LIFE ON AUTOMATIC
My friend and I are rapt in conversation in a busy restaurant, to ward the end of our lunch. He's immersed in his narrative, telling e about a particularly intense moment he's had recently.
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He's been so lost in telling me about it that he's not done with his food. My plate was cleared a while ago.
At that point the server comes to our table and asks him, "Are
you enjoying your lunch?"
He barely notices her, mutters a dismissive, "No, not yet," and continues on with his story without missing a beat.
My friend's reply, of course, was not to what the server actually said, but rather to what waiters usually say at that point in a meal: "Have you finished?"
That small mistake typifies the downside of a life lived bottom up, on automatic: we miss the moment as it actually comes to us, reacting instead to a fixed template of assumptions about what's going on. And we miss the humor of the moment:
Waiter: "Are you enjoying your lunch?" Customer: "No, not yet."
Back in the day when there were often long lines in many of fices as people waited to use a copier, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer had people go to the head of the line and simply say, "I've got to make some copies."
Of course, everyone else in line was there to make copies, too. Yet more often than not, the person at the head of the line would let Langer's confederate go ahead. That, says Langer, exemplifies mind lessness, attention on automatic. An active attention, by contrast, might lead the person at the front of the line to question whether there really was some privileged urgent need for those copies.
Active engagement of attention signifies top-down activity, an antidote to going through the day with a zombie-like automatic ity. We can talk back to commercials, stay alert to what's happen ing around us, question automatic routines or improve them. This focused, often goal-oriented attention, inhibits mindless mental
habits.