From the Notebooks
In The Guinea Pig Diaries, A.J. Jacobs engages in intense experiments of the subjective sort: he uses himself, the guinea pig, to test ideas and phenomenon. Each chapter of the book describes the results. In “My Outsourced Life,” he wants to know what it's like to outsource work, so he hires two workers from India and outsources his drab editorial and personal chores. And what did he discover? He discovered that young Americans have some stiff competition on the horizon.
In “Whipped,” Jacobs does everything his wife asks for thirty days, just to find out what it's like to give oneself fully to another. And what did he discover? He discovered that he started to love her even more than before.
But it's an observation at the end of the book that really resonated with me. He wrote, “It goes back to a recurring theme I've found in almost all my experiments: behavior shapes your thoughts.” It was the same point C.S. Lewis once made. Lewis observed that, even if people aren't nice or generous or charitable, they can attain the particular virtue if they pretend to be. If they behave like they're nice, they'll start becoming nice. Their inner life, in other words, will come to match their outward appearance. In the words of German theologian Romano Guardini, “Gesture reaches from the hand back to the heart.”
In an age that craves “authenticity” and sincerity, such an idea clunks with us mentally, but it's true. If you pretend to possess a certain trait, you will come to possess it. You can't pretend to possess it for purposes of conning people, of course, but if you pretend with the proper intent, you will soon no longer be pretending.
