The Guinea Pig Diaries

A
LSO BY
A. J. J
ACOBS

The Know-It-All
The Year of Living Biblically

My Life as an Experiment

A. J. Jacobs

Copyright © 2009 by A. J. Jacobs

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Designed by Davina Mock-Maniscalco

Versions of some of these chapters appeared in
Esquire
magazine.
Manufactured in the United States of America

10     9    8     7     6     5     4    3     2     1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jacobs, A. J., 1968-

The guinea pig diaries : my life as an experiment / A. J. Jacobs.

p. cm.

1. Conduct of life—Humor. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Humor. I. Title.

PN6231.6142J33        2009

ISBN 978-1-4165-9906-7

ISBN 978-1-4391-1014-0 (ebook)

To Julie

(and also
Courtney Holt
)

Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot of suggestions.

Some are intriguing. My brother-in-law suggested I spend a year growing my own food in my Manhattan apartment.

Some are intriguing, but possibly come with a hidden agenda. A friend—at least I think he’s a friend—told me I should spend a year without human contact.

Some
definitely
come with an agenda. My wife keeps suggesting that I spend a year giving her foot massages. I usually counteroffer that we could try all the positions in the Kama Sutra. The subject is generally dropped after that.

The suggestions come with the territory. For the last fifteen years, I’ve attempted to live my life as a human guinea pig. I’ve engaged in a series of experiments on my mind and body, some of which have been fruitful, some humiliating failures. I’ve tried to understand the world by immersing myself in extraordinary circumstances. I’ve also grown a tremendously unattractive beard.

My career as a human guinea pig began with a piece of furniture. I was working at
Entertainment Weekly
magazine in the mid-1990s, and the La-Z-Boy company had just created the most pimped-out, excessive chair in the history of human seating. It pushed the concept of leisure—or sloth, if you are feeling moral—to unheard-of extremes. It had a butt massager, a heater, a built-in fridge for you to store beers and cheese
sticks, a modem jack—everything but a toilet and an outboard motor.

I figured the only way to address this magnificent monstrosity was to road test it. See how it held up under severe conditions. Being a committed journalist, I offered to spend twenty-four hours watching TV in this La-Z-Boy and then write about it.

The experiment was actually a bit of a bust. Somewhere in the middle of a
Law & Order
marathon at 3
A.M.,
I fell asleep for five hours. But I glimpsed the possibilities this type of journalism offered. I was hooked. Since then, I’ve put myself (and my patient wife) through a battery of experiments, the highlights and lowlights of which are in this book.

To understand the global phenomenon that is outsourcing, I outsourced everything in my life. I hired a team of people in Bangalore, India, to answer my phone, answer my e-mail, argue with my spouse for me. This, by the way, was probably the best month of my life.

To explore the meaning of Truth, I decided to practice something called Radical Honesty. I spent a month without lying. But more than that, I vowed to say whatever popped into my head. No filter between the brain and the mouth. This, by the way, was probably the worst month of my life.

To slow the descent of my rapidly plummeting IQ, I read the
Encyclopædia Britannica
from A to Z. To try to understand religion, I lived by the rules of the Bible, from the Ten Commandments all the way down to stoning adulterers.

I’ve been told—many, many times—that there are easier ways to make a living.

Which is true.

But I’m addicted to these experiments. I’ve come to believe that if you really want to learn about a topic, you should get
on-the-job training. You should dive in and try to live that topic. If you’re interested in Rome, you can look at maps and postcards and read census data. Or you can actually go to Italy and taste the pesto gnocchi. As the old saying goes: To understand the Italians, you must walk a mile in their loafers.

You have to be interested in the topic. That’s rule number one. If you aren’t passionate, it shows. But if you are committed to the possibility of change, then there’s nothing like it. And these experiences have, in fact,
transformed my life
for good. I may not keep everything from each experiment—after my year of living biblically, I decided to shave my beard and hang up my robe and sandals. But I do still observe the Sabbath, I still say prayers of thanksgiving every day (even though I’m an agnostic, go figure), and I still try not to covet and gossip, with varying degrees of success.

The goal is that you’re able to keep the good parts and not descend into insanity. That the pain of the experiment will end up making life better in the end. And that your spouse will forgive you. For, as I’ve been told many times, my wife is a saint. A saint, I might add, who doesn’t tolerate these experiments lying down. (With the encyclopedia project, for instance, she fined me a dollar for every irrelevant fact that I inserted into conversation.)

Partly, of course, I’m drawn to these experiments because I’m a writer. And a writer who is cursed with a relatively uneventful upbringing. My dad was not a carny or a drunk or a spy, as far as I know. My ordinary life doesn’t merit a book. So I put myself into extraordinary situations, and see what happens.

I’ve always loved the genre. One of my literary idols is George Plimpton. He’s the Dante of participatory journalism. For the sake of the story, he’s been sacked by a Detroit Lions defensive lineman and punched in the face by boxer Archie Moore. Before him was method writer John Howard Griffin, who chemically
darkened his skin to see how it felt to be a black man in the 1950s South. And even before that came an amazing nineteenth-century journalist named Nellie Bly. Her experiments ranged from the madcap—when Jules Verne’s book
Around the World in Eighty Days
came out, she decided to try to replicate the stunt—to the serious—she had herself committed to an infamous New York insane asylum to expose the abuses there.

And when I read the encyclopedia, I found a whole other breed of heroes who experimented on themselves for actual science—usually because no one else would volunteer. There’s a great nineteenth-century doctor named Jesse William Lazear, who allowed himself to be bitten by a yellow fever-infected mosquito to show that the insects were spreading the disease. He died proving himself right. And there’s Sasha Shulgin, the Thomas Edison of psychedelics. A true mad scientist based in Berkeley, California (of course), the eighty-four-year-old chemist has invented 230 different hallucinogenic drugs. He has ingested each of them himself. “It is like opening a door to a hallway that has unopened doors for its entire length, and beyond every door is a world with which you are totally unfamiliar.”

I haven’t taken drugs since college. But I know exactly what he means about opening doors. That’s what I’ve tried to do in my career and in this book,
The Guinea Pig Diaries.
I hope you like what I’ve found behind them.