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 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 The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  He stared at me for a long moment and then went back to whatever he was doing. I was trying to make him miss me by going to Florida, but it wasn’t working. On the way down, while driving in my car, I would have long imaginary arguments with him, where I hit every point square on the head and he was left speechless and remorseful. I had him apologizing to me left and right, every hundred miles or so. Between that and singing to the radio, it was a pretty productive trip down. So, my friend’s sister left and I wandered around her house, upstairs, downstairs, finally setting up my typewriter in front of a large glass door that opened onto a balcony with a view of the water and some boats. I organized all my writing paraphernalia, sharpened some pencils using a paring knife from the kitchen, and then sat down and began having a nervous breakdown. Eventually the sun dropped into the water, leaving a fakey sunset, gaudy pink and yellow stripes along the horizon. The boats disappeared, one by one, and a group of long-legged storklike birds flew past the large glass door, out over the water, and then were gone. They weren’t the kind of storks that carry babies, thank God; not bothering to have a baby being one of the things I deeply regretted the minute my marriage started unraveling. As soon as it got completely dark, the glass door turned into a giant black mirror, showing a ghostly image of me sitting in a wicker chair in the dimness. My hands were folded calmly in my lap. I looked like a dark painting of barely controlled hysteria, surrounded by wicker and the long fronds of tropical plants. I felt like I was on an elevator that had burst through the top of the building and was still climbing. At some point I stood up creakily on my stiff legs and went looking for something to put me to sleep. Three warm beers later I stretched out on the king-size bed and stared at the ceiling. I felt like myself as a six-year-old, lying in bed for hours, making up frightening stories in my head, waiting for my sister to wake up and torture me. Me as a kid: skinny and pale and jumpy, terrified of a particular cartoon character who was thin and wiry with a narrow, whiplike mustache. He wore a black outfit with a string tie and he tied girls to railroad tracks or to conveyor belts with buzz saws at the end. On the way to the bathroom, I heard the sound of a Frito crunching. It was a cockroach, stuck to my foot. I began freaking out in earnest. Heart pounding, I scraped the bug off, peed, and stared at myself in the dark mirror. I was spooked and looked it. I walked on my tiptoes back into the bedroom and jumped onto the bed.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Those who benefit from racist structures usually do not recognize their existence, making complicity effortless. In fact, racism has become so ingrained in our subconscious that we can actually measure our physical reactions to other races. In a 1998 study conducted at Purdue University, researchers examined the physiological response to an encounter and a physical contact with an unfamiliar person. Fifty-three African American (23 males and 30 females) and fifty-one Euroamerican (23 males and 28 females) undergraduates participated in the study. By measuring facial muscle activity, increased skin conductance, and heart rate acceleration, the study was able to investigate the automatic and expressive effects of an initial greeting and touch from an unfamiliar person. The subjects were met by a female research assistant of the same race who oriented them to the laboratory and attached sensors to them. The research assistant left the room, only to have an unfamiliar interactor enter moments later. The interactor was of the same sex as the subject but varied in racial composition, with half of the subjects encountering a white person and the other half encountering a black person. After a few moments of introducing themselves and checking the equipment, the interactor asked to take the subject's pulse rate. The results of the experiment showed that when the interactor was of a different race, the subject's heart rate accelerated, skin conductance increased, and facial muscles tightened; in other words, the subject showed internal physical manifestations of stress. These levels were significantly higher when the interactor was a black man (especially among white male subjects).5 The study seems to indicate that even when we profess to be “color-blind,” white bodies physically react when touched by black bodies. Politically correct rhetoric aside, race is deeply ingrained in how we have been taught to see others. We cannot, however, speak about race as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences because every reputable biologist understands that race as a scientific category is unsupportable. The human genetic variability between the populations of Africa or Asia or Europe or Latin America is not significantly greater than the differences existing within those ethnic populations. Race is not a scientific notion; it is a sociohistorical concept. Race is not a biological factor differentiating humans; rather, it is a social construction whose function is the oppression of one group of people for the benefit of another. With the exception of skin color and physical difference (hair texture, eye and nose size, and so on), racial character differences do not exist. Rather, race is a sign that signifies who has power and privilege within a given society. Yet, if race is a social construction, can persons find themselves occupying more than one race? Throughout my life, the Latino/a community where I was raised reinforced the notion that I was “white.” Thus, when I gazed into the mirror, I was taught to see a white middle-class Hispanic man.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  paychecks. Their career choices have slight or no connection to their actual inclinations. The fields they choose will tend to be crowded with other insatiable hunters of money and success, and so the competition is fierce. If they are zealous enough, they might do quite well for a while, but as they get older, they begin to feel restless and ever so slightly bored. They try different avenues for money and success; they need new challenges. They have to keep finding ways to motivate themselves. Often they make big mistakes in their obsessive pursuit of money because their thinking is so short term, as we saw with those who went all in on the derivatives frenzy leading up to the crash of 2008. Second, money and success that last come from remaining original and not mindlessly following the path that others are following. If we make money our primary goal, we never truly cultivate our uniqueness, and eventually someone younger and hungrier will supplant us. And finally, what often motivates people in this quest is to simply have more money and status than other people, and to feel superior. With that standard, it is difficult to know when they have enough, because there are always people with more. And so the quest is endless and exhausting. And since the connection to their work is not personal, such people become alienated from themselves; the pursuit feels soulless; they are workaholics without a true calling. They may become depressed or manic, and they will often lose what they have gained if they become manic enough. We all know the effects of “hyperintention”: If we want and need desperately to sleep, we are less likely to fall asleep. If we absolutely must give the best talk possible at some conference, we become hyperanxious about the result, and the performance suffers. If we desperately need to find an intimate partner or make friends, we are more likely to push them away. If instead we relax and focus on other things, we are more likely to fall asleep or give a great talk or charm people. The most pleasurable things in life occur as a result of something not directly intended and expected. When we try to manufacture happy moments, they tend to disappoint us. The same goes for the dogged pursuit of money and success. Many of the most successful, famous, and wealthy individuals do not begin with an obsession with money and status. One prime example would be Steve Jobs, who amassed quite a fortune in his relatively short life. He actually cared very little for material possessions. His singular focus was on creating the best and most original designs, and when he did so, good fortune followed him. Concentrate on maintaining a high sense of purpose, and the success will flow to you naturally. Attention: People have always pursued fame and attention as a way to feel enlarged and more important. They become dependent

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Grandiosity has some positive and productive uses. The exuberance and high self-belief that come from it can be channeled into your work and help inspire you. (See “Practical Grandiosity,” on this page , for more on this.) But in general it would be best for you to accept your limitations and work with what you have, rather than fantasize about godlike powers you can never attain. The greatest protection you can have against grandiosity is to maintain a realistic attitude. You know what subjects and activities you are naturally attracted to. You cannot be skilled at everything. You need to play to your strengths and not imagine you can be great at whatever you put your mind to. You must have a thorough understanding of your energy levels, of how far you can reasonably push yourself, and of how this changes with age. And you must have a solid grasp on your social position—your allies, the people with whom you have the greatest rapport, the natural audience for your work. You cannot please everyone. This self-awareness has a physical component to it that you must be sensitive to. When you are doing activities that mesh with your natural inclinations, you feel ease in the effort. You learn faster. You have more energy and you can withstand the tedium that comes with learning anything important. When you take on too much, more than you can handle, you feel not only exhausted but also irritable and nervous. You are prone to headaches. When you have success in life, you will naturally feel a touch of fear, as if the good fortune could disappear. You sense with this fear the dangers that can come from rising too high (almost like vertigo) and feeling too superior. Your anxiety is telling you to come back down to earth. You want to listen to your body as it signals to you when you are working against your strengths. In knowing yourself, you accept your limits. You are simply one person among many in the world, and not naturally superior to anyone. You are not a god or an angel but a flawed human like the rest of us. You accept the fact that you cannot control the people around you and no strategy is ever foolproof. Human nature is too unpredictable. With this self-knowledge and acceptance of limits you will have a sense of proportion. You will search for greatness in your work. And when you feel the pull to think more highly of yourself than is reasonable, this self-knowledge will serve as a gravity mechanism, pulling you back down and directing you toward the actions and decisions that will best serve your particular nature. Being realistic and pragmatic is what makes us humans so powerful. It is how we overcame our physical weakness in a hostile environment so many thousands of years ago, and learned to work with others and form powerful communities and tools for survival.

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

  Once you’ve established a pheromone trail to follow, you become myopic, making it hard to see those other opportunities that your ant friends otherwise would be looking for. One of the most famous studies showing that being fixated on a task or goal can cause you to literally not see what’s right in front of you is the invisible gorilla experiment, conducted by Harvard psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris in 1999. Participants watched a video of a group of people passing a basketball back and forth and were tasked with counting the number of passes. Halfway through the video, a woman in a full gorilla suit walked through the scene. After completing the task of counting the number of times the basketball was passed, the participants were asked if they noticed anything unusual. If they said no, they were asked if they saw anything or anyone other than the six players. If they said no to that, they were asked, “Did you see a gorilla walk across the screen?” More than half of the participants (56%) answered “no” to all those questions . The gorilla was obvious to anyone just watching the video, with no directive to count anything. Indeed, when the experimenters showed them the video a second time, the participants were consistently shocked that they missed it. If they couldn’t see the gorilla right in front of their noses, what do you think you are missing when you are pursuing a goal? You need to be really wary of this myopia because it’s counterproductive to seeing the opportunities around you. That’s another reason why developing an exploratory mindset is so important. You have to be making sure that you’ve got a good view of the landscape, that you are taking calls from recruiters, that you’re exploring other functions, and that you’re generally trying out new things, so that you can start to add to and expand your portfolio. Quitting coaches can also reduce myopia, because they can generally see the opportunities that are available to you better than you can. Quit Thinking about WasteWhen we think about the friction that makes it hard for us to quit, we can see how goal-setting piles onto the katamari. We loathe closing mental accounts in the losses. But as soon as we set a goal, we start ourselves in the losses. This adds to the ruckus caused by all those other biases that gaff the scale against quitting. We are endowed to our goals, and they can easily become part of our identity. They become the status quo. Once we start toward a finish line, we accumulate the sunk costs of time and effort and money spent trying to get there. What makes it so hard to quit, if we were to sum up everything that we’ve talked about in this book, is that when we quit, we fear two things: that we’ve failed, and that we’ve wasted our time, effort, or money.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  The air is thick, stale, dreamy, though barely masking the overpowering smell of stale sweat. When open the lobbies fill with a constant nameless din, the murmur of hundreds of men, the narcotic drone of a television, punctuated by the occasional freak-out—an altercation here, someone shouting down a private demon there. All heads turn toward the sound, register it, turn away. When blows are being exchanged, if a staff member is there to intervene, he or she will intervene. A balance between escalating and defusing, stepping in and backing the fuck off. The ground floor is divided into the Brown Lobby and the Yellow Lobby, each lobby its own city, cities within the city, each with its own rules, its own physics. Brown is mostly oldtimers—drunks, mellow, regular; Yellow is the youngbloods—psych, addicts, wilder. From my perch behind the steel-mesh screen, when there is a lull in giving out bed tickets, in putting pennies into envelopes, the rhythm of these cities can slowly enter my bloodstream. I work the Cage for a few months through that first fall, until the cycle of life within the shelter begins to make some sense to me. Patterns emerge. On Fridays, payday, there’s more money to check in, more drunken men pushing it at me through the slot. The drunks show up later and are, depending on the man, either more boisterous or more sullen. Jimmy’s got the shakes again, after a month of doing so well. He’s perfected the trick of stashing a fifth in his sleeve, of raising his arms with a flourish above his head for the frisk. Eddie is carried in by the cops again—not only did he lose his leg beneath a bus a few winters before, but now he’s lost his fake leg. More than likely he took it off himself and brandished it at a passerby, some “punk-assed bitch.” Some get government checks, either for a physical disability or a mental one. They call the mental ones “nut checks.” These checks come on the first of the month, a time when the predators, usually the young addicts, show up at the shelter, lurking, waiting for a mark. Staff that have worked the shelter longer know the thieves, know their targets. But the old guys are easily lured away by a bottle, down the alley, only to limp back, sheepish, a pocket torn, a bloodied ear, broke again. Joy works the front desk. She’d been a cokehead and a prostitute and is now an oversized redheaded mother to the guys. Years later she will end up in a room with a shotgun across her lap, back to dealing and smoking crack 24/7. When I first land at Pine Street she is benign and ravaged, a failed queen who seldom leaves her throne at the front door. We catch them on the way down, Joy says. Next stop, the morgue . Each year we count a hundred, a hundred and fifty, dead from the year before.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  openly displayed in the virtual world, where it is so much easier to play out our shadow sides without repercussions. Notice how our propensities to compare ourselves with others, to feel envy, and to seek status through attention have only become intensified with our ability to communicate so quickly with so many people. And finally, look at our tribal tendencies and how they have now found the perfect medium to operate in—we can find a group to identify with, reinforce our tribal opinions in a virtual echo chamber, and demonize any outsiders, leading to mob intimidation. The potential for mayhem stemming from the primitive side of our nature has only increased. It is simple: Human nature is stronger than any individual, than any institution or technological invention. It ends up shaping what we create to reflect itself and its primitive roots. It moves us around like pawns. Ignore the laws at your own peril. Refusing to come to terms with human nature simply means that you are dooming yourself to patterns beyond your control and to feelings of confusion and helplessness. — The Laws of Human Nature is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes. If you let it guide you, it will radically alter how you perceive people and your entire approach to dealing with them. It will also radically change how you see yourself. It will accomplish these shifts in perspective in the following ways: First, the Laws will work to transform you into a calmer and more strategic observer of people, helping to free you from all the emotional drama that needlessly drains you. Being around people stirs up our anxieties and insecurities as to how others perceive us. Once we feel such emotions, it becomes very hard to observe people as we are drawn into our own feelings, evaluating what people say and do in personal terms—do they like me or dislike me? The Laws will help you avoid falling into this trap by revealing that people are generally dealing with emotions and issues that have deep roots. They’re experiencing some desires and disappointments that predate you by years and decades. You cross their path at a particular moment and become the convenient target of their anger or frustration. They’re projecting onto you certain qualities they want to see. In most cases, they’re not relating to you as an individual. This should not upset you but liberate you. The book will teach you to stop taking personally their insinuating comments, shows of coldness, or moments of irritation. The more you grasp this, the easier it will be to react not with your emotions but rather with the desire to understand where their behavior might come from. You will feel much calmer in the process. And as this takes root in you, you will be less prone to moralize and judge people; instead you will accept them and their flaws as part of human nature. People will like

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  You will imagine that you have come upon these ideas on your own, that you have chosen to believe this and think that. You don’t want to confront the social force operating on you and causing you to blend in and enhance your sense of belonging. In the long run, it is much better to confront your conformity to the group ethos, so that you can become aware of it as it happens and control the process to some degree. The need to perform: Stemming from this first effect is the second effect—in the group setting, we are always performing . It is not just that we conform in appearances and thinking but that we exaggerate our agreement and show others that we belong. In the group, we become actors, molding what we say and do so that others accept and like us and see us as loyal team members. Our performances change depending on the size of the group and its particular makeup—bosses or colleagues or friends. We might begin with a degree of inner distance in these performances, aware, for instance, that we are being unusually obsequious around the boss. But over time, in acting the part we begin to feel what we are showing; the inner distance melts away, and the mask we wear fuses into our personality. Instead of thinking to smile in appropriate moments, we automatically paste on the smile. As part of this performance, we minimize our flaws and display what we consider our strengths. We put on confidence. We act more altruistic. Studies have shown that we are much more likely to give money or help someone cross the road when others are looking at us. In the group, we make sure that people see we support the right causes; we post our progressive opinions prominently on social media. We also make sure others see us working hard and putting in extra hours. When we are alone, we often rehearse in our minds things we will say or do for our next performance. Do not imagine that it is better to simply be your natural self or to rebel against this. There is nothing more unnatural than curbing this need to perform, which even chimpanzees display to a high degree. If you want to seem natural, as if you are comfortable with yourself, you have to act the part; you have to train yourself to not feel nervous and to shape your appearance so that in your naturalness you don’t offend people or the group values.

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

  228The History of Christianity II and worried about reconciling faith with science. Fights between fundamentalists and modernists started among descendants of that reformed tradition, Presbyterians and Baptists. õAnother factor: In the early 20 th century, America was already a culturally diverse country, where vast distances separated different subcultures and an ocean—both geographic and cultural— divided Americans from the universities of Europe. For American fundamentalists, there was no sense of continuity or cultural kinship with the groundbreaking scholarship that f lourished in Europe during the 19 th cent u r y. õCompare this with Canada, where most Christians felt themselves to be a part of the same intellectual culture as their peers in Britain. For example, they experienced Charles Darwin’s discoveries as events in their own society, and got used to them more gradually. American Christians were more likely to experience the theory of evolution or German theological ideas as foreign invasions. Fundamentalists fought these invasions with all the vigor they could muster. õAdditionally, American fundamentalism didn’t make much sense to Christians outside the West. American fundamentalists focused on proper Christian behavior, but they were also obsessed with the clash between faith and reason. They thought of scientists and university professors as vile enemies of the faith. They read the Bible in a very rationalistic way, as if it were a science textbook. As one Presbyterian theologian put it, “the Bible is a storehouse of facts.” õThis understanding of Christianity would not resonate much at all with, for example, Zulu tribesmen in South Africa, who were probably more worried about whether they would see their ancestors in heaven, or how to defend their children against witches, or how to survive the brutalities of the emerging apartheid system. 229Lecture 23—Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism õFrom the 1930s into the Cold War era, American fundamentalists tended to fuse their understanding of Christian orthodoxy with a nationalistic vision of American world dominance. Conservative Protestants in Europe and the Global South were a bit leery of allying with them. SUGGESTED READING Espinosa, William J. Seymour. Kalu, Ogbu. African Pentecostalism. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äWhat aspects of modernity did Pentecostals and fundamentalists find frightening or dangerous? äWhy did so many worshippers at Azusa Street violate the social taboos of the day? äHow does the meaning of fundamentalist in today’s common speech compare to the term’s historical meaning? 230 LECTURE 24 APOCALYPTIC FAITH IN THE 180 0s AND BEYOND T his lecture tackles the question of what exactly the apocalypse is and how Christians have interpreted it. Then, the lecture digs into the ideas about the end times that became popular in 19 th -century and 20 th -century America and remain inf luential today.

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

  350 LECTURE 36 THE CHALLENGE OF 21 ST -CENTURY CHRISTIANITY T his lecture considers what may be the three most important challenges for Christians in modern times. These can become terrible, violent clashes, or they might become fruitful opportunities for creativity and collaboration. Either way, they will decisively shape the future of the faith. Those three factors are Christians’ engagement with the world of Islam, their attitude toward global capitalism, and their reaction to the forces of secularization. All three of these are unstoppable forces, and Christians have no choice but to respond. 351Lecture 36—The Challenge of 21 st -Century Christianity ENCOUNTERS WITH ISLAM õIn 1996, the Harvard political scientist Sam Huntington published a book called The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. This book, probably more than any other, has shaped the way Western Christians think about Islam. õIn the years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a lot of people in the West were optimistic. They published reams of articles and books that said essentially the Cold War is over and the forces of democracy won. õHuntington, however, said the Cold War may be over but the clash of civilizations has only just begun. He divided up the world into a few different civilizations: ✳The United States, Canada, most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand. ✳Latin America. ✳The Orthodox world of Russia and Eastern Europe. ✳ The Hindu civilization of India, Nepal, and Bhutan. ✳The Confucian civilization of China, Korea, and their spheres of inf luence. ✳The Muslim world, which included the Middle East, Pakistan, Malaysia, parts of Africa, and other majority-Muslim countries. õHuntington wrote that these Muslim lands tend to have “bloody borders:” that is, they tend to get into fights with non-Muslim neighbors. Islam, like Christianity, is an exclusive faith that denies any other religion can be true. 352The History of Christianity II õBut unlike Western Christian communities, Muslims have not had a long history of adjusting their beliefs and practices to the values of pluralism, democracy, and the Enlightenment. It’s true that in centuries past, some Muslim empires extended remarkable toleration to non-Muslims, but these subjects had to acknowledge their inferiority and accept Muslim domination. õCouple this cultural legacy with the population boom in many Muslim regions, and the fact that globalization has brought us all closer together while also leaving many Muslims feeling like economic have- nots, and you have a recipe for violence, particularly between Muslims and Christians. õThis was Huntington’s basic argument. Three years before his book came out, Islamic terrorists had attacked New York’s World Trade Center for the first time, detonating a truck bomb underneath the North Tower. After the attack, this “clash of civilizations” idea made sense to a growing number of Westerners.

• 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)

  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.)