David McElroy

I can’t stop looking at this photograph tonight. I don’t know a single person in the picture, but it represents much of what I want to experience in life.

When NASA’s New Horizons probe made contact with Earth Wednesday to say it had arrived on schedule at Pluto, the most excited people in the world were the men and women of the project staff in Maryland. This picture shows the jubilant reaction of the employees to the successful achievement of what some of them have worked for many years to achieve.

This picture of that moment captures something fundamental about the human experience — and it reminds me of things I still want in my own life.

It wasn’t that big a deal for me when New Horizons reached Pluto, but it was huge news to many scientists. I can’t imagine, though, that anyone on this planet felt the kind of joy and exhilaration the success brought to the project team. What I see in these people is the pure joy of being part of something big and feeling happy about being alive to be a part of it.

I wrote just a few days ago about my realization years ago that it was certain emotional or psychological states we really seem to want, rather than the actual goals we attach those feelings to. This is an example of that. In the practical sense, nothing that this probe accomplishes will changes the lives of these excited people at NASA. It might help the careers of a few of them, but most of these cheering people won’t be objectively changed by the discoveries.

But they will be forever changed in some fundamental way by the exhilaration of this experience — of the feeling they had of being part of something big and important.

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When we feel a strong craving for another person, we sometimes say the two of us have strong chemistry. What if that’s more than a metaphor?

It was almost 10 years ago when something hit me which seemed like a major revelation at the time, even though I realize others had already figured it out. I realized that the things people wanted in life — myself included — weren’t the actual material things or the achieved goals. Instead, what we really want is the emotional or psychological states that come with those things.

Once I’ve satisfied my actual physical needs, I don’t actually want money. Instead, I want the feelings that I’ve attached to money and having more of it.

I don’t have to have one partner I’ve committed myself to as my wife. After all, I could make the wrong choice. But I’m driven to find the right wife anyway, because I want the feelings I’ve attached to being loved and understood by a one special woman who is my partner.

In an objective way, I don’t want the extra responsibility and headaches that come with having children and raising them, but I want the emotional state that I attach to reproducing and having a loving family.

Plenty of people have money and spouses and children — and hundreds of other things that we attach to this sort of emotional state — and they’re miserable. So just having the thing itself isn’t necessarily what we need or want.

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The man ran over to the television and got close so he could hear what was being said. I was watching the scene unfold in a restaurant where a television is permanently set to show cable news.

“He just makes me so mad,” the man muttered with intensity. I wasn’t sure whether he was talking to me or to himself, but he was clearly referring to the media personality talking on the screen. He was upset, but the flickering image commanded his attention and his eyes were glued to the TV.

I watched him for a minute and finally asked the obvious question.

“If he makes you so angry, why do you listen so closely to him?” I asked. “Why not just ignore him?”

The man first looked puzzled, as though I had asked him a trick question. Then he finally responded with the tone one might use when explaining something obvious to a child.

“Well, he’s on television,” the man said. “He doesn’t like [my political group] and he’s always saying negative things about us. He’s on the news. I have to know what he says — because he makes me furious!”

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