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You Can Pretend Your Way to the Flourishing Life
The Goodness of Faking Yourself Out
“If one way to make friends is to show a great interest in other people, showing such an interest, however artificial it might be at the outset, can before long issue in genuine interest.” Joseph Epstein, Once More Around the Block
In The Guinea Pig Diaries, A.J. Jacobs wrotes about a series of intense experiments of the subjective sort: he used himself, the guinea pig, to test ideas and phenomena. Each chapter of the book described the results of the various experiments.
In “My Outsourced Life,” he wanted to know what it’s like to outsource work, so he hired two workers from India and outsourced his drab editorial and personal chores. What did he discover? He discovered that young Americans have some stiff competition on the horizon.
In “Whipped,” Jacobs did everything his wife asked for thirty days, just to find out what it’s like to give oneself fully to another. What did he discover? He discovered that he started to love her even more than he had before.
But it’s an observation at the end of the book that really resonated with me. He wrote, “It…
