’s like roulette, what would be the smartest next move? Keep betting on “black” when red has come up three times? Or change your behavior to bet on “red”? According to current scientific theory, there is no smartest next move — each spin of a fair roulette table brings a completely new result, not influenced by previous spins. But multiple behavioral studies show that in these kind of low-control situations, people tend to keep betting on “black” after a string of “red” outcomes. This is what I call the “If it’s broken, don’t fix it” strategy. So it looks like people apply different rules to make decisions depending on how much control they think they have over a situation.

Back to the job interview scenario. If you think you have a lot of control over the situation, you’re likely to change your interview strategy (even though you already thought your strategy was good). After all, it seems you are consistently failing, and you have control, so you’d better try something new! On the other hand, if you feel powerless over the situation, then it’s more like the roulette wheel. You’ll keep using the same interview strategy again and again, because you don’t have any control, so there’s no reason that changing your strategy should make a difference.

What this seems to produce is a situation in which people who feel in control are more flexible in their approaches, and people who feel powerless are more rigid. It also means that people who feel more in control also get more experience using multiple strategies to solve problems, whereas people who feel powerless get much less experience and therefore develop less expertise. As you can see, the situation feeds back upon itself — feeling in control leads to more feelings of mastery; feeling helplessness leads to more opportunities to demonstrate one’s lack of control.

So what can you do when you feel like you’re failing? Whether you feel like you have control or not, it makes sense to act like a person who feels control. Change your strategy after a few failures. If you do have even a little bit of influence over the situation (and we usually do), this change could help. And, in the unusual case in which you don’t have any influence at all, changing your strategy at least gives you practice in a new way of doing things.