Better Off Than King Louis

A Seat by the Window

The day Lina was accepted for the design job, after years in accounting, she called everyone she knew except one person. His name was at the top of her call history, because he called whenever anything broke. She did not tap it. “And your father?” her husband asked. “Soon,” she said. That night she promised herself twenty minutes every evening for a design of her own, one nobody had asked her to make.

On her first morning at the new job, she set the alarm for two hours before she was due to start. Her seat was by the window, and the light fell on her paper before ten. She arranged her pens by length, as she did on her desk at home. The day passed without her looking at the clock. That evening she opened her design file and went beyond the twenty minutes without noticing. She, who never missed a number.

After two weeks, the seat was just a seat. She arrived, turned on her computer, and did not look up at the window. The seat was not the only thing that had become ordinary. Over the past few weeks, her Saturday hour with her father, who lived ten minutes away, had become forty minutes, then twenty-five, then ten: as long as the journey there. The story of his first job, which he had broken off months before with “Next Saturday,” was still waiting for a longer Saturday. At home, her design file stayed closed for ten nights. “Aren’t you going to open it?” her husband asked. “Nothing worthwhile,” she said. Then she noticed what she had said, while working in a job she had waited for since university.

You may reach what you have been waiting for, then wonder weeks later where the joy went. Has the thing disappeared, or have you stopped noticing it? If you are truly exhausted, look into why. But a list of what is missing cannot by itself tell you what you can use today to keep one promise.

We do not mean that you wield more power than Louis XIV, king of France. We mean that your day, when these things are available to you, includes health, comfort, and safety he lacked, despite everything he owned.

Louis XIV had six children with his wife Maria Theresa. Only the eldest reached adulthood¹. He suffered complications from tooth extractions in 1685², and his life ended with gangrene his doctors could not treat³. Money could not buy him what his age had yet to discover.

In France between 1750 and 1780, after his reign, around 45% of children died before the age of fifteen, according to Our World in Data⁴. People with access to medical care and safety today may overlook them.

The Rational Optimist compares the services available to the king with those available to a person today⁵. You benefit from the work of people you have never met, without owning a palace. Seeing what has become familiar keeps the picture of what is missing from taking over the whole frame.

The Line That Moves with You

This is part of what is called hedonic adaptation: an event that once filled our attention loses some of its effect and becomes part of the ordinary level against which we measure what follows. But a review by Diener, Lucas, and Scollon cautions that people adapt differently, and the baseline itself can change⁶.

In chapter 13, comparison obscures your view. Here, familiarity does. It may lead someone to put off keeping a promise they could act on now, while waiting for a different life. Available minutes and a quiet place do not make up for what you lack. But they count toward what you can do.

What the Picture Leaves Out

In the standard cosmological model of the Planck 2018 results, ordinary matter makes up about 5% of the matter-and-energy budget. The rest is dark matter and dark energy, which we infer from their effects⁷. What we have is like this too: the eye does not see all of it, and we infer it from its effects. Lina’s seat by the window did not disappear when she stopped noticing it.

That night, after saying “Nothing worthwhile,” Lina opened the notebook where she wrote a line after dinner about the best thing in her day. The last four lines all said the same thing: “An ordinary day.” Under them, she wrote, “I’m grateful for my new job.” She read the sentence twice. It was true, but it stirred nothing in her. She turned the notebook toward her husband. “I wrote it, and nothing changed,” she said. Then she closed it and did not open her design file.

Seeing What Might Never Have Happened

Koo, Algoe, Wilson, and Gilbert tested “mental subtraction”: thinking about how a positive event might never have happened, rather than simply remembering that it did. In their experiments, this helped improve positive feelings⁸. For Lina, the question could begin with a course she almost missed, then return to an opportunity she now had. There is no need to imagine a catastrophe.

Specific gratitude follows: naming a detail rather than writing a broad heading like “my work.” In experiments by Emmons and McCullough, some measures of well-being improved among groups who wrote down what they appreciated⁹.

The next night she did not write “grateful.” She wrote, “If I hadn’t signed up for the course…” Then she continued as if completing a calculation: no course, no portfolio; no portfolio, no interview; no interview, no job. She would have remained an accountant, the old sentence traveling with her from phone to phone: “When things settle down, I’ll start the design course.”

Then she returned to what she had now. She did not write “my work.” She wrote one detail: the seat by the window and the light that fell on her paper before ten. Her husband read the line over her shoulder. “A seat?” he asked. “A seat I’ve waited for since university,” she said. Then she opened the design file she had left closed for ten nights, set her phone’s timer for twenty minutes, and worked until it rang.

A week later she stayed late at work and fell asleep before opening the file. The following evening she returned to the line “If you fall” and wrote one detail: her first design that the company had sent to a client. Then she set the timer for another twenty minutes. In the morning, she looked up at the window before turning on her computer.

You can remember the tool this way: “What you notice in what you have − what you envy in others.” A reminder to pay attention, not a scientific equation for happiness. Name what you have, then use it to keep one promise. That is more within reach than waiting for a palace.

On Thursday evening, Karim stepped off the bus in front of his father’s house. The light by the door was on, as his father left it every night. He reached the doorstep before the bus had pulled away behind him.