Happier: Why We Need to Get Off Autopilot
"Life is divided into three periods: past, present and future. Of these, the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain." — Seneca
Before Oak & Iron, I spent years coaching clients through exactly this tension: the pull between where they'd been, where they were headed, and the days actually in front of them. One book I kept coming back to during that season was Tal Ben-Shahar's Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. Ben-Shahar taught the wildly popular positive psychology course at Harvard that the book grew out of, and it's stuck with me as one of the clearest frameworks I've found for thinking about time, attention, and what it actually means to live well enjoying the journey over the destination.
I want to introduce it here because the questions it raises are ones every family eventually runs into, whether you're just putting down roots or you're deep in the full-growth-and-full-pressure years.
My wife Erin and I took a weekend getaway a while back as a deliberate attempt to shift out of autopilot, look back on where we'd been, look ahead at where we were going, and mostly just acknowledge, appreciate, and enjoy where we were. It was a good, needed time. I wasn't in the business of facilitating weekend retreats, but shifting people out of autopilot was a lot of what I offered clients through coaching, and here's some of the insight that work left me with.
Clients used to reach out to me because they'd been operating on autopilot and needed someone to help them regain control of their life. That task required me, as their coach, to climb into the passenger seat just long enough to help them remember they were the ones in the driver's seat. We'd clarify their future goals, make sure those goals were informed by the wisdom and values gained from their past, and reinforce their belief that what they did in the present could (and would) get them moving in the right direction.
As we assessed where they actually stood:
Sometimes they could see what they wanted but realized their feet had been on the brakes, or on the gas with the car in reverse.
Sometimes they were driving forward but with their eyes fixed on the rearview mirror of the past recklessly driving through people.
Often, their attention was fixed on their phones while the car cruised ahead on autopilot, okay enough (or so they thought) until it wasn't: a spouse filed for divorce, a health condition became debilitating, or they realized they'd been circling the same roundabout for a decade, having gone nowhere at all (a scenario that hits a little close to home for those of us navigating Carmel's roundabouts).
The trouble with autopilot is that it frees up our attention to drift too far into the future, the past, or our phones. And there's a reason the windshield is bigger than the rearview mirror.
Ben-Shahar frames it well: happiness, in his account, isn't a destination but a way of experiencing the journey itself. Enjoying the present because it's building toward a future worth having, not despite it. He lays out four archetypes for how people tend to relate to time:
Past-minded (the nihilist): lost the lust for life — no enjoyment of the moment, no sense of future purpose.
Present-minded (the hedonist): enjoys the present, ignores the consequences.
Future-minded (the rat racer): suffers now for some anticipated future payoff.
Present-and-future-minded (the "Happier" archetype): finds enjoyment in both the present and what it's building toward.
So, where has your attention been lately? The windshield, the rearview mirror, your phone? When you slip onto autopilot, where do you tend to drift: toward nihilism, hedonism, the rat race, or Ben-Shahar's "Happier" state of mind?
And what's one routine practice that might help keep the future and past in their proper place while you attend more intentionally to the present: a daily walk, meditation, prayer, an intentionally protected time for conversation with the people you love, a recurring weekend getaway?