Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 300 of 501 · 20 per page

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  on the number of people applauding, the size of the army they command, the crowd of courtiers that serve them. But this false sense of purpose has become greatly democratized and widespread through social media. Now almost any one of us can have the quantity of attention that past kings and conquerors could only dream about. Our self-image and self-esteem become tied to the attention we receive on a daily basis. In social media, this often requires becoming increasingly outrageous to capture eyeballs. It is an exhausting and alienating quest, as we become more of a clown than anything else. And each moment that the attention ebbs ever so slightly, a gnawing pain eats away at us: Are we losing it? Who is siphoning off the flow of attention that was ours? As with money and success, we have a much greater chance of attracting attention by developing a high sense of purpose and creating work that will naturally draw people to it. When the attention is unexpected, as with the success we suddenly have, it is all the more pleasurable. Cynicism: According to Friedrich Nietzsche, “Man would rather have the void as purpose than be void of purpose.” Cynicism, the feeling that there is no purpose or meaning in life, is what we shall call having “the void as purpose.” In the world today, with growing disenchantment with politics and the belief systems of the past, this form of the false purpose is becoming increasingly common. Such cynicism involves some or all of the following beliefs: Life is absurd, meaningless, and random. Standards of truth, excellence, or meaning are completely old-fashioned. Everything is relative. People’s judgments are simply interpretations of the world, none better than another. All politicians are corrupt, so it’s not really worth it to get involved; better to abstain or choose a leader who will deliberately tear it all down. People who are successful get there through gaming the system. Any form of authority should be naturally mistrusted. Look behind people’s motives and you will see that they are selfish. Reality is quite brutal and ugly; better to accept this and be skeptical. It’s really hard to take anything so seriously; we should just laugh and have a good time. It’s all the same. This attitude presents itself as cool and hip. Its adherents display a somewhat apathetic and sardonic air that gives them the appearance that they see through it all. But the attitude is not what it seems. Behind it is the adolescent pose of appearing to not care, which disguises a great fear of trying and failing, of standing out and being ridiculed. It stems from sheer laziness and offers its believers consolation for their lack of accomplishments. As hunters for purpose and meaning, we want to move in the opposite direction. Reality is not brutal and ugly—it contains much that is sublime, beautiful, and worthy of wonder. We see this in the

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early. If you quit on time, it’s not going to seem like anything particularly dire is happening at that particular moment. That’s because quitting is a problem of being able to glimpse at the range of ways the future might play out and see that the likelihood that things will turn out poorly is too high to make it worth your while to continue. At the moment that quitting becomes the objectively best choice, in practice things generally won’t look particularly grim, even though the present does contain clues that can help you figure out how the future might unfold. The problem is, perhaps because of our aversion to quitting, we tend to rationalize away the clues contained in the present that would allow us to see how bad things really are. Stewart Butterfield did see how bad things were, despite all appearances. He looked at what was happening to the quality of new users and how many of them stuck around to figure out what the future had in store for Glitch. Most of us, in Butterfield’s place, would focus on a rosy version of the present, or at least one that is not so bad that it would warrant quitting. After all, you’ve created a great online game that has attracted a community of five thousand die-hard customers. It looks amazing. Your investors are encouraged. Your cofounders are happy. You just had your best month ever and acquired a lot of new customers. You have $6 million in the bank. You just have to work on the problem of how to get more people to stick. Everyone else is encouraged and expects to continue. Or you’re near the top of Everest, only three hours or so from the summit. You have plenty of oxygen. You’re just moving a little slow, but the climbing conditions look pretty good, good enough that most people are continuing upward. The ideal time for Muhammad Ali to walk away might have been after he regained his title from George Foreman. Obviously, that would have required superhuman time-traveling skills, maybe omniscience. But it was after he had just achieved his life’s ambition, and certainly before he suffered renal and neurological damage. Teddy Brenner and Ferdie Pacheco didn’t need omniscience to see, after the Earnie Shavers fight in September 1977, the high likelihood and severity of

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  If you say, “I want to run sixteen miles a week” or “I’d like to raise my GPA by half a grade in the next semester,” you’ll make more progress toward achieving those things than if you say, “I’d like to run more” or “I want to try harder in school.” But just because there are a lot of benefits to setting goals doesn’t mean that there isn’t a downside to them as well. As you might already suspect, clearly defined finish lines should come with a warning: Danger, you may experience escalation of commitment. Maurice Schweitzer of the Wharton School and Lisa Ordóñez, then of the University of Arizona, along with several other scholars including Max Bazerman, Adam Galinsky, and Bambi Douma, coauthored a number of papers making the case that goals have a dark side. They point to numerous negative consequences of goal setting, several of which interfere with rational quitting behavior. In particular, they note the pass-fail nature of goals, their inflexibility, and how pursuing them leads to ignoring other opportunities that might be available. The point the authors are echoing is that, while goals do help us to be grittier, grit isn’t always a virtue. As you already know, grit is good for getting you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, but grit also gets you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile. In part, what makes goals effective is that they get you to focus on the finish line and motivate you to keep going. But the duality is that goals also keep you from quitting in a bad situation because they focus you on the finish line and motivate you to keep going. Why? In part, because they are graded as pass-fail. To understand why the pass-fail nature of goals can impede progress and increase escalation of commitment, consider this thought experiment. Which feels worse? If you never try to run a marathon, or if you make the attempt and have to stop after sixteen miles? In the first case, you never train for a marathon, never start one, and never finish one. You run zero miles. In the second case, you decide to try, you train, you start, and sixteen miles in you have to quit. I think that we all share the intuition that the latter case would feel worse, even though that version of you trained for distance running and actually ran 16 miles of a 26.2-mile race, compared with the version of you that never got off the couch. The reason it feels worse is that if you don’t try, if you never start the race, there is no failing to reach the finish line because you never set that as a goal for yourself in the first place. The pass-fail nature of goals impedes your progress because it stops you from starting things for fear of being unable to complete them.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  There’s a choice to be made. “I don’t understand,” I tell Mary. We sit in the darkening living room, smoking and sipping our cups of whiskey. Inside my head I keep thinking Uh-oh, over and over. I’m in a rattled condition; I can’t calm down and figure this out. “I think we should brace ourselves in case something bad has happened,” I say to Mary. She nods. “Just in case. It won’t hurt to be braced.” She nods again. I realize that I don’t know what braced means. You hear it all the time but that doesn’t mean it makes sense. Whiskey is supposed to be bracing but what it is is awful. I want either tea or beer, no whiskey. Mary nods and heads into the kitchen. Within an hour there are seven women in the dim living room, sitting. Switching back and forth between CNN and the special reports by the local news. There is something terrifying about the quality of the light and the way voices are echoing in the room. The phone never stops ringing, ever since the story hit the national news. Physics, University of Iowa, dead people. Names not yet released. Everyone I’ve ever known is checking in to see if I’m still alive. California calls, New York calls, Florida calls, Ohio calls twice. All the guests at a party my husband is having call, one after the other, to ask how I’m doing. Each time, fifty times, I think it might be Chris and then it isn’t. It occurs to me once that I could call his house and talk to him directly, find out exactly what happened. Fear that his mother would answer prevents me from doing it. By this time I am getting reconciled to the fact that Shan, Gang Lu, and Dwight were killed. Also an administrator and her office assistant. The Channel 9 newslady keeps saying there are six dead and two in critical condition. They’re not saying who did the shooting. The names will be released at nine o’clock. Eventually I sacrifice all of them except Chris and Bob; they are the ones in critical condition, which is certainly not hopeless. At some point I go into the study to get away from the terrible dimness in the living room, all those eyes, all that calmness in the face of chaos. The collie tries to stand up but someone stops her with a handful of Fritos. The study is small and cold after I shut the door, but more brightly lit than the living room. I can’t remember what anything means. The phone rings and I pick up the extension and listen. My friend Michael is calling from Illinois for the second time. He asks Shirley if I’m holding up okay. Shirley says it’s hard to tell. I go back into the living room. The newslady breaks in at nine o’clock, and of course they drag it out as long as they can.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  because we do not see the connection between problems in our lives and our constant misreading of people’s moods and intentions and the endless missed opportunities that accrue from this. The first step, then, is the most important: to realize you have a remarkable social tool that you are not cultivating. The best way to see this is to try it out. Stop your incessant interior monologue and pay deeper attention to people. Attune yourself to the shifting moods of individuals and the group. Get a read on each person’s particular psychology and what motivates them. Try to take their perspective, enter their world and value system. You will suddenly become aware of an entire world of nonverbal behavior you never knew existed, as if your eyes could now suddenly see ultraviolet light. Once you sense this power, you will feel its importance and awaken to new social possibilities. I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. . . . I myself become the wounded person. —Walt Whitman 3 See Through People’s Masks The Law of Role-playing People tend to wear the mask that shows them off in the best possible light—humble, confident, diligent. They say the right things, smile, and seem interested in our ideas. They learn to conceal their insecurities and envy. If we take this appearance for reality, we never really know their true feelings, and on occasion we are blindsided by their sudden resistance, hostility, and manipulative actions. Fortunately, the mask has cracks in it. People continually leak out their true feelings and unconscious desires in the nonverbal cues they cannot completely control—facial expressions, vocal inflections, tension in the body, and nervous gestures. You must master this language by transforming yourself into a superior reader of men and women. Armed with this knowledge, you can take the proper defensive measures. On the other hand, since appearances are what people judge you by, you must learn how to present the best front and play your role to maximum effect. The Second Language One morning in August 1919 seventeen-year-old Milton Erickson, future pioneer in hypnotherapy and one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, awoke to discover parts of his body suddenly paralyzed. Over the next few days the paralysis spread. He was soon diagnosed with polio, a near epidemic at the time. As he lay in bed, he heard his mother in another room discussing his case with two specialists the family had called in. Assuming Erickson was asleep, one of the doctors told her, “The boy will be dead by morning.” His mother came into his room, clearly trying to disguise her grief, unaware that her son had overhead the conversation. Erickson kept asking her to move the chest of drawers near his bed over here, over there. She thought he was delusional, but he had his reasons: he wanted to distract her from her anguish, and he wanted the mirror on the chest positioned just right. If he

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  a law of human nature, when we go so far in our denial, the paradoxical effect takes hold of us in the negative direction, making our life more constrained and deathlike. We became aware of our mortality quite early on in childhood, and this filled us with an anxiety that we cannot remember but that was very real and visceral. Such anxiety cannot be wished away or denied. It sits in us as adults in a powerfully latent form. When we choose to repress the thought of death, our anxiety is only made stronger by our not confronting the source of it. The slightest incident or uncertainty about the future will tend to stir up this anxiety and even make it chronic. To fight this, we will tend to narrow down the scope of our thoughts and activities; if we don’t leave our comfort zones in what we think and do, then we can make life rather predictable and feel less vulnerable to anxiety. Certain addictions to foods or stimulants or forms of entertainment will have a similar dulling effect. If we take this far enough, we become increasingly self-absorbed and less dependent on people, who often stir up our anxieties with their unpredictable behavior. We can describe the contrast between life and death in the following manner: Death is absolute stillness, without movement or change except decay. In death we are separated from others and completely alone. Life on the other hand is movement, connection to other living things, and diversity of life forms. By denying and repressing the thought of death, we feed our anxieties and become more deathlike from within—separated from other people, our thinking habitual and repetitive, with little overall movement and change. On the other hand, the familiarity and closeness with death, the ability to confront the thought of it has the paradoxical effect of making us feel more alive, as the story of Flannery O’Connor well illustrates. By connecting to the reality of death, we connect more profoundly to the reality and fullness of life. By separating death from life and repressing our awareness of it, we do the opposite. What we require in the modern world is a way to create for ourselves the positive paradoxical effect. The following is an attempt to help us accomplish this, by forging a practical philosophy for transforming the consciousness of our mortality into something productive and life enhancing. A Philosophy of Life Through Death The problem for us humans is that we are aware of our mortality, but we are afraid to take this awareness further. It is like we are at the shore of a vast ocean and stop ourselves from exploring it, even turning our back to it. The purpose of our consciousness is to always take it as far as we can. That is the source of our power as a species, what we are called to do. The philosophy we are adopting

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Not so long ago, the desire to feel passionate about one’s husband would have been considered a contradiction in terms. Historically, these two realms of life were organized separately—marriage on one side and passion most likely somewhere else, if anywhere at all. The concept of romantic love, which came about toward the end of the nineteenth century, brought them together for the first time. The central place of sex in marriage, and the heightened expectations surrounding it, took decades more to arrive. The social and cultural transformations of the past fifty years have redefined modern coupledom. Alan and Adele are beneficiaries of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, women’s liberation, the availability of birth control pills, and the emergence of the gay movement. With the widespread use of the pill, sex became liberated from reproduction. Feminism and gay pride fought to define sexual expression as an inalienable right. Anthony Giddens describes this transition in The Transformation of Intimacy when he explains that sexuality became a property of the self, one that we develop, define, and renegotiate throughout our lives. Today, our sexuality is an open-ended personal project; it is part of who we are, an identity, and no longer merely something we do. It has become a central feature of intimate relationships, and sexual satisfaction, we believe, is our due. The era of pleasure has arrived. These developments, in conjunction with postwar economic prosperity, have contributed to a period of unmatched freedom and individualism. People today are encouraged to pursue personal fulfillment and sexual gratification, and to break free of the constraints of a social and family life heretofore defined by duty and obligation. But trailing in the shadow of this manifest extravagance lies a new kind of gnawing insecurity. The extended family, the community, and religion may indeed have limited our freedom, sexual and otherwise, but in return they offered us a much-needed sense of belonging. For generations, these traditional institutions provided order, meaning, continuity, and social support. Dismantling them has left us with more choices and fewer restrictions than ever. We are freer, but also more alone. As Giddens describes it, we have become ontologically more anxious. We bring to our love relationships this free-floating anxiety. Love, beyond providing emotional sustenance, compassion, and companionship, is now expected to act as a panacea for existential aloneness as well. We look to our partner as a bulwark against the vicissitudes of modern life. It is not that our human insecurity is greater today than in earlier times. In fact, quite the contrary may be true. What is different is that modern life has deprived us of our traditional resources, and has created a situation in which we turn to one person for the protection and emotional connections that a multitude of social networks used to provide. Adult intimacy has become overburdened with expectations.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  My belief, reinforced by twenty years of practice, is that in the course of establishing security, many couples confuse love with merging. This mix-up is a bad omen for sex. To sustain an élan toward the other, there must be a synapse to cross. Eroticism requires separateness. In other words, eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to commune with the one we love, we must be able to tolerate this void and its pall of uncertainties. With this paradox to chew on, consider another: desire is often accompanied by feelings that would seem to cramp love’s style. Aggression, jealousy, and discord come to mind, for starters. I will explore the cultural pressures that shape domesticated sex, making it fair, equal, and safe, but also producing many bored couples. I’d like to suggest that we might have more exciting, playful, even frivolous sex if we were less constrained by our cultural penchant for democracy in the bedroom. To buttress this notion, I take the reader on a detour into social history. We’ll see that contemporary couples invest more in love than ever before; yet, in a cruel twist of fate it is this very model of love and marriage that is behind the exponential rise in the divorce rate. Here it behooves us to question whether traditional marital structures can ever meet the modern mandate, especially when “till death do us part” entails a life span double that of past centuries. The magic elixir that’s meant to make this possible is intimacy. We’ll get to the bottom of this by looking through various lenses, but here it’s worth pointing out that the stereotype of women as entirely romantic and men as sexual conquistadors should have been dispelled a long time ago. The same goes for any ideas that cast women as longing for love, essentially faithful, and domestically inclined, and men as biologically non-monogamous and fearful of intimacy. As a result of social and economic changes that have occurred in recent western history, traditional gender lines have been circumvented, and these qualities are now seen in both men and women. While stereotypes can hold considerable truth, they fall short of capturing the complexities of contemporary relationships. I seek a more androgynous approach to love. As a couples therapist, I have inverted the usual therapeutic priorities. In my field we are taught to inquire about the state of the union first and then ask how this is manifested in the bedroom. Seen this way, the sexual relationship is a metaphor for the overall relationship. The underlying assumption is that if we can improve the relationship, the sex will follow. But in my experience, this is often not the case.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  But Marshall Sahlins’ theoretical survey of a wide range of anthropological literature on the topic of “kinship” once more would make it plain that, in fact, most human beings have not understood themselves to exist as someone in particular in this manner. While the specific features of a given person’s “flesh” obviously would play some role in defining who that person is, the same flesh has not always or even usual y determined this person’s operative or governing identity in a given social context. That is why, to cut to the chase, Daniel Boyarin in A Radical Jew essential y misconstrues, in my opinion, the significance of Paul’s discourse about himself as a Jew in Christ. Because Boyarin basical y equates the later rabbinical emphasis on the enduring opacity of the written sign aka the letter of the law including the practice of circumcision with a decidedly (post-) modern focus on the physical body as the locus for having a specific social identity together with other practices of signification, Boyarin has no choice but to understand Paul’s displacement of the telling nature of his own flesh as the result of his adoption of a Hellenistic “universalizing” hermeneutic. But Paul’s own sense of himself as someone who obviously was Ioudaios is not unlike Boyarin’s account of a “carnal Israel.” 23 For both Paul and Boyarin, being Ioudaios is a function of the flesh. Where Boyarin and Paul would differ from one another is Boyarin’s apparent assumption that such an embodied identity—being “Jewish”—cannot coexist with another that claims “in Christ there is no Jew or Greek.” For Boyarin, it seems that there can only be the truth of the flesh, viz. its refusal, whereas, for Paul, there would be both that truth and another that neither contested nor observed it.24 Why does Boyarin insist as he does—both traditional y and nervously—on the role of the flesh for being Jewish? There is likely more than one reason for this emphasis. What makes it traditional is the degree to which Boyarin reiterates what the rabbinical reasoning enshrined in the Talmudim actual y teaches. Boyarin’s nervousness in reaffirming this perspective has everything to do with the way in which that reasoning now inevitably becomes entangled with the recent history of the Jews—both before and after 1948—in which such a definition of being “Jewish” has tended to support a view of the Jews as constituting a separate “race” of human being.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  take-profit order would tell them to, in order to lock up a sure win, regardless of whether continuing to hold that position would be a winning decision. When they have a win on paper, they don’t have any interest in recruiting luck into the equation any further, risking losing gains that they could put in their pocket. (I hope it’s becoming very clear how bad the advice “quit while you’re ahead” really is, because it’s encouraging our natural tendency to be irrational in these situations already.) On the other hand, when traders are losing, they cancel their stop-loss orders, preferring to gamble that the position will recover and they won’t have to turn their loss on paper into one that’s realized, a decision that carries with it the risk of accumulating bigger and bigger negative returns. Our goal, obviously, should be to persist when we have a positive expected value, regardless of whether we have already won or lost to a prior course of action. Because these decisions are made under uncertainty, we rarely know for sure whether sticking or quitting is the best choice. In the same way that it’s easier for the cab drivers to see if they’ve met a daily goal, it’s easier for any of us to see whether we’re ahead or behind so we use that signal to determine whether or not to persevere. The result is that we’ll quit when we’re ahead, even if we’re giving up good opportunities to win more. If we’re behind, we don’t want to quit, even if persisting—to try to get to the other side of zero—is more likely to make things worse. I saw this routinely in poker. When most players were offered the slightest pretense to quit a game when they were ahead, they couldn’t get their chips off the table and over to the cashier fast enough. But it’s also true that when they were in the losses, they were superglued to the seat. Many times, I saw otherwise skilled poker players lose money in a game and refuse to quit when they were drunk, tired, angry, or just not capable of playing well. This quit-while-you’re-ahead strategy costs poker players real money, causing them to minimize the hours when they’re playing well, because that’s correlated with winning, and maximize the hours they’re playing poorly, because that’s correlated with losing. Make no mistake, this is costing you money too. Whether it’s in the stock market or some other investment, this behavioral tendency is affecting your

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  My aunt runs her thumb over his bald spot. “The paint’s wearing off his head,” she says definitively. “Throw him out and get her a new one.” Thus spake Bernice. “No,” I say, shaking my head vigorously. I get right up in Aunt Bernie’s face. I shake my head again, harder. She holds Hal out of my reach. I do one short bloodcurdling scream and she hands him over. My mother, the one who is not taking credit for the bald spot on his head, lights a cigarette nervously and exhales. Bernie is the oldest of five brothers and sisters. My own big sister Linda is playing jacks on the kitchen floor and every time I move she calls out She’s getting my jacks . My mother believes her. One more time and I’m going to be sat right down in a chair. Aunt Bernie is still waiting for a reply. Her eyebrows are in the middle of her forehead. “Listen,” my mother tells her. “She will scream until we’re all in the asylum, you included.” Bernie snorts, takes a cigarette and lights it. Smoke pours out her nose. “She may run you,” Bernie says dryly, “but she doesn’t run me.” Her own daughters are in the living room standing in separate corners. The crime was cursing. It’s time for Hal’s thumb to be sucked. “She’s got that thing in her mouth,” Bernie says. “Don’t put that in your mouth,” my mother tells me in a stagey, I’m-the-mother voice. I stare at her until she reaches over and gives his hand a yank. It doesn’t move. “She’s biting on it,” Bernie says. “I don’t know what’s got into her today,” my mother says nervously. She lights another cigarette and gives me a desperate glare. Linda’s rubber ball bounces one, two, three, four times. Hal’s hand drops back down to his side. “Okay then,” my mother says. When they put me down for my nap Bernie looks around the bedroom and says she doesn’t know why they’ve got me in a crib. “It’s either a crib or a leash,” my mother says shortly. When they leave I cry the minimum amount and then put my feet through the bars. Hal is lying with his head on the pillow and the blanket up to his chin. I put him down at the bottom where he belongs and then I go down there with him. The ceiling is white and has sparkles just like in the bathroom. If I pee in this bed it doesn’t matter but I don’t have to pee right now. I put my face next to Hal’s and close my eyes. The ceiling sparkles appear against my eyelids, like stars. Hal’s got his arm under me. In my sleep I show my girl cousins how to tie shoes, just like my dad showed me. Make a bunny, cross over, push one ear through, and pull. It’s supposed to be a bow but it unravels, just like always.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Erotic intimacy is an act of generosity and self-centeredness, of giving and taking. We need to be able to enter the body or the erotic space of another, without the terror that we will be swallowed and lose ourselves. At the same time we need to be able to enter inside ourselves, to surrender to self-absorption while in the other’s presence, believing that the other will still be there when we return, that he or she won’t feel rejected by our momentary absence. We need to be able to connect without the terror of obliteration, and we need to be able to experience our separateness without the terror of abandonment. The Selfishness of Intimate Pleasures I have always been interested in the people who are able to achieve balance between self and other on an emotional level but who repeatedly fail to achieve it physically. The threat of merging in the physical act of sex, and the ensuing loss of self, is so intense for these people that they defend against it either by shutting down sexually or by taking their desire elsewhere. The psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin writes, “The child’s struggle for autonomy takes place within the realm of the body and its pleasures.” It is no different for the adult. The first time James walked into my office, he sat down and said, “Stella and I have a very good marriage, but sex has always been a problem.” James feels sexually inhibited with Stella, and their erotic misfit fills him with tension. Whatever initial excitement he may feel when Stella approaches him invariably turns into a preoccupation with his own performance. Will I stay hard? Will I come too soon? Will Stella have an orgasm? Sex becomes a race to the finish line—can he get there before he loses his erection? His ability to enjoy himself is massively curtailed by this narrow focus. He can’t be playful, can’t try out new things, because anything that strays from the routine might jeopardize his capacity to perform. These anxieties always have a ripple effect, and James’s inhibitions have also stifled Stella. She senses his absence, laments his lack of attention, and has complained about it bitterly over the years. “Tell me about your mother,” I ask James. “My mother? You don’t waste a minute, do you? A few years ago I went to see a therapist, and she also wanted me to talk about my mother. It didn’t change a thing. My wife is nothing like my mother.” “In due diligence I always go back to the source. I promise I won’t tell you that you married your mother. But the first place we learn about love and relationships is in our original family. None of the others—friends, flings, teachers, lovers—can carry this kind of emotional resonance. So, tell me about your mother.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Not wanting to go too far in either direction, we mostly live within the present. We react to what we see and hear and to what others are reacting to. We live for immediate pleasures to distract us from the passage of time and make us feel more alive. But we pay a price for all this. Repressing the thought of death and aging creates a continual underlying anxiety. We are not coming to terms with reality. Continually reacting to events in the present puts us on a roller coaster ride—up and down we go with each change in fortune. This can only add to our anxiety, as life seems to pass so quickly in the immediate rush of events. Your task as a student of human nature, and someone aspiring to reach the greater potential of the human animal, is to widen your relationship to time as much as possible, and slow it down. This means you do not see the passage of time as an enemy but rather as a great ally. Each stage in life has its advantages—those of youth are most obvious, but with age comes greater perspective. Aging does not frighten you. Death is equally your friend (see chapter 18). It motivates you to make the most of each moment; it gives you a sense of urgency. Time is your great teacher and master. This affects you deeply in the present. Awareness that a year from now this current problem you are experiencing will hardly seem so important will help you lower your anxiety and adjust your priorities. Knowing that time will reveal the weaknesses of your plans, you become more careful and deliberative with them. In relation to the future, you think deeply about your long-term goals. They are not vague dreams but concrete objectives, and you have mapped out a path to reach them. In relation to the past, you feel a deep sense of connection to your childhood. Yes, you are constantly changing, but these changes are on the surface and create the illusion of real change. In fact, your character was set in your earliest years (see chapter 4), along with your inclinations toward certain activities, your likes and dislikes. As you get older, this character only becomes more apparent. Feeling organically connected to who you were in the past gives you a strong sense of identity. You know what you like and dislike, you know who you are. This will help you maintain your self-love, which is so critical in resisting the descent into deep narcissism and in helping you to develop empathy (see chapter 2). Also, you will pay greater attention to the mistakes and lessons of the past, which those who are locked in the present tend to repress. Like everyone, you enjoy the present and its passing pleasures. You are not a monk. You connect to the trends of the moment and to the current flow of life. But you derive even greater pleasure from

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  The importance of thinking about states and dates in setting kill criteria in advance has been developed and tested in situations with the highest possible stakes, affecting large numbers of people and gigantic, world-changing decisions. But the concepts are broadly applicable to your personal decisions, where you are trying to spend your resources on things that matter and avoid pedestal-building when you ought to be quitting. Kevin Zollman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a game theory philosopher, offered up an excellent example of states and dates as it applies to seeking academic jobs. There are relatively few tenure-track positions for those who have earned PhDs in the humanities. That limited supply is pretty well known, and not likely to change by much. There are two big problems a newly minted PhD faces in their quest for a tenure-track position that make setting out kill criteria in advance of their search crucial. The first is that, within the humanities, leaving academics is considered a one-way decision. If you choose to quit academia, it’s incredibly hard to go back. Knowing that the decision is last and final will make it harder for people to quit, even when the signals are pretty strong that they should. The second issue is that there are lots of pedestals that you can build within the humanities in the form of endless adjunct professor and postdoctoral positions you can secure. These jobs aren’t tenure-track positions but they offer the illusion of progress, that you are advancing in your career. It’s easy to move from one pedestal to another, from a postdoc to an adjunct and so forth, thinking that your big break is right around the corner. Of course, with every pedestal, you’re accumulating sunk costs, putting more time and effort into the endeavor, making it harder and harder to walk away. To avoid becoming entrapped, set benchmarks, in the form of states and dates, in advance. Find out the average time it takes a newly minted PhD to secure a tenure-track position and circle that date on the calendar as a quitting deadline. If, for example, that’s four years from the time you get your PhD, then if you haven’t secured a tenure-track position (the state) within four years (the date), you ought to quit. If your goal is to be an Olympic sprinter, figure out how fast the best runners in the world were running the 100-meter dash at fifteen years old, or eighteen years old, or as college sprinters. You can mark those milestones along the way

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Perpetual Motion MachineThere’s this game I played during gym class when I was eight, when they sent me to the outfield during baseball. I would stand so far from everyone else that the balls my classmates hit could never reach me, and our gym teacher didn’t seem to notice that I was sitting open-legged in the tall grass. The teacher, Ms. Lily, was short and stocky and had a cropped haircut, and one of the kids in my class called her a lesbian. I had no idea what that meant; I’m not sure he did, either. It was 1994. Ms. Lily wore baggy athletic pants with patches of neon greens and purples in abstract, eye-searing patterns. (When I learned the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors in Sunday school, all I could think of was Ms. Lily’s outfit.) The synthetic fabric hissed when she walked; you could always hear her coming. I have a clear memory of her trying to explain body isolation to us—she drew a line down the center of herself, starting at the top of her head. When she reached her crotch, kids giggled. From there, she showed us our left sides and our right sides, how to move each independently and then in tandem. She spun her arms like a carnival ride. Fitness!, she’d say, touching her right hand to her left foot, then her left hand to her right foot. You only have one body! You have to take care of it! Maybe she was a lesbian. Sitting in the grass during those baseball games, I’d rip up all of the weeds within my reach, leaving my hands smelling like dirt and wild onions. I broke dandelion stems and marveled at their sticky white milk. The game is this: You take the dandelion and rub it hard beneath your chin—in my case, right over the narrow white scar I earned falling in the tub when I was a toddler—so hard the florets begin to disintegrate. If your chin turns yellow, it means you’re in love. At eight I was reed-thin, anxious. I was too tightly wound to be dreamy, most of the time, but sitting in the grass gave me a kind of peace. Every class I took that dandelion’s severed head and worked it against my chin until it was a hot, wet ball, like a bud that hadn’t yet opened. The trick, or maybe it’s the punch line, is that the yellow always comes off on your skin. The dandelion yields every time. It has no wiles, no secrets, no sense of self-preservation. And so it goes that, even as children, we understand something we cannot articulate: The diagnosis never changes. We will always be hungry, will always want. Our bodies and minds will always crave something, even if we don’t recognize it.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 33. Legal scholar Ruthann Robson calls this a “dual theoretical demand,” and adds, “the demand, of course, is in many cases more than dual. As Black lesbian poet Pat Parker writes in her poem For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend: ‘The first thing you do is forget that i’m Black / Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.’”34. It should be noted that Alice Mitchell was hardly the first woman to create such public confusion over her gender as it related to both her passions and her shocking act of violence. In 1879, when Lily Duer shot her friend Ella Hearn for rejecting her love, a headline in the National Police Gazette read in part, “A Female Romeo: Her Terrible Love for a Chosen Friend of Her Own Alleged Sex [emphasis mine] Assumes a Passionate Character.” Sometime before the murder, a witness reported an exchange in which Lily said, “Ella, why will you not walk out with me? Do you not love me?” “Oh, yes, I love you,” Ella responded, “but I am afraid of you.”35. It should be noted that the word battered (as in: battered wife, battered woman, battered lesbian), while woefully imprecise and covering only a fraction of abuse experiences, was the preferred term in this era. It is, of course, a specific legal term with specific legal implications, and I have never thought of myself as a “battered” anyone. The fact that the expression persisted for so long, despite the fact that the lesbian conversation in particular focused on many kinds of abuse that were not explicitly physical, is the perfect example of how inadequate this conversation has been—discouraging useful subtlety. (Other ways in which the conversation remains inadequate: devaluing the narratives of nonwhite victims, insufficiently addressing nonmonosexuality, rarely taking noncisgendered people into account.)36. In a 1991 article about a white lesbian in Boise, Idaho, who successfully used “battered-wife syndrome” as a defense for killing her abusive girlfriend, the reporter emphasized that the defendant was a “diminutive 4-foot-10.” The prosecutor in the case speculated that the reason for the acquittal was that the abused wife “seemed more heterosexual,” and the abuser “more ‘lesbian.’”Dream House as UndeadI think about Debra Reid so much—incarcerated, unpardoned—how powerless she must have felt. Even after Jackie was gone, she was still there. When Debra was on trial for her murder, Debra’s brother brought her a dress to wear. Her first thought was, “Oh God, Jackie going to kill me if she saw me with this one.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  In those months, hazy from lack of sleep and raw with anxiety, I felt like a calculator with someone’s finger over the solar panel—fading in and out, threatening to shut off altogether. Joel, though, seemed to run on his own hunger. I wanted to be like that. I wept the last time I saw him. I was going to college, but I didn’t want to be so far apart. He assured me he was just a phone call away. “Plus,” he said, “DC isn’t that far. Maybe I can come visit.” At school, I had my first kiss, my first grope in the dark. I felt strange afterward: elated and sad and content and like an adult. When it was over, I went back to my dorm room. It was after midnight. I took my phone into the hallway so my roommate wouldn’t overhear, and I called Joel. He asked me what had happened. I told him, one detail after another. He didn’t refuse any of them; just listened until I was done. “What should I do?” I asked him, the question slipping out of my mouth before I could stop it. Until that moment I’d been, secretly, excited, bolstered with the newness of a man’s stubble across my face, hands that went where I wanted them to. But in Joel’s silence, which carried a whiff of disapproval, I recalled the sin of it. For the first time, he didn’t seem to know what to say. Where there had always been smooth advice that felt right and good and clear, now there was reticence. Hesitation. “Ask for forgiveness,” he said, finally. A few weeks later, Joel stopped responding to my calls. I went about my normal routine, but his silence hovered around me. Was he angry about my hookup? Was he—jealous? I panicked. Maybe he had lost interest in me. Maybe I’d crossed some invisible line, committed some unforgivable act. I sent him a few emails, spaced at what I hoped were ordinary intervals. He didn’t respond. A few weeks later, I was sitting in my dorm room on my brown corduroy comforter, trying to decide whether to go to the dining hall, when my phone rang. I told my roommate to go ahead; I’d follow in a second. My mother’s voice was restrained, slightly chilly. “Pastor Jones has been fired from the church,” she said. “What?” “The rumor is, he was having an affair with a parishioner,” she said. “A woman he was giving marriage counseling to.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as the First Thanksgiving You arrive in Bloomington just before the holiday to learn that she has invited her entire graduate cohort over for Thanksgiving. 24 You stare at her in disbelief. “All of them?” you ask. You count the number of people in your head. “But you have, like, two chairs,” you say. “Only one small table. You haven’t even really unpacked.” She does not say anything. “You told them it’s potluck style, right? They’re bringing their own side dishes, and we just have to do, like, a bird or something?” “No,” she says. “No. That would be rude. We are taking care of people.” “Who is going to take care of us?” you say. “I’m broke.” “Don’t be such a fucking bitch,” she says. This is how you find yourself at the Kroger’s at 11 p.m., alone, picking up groceries and trying to remember how you ended up there. You pay for all of it. Back at the house you discover that she has only a handful of pans, too, and you defrost the Cornish game hens and baste them in oil and salt and pepper, and at some point you realize you’ll have to cut them in half. You’re not normally squeamish about meat but you find yourself balking at the idea of cracking through those backbones, pressing glistening spatchcocks down onto the aluminum foil. “Help me,” you say. She takes off her shirt and bra and cuts each of them with a pair of kitchen shears. The blades bite and open the birds from thigh to throat. The sound of it is terrible. It reminds you of the time you were ten feet from a lion in South Africa and it was tearing the skin off a zebra leg, and the caveman part of your brain was screaming RUN RUN RUN . She pulls out the spines and turns the birds over; presses them into the pan like open books. You are still cooking when people arrive, still cooking as people are laughing and eating off paper plates standing up and not quite looking at you. 24 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type C745, Taboo: entertaining strangers.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Forge a battle-tested group. It is essential that you know your group well, its strengths and weaknesses and the maximum you can expect of it. But appearances can be deceiving. In their day-to-day work, people can seem motivated, connected, and productive. But add some stress or pressure or even a crisis, and suddenly you see a whole other side of them. Some begin to think more about themselves and disconnect from the group spirit; others become far too anxious and infect the group with their fears. Part of the reality you need to be on top of is the actual strength of your team. You want to be able to gauge the relative inner toughness of people before you are thrust into a crisis. Give various members some relatively challenging tasks or shorter deadlines than usual, and see how they respond. Some people rise to the occasion and even do better under such stress; consider such people a treasure to hoard. Lead the team itself into an action that is novel and slightly riskier than usual. Observe carefully how individuals react to the slight amount of chaos and uncertainty that unfold from this. Of course, in the aftermath of any crises or failures, use such moments as a way to review people’s inner strength or lack of it. You can tolerate a few fearful types who have other virtues, but not too many. In the end, you want a group that has been through a few wars, dealt with them reasonably well, and now is battle-tested. They do not wilt at the sign of new obstacles and in fact welcome them. With such a group, you can slowly expand the limits of what you can ask of them, and the members feel a powerful upward pull to meet challenges and prove themselves. Such a group can move mountains. — Finally, we like to focus on the psychological health of individuals, and how perhaps a therapist could fix any problems they might have. What we don’t consider, however, is that being in a dysfunctional group can actually make individuals unstable and neurotic. The opposite is true as well: by participating in a high-functioning reality group, we can make ourselves healthy and whole. Such experiences are memorable and life-changing. We learn the value of cooperating on a higher level, of seeing our fate as intertwined with those around us. We develop greater empathy. We gain confidence in our own abilities, which such a group rewards. We feel connected to reality. We are brought into the upward pull of the group, realizing our social nature on the high level it was intended for. It is our duty as enlightened humans to create as many such groups as possible, making society healthier in the process. Madness is something rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages it is the rule. —Friedrich Nietzsche 15 Make Them Want to Follow You The Law of Fickleness Although styles of leadership change with the times, one constant

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  the emotion, the stronger it gets, which makes us focus even more on it, and so on and so forth. Our minds tunnel into the emotion, and everything reminds us of our anger or excitement. We become reactive. Because we are unable to bear the tension this brings, high-grade emotion usually culminates in some rash action with disastrous consequences. In the middle of such an attack we feel possessed, as if a second, limbic self has taken over. It is best to be aware of these factors so that you can stop the mind from tunneling and prevent the releasing action that you will always come to regret. You should also be aware of high-grade irrationality in others, to either get out of their way or help bring them back to reality. Trigger Points from Early Childhood In early childhood we were at our most sensitive and vulnerable. Our relationship to our parents had a much greater impact on us the further back in time we go. The same could be said for any early powerful experience. These vulnerabilities and wounds remain buried deep within our minds. Sometimes we try to repress the memory of these influences, if they happen to be negative—great fears or humiliations. Sometimes, however, they are associated with positive emotions, experiences of love and attention that we continually want to relive. Later in life, a person or event will trigger a memory of this positive or negative experience, and with it a release of powerful chemicals or hormones associated with the memory. Take, for example, a young man who had a distant, narcissistic mother. As an infant or child, he experienced her coldness as abandonment, and to be abandoned must mean he was somehow unworthy of her love. Or similarly, a new sibling on the scene caused his mother to give him much less attention, which he equally experienced as abandonment. Later in life, in a relationship, a woman might hint at disapproval of some trait or action of his, all of which is part of a healthy relationship. This will hit a trigger point— she is noticing his flaws, which, he imagines, precedes her abandonment of him. He feels a powerful rush of emotion, a sense of imminent betrayal. He does not see the source of this; it is beyond his control. He overreacts, accuses, withdraws, all of which leads to the very thing he feared—abandonment. His reaction was to some reflection in his mind, not to the reality. This is the height of irrationality. The way to recognize this in yourself and in others is by noticing behavior that is suddenly childish in its intensity and seemingly out of character. This could center on any key emotion. It could be fear—of losing control, of failure. In this case, we react by withdrawing from the situation and the presence of others, like a child curling up into a ball. A sudden illness, brought on by the intense fear, will