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.

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• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  144The History of Christianity II õThe poster child for the Great Awakening in Britain and the American colonies was a preacher named George Whitefield. He was born in Gloucester, England to relatively poor parents. When he went to study at Oxford, he began to channel his theatrical talents into religion. He fell in with a group of pious Anglicans who called themselves the Holy Club. They spent a lot of time studying scripture and trying to discern the most pious way to pray and live. õBut living a holy life does not necessarily mean you’ve had a true conversion experience. Whitefield’s own conversion experience, as a university student, was agony. Someone gave him a book by a Scottish theologian that convinced him all his good works could never save him. At one point, he prayed: “Lord, if I am not a Christian, if I am not a real one, God, for Jesus Christ’s sake, show me what Christianity is, that I may not be damned at last.” õHe took comfort in reading more Christian books, including books on Christian discipleship by great Catholic thinkers like Thomas à Kempis. This is interesting: Whitefield’s later preaching was violently anti-Catholic, as you would expect for a Protestant of his time, but he recognized that he had something to learn about how to imitate Christ and fight the devil from Roman Catholics. õFinally, during the season of Lent in 1735, after fasting so strenuously that he ended up emaciated and sick in bed, Whitefield had the spiritual breakthrough he had been hoping for. God lifted the sense of his own inescapable sin, and, as he put it, enabled him “to lay hold on his dear Son by a living faith.” WHITEFIELD’S INNOVATIONS õAfter his conversion, Whitefield felt a stronger and stronger call to become a preacher, and became ordained as a priest in the Church of England. He began his career in England and started traveling to America in the late 1730s. He preached at revivals up and down the eastern seaboard, mainly in New England but also in places like New York and Charleston.

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

  But in the middle of this pastoral landscape is the minefield of sex, where their worst arguments occur. She wants it; he doesn’t. She wants to talk about it; he doesn’t. She gets angry. He gets defensive. They clash, then wait for the dust to settle. This situation is chronic and relentless, and recently it got a lot worse. For years, Stella has resented being the custodian of their sex life. “I’m the one who thinks about it, who wants it, who makes it happen, and who complains when it doesn’t. If I left it up to James, our erotic life would be a desert.” Privately James admits that he initiates only when he’s reasonably sure she won’t be receptive; that way, he appears to keep up his end of the bargain. Stella hates being the one who “does it all,” but she doesn’t dare stop, for fear that there will be nothing, an unbearable void. Better to assume his lack of interest than to confirm it. Since Stella entered menopause her sex drive has plummeted, and her worst fears have, in fact, been confirmed. James’s lack of sexual initiative, once cloaked by her eagerness, is now glaring. She feels frantic at the prospect of sexual deadness that looms before her. “We’re like roommates. This time I really need him to make the effort, and he won’t.” I point out to Stella that even though it may look as if he won’t, what’s more likely is that he doesn’t know how. The disruption brought about by menopause challenges a pattern that has been fixed since early in their relationship. They will soon discover that it also opens up new possibilities. James is quick to focus on performance issues to justify his lack of desire. He foresees sexual failure, and his anxiety makes this prophecy self-fulfilling. He feels diminished and unmanly each time he fails, and his fear of impotence makes him want to stop even before he starts. The unintended irony in all this is that James becomes so obsessed with doing it right, staying hard for Stella, that he loses sight of her entirely. So while he thinks he’s focusing completely on her, she feels as if he’s somewhere else altogether. This has been a point of contention between them. I remark to James that holding the lens squarely on the physical act of sex—sex as a performance—is a decidedly unerotic approach. It is too narrow an angle. To me, it seems that James is overwhelmed by the whole prospect of being sexual with his wife: claiming desire, eroticizing her, feeling free to express the bawdiness of his lust with her.

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

  However that may be, Paul’s posture toward his Judaean past in these letters to his own groups does not seem extraordinarily complex or vague. The Announcement is about a radical y “new creation: the old has gone away” (2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15). He is preparing himself and the chosen (= those who have trusted The Announcement) for evacuation from the impending wrath of God, to be with Christ in heaven—a 54 E.g., Charles H. Buck and Greer Taylor, Saint Paul: The Development of His Thought (New York, NY: Scribner, 1969). 55 E.g., J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1980). 56 E.g., Heikki Räisänen, Paul and the Law, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1987). 57 Räisänen, Paul, xi–xvi. 33 Paul without Judaism 33 scenario that would later attract Porphyry’s criticism that human bodies do not belong in heavenly spheres. 58 Partly anticipating this objection, perhaps, Paul insists that preparation for heaven requires both a spiritual mode of life, free of carnal attachment, and a final transformation to spirit, following Christ’s example, before the upward journey (1 Cor 15:50–53). Since Paul attached The Announcement to a historical figure whom he had not personal y known before his crucifixion, but others had known intimately, his Announcement was certain to put some noses out of joint. After a brief meeting with Peter and Jesus’ brother in Jerusalem, he steered clear of the Judaean mother- polis. When he returned there after fourteen years, he says, he did so only because of “a revelation” and not from any obligation or summons—though still he worried that these influential Christ-followers would sink his project (Gal 2:2). It is unclear that they ever did accept The Announcement. Even when trying to put the best face on their encounter, Paul can speak only of his promise to Jesus’ family and students that he would speak to non-Judaeans only, and “remember the poor” in Jerusalem. With this, they politely shook his hand and sent him off (Gal 2:2–10). The “pil ars” themselves also did some travelling, however, as we have seen, and became known to Paul’s groups. Whether or not they intended to interfere, their assumption that Christ-followers should follow Judaean laws got around, and they or people influenced by them became quite insistent. In dismissing these claims, Paul used his own formidable knowledge of scripture to make claims about the law’s temporary nature and displacement by Christ.

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

  That attitude, similar to poker players who won’t want to fold a hand as long as there is any chance of winning it, gives you the peace of mind that you never have to give up on anything and wonder “What if?” But, also like poker players, that’s a bad use of resources, and a prescription for eventually going broke. Setting out kill criteria can be very valuable to making decisions within the sales function more rational and efficient. As an example, I worked with one of my clients, mParticle, to help them develop and implement kill criteria in their sales process. mParticle is a SaaS (software as a service) company that offers a customer data platform (CDP) that helps teams unify their customer data and connect it to various marketing and analytics APIs (application programming interfaces). When I started working with them, their sellers were having difficulty letting go of low-value leads, partly because the culture reinforced the notion that walking away from an opportunity would make the company lose ground. A sales professional’s time is a valuable and limited resource. Any time spent on a low-value lead is time they can’t spend on higher-value leads, or developing new opportunities. That means that if they don’t quickly identify and quit the likely dead ends, that is what will, in reality, slow progress. Creating a set of kill criteria would help the team to cut their losses faster when the signs were clear. To develop such criteria, we started by working with the sales team to generate a list of signals that would tell them that an opportunity wasn’t worth pursuing. To do that, we sent out the following prompt to the sellers and the sales leadership: Imagine you were pursuing a lead that came through an RFP (request for proposal) or RFI (request for information). It’s six months from now, and you have lost the deal. Looking back, you realize there were early signals that the deal was not going to close. What were they? In general, this idea of casting yourself into the future, imagining a failure, and then looking back to try to figure out why is called a premortem . Using a premortem is a great tool to help develop high-quality kill criteria. This particular prompt targeted the early signals of failure that the sellers (and all of us) tend to overlook, rationalize, or ignore. In other words, we were looking for the kinds of indicators of things not going well that intuitively we should pay attention to, but don’t. We asked members of the team to respond to the prompt outside of a group setting, independently and asynchronously, so we could get the broadest range of answers, uninfluenced by the opinions of others. We also had them answer this as a hypothetical, not pegged to a particular opportunity they were currently pursuing or had lost.

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

  If most anyone were asked to start the project today as a new endeavor—knowing about the exploding costs, currently as much as $105 billion but likely to increase significantly, and how hard it will be to blast through those two mountain ranges—it seems obvious that the answer would be a hard no. In addition to the direct costs of the project, there is the issue of opportunity costs. Every dollar that California sinks into the project is a dollar that could otherwise be allocated to something that would create more value and a greater public good for the taxpayers whose money is funding the endeavor. But imagine how gutsy a politician would have to be to abandon the project, knowing they’re going to have to defend themselves against charges of having “wasted” more than $8 billion on a train that was never completed. The pressure to keep going to “recover” those costs is enormous. When it comes to these types of public works projects, sunk cost is a familiar refrain. Decades earlier, between the mid-1970s and 1984, the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway[*] lived out the same fate as the bullet train, becoming one of the most expensive public works projects ever undertaken by the federal government. Jimmy Carter tried unsuccessfully to shut it down as a waste of money. The New York Times noted that “congressmen from other regions called it a $2 billion boondoggle, the worst kind of pork barrel politics.” Ironically, bloated past costs became the justification for not abandoning the project. The completion of the waterway hinged on a group of senators (from the states where the money was being spent) who successfully argued that “to stop the project after a great deal had already been spent would represent a waste of taxpayers’ money.” As Alabama senator Jeremiah Denton said, “To terminate a project in which $1.1 billion has been invested represents an unconscionable mishandling of taxpayers’ dollars.” Senator Denton wasn’t intending it, but I’m not sure that there has ever been a clearer explanation of the sunk cost fallacy. New York’s Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, the subject of a field study by Jerry Ross and Barry Staw, was another, much more expensive public works project that similarly suffered from escalating commitment. The plant’s initial estimated cost back in 1966 was $75 million for completion in 1973. Just getting the approval from the Atomic Energy Commission to start construction exceeded both the initial cost of the entire plant and blew past the original completion date. In 1979, the people responsible for the project claimed the plant was 80% done.

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

  In a final desperation move, they salvaged one feature of the game, an inventory of objects the players accumulated, represented by a shoebox of photos. This became Flickr, one of the first photo-sharing websites. Within a year, Butterfield and his cofounders sold it to Yahoo for $25 million. Stewart Butterfield left Yahoo in 2008 and returned to the idea of creating an open-ended, cooperative, world-building online game. He rounded up some of the folks from his Flickr days and cofounded another gaming company, Tiny Speck, whose first product was an even more ambitious game, Glitch . Computing power had advanced one hundredfold. His whole team of engineers and designers were more experienced and capable. Flickr afforded him a track record, plus the funding environment was much more favorable. This all gave him greater access to venture capital. The company raised $17.5 million from venture investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. They launched the game publicly on September 27, 2011. Glitch looked amazing and had a vividly imagined story line, described by fans and reviewers as “Monty Python meets Dr. Seuss.” By November 2012, the game had a devoted following of about five thousand diehard users, who were playing at least twenty hours a week. The problem was that these players, who paid a monthly subscription fee, represented less than 5% of more than a hundred thousand users who signed up to try out the game for free. Over 95% of new users played Glitch for less than seven minutes and never returned. Butterfield, his cofounders, and his investors recognized the problem. They had to attract as many as ninety-five to one hundred new users to end up with just one paying player. They decided to get more aggressive with customer acquisition. Their strategy had been low-key, doing PR and relying on word of mouth. Now they stepped up marketing, taking out paid ads and involving affiliate networks to get more people to try out the game. They executed the new marketing plan and it was working. Over the weekend of November 10–11, the last weekend of the push, they got ten thousand new accounts. Daily active users, over the previous fifteen weeks, had been growing by more than 7% per week. The number of super hard-core players, playing at least five days a week, had been growing by over 6% per week. Yet, on the Sunday night after that stellar weekend, Stewart Butterfield found himself stressed and unable to sleep. In the middle of the night, he had a revelation, which he acted on the next day, Monday, November 12. He sent an email to his investors that started with, “I woke up this morning with the dead certainty that Glitch was over.” This took the other founders and the investors completely by surprise. By all appearances, things were going fine. In fact, they were more than fine. Glitch just experienced its greatest growth ever. They were still well capitalized, with $6 million in the bank.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  He tries to counter it by insulting Carol Burnett but my mother cuts him off. You don’t see Carol Burnett standing there with a drink in her hand; she actually puts on a show . Usually I try to think of other things when they fight like this at the dinner table, like how to swallow. But by using television personalities, they’re holding my interest. My favorite show is That Girl , but I’m one hundred percent sure they aren’t going to mention her. Linda ignores them completely, staring instead at me, willing me to look. I can see out of the corner of my eye what appears to be a Ping-Pong ball coming out of her mouth. Next to me, Brad is a country unto himself, quietly stirring his Spaghettios and taking occasional peeks under the table at his cowboy boots. His mouth is orange. Dinner ends when my father gets indignant and tries to stand up. He falls backward into the wall and the big ceramic salad fork drops from its hook and shatters. My mother can’t have anything nice; the minute she gets something decent, it’s ruined. She works all day and then comes home and makes a beautiful meal like this, and the dog is the only one who will eat it. Soon there are distant unrestful snores coming from upstairs; from the sewing room the furious, intermittent buzz of the Singer 9000. In the living room, Brad and Charcoal play a friendly game of cards. “When I go like this, it means you lose,” the visible one tells the invisible one. This is our house in Moline, Illinois, a big white clapboard that needs new gutters. There’s a little garage out back, and in the corner of the garage is an old cupboard. Inside it are cans of paint, folded rags, tools for cleaning fish, an old dog brush, and a bottle of vodka in a brown paper sack. Here in the kitchen, African violets bloom wildly on the windowsill, hopped-up with fertilizer. The radio on the counter plays a new Beatles song and the girls take a break from clearing the table to clutch their hearts and listen. Tuesday night at the Beard household, and it’s business as usual: Linda washes, Jo Ann dries. Yimmer the dog is missing. She spends most of her time shedding on the furniture, or balanced on her back legs at the end of her chain, barking at the house. Right now, the last time any of us can remember seeing her was hours ago, at lunch, when she coughed up part of a garter snake on the living room rug. My father is also missing, which has led the authorities — my mother and her girlfriend — to believe they are together. “It isn’t enough that he goes to the tavern in broad daylight,” my mother says to Helen. Her mouth is full of pins.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Second Chances One day you are both napping off a hangover in the Dream House when she turns to you, wide awake—more wide awake than you thought she was. “What would you say if I told you I wanted to apply to Iowa again?” she asks. “So I can move back, be with you.” It is hard to identify the sensation in your chest, the simultaneous leap of excitement yanked back by a leash of panic. You smile, quickly, but she has seen something in your face, and hers collapses with displeasure. “What, you don’t think I’m good enough? Or you don’t want me there?” “No, I just—you spent all of this time and money getting to Bloomington, and you love it here. And you love your friends—why would you leave? This is such a great program. I think we’re making the long-distance thing work, don’t you?” She pushes herself up off the bed and walks away. She doesn’t talk to you for the rest of the day. Not until you muster up all your sweetness and agree to help her. “I can’t wait for you to be there with me,” you tell her. You don’t question her logic again. But you know. You know that, somewhere deep down, it isn’t about you at all. You help her edit her stories for her application. One of them is about a man who is so possessive and jealous he wrecks all of his relationships. It’s pretty good.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  phenomenon troubles us. Our automatic reactions in a group, or our propensity to imitate others, reminds us of the most primitive aspects of our nature, our animal roots. We want to imagine ourselves not only as civilized and sophisticated but also as individuals with conscious control of much of what we do. Our group behavior tends to shatter this myth, and historical examples such as the Cultural Revolution frighten us with our own possibilities. We do not like to see ourselves as social animals operating under particular compulsions. It offends our self-opinion as a species. Understand: The social force is neither positive nor negative. It is simply a physiological part of our nature. Many aspects of this force that evolved so long ago are quite dangerous in the modern world. For instance, the deep suspicion we tend to feel toward outsiders to our group, and our need to demonize them, evolved among our earliest ancestors because of the tremendous dangers of infectious diseases and the aggressive intentions of rival hunter-gatherers. But such group reactions are no longer relevant in the twenty-first century. In fact, with our technological prowess, they can be the source of our most violent and genocidal behavior. In general, to the degree that the social force tends to degrade our ability to think independently and rationally, we can say it exerts a downward pull into more primitive ways of behaving, unsuited to modern conditions. The social force, however, can be used and shaped for positive purposes, for high-level cooperation and empathy, for an upward pull, which we experience when we create something together in a group. The problem we face as social animals is not that we experience this force, which occurs automatically, but that we are in denial of its existence. We become influenced by others without realizing it. Accustomed to unconsciously following what others say and do, we lose the ability to think for ourselves. When faced with critical decisions in life, we simply imitate what others have done or listen to people who parrot conventional wisdom. This can lead to many inappropriate decisions. We also lose contact with what makes us unique, the source of our power as individuals (see chapter 13 for more on this). Some people, aware of these tendencies in our nature, may choose to rebel and become nonconformists. But this can be equally mindless and self-destructive. We are social creatures. We depend on our ability to work with others. Rebelling for its own sake will simply marginalize us. What we need more than anything is group intelligence . This intelligence includes a thorough understanding of the effect that groups have on our thinking and emotions; with such awareness, we can resist the downward pull. It also includes understanding how human groups operate according to certain laws and dynamics, which can make it easier to navigate through such spaces. With such intelligence, we can do a delicate dance—we can become gifted social actors and outwardly fit in, while inwardly maintaining

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  how they organize their thoughts and their time. Challenge them with a difficult assignment or some novel way of doing something, and see how they respond, how they handle their anxiety. Remember: weak character will neutralize all of the other possible good qualities a person might possess. For instance, people of high intelligence but weak character may come up with good ideas and even do a job well, but they will crumble under pressure, or they will not take to kindly to criticism, or they will think first and foremost of their own agenda, or their arrogance and annoying qualities will cause others around them to quit, harming the general environment. There are hidden costs to working with them or hiring them. Someone less charming and intelligent but of strong character will prove more reliable and productive over the long run. People of real strength are as rare as gold, and if you find them, you should respond as if you had a discovered a treasure. Toxic Types Although each person’s character is as unique as a fingerprint, we can notice throughout history certain types that keep recurring and that can be particularly pernicious to deal with. As opposed to the more obviously evil or manipulative characters that you can spot a mile away, these types are trickier. They often lure you in with an appearance that presents their weaknesses as something positive. Only over time do you see the toxic nature beneath the appearance, often when it is too late. Your best defense is to be armed with knowledge of these types, to notice the signs earlier on, and to not get involved or to disengage from them as quickly as possible. The Hyperperfectionist: You are lured into their circle by how hard they work, how dedicated they are to making the best of whatever it is they produce. They put in longer hours than even the lowliest employee. Yes, they might explode and yell at people below them for not doing the job right, but that is because they want to maintain the highest standards, and that should be a good thing. But if you have the misfortune of agreeing to work with or for such a type, you will slowly discover the reality. They cannot delegate tasks; they have to oversee everything. It is less about high standards and dedication to the group than about power and control. Such people often have dependency issues stemming from their family background, similar to Howard Hughes. Any feeling that they might have to depend on someone for something opens up old wounds and anxieties. They can’t trust anyone. Once their back is turned, they imagine everyone slacking off. Their compulsive need to micromanage leads to people feeling resentful and secretly resistant, which is precisely what they fear the most. You will notice that the group they lead is not very well organized, since everything must flow through them. This leads to chaos and political infighting as the

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

  By November 2012, the game had a devoted following of about five thousand diehard users, who were playing at least twenty hours a week. The problem was that these players, who paid a monthly subscription fee, represented less than 5% of more than a hundred thousand users who signed up to try out the game for free. Over 95% of new users played Glitch for less than seven minutes and never returned. Butterfield, his cofounders, and his investors recognized the problem. They had to attract as many as ninety-five to one hundred new users to end up with just one paying player. They decided to get more aggressive with customer acquisition. Their strategy had been low-key, doing PR and relying on word of mouth. Now they stepped up marketing, taking out paid ads and involving affiliate networks to get more people to try out the game. They executed the new marketing plan and it was working. Over the weekend of November 10–11, the last weekend of the push, they got ten thousand new accounts. Daily active users, over the previous fifteen weeks, had been growing by more than 7% per week. The number of super hard-core players, playing at least five days a week, had been growing by over 6% per week. Yet, on the Sunday night after that stellar weekend, Stewart Butterfield found himself stressed and unable to sleep. In the middle of the night, he had a revelation, which he acted on the next day, Monday, November 12. He sent an email to his investors that started with, “I woke up this morning with the dead certainty that Glitch was over.” This took the other founders and the investors completely by surprise. By all appearances, things were going fine. In fact, they were more than fine. Glitch just experienced its greatest growth ever. They were still well capitalized, with $6 million in the bank. Yet Butterfield was telling them he was quitting Glitch and offering to return the remaining capital to his investors. In the midst of all the company’s good news, what was bothering Butterfield so much he couldn’t sleep? What was motivating him to shut down the company? The answer is that Stewart Butterfield was able to peek into the future, allowing him to see things others couldn’t see (or didn’t want to see). When he

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Public Relations And haven’t men been gaslighting women, abusing their lovers, harassing their girlfriends, murdering their wives for as long as human history has existed? And isn’t their violence always a footnote, an acceptable causality? David Foster Wallace threw a coffee table at Mary Karr and pushed her out of a moving car, but no one ever really talks about it. Carl Andre almost certainly shoved Ana Mendieta out the thirty-fourth-story window of their Greenwich Village apartment and got away with it. 51 In Mexico, William Burroughs shot Joan Vollmer in the head; her death, he said later, made him into a writer. These stories are so common that they are no longer shocking in any meaningful sense; it is more surprising when there is no evidence of a talented man having hurt someone at all. (I confess, I never quite believe it; I just assume those men are better at hiding than most.) I have spent years struggling to find examples of my own experience in history’s queer women. I tore through book after book about the queer women of the past, pen poised over paper, wondering what would happen if they had let the world know they were unmade by someone with just as little power as they. Did Susan B. Anthony’s womanizing extend to psychological torment? What did Elizabeth Bishop really say to Lota de Macedo Soares when she’d been drinking heavily? Did their voices crawl with jealousy? Did they hurl inkwells and figurines? Did any of them gingerly touch their bruises and know that explaining would be too complicated? Did any of them wonder if what had happened to them had any name at all? I’ll never forget the gut punch I felt when one of the first lesbian couples married in Massachusetts got divorced five years later—a kind of embarrassed panic. I was recently graduated, newly out, trying to date women in Berkeley. I remember feeling dread, as though divorces weren’t the kind of thing happening all around me at every moment, as if they weren’t a complete nonentity. But that’s the minority anxiety, right? That if you’re not careful, someone will see you—or people who share your identity—doing something human and use it against you. The irony, of course, is that queer folks need that good PR; to fight for rights we don’t have, to retain the ones we do. But haven’t we been trying to say, this whole time, that we’re just like you? It’s not being radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove. In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail. But people have trouble with this concept. It’s like how, after Finding Nemo, people who were ill equipped to take care of them rushed to buy clown fish and how the fish died. People love an idea, even if they don’t know what to do with it. Even if they only know how to do exactly the wrong thing. 51. Andre was tried for, and acquitted of, Mendieta’s death. In his 911 call, Andre told the operator, “My wife is an artist, and I’m an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.” Whenever Andre has an exhibition, protestors show up. They create outlines of bodies on the ground, as if someone has fallen from a great height. They leave animal viscera smeared on sidewalks. They ask, “¿Dondé está Ana Mendieta?”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The rest of the visit is uneventful, except for one night toward the end when you both come in from the pool just after sunset. You open the sliding glass door to air-conditioning and escalating voices, and as you cross the kitchen together, you see her father stepping toward her mother. He’s holding a drink, and he’s shouting about—something. She is tight against the counter. Your girlfriend keeps moving, without pause, but you stop for a beat and look at them. Her mother flashes you a glance, and then tilts her chin up toward her husband and says, “I need to finish dinner,” before turning her back to him. The moment feels fraught, but it passes and he stalks away. In your girlfriend’s bedroom, you are shaking. Outside, the air is filled with prestorm pressure. She strips down to nothing and stands there covered in goosebumps. “I don’t want to be like him,” she says, “but sometimes I worry that I am.” It doesn’t sound like she’s talking to you. When the storm breaks, the thunder is as loud as a gun. Dream House as BluebeardBluebeard’s greatest lie was that there was only one rule: the newest wife could do anything she wanted—anything—as long as she didn’t do that (single, arbitrary) thing; didn’t stick that tiny, inconsequential key into that tiny, inconsequential lock.14 But we all know that was just the beginning, a test. She failed (and lived to tell the tale, as I have), but even if she’d passed, even if she’d listened, there would have been some other request, a little larger, a little stranger, and if she’d kept going—kept allowing herself to be trained, like a corset fanatic pinching her waist smaller and smaller—there’d have been a scene where Bluebeard danced around with the rotting corpses of his past wives clasped in his arms, and the newest wife would have sat there mutely, suppressing growing horror, swallowing the egg of vomit that bobbed behind her breastbone. And then later, another scene, in which he did unspeakable things to the bodies (women, they’d once been women) and she just stared dead into the middle distance, seeking some mute purgatory where she could live forever. (Some scholars believe that Bluebeard’s blue beard is a symbol of his supernatural nature; easier to accept than being brought to heel by a simple man. But isn’t that the joke? He can be simple, and he doesn’t have to be a man.)

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  “You threw things at me,” you say. “You chased me. You destroyed everything around me. You have no memory of any of it. Doesn’t that alarm you?”38 She is silent. Then she says, “I’ve got lots of things to do. You don’t understand how hard I work.” You remember your promise, to leave her if she doesn’t get help. But you don’t push the issue. You will never talk about it ever again. [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 37. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type X905.4, The liar: “I have no time to lie today”; lies nevertheless.38. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C411.1, Taboo: Asking for reason of an unusual action.Dream House as Dirty LaundryOne day she asks, Who knows about us? It becomes a refrain. It’s strange—in some past generation this could have meant so many things. Who knows we’re together? Who knows we’re lovers? Who knows we’re queer? But when she asks, the unspoken reason is awful, deflated of nobility or romance: Who knows that I yell at you like this? Who’s heard about the incident over Christmas? She never says exactly that, of course; she just wants to know who you’re talking to, who she should be avoiding, who she shouldn’t bother to try to charm. Every answer enrages her. When you tell her, “No one,” she calls you a liar. When you say, “Just my roommates,” her eyes go flat and hard as flint. Dream House as Five LightsIn the sixth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard is captured by the Cardassians during a secret mission to Celtris III. Early on in the second episode of the two-episode arc, the Cardassians use a truth serum to interrogate Picard on the details of his mission. Gul Madred ostensibly wants cooperation; information about the defense strategy for the Minos Korva planetary system. When the serum does not give him the results he desires, he implants a device in Picard’s body that, when activated, produces excruciating pain. “From now on, I will refer to you only as ‘human,’” Madred tells him. “You have no other identity.” They strip Picard naked, hang him from his wrists, and leave him there overnight. In the morning, Madred is unctuous, measured, unflaggingly polite. He drinks from a thermos like a weary bureaucrat. He turns on a string of lights above him, flooding Picard with illumination. Picard flinches; holds his arm like a wounded velociraptor. Madred asks him how many lights he can see. “Four,” Picard says. “No,” Madred replies. “There are five.” “Are you quite sure?” Picard asks. Madred presses the button on the device in his hand; Picard buckles, staggers, and drops to the ground in agony. The scene is a pastiche of one from 1984, but there are also some beats lifted, very lightly, from The Princess Bride. Madred is inordinately fond of his machine. That was the lowest possible setting. “I know nothing about Minos Korva,” Picard says.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Legacy She goes on a ski trip to Colorado with her parents, and you are not invited. She calls you from the lodge while you are at home, writing. “I’m taking a hot bath,” she says. “Drinking a gin and tonic. Thinking about you. I’m going to get myself off. I miss you.” “I miss you too,” you say. “Do you want to get off with me?” she asks. The idea is tempting—your cunt clenches and relaxes, a reflex—but your roommates are in the kitchen, feet from your door, and you don’t trust yourself to be quiet. “I don’t know if I can, right now.” “You know,” she says, her voice leaking through the receiver like gas, “if you’re not turned on by me, you can say so.” “I’m not—what?” “If you don’t find me attractive, maybe we shouldn’t be together at all.” You are sitting up straight now. “Are you breaking up with me?” “I’m saying that it’s really hard to be with someone who isn’t into you, and I don’t think I should be.” “You are breaking up with me.” You feel a sudden ballooning in your chest, somewhere between panic and elation. You hang up the phone. She calls back immediately, and you reject the call. Again, and again. You start sobbing, and John comes in. He asks you what’s going on. “I think she just broke up with me,” you say. The phone keeps chirping. John gently pries it out of your hand. “Why don’t we turn this off?” he says. You try to turn it off but you are having trouble remembering how, so you open up the back and remove the battery. The whole thing goes black, mercifully silent. You are sobbing in disbelief, your body aching from the whiplash turn of the conversation. He hugs you tightly, and you sit there together. After an hour, you put the battery back in the phone. Almost immediately, it rings. You pick up. She is weeping. “Why weren’t you answering my calls?” she sobs. “You just broke up with me,” you say. “I didn’t break up with you!” she howls, and then from the background you hear her father’s voice, enraged. “Is that that fucking bitch? Get off the goddamned phone—” And then she starts screaming at him to go away, and the phone goes dead. John stares at you but doesn’t say anything. You will eventually lose track of the number of times she breaks up with you like this.

• 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 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