Charlie’s Delusion
What Wonka’s terrible oversight tells us about how we should live our lives.
The movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is one of my all time favorites, and for good reason. As anyone who has had their tongue in my mouth can attest, I’ve always had a sweet tooth, so the combination of secret sugary goodness and magic made Willy Wonka a staple of my childhood. Remember the everlasting gobstopper? Mr. Slugworth? Wonka-vision? You couldn’t conjure more powerful plot devices for a seven-year-old.
During my childhood I watched the movie at least once a month. I knew every line and each time that glass elevator lifted off, my heart soared with it, along for the ride. I loved the movie, and I always looked forward to the time of the year when I could channel my inner Charlie—I’m talking, of course, about Halloween.
Each year my neighborhood chum and I would begin our costumed quest exactly at sundown and spend the next two hours sprinting up and down every street within a three-mile radius. We had but one rule for the night—your costume couldn’t slow you down. One year we even mapped out our route and scribbled out the optimal way to avoid overlap, making absolutely sure to hit those houses rumored to have the ever-elusive King-Size candy bars. Naturally we opted for pillowcases instead of the more appropriate buckets for our plunder because, well, they could carry way, way more candy.
When the night was over we each probably had enough candy to last until the next year’s Halloween.
Sitting in my family room, we would put on a movie (I always requested Willy Wonka), pour out our pillowcases, and stare at our massive piles of candy. And although we were dressed as superheroes, wizards, ninjas, or ghouls, each of us ended the night as pirates, sitting on our personal treasure islands, staring greedily at the size of our bounties.
Inevitably, however, our ecstasy would ween. The candy was delicious, of course—that’s why we so craved it. But in the end, it was the idea of the mounds of candy much more so than the mounds themselves, that we valued. The reality always fell short of our imagination. Other than belly-aches and sore legs, the most we got from the night was a few days of bragging rights and candy in our lunches. These things were nice of course, but soon all was forgotten and things were back to normal. Ignorant children as we were, we thought we could find fulfillment from fudge; satisfaction from skittles; meaning from mars bars. But we couldn’t.
My Wonka phase ended about the time I stopped trick-or-treating and for the next few years I didn’t think about the Chocolate Factory much. I left it along with the innocence of my childhood, hearing curse words, developing crushes, and going through the social life tragicomedy that was high school. I grew into a tall, skinny eighteen year-old whose features had aged at different speeds; my nose was eleven, my jaw fifteen, and my lips somewhere in the middle. I looked a bit like an alien. And on top of that, according to adults I had an even bigger problem: I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. They kept asking—
“What college do you want to go to?”
or
“What do you want to study?”
or
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
The parents asking the questions often seemed ambivalent to their own careers; maybe they hoped that with a bit of direction I could find my calling. Where was my Golden Ticket? If only we could all be as lucky as Charlie, I thought.
It’s eight years later, and I wonder—was Charlie actually lucky? The last lines of the movie are these, as Charlie and Wonka soar over the city in the Glass Elevator:
Wonka: “But Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted.”
Charlie: “What happened?”
Wonka: “He lived happily ever after.”
So Charlie suddenly got everything he ever wanted—and this will this make him happy, right? We are certainly led to believe so.
Unfortunately, this is a fallacy. Charlie fell victim to the same error in judgement in the Glass Elevator that my friends and I, on Halloween, made. In both cases we were imagining a life lived forever in the present; a perpetual existence at the moment we were just about to bite into that Wonka-bar. And as we’ve all learned at one point or another, once that bite is taken, chewed and swallowed—and you have six or seven more bars—you get a little sick of chocolate. As sad as it is for me to admit, the image of Charlie spending the rest of his days gaily running the Chocolate Factory with his family and Oompa-Loompas is probably unrealistic. Charlie, once he’s over his initial excitement about his new life, will quickly do what we humans do—adapt. Soon, living in and running the chocolate factory will become his new normal.
In the Glass Elevator, Charlie is imagining his dream come true: an escape from poverty for his family and endless chocolate—two wonderful things, of course—but he isn’t thinking about the fact that his new life will include different stresses and struggles, likely no less challenging than the ones he had before.
Sure, this is just a story; a fantasy tale of childhood hope and desire, but the fact is that we are all victims to Charlie’s delusion. We all desire things that probably will not, in the end, satisfy us. Will a new car, a new iPhone, a new house—or more likes on Instagram—ultimately make us happier?
The answer is complicated, but it starts with something called habituation.
Habituation. ha·bit·u·a·tion (h-bch-shn): n. a general accommodation to unchanging environmental conditions.
Psychological habituation is usually explained through drug addiction. The brain habituates—gets used to—the amount of a drug hitting the brain by increasing the amount of the countering neurochemicals in order to bring the brain back to its normal state, creating what drug-users know as ‘tolerance.’ Habituation doesn’t just apply to drug addiction, however—when we do anything that satisfies us, such as biting into a chocolate bar or listening to a great song, our brain releases the hormone dopamine. After repeated exposure without a break, our brains habituate to the specific stimuli (chocolate bar or song) in the same way as they do to drugs. Continuing to eat more chocolate or continuing to listen to the same song on repeat will lead to our brains release less dopamine. So what do we do? Simple: we go on and listen to a new song or have a bite of a steak and enjoy it just as much, if not more. Change is vital.
In a way, habituation can be thought of as a psychological immune system, making sure that whatever changes we encounter we can recover from, positive and negative. We will adapt to our new state of being and our brains will bring us automatically back to baseline.
So, it really is the journey rather than the finish line that makes life worth living. But you can’t have the journey without the goal. What was Charlie’s goal? It wasn’t a chocolate factory—it was an escape from poverty. Well, he achieved his goal: he escaped from poverty. But it’s not enough to achieve—the pursuit of the goal is the meaningful part. Did Charlie earn his factory?
Ironically, the stories of the other children in Willy Wonka echo this issue. Veruca Salt, the overindulged, selfish scamp whose wealthy parents transitioned their legume factory into a Wonka-bar opening sweatshop to find her Golden Ticket, is a perfect example. She was clearly an unhappy child, and the movie suggests that this is because she never had to work for anything (we all know a Veruca in our own lives), and so was always dissatisfied with what she did have. Sure, Charlie wasn’t a selfish, overindulged twit like Veruca, and sure, he had a paper route, but that hardly earned him a multimillion dollar sweets empire. The truth is, it was all luck.
In the beginning of the movie he found a coin in the gutter that bought him a chocolate bar containing his Golden Ticket. And of course, it was only due to the fact that every other child with a ticket was an absolute terror that he was given the factory and, consequently, his escape from poverty. Sure, he can be happy that he got his escape, but he can’t possibly feel as if he accomplished anything remotely impressive. Wonka too, is deluded, thinking that Charlie could feel the same type of pride in something Wonka had toiled his whole life to build.
With all that came with the Chocolate Factory; an escape from poverty, an endless supply of chocolate and candy, and an army of green-haired minions, Charlie lost something much more important. He lost the one thing that makes our lives worth living. In being given the chocolate factory he was deprived something much greater—his chance at building something himself.
So what is the lesson, then? What does this teach us about how we can find worth in our own lives? It’s that constant, throbbing question in all of our hearts.
Questions, questions. I think the German-American Psychologist Erich Fromm put it perfectly:
“Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”
Even those of us who have spent enormous effort to achieve something and then achieved it still are hit with that existential bummer of ‘What next?’ at the finish line.
Maybe Charlie will have a happy rest of his life in the Chocolate Factory. Maybe he’ll love making candy and he will happen to have the rare, unique personality needed to fit perfectly into his forced profession.
Maybe I’ll be happier if I get the new iPhone.
Maybe.
Kevin Ferguson is a writer and magician based out of San Francisco. You can find Kevin on his website at mindofkevin.com or on Twitter at @mindofkevin.
This post originally appeared on his blog.
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