Disappointment

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)

  In this first phase of life, we shape a generational perspective. It is a kind of collective mind-set, as we absorb the prevailing culture at the same time as our peers, from the point of view of childhood and youth. And because we are too young to understand or analyze this perspective, we are generally ignorant of its formation and how it influences what we see and how we interpret events. Then, when we reach our twenties and into our thirties, we enter a new phase of life and experience a shift. Now we are in a position to assume some power, to actually alter this world according to our own values and ideals. As we progress in our work, we begin to influence the culture and its politics. We inevitably clash with the older generation that has held power for some time, as they insist on their own way of acting and evaluating events. Many of them often view us as immature, unsophisticated, soft, undisciplined, pampered, unenlightened, and certainly not ready to assume power. In some periods, the youth culture that is generated is so strong that it comes to dominate the culture at large—in the 1920s and the 1960s, for instance. In other periods, the older generation in positions of leadership is much more dominant, and the influence of the emerging adults in their twenties is less noticeable. In any event, to a greater or lesser degree, a struggle and clash occurs between these two generations and their perspectives. Then, as we enter our forties and midlife and assume many of the leadership positions in society, we begin to take notice of a younger generation that is fighting for its own power and position. Its members are now judging us and finding our own style and ideas rather irrelevant. We begin to judge them in return, describing them as immature, unsophisticated, soft, et cetera. We might begin to entertain the notion that the world is heading downhill fast, the values we found so important no longer mattering to this youthful set. When we judge in this way, we are not aware that we are reacting according to a pattern that has existed for at least three thousand years. (There is an inscription on a Babylonian clay tablet that dates from around 1000 BC that reads, “Today’s youth is rotten, evil, godless and lazy. It will never be what youth used to be, and it will never be able to preserve our culture.” We find similar complaints in all cultures and in all time periods.) We think we are judging the younger generation in an objective manner, but we are merely succumbing to an illusion of perspective. It is also true that we are probably experiencing some hidden envy of their youth and mourning the loss of our own.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Louis had never seen before), and by his whole manner, his fast way of talking, the lack of awe and respect in the king’s presence. He bowed graciously before the king, but he refused to kiss his hand, quite a breach of protocol. So this was a revolutionary, a man of the people? Louis had never met such a fellow, and he found the experience decidedly unpleasant. — During the summer months of 1789, Danton had largely supported the decisions of the National Assembly, but he had remained wary of the aristocracy and wanted to make sure they had permanently lost their privileges. The nobility was the source of the country’s misery, and the French must never forget this. He had become one of the principal fomenters against the upper classes, and as such he had earned the mistrust of the more moderate and bourgeois leaders of the revolution, who wanted to go slowly. To them, Danton was like a ranting, monstrous ogre, and they had excluded him from their social circles and any official position in the new government under formation. Feeling ostracized and perhaps recalling his own peasant roots, Danton had come to increasingly identify with the sans-culottes (“without breeches”), members of the lowest classes in France and the most revolutionary in spirit. As the news of the scandalous behavior of the Flanders Regiment on October 1 had reached Paris, Danton had been one of the key agitators for the march on Versailles, and with its success he had become the leader of the Cordeliers. And it was in that capacity that he had paid a visit to the Tuileries, as much to discern the king’s degree of support for the new constitution as to welcome him. Danton could not help but recall the coronation he had attended over fourteen years earlier, with all of its pomp, for despite everything that had happened in the last few months, the king seemed bent on re-creating the protocol and ceremony of Versailles. He wore his royal outfit, with its sash and various medals attached to his coat. He insisted on the old formalities, and he kept his attendants in their elaborate uniforms. It was all so empty, so disconnected from what was going on. Danton was polite. He still felt a strange sympathy for the king, but now, as he scrutinized him, all he could see was a relic of the past. He doubted the king’s allegiance to the new order. He left the meeting more certain than ever that the French monarchy had become obsolete. In the months that followed, the king professed his loyalty to the new constitution, but Danton suspected that Louis was playing a double game, still plotting to bring the monarchy and nobility back to power. A coalition of armies from other countries in Europe was now waging open war against the revolution, determined to rescue the king and restore the old order. And Danton felt certain that the king was in communication with them.

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

  The Texas shareholders took back their Sage stores, Harold’s partners in the earlier merger took back their two California stores, and Harold was left with the rest of the California stores. To keep competing with Kmart, Harold started taking the wealth he and Shirley had accumulated over two decades and invested it in a futile attempt to save his business. Within a few years, a piece of good luck fell in his path, in the form of an offer by Fred Meyer Inc. to buy him out. Fred Meyer was a successful regional discounter founded in Oregon and looking for a foothold in California. At the time, it had over forty stores in four states and had been a public company since 1960. He turned the offer down. Harold Staw eventually lost all of his retail operations, along with all his family’s accumulated wealth. The only thing that kept him and Shirley from becoming completely destitute was that fifty-year lease on the Montclair property. After ABC Stores was long gone, he was able to earn a bit of income by leasing it to other storefronts. Ironically, many of those tenants succumbed to the same refusal to adapt to the changing business landscape that was Harold’s undoing. CompUSA, for instance, made the list of 2002 Super Bowl advertisers that later went out of business as well as the list of Harold’s tenants. From the outside looking in at what happened to Harold Staw, it’s easy to see that he was ignoring some pretty clear signals that he was now in a losing game: his inability to compete with Kmart, the flight of the other independents in the face of the new environment, the attitude of his former merger partners, his close friend and attorney taking sides against him. If he didn’t have an opportunity to jettison ABC and profit from a position in Sage, he certainly had the chance afterward to get out on the favorable terms offered by Fred Meyer. Yet he nevertheless chose to keep investing in the doomed effort, eventually pouring in almost everything he had accumulated. The mystery of it all is why : What blinded such a nimble, flexible decision-maker to the clear signals right in front of him? How could some of the same behavior that helped him thrive (through grit, determination, and stick-to-itiveness) end up causing his failure (through inflexibility, intractability, and maybe even some hubris)? It seems that if we can get to the bottom of this mystery for Harold Staw, then we can do it for a lot of other people, including ourselves.

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

  But those local goals can impede us from acting in a way that embodies the reality that life is one long game. That means trying to maximize the expected value over our lifetime, which requires us to sometimes give up on these interim finish lines. There are lots of unlesses you can apply in poker. I’ll keep playing, unless I’ve lost a certain amount of money, or unless new players have joined the game who are significantly better than the ones who’ve left, or unless I’ve played past a certain number of hours, or unless I’m feeling emotional or tired or sick. Unlesses can get us out from under the forces that will keep us playing in the short run, chasing a win, and align our behavior more closely with our long-term best interests. Sticking to something that’s no longer worthwhile is going to stop you from reaping the benefits that were the original reason for setting the goal in the first place, or it’s going to cause you to incur more costs than you were originally willing to bear. Your goals should change because the world changes and you change. To keep up with all that change, you need to check back periodically on whether you’re taking the fastest route to the finish line, or if you’re even running to the right place. Marking Progress along the WayIt’s a pretty rigid view of the world that defines success only as crossing the finish line. It’s not just that we need to set more flexible goals. We ourselves also need to be more flexible in the way we evaluate success and failure. The way we view goals as pass-fail is, by definition, inflexible and categorical, causing us to discount or completely ignore any progress that we’ve made. That means, to counteract this problem, we need to find ways to mark that progress, to celebrate the things that we’ve accomplished on the way to the finish line. If you’re trying to summit Everest because you get a lot of value out of that physical and mental challenge, you’re not objectively in the losses if you make it to Camp 1, 2, 3, or 4, or 300 feet from the summit, certainly not in comparison with not having tried at all. Of course, that’s not our subjective experience. That’s what we need to change. We need to find a way to flip the script and stop measuring ourselves solely by how far we are from the finish line. We need to start giving ourselves more credit for how far we are from where we started. If we do that, a silver medal will feel much less disappointing, because in reality it’s a huge accomplishment, as measured against where any figure skater has ever started. Doing that would let you see what an accomplishment it is to earn acceptance as a private student from Itzhak Perlman or, in my case, to have completed five years of graduate-level work.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Each time I get her situated on her blankets and try to stretch out on the couch she stands up, looks at me, wags her tail. I call my office pal, Mary, and wake her up. “I’m weary,” I say, in italics. Mary listens, sympathetic, on the other end. “Oh my God,” she finally says, “what are you going to do?” I calm down immediately. “Exactly what I’m doing,” I tell her. The dog finally parks herself with a thump on the stack of damp blankets. She sets her nose down and tips her eyes up to watch me. We all sleep then, for a bit, while the squirrels sort through the boxes overhead and the dog on the blanket keeps nervous watch. I’ve called in tired to work. It’s midmorning and I’m shuffling around in my long underwear, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. The whole house is bathed in sunlight and the faint odor of used diapers. The collie is on her blanket, taking one of her vampirish daytime naps. The other two dogs are being mild-mannered and charming. I nudge the collie with my foot. “Wake up and smell zee bacons,” I say. She startles awake, lifts her nose groggily, and falls back asleep. I get ready for the office. “I’m leaving and I’m never coming back,” I say while putting on my coat. I use my mother’s aggrieved, underappreciated tone. The little brown dog wags her tail, transferring her gaze from me to the table, which is the last place she remembers seeing toast. The collie continues her ghoulish sleep, eyes partially open, teeth exposed, while the Labrador, who understands English, begins howling miserably. She wins the toast sweepstakes and is chewing loudly when I leave, the little dog barking ferociously at her. Work is its usual comforting green-corridored self. There are three blinks on the answering machine, the first from an author who speaks very slowly, like a kindergarten teacher, asking about reprints. “What am I, the village idiot?” I ask the room, taking down his number in large backward characters. The second and third blinks are from my husband, the across-town apartment dweller. The first makes my heart lurch in a hopeful way. “I have to talk to you right now ,” he says grimly. “Where are you? I can never find you.” “Try calling your own house,” I say to the machine. In the second message he has composed himself. “I’m fine now,” he says firmly. “Disregard previous message and don’t call me back, please; I have meetings.” Click, dial tone, rewind. I feel crestfallen, the leaping heart settles back into its hole in my chest. I say damn it out loud, just as Chris strides into the office. “What?” he asks defensively. He tries to think if he’s done anything wrong recently. He checks the table for work; none there. He’s on top of it.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  logo of interlocking C ’s. It looked like nothing else out there. To launch the perfume, she decided upon a subliminal campaign. She began by spraying the scent everywhere in her store in Paris. It filled the air. Women kept asking what it was and she would feign ignorance. She would then slip bottles of the perfume, without labels, into the bags of her wealthiest and best-connected clients. Soon women began to talk of this strange new scent, rather haunting and impossible to identify as any known flower. The word of yet another Chanel creation began to spread like wildfire and women were soon showing up at her store begging to buy the new scent, which she now began to place discreetly on shelves. In the first few weeks they could not stock enough. Nothing like this had ever happened in the industry, and it would go on to become the most successful perfume in history, making her a fortune. Over the next two decades the house of Chanel reigned supreme in the fashion world, but during World War II she flirted with Nazism, staying in Paris during the Nazi occupation and visibly siding with the occupiers. She had closed her store at the beginning of the war, and by the end of the war she had been thoroughly disgraced in the eyes of the French by her political sympathies. Aware and perhaps ashamed, she fled to Switzerland, where she would remain in self-imposed exile. By 1953, however, she felt the need not only for a comeback but for something even greater. Although she was now seventy, she had become disgusted at the latest trends in fashion, which she felt had returned to the old constrictions and fussiness of women’s clothing that she had sought to destroy. Perhaps this also signaled a return to a more subservient role for women. To Chanel it would be the ultimate challenge—after some fourteen years out of business, she was now largely forgotten. No one thought of her anymore as a trendsetter. She would have to start almost completely over. Her first move was to encourage rumors that she was planning a return, but she gave no interviews. She wanted to stimulate talk and excitement but surround herself with mystery. Her new show debuted in 1954, and an enormous crowd filled her store to watch it, mostly out of curiosity. Almost immediately there was a sense of disappointment. The clothes were mostly a rehash of her 1930s styles with a few new touches. The models were all Chanel look- alikes and mimicked her way of walking. To the audience, Chanel seemed a woman hopelessly locked in a past that would never return. The clothes seemed passé and the press pilloried her, dredging up at the same time her Nazi associations during the war. For almost any designer this would have been a devastating blow, but she appeared remarkably unfazed by it all. As always, she had a

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

  direct students, Cephas (Peter), a Galilean fisherman according to the gospels, who has surprisingly travelled abroad in the Greek world with his wife, Jesus’ brothers, and their spouses too (9:5–6). Whatever their intentions may have been, serious rifts have now opened, because elements from Paul’s group are tending to prefer what these teachers are saying (1:11–12; 3:22). Paul has already written to the group at least once since his departure (5:9). We know precious little about that lost letter, or much else that was happening, including what exactly Jesus’ family members and students taught, or how they viewed their relationships with Paul and each other. Nevertheless, it seems that Apollos is Paul’s most immediate concern, given that he singles him out as the one building on his foundation (3:4–11). Paul also vigorously disparages wisdom and rhetoric (4:6), while apparently punning on Apollos’ name (1:19: ἀπολῶ τὴν σοφίαν τῶν σοφῶν). Tellingly, the Corinthians ask Paul, their epistolary contact, when Apollos and perhaps the others will return (16:12). It is not clear that they wanted Paul back. It seems that they are not so eager for his return, given that he urgently dispatches Timothy, “my beloved child and trustworthy in the lord, who will remind you of my ways in Christ Jesus”—and in a clearly defensive posture threatens a follow-up visit, with a stick to enforce discipline (4:17–21). And when he does eventual y visit, it is “painful,” causing a very serious rift between Paul and the community he established (2 Cor 1:23–2:7). 52 Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 434–42. 31 Paul without Judaism 31 In the febrile atmosphere of 1 Cor, the clearest thread of contention turns on the circumstance that some in the community have come to think of Christ’s significance in ways rather different from those of Paul’s Announcement. They have come to prefer the notion that following Christ is about finding a kind of fullness, knowledge, and peace in this life, which makes better sense than the misery and suffering Paul predicts before Christ’s heavenly return (4:8–13). Other concerns of theirs, which Paul has heard by various means (7:1), would be easy to link up with the same picture, though we cannot join the dots with confidence: whether one should stop engaging with the world in light of Christ’s return, as Paul counsels, especial y in relation to marriage (ch. 7: he prefers no marriage in light of the imminent end); why they might not eat good meat even if it came to market after temple sacrifices, since there are no real gods other than the true One (chs. 8–10; he prefers not); manifestations of spiritual gifts (chs. 12–14); and the central question of physical resurrection, for Christ and then for his followers—the heart of Paul’s Announcement, which some of them now doubt (15:12).

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

  Additional y, Matthew demonstrates a danger of insisting upon difference in the absolute terms of rigid stereotypes. There are historical as well as social psychological reasons why he cast things in this way. These explanations may or may not be helpful for modern readers when it comes to rendering a moral verdict against this ancient writer and his community. How might one determine “guilt” or “innocence” in a case like this? Perhaps we might do this by using a pragmatic measurement of success? How successful was Matthew in the use of the Pharisees in his gospel? If success is measured by the number of people who profoundly identified with a group so that that group’s identity and their own self-concept became fused, at least in part, then Matthew’s construction of collective identity was successful. On the other hand, if success is measured by the ethical treatment of the other that this collective identity justified, then Matthew’s construction of identity was unsuccessful. Perhaps Matthew’s own standard can be used to evaluate success in this latter sense: did Matthew’s constructed collective identity develop a habit of characteristical y loving the group’s enemies (Matthew 5:38–42)? Matthew’s animosity toward the Pharisees suggests that he did not do so personal y, and subsequent Christian history suggests that, by and large, the Christian church did not do so either. 130 130 131 8 From Tamar and Mary to Perpetua: Women and the Word in Matthew Catherine Sider Hamilton And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.” Luke 1:46–47 In Luke’s gospel, famously, Mary speaks—and speaks stil , in my own Anglican tradition, every time the Magnificat is sung at Evensong. In Matthew, by contrast, she is silent. “In Matthew,” Andries van Aarde and Yolanda Dreyer say, “Mary quickly recedes into the background.” 1 As commentators universal y note, in Matthew’s birth narrative it is Joseph and not Mary who is the main actor. 2 In Dreyer and van Aarde’s judgment, the Gospel of Matthew as a whole “relegates women to being supporting characters. ”3 Indeed, P. J. J. Botha concludes, in Matthew’s gospel “women characters are demeaned … The gender inflection of the Matthean text is implicitly and explicitly male and it reflects a symbolic universe characterised by this androcentric bias.” 4 And yet from the outset Matthew’s text places a question-mark against this reading.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  One example is the woman who wants to lose weight for health reasons (a mental idea—unable to sustain the goal) and adapts the (emotional) strategy of imaging herself, in a sexy dress, walking into a party and turning heads. Leaving aside the possibility that one of the reasons for the woman’s excessive weight might have been a desire to not have just such attention called to her body, the imaging strategy is a reasonable one. The point here is that conscious deliberation is easily forgotten and buried among the flotsam and jetsam of our daily lives. However, this frailty is sidestepped when sensations and feelings are evoked. Perhaps the reason that “the elephant never forgets” is because her memories are emotional ones. In contrast to volitional memory, emotional memory often operates outside the range of conscious awareness. Rather than holding a verbal idea in our conscious minds (“I have to wait until the meeting on Friday” or “Remember to eat salads for lunch to lose weight”), experiential memory makes use of what have been called somatic markers. 138 These are emotions or physical sensations that inform us about a situation based on past experiences or feelings. Somatic markers might be the fluttering butterflies in our stomachs when we are anxious, the flushing of our cheeks when we are embarrassed, wide-open eyes when we hear an idea that excites us, the relaxation of our body muscles signaling the relief we feel when we complete a crucial task or the lightness and easy breathing we notice when we get something important off our chest. The reason the bodily felt sense has the power to creatively influence our behaviors is precisely because it is involuntary; feelings are not evoked through acts of will. They give us information that does not come from the conscious mind. “Emotional intelligence” and “emotional literacy” communicate through the felt-sense/somatic markers and are vitally important to the conduct of our lives. Indeed, the writer Daniel Goleman 139 claims that it accounts for eighty% of our success in life. However, emotions can also lead us astray. The Merry-Go-Round of Therapy When psychologists talk about change, they often equate it with insight. This assumption, though often subliminal, has had a profound influence on theories and therapies purported to help people deal with “mental” and “emotional” disorders. However, when we investigate this further, we see that understanding, talk and change frequently have little relationship to one other. Woody Allen, asked if he still had his same symptoms, quipped that he was only on his “fifteenth year” of psychoanalysis. If only he had known that the process of change has to do primarily with being able to alter one’s internal feeling states, and that “psychological” problems arise when these states have become habitual or “stuck.” These chronic emotional states in turn dominate our ways of thinking, imagining and behaving. An understanding of how deeply rooted feelings can change is at the core of any effective therapy.

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

  In his 2020 book, Perfectly Confident , Moore makes the point that even if optimism helps you in that situation, there must be limits to how much it helps. Let’s say that sufficiently energetic optimism could help you leap a six-foot crevasse. If it’s a twenty-foot leap, there’s no way you’re better off with optimism than with a realistic calibration of your confidence. And Moore literally has the scars to prove it. He humbly admits, “Believing in myself did not prevent my feet from getting burned on [a] fire walk.” Moore, along with colleagues Elizabeth Tenney of the University of Utah and Jennifer Logg of Georgetown University, has explored whether people actually believe that more optimism will lead to better performance. Their 2015 paper examines performance on a variety of tasks, ranging from math problems to Where’s Waldo? puzzles. The researchers led some participants to be optimistic about their likely performance. When others were asked to guess at how well those participants would do as compared with ones who were not so optimistic, Moore and his colleagues found that people do, indeed, believe in The Little Engine That Could . The people who think they can get up the hill or finish more math problems or find Waldo were rated as more likely to actually do it. This unfettered belief in the power of optimism is, of course, widespread in Silicon Valley, which makes Ron Conway a contrarian in a world where being overly optimistic is not only considered a job requirement for founders but is also actively encouraged. And that ethos is reflected in founders’ actual beliefs. A survey of three thousand entrepreneurs found that 81% of founders put their odds of success at 70% or better and a third of founders put their odds of success at 100%! Given that only about one in ten of the ambitious ventures Conway invests in generates a positive return, that optimism borders on the delusional. Of course, if optimism actually improves performance, delusional confidence might be worth it. If you are in a business where you only have a 10% chance of success, maybe being optimistic improves your chances to 40%. Even if that is far short of the 70% shot you think you have, that boost might be worth the cost of being poorly calibrated. Moore and his colleagues tested just this idea, looking to see if the more-optimistic participants had better performance on the math problems or found Waldo more often. While they did find that more-optimistic people stuck to the tasks longer, the optimists failed to perform measurably better on these tasks than the people who were less optimistic. In other words, they quit later, but to no benefit. What is true for grit is true for optimism. Optimism gets you to stick to things that are worthwhile. But optimism also gets you to stick to things that are no longer worthwhile. And life’s too short to do that.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  THE RICH YOUNG RULER, THE SINNING TAX COLLECTOR, AND THE BEGGING BLIND MAN Luke 18:18–30 tells of a young man, a member of a leading family, who approaches Jesus, asking the question “Good Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” As a former Southern Baptist pastor of a small rural Kentucky church, I used to live for questions like this and had no doubt as to my response. After leading the seeker through “Roman's road to salvation” outlined in Paul's letter to the Romans, I would guide them through a sinner's prayer (similar to the one in Dr. Graham's book); have them walk down the church aisle, make a public profession, and join the church; admonish them to give up drinking and carousing; and get them baptized the following Sunday. Depending on denominational association, this is how many ministers throughout the United States would have answered the question of the young man in Luke. Fortunately, Jesus does not give this response. Jesus does not invite the young aristocrat to repent of his sins and then ask that he allow Jesus to enter into his life in a personal relationship. Instead, Jesus tells him to keep the commandments, which the rich young man confesses he has kept since his earliest days. Then Jesus does the unexpected. Rather than simply accept the young man as a follower, Jesus tells him to sell all that he owns and distribute the money to the poor so as to gain treasures in heaven. Then he can follow Jesus. But when the rich young man heard this, he became full of sadness. As the rich young man walks away, Jesus makes a disturbing pronouncement: “How hard it is for those having riches to enter into the reign of God. For it is easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter into the reign of God” (18:24–25). It appears that for the rich, Jesus determines salvation by how they interact with the poor. It is important to note that the term “poor” does not just refer to a lack of financial resources; instead, “poor” encompasses the inequality and injustice that accompany the lack of access to opportunities that the dominant culture takes for granted as a privileged right. Yet some readers will turn to Ephesians, which clearly states, “For by grace you are being saved, through faith, and this not of yourselves, it is a gift from God; not works, lest anyone should boast” (2:8–9). After all, Isaiah reminds us that “all of our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (64:6). How then can Jesus make the salvation of this rich young aristocrat conditional on his treatment of the poor? Often the dominant culture reconciles this apparent contradiction by employing a metaphoric reading. Such an interpretation recognizes the primary message of the story, which is that Jesus must be the center of every aspect of the life of the believer.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Hotel Room in Iowa City She emails you to tell you that she is staying in a hotel room in Iowa City, and will you come see her? You say no, no, but then you go anyway. She says she is in town to see you, that she wants to be with you, and you bring a box of her things to leave with her but end up staying instead. You scream at her, and cry. At some point, there is a knock on the door. You open it, and a slow-speaking, square-headed Iowa City bro stands on the other side. He has a strange, eerie smile. He says that the two of you should come party with his friends, do you want to come on over? They have booze, and other things. You don’t learn what the other things are, you just close the door. You stand there for a second, then flip the deadbolt. She comes up behind you, to hug you. You pull away so hard you smash into the door. You turn and slide down to the floor and she says, “Shhhh, shhhh,” and you beg her not to touch you, but she does. She leans in to your head. “Did you change your shampoo?” she asks, and you nod because you have. You have sex with her because you don’t know what else to do; you only speak the language of giving yourself up. “This will work,” she says to you as she touches you. “Amber means nothing to me. When I think about her, I feel sick. This will work, I promise. I love you so much.” The morning after, you go to a restaurant next door. A gorgeous baby coos from the adjacent vinyl booth, and it makes you cry so hard the waitress writes with a blue pen on your Styrofoam box of leftovers: Have a beautiful day! Maria. You are startled because she’s written your middle name, and you think to yourself that she’s sending you a message before you realize it is her first name. You take the box of her things back to your car, drive home. A week later—after you’ve convinced yourself that everything is going to be okay and you’ve gotten a new phone—you run into a woman who asks if your girlfriend has found an apartment yet, since she’s been here in town, looking. You are confused, but then later that night, when a friend tells you about a rumor she’s heard through the grad-school grapevine—your girlfriend is dating Amber, back in Indiana—you realize so many things all at once: She is not planning on moving in with you. You have made some bad choices. You call her, tell her what you know. Even here, on this incontrovertible hook, she equivocates so smoothly you can barely see her squirm. It is, she explains, merely complicated. She simply has too many wonderful things in her life; she is having difficulty making sense of it all. “I cannot be an attentive girlfriend while I love someone else,” she says, finally, and then it is over for good.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Wanting to cultivate a more public presence, Eisner decided to revive the old The Wonderful World of Disney , an hourlong television show from the fifties and sixties hosted by Walt Disney himself. This time Eisner would be the host. He was not a natural in front of the camera, but he felt audiences would grow to like him. He could be comforting to children, like Walt himself. In fact, he began to feel the two of them were somehow magically connected, as if he were more than just the head of the corporation but rather the natural son and successor to Walt Disney himself. Despite all his success, however, the old restlessness returned. He needed a new venture, a bigger challenge, and soon he found it. The Walt Disney Company had plans to create a new theme park in Europe. The last one to open, Tokyo Disneyland in 1983, had been a success. Those in charge of theme parks had settled upon two potential sites for the new Disneyland—one near Barcelona, Spain, the other near Paris. Although the Barcelona site made more economic sense, since the weather there was much better, Eisner chose the French site. This was going to be more than a theme park. This was going to be a cultural statement. He would hire the best architects in the world. Unlike the usual fiberglass castles at the other theme parks, at Euro Disney—as it came to be known—the castles would be built out of pink stone and feature handcrafted stained-glass windows with scenes from various fairy tales. It would be a place even snobby French elites would be excited to visit. Eisner loved architecture, and here he could be a modern-day Medici. As the years went by, the cost of Euro Disney mounted. Letting go of his usual obsession with the bottom line, Eisner felt that if he built it right, the crowds would come and the park would eventually pay for itself. But when it finally opened as planned in 1992, it quickly became clear that Eisner had not understood French tastes and vacation habits. The French were not so willing to wait in line for rides, particularly in bad weather. As in the other theme parks, no beer or wine was served on the premises, and that seemed like sacrilege to the French. The hotel rooms were too expensive for a family to stay there more than a night. And despite all the attention to detail, the pink stone castles still looked like kitschy versions of the originals. Attendance was only half of what Eisner had anticipated. The debts Disney had incurred in the construction had ballooned, and the money coming in from visitors could not even service the interest on them. It was shaping up to be a disaster, the first ever in his glorious career. As he finally came to terms with this reality, he decided that Frank Wells was to blame. It was his job to oversee the financial

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

  Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. —Anaïs Nin It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before…to test your limits…to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —Anaïs Nin IT ALWAYS AMAZES ME HOW much people are willing to experiment sexually outside their relationships, yet how tame and puritanical they are at home with their partners. Many of my patients have, by their own account, domestic lives devoid of excitement and eroticism, yet they are consumed and aroused by a richly imaginative sexual life beyond domesticity—affairs, pornography, cybersex, feverish daydreams. For them, sexual love becomes compromised in the making of a family, even a family of two. They numb themselves erotically. Then, having denied themselves freedom, and freedom of imagination, in their relationships, they go outside to reimagine themselves liberated from the constraints of commitment. Security inside, adventure and passion outside. So when the media frantically (yet regularly) announce that couples are not having sex, I can’t help thinking that they may be having plenty of sex, but not with each other. Passion may fuel the initial stages of a relationship, or it may not. Either way, the volatility of passionate eroticism is expected to evolve into a more staid, stable, and manageable alternative: mature love. Even the biochemistry of passion is known to be short-lived. The evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher says that the hormonal cocktail of romance (dopamine, norepineprine, and PEA) is known to last no more than a few years at best. Oxytocin, the cuddling hormone, outlasts them all. The fruits of this ripening love—companionship, deep respect, mutuality, and care—are considered by many to be a fair trade for erotic heat. If attraction and desire were the central actors in your courtship, now they retreat backstage to make way for the main act: building a life together. Eroticism is conspicuously absent from our idea of marriage. Of course, committed couples are expected to have sex, and even to enjoy it these days. Sex solely for the sake of reproduction is, theoretically, passé. But sex and eroticism are not the same, and the lascivious, intimate, ardent, needful, frivolous, erotic sex of lovers becomes rare after the housewarming party. In spite of the sexually saturated media that promise unfettered excitement provided we follow the ten ideas suggested in this week’s issue, there is still some anti-hedonism surrounding domesticated sex. Could it be that we’re inundated with articles about how to make sex hot with our partners because we don’t actually believe it can be hot with our partners? More to the point, could we believe deep down that it’s not supposed to be? Could we believe that regardless of how sexually free we might have been before tying the knot, marriage is no place for the naughtiness of lust?

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Cecil’s great fear was that she would marry the one man whom she had actually fallen in love with, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, a man beneath her in station who would stir up all kinds of dissension and intrigue within the English court. As representatives of different countries pressed their cases, Elizabeth would seem to favor one, then grow cold. If the Spanish were suddenly creating trouble on the Continent, she would begin marriage negotiations with the French to make King Philip II of Spain suddenly fear a French-English alliance and back off, or with Archduke Charles of Austria to strike fear in both the French and Spanish. Year after year she played this game. She confessed to Cecil she had no desire to be a wife, but when Parliament threatened to cut off funds if she did not promise to marry, Elizabeth would soften and negotiate with one of her suitors. Then, once the funds from Parliament had been secured, she would find some other excuse to break off the marriage talk—the prince or king or archduke was too young, too fervently Catholic, not her type, too effeminate, on and on. Not even Dudley could break her resolve and get her to marry him. After a few years of this, his frustration mounting, Cecil finally saw through the game. There was nothing he could do, but at the same time he had come to realize that Queen Elizabeth I was almost certainly a more capable ruler than any of the foreign matches. She was so frugal with expenses that the government was no longer in debt. As Spain and France ruined themselves with endless wars, Elizabeth prudently kept England out of the conflicts, and soon the country was prospering. Although she was Protestant, she treated the English Catholics well, and the bitter feelings from the religious wars a decade before were now mostly gone. “There was never so wise a woman born as Queen Elizabeth,” he would later write, and so he eventually dropped the marriage issue, and the country itself slowly became used to the idea of the Virgin Queen, married to her subjects. Over the years, however, one issue would continue to eat away at the people’s affection for the queen, and even made Cecil begin to doubt her competence: the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, cousin to Elizabeth. Mary was a staunch Catholic, while Scotland had become largely Protestant. Mary was next in line to be Queen of England, and many Catholics asserted that Mary was in fact the rightful queen. The Scots themselves came to despise Mary for her religious sentiments, for her adulterous affairs, and for her apparent implication in the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley.

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

  their expected value over all those days and all those hands. That’s what they mean by one long game. This mantra is meant to help expert players overcome the sunk cost fallacy, expressed in poker as wanting to protect the money you’ve already invested in a single hand by not folding, or not wanting to quit a game when you’re in the losses. Of course, what applies to poker applies to life as well. We all need this kind of reminder because of a quirk in our mental accounting. When we start something, whether it’s putting money into the pot in a hand of poker, or starting a relationship or a job, or buying a stock, we open up a mental account. When we exit that thing, whether it’s folding a hand, or leaving a relationship or job, or selling the stock, we close that mental account. It turns out that we just don’t like to close mental accounts in the losses. If we’re losing in a hand of poker, we don’t want to fold because that means we have to realize the loss of the money we put in the pot. If we’re losing in a poker game, we don’t want to quit because it means that we have to leave with less money than we started with. If we’re in a relationship or a job, we don’t want to walk away because we’ll feel like we will have wasted or lost all the time and effort that we put in. Of course, that’s irrational. What really matters is maximizing your expected value across all the things you start, across all of your mental accounts. If you’re investing in a number of stocks, some are going to win and some are going to lose. What matters is whether you’re winning across your whole portfolio not whether any one investment is up or down. But that’s not how we naturally think. We don’t think about the whole portfolio of stocks we own. Each is associated with its own mental account that we don’t want to close out unless we are in the gains. What’s true for one stock or one hand of poker is just as true for an individual decision or a project, or climbing a mountain, or opening a discount store in a converted chicken coop. When we start any of these things, we open a mental account. When things start going poorly, we don’t want to quit because we don’t like to close accounts in the losses. This is why poker players remind themselves that poker is one long game. We would all do well to remember that life is one long game as well.

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

  When Carla and Leo came to see me, she was at her wit’s end. They’d been together seventeen years: the first six a frenzy of the flesh, the next four the chaos of babyhood, the last seven a sexual desert. She went from talking to pleading to screaming to compensating. She had a number of flings and then a serious affair. He found out, she threatened divorce, he suggested therapy, and here they are. She says, “I am so sick of the excuses. It’s his work, it’s the stress, it’s his dying father, he has to get up early, he hasn’t been to the gym and so he doesn’t have the energy, his back hurts, it’s my breath, it’s my weight, it’s his weight. I took it personally for so long, but now I’m done. I love this man, I’m prepared to stay, but I can’t live like this.” He says, “I always considered myself to be very competent sexually. We kid around that we broke furniture when we first started dating; there was a lot of passion. I never looked at the kids as a defining moment in my life sexually, but obviously something switched somewhere deep inside.” I learn that Leo had begun to withdraw physically when Carla became pregnant with their first son, and they had no sexual contact at all during the last trimester. Leo just came home later and later from work. Carla knew something was up, though they never discussed it openly. “What changed for you when she became a mother?” I ask. “Her significance,” he answers. “Her whole being turned from being my lover, my partner, and my wife to being the mother of my son. And then the mother of my other son. For a while they needed her completely, and that was really OK with me. I thought it was the most awesome thing in the world to have our babies sleeping next to us, for her to nurse them through the night. I wasn’t jealous at all. I’m a very loving, nurturing father myself.” “What’s it like to suck the breast of a woman who’s been nursing a baby?” I ask him. “It was weird,” he answered. “The whole physical thing was a little weird. I watched her give birth, twice, and I’ve got to say it was not so great for our sex life.” “I know it’s supposed to be this magical moment, the miracle of life and all that, but no one seems to want to acknowledge the yuck factor,” I reassure him. “It’s not politically correct for a man to admit that watching his wife give birth can be gross. There’s a character in one of Alice Walker’s books, I think it’s Mr. Hal, who watches his partner give birth and is never able to touch her—or any other woman—for the rest of his life. He says he never wants to put someone through that again.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Lesson 6: Never Send to Know for Whom the Bell Tolls One day, in the fourth year of therapy, Irene arrived carrying a large portfolio. She put it on the floor, slowly unbuckled it, and pulled out a big canvas, keeping its back toward me so I couldn’t see it. “Did I tell you I was taking art lessons?” she asked in an uncharacteristically playful manner. “No. First I’ve heard of it. But I think that’s great.” And I did. I took no umbrage that she mentioned it en passant; every therapist is used to patients’ forgetting to mention the good things in their lives. Perhaps it’s simply a misunderstanding, a mistaken assumption by patients that since therapy is pathology-oriented, therapists want to hear only about problems. Other patients, however, who are dependent upon therapy choose to conceal positive developments lest their therapists conclude that they no longer need help. Now, taking a breath, Irene flipped the canvas. Before me gleamed a still life, a simple wooden bowl containing a lemon, an orange, and an avocado. While impressed with her graphic skills, I felt disappointed in her subject matter, so flat and pointless. I would have hoped for something more relevant to our work. But I feigned interest and was convincingly enthusiastic in my praise. Not as convincing as I had thought, I soon learned. In the next session she announced, “I’m signing up for another six months of art lessons.” “That’s wonderful. Same teacher?” “Yes, same teacher, same class.” “You mean a still-life class?” “You’re hoping not, I think. Obviously there’s something you’re not sharing.” “Like what?” I began to feel uncomfortable. “What’s your hunch?” “I see I’ve hit on something.” Irene grinned. “Almost never do you fall back on the traditional shrink practice of answering a question with a question.” “Never miss a trick, Irene. Okay, the truth is that I had two very different feelings about the painting.” Here I invoked a practice I always teach my students: when two opposing feelings put you in a dilemma, your best recourse is to express both feelings and the dilemma. “First, as I said, I admired it greatly. I have absolutely no artistic talent and am filled with respect for work of such quality.” I hesitated, and Irene nudged me: “But—” “But—well—uh—I’m so pleased with your finding pleasure in painting that I dread sounding even slightly critical, but I guess I was hoping that you might do something with your art that might be more—uh—how to put it?—resonant with our therapy.” “Resonant?”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  must consciously develop, because we humans are generally inept when it comes to such assessments. The general source of our ineptness is that we tend to base our judgments of people on what is most apparent. But as stated earlier, people often try to cover up their weaknesses by presenting them as something positive. We see them brimming with self-confidence, only to later discover that they are actually arrogant and incapable of listening. They seem frank and sincere, but over time we realize that they are actually boorish and unable to consider the feelings of others. Or they seem prudent and thoughtful, but eventually we see that they are in fact timid at their core and afraid of the slightest criticism. People can be quite adept at creating these optical illusions, and we fall for them. Similarly, people will charm and flatter us and, blinded by our desire to like them, we fail to look deeper and see the character flaws. Related to this, when we look at people we often are really seeing only their reputation, the myth that surrounds them, the position they occupy, and not the individual. We come to believe that a person who has success must by nature be generous, intelligent, and good, and that they deserve everything they have gotten. But successful people come in all shapes. Some are good at using others to get where they have gotten, masking their own incompetence. Some are completely manipulative. Successful people have just as many character flaws as anyone else. Also, we tend to believe that someone who adheres to a particular religion or political belief system or moral code must have the character to go with this. But people bring the character they have to the position they occupy or to the religion they practice. A person can be a progressive liberal or a loving Christian and still be an intolerant tyrant at heart. The first step, then, in studying character is to be aware of these illusions and façades and to train ourselves to look through them. We must scrutinize everybody for signs of their character, no matter the appearance they present or the position they occupy. With this firmly in mind, we can then work on several key components to the skill: recognizing certain signs that people emit in certain situations and that clearly reveal their character; understanding some general categories that people fit into (strong versus weak character, for instance), and finally being aware of certain types of characters that often are the most toxic and should be avoided if possible. Character Signs The most significant indicator of people’s character comes through their actions over time. Despite what people say about the lessons they have learned (see Howard Hughes), and how they have changed over the years, you will inevitably notice the same actions and decisions repeating in the course of their life. In these decisions they reveal their character. You must take notice of any salient forms

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I don’t know where a dump is, and I don’t know how long it takes to get back from one. A car pulls up to the curb, stops, and one of my girl cousins gets out holding a sack. Aunt Bernie and my other cousin stay in the car. My mother hangs up the phone and goes to the door while Bernice and I watch each other through the glass. “We went to the store and this is for Jo-Jo,” my cousin says when she hands the sack over. She’s been crying. “We didn’t get anything!” she bursts out. My mother sends her into the kitchen for cookies. “One for you, one for your sister, and none for your mom,” she tells her. She holds up the sack and calls, “You didn’t have to do this!” to Bernie, who rolls down her window. “You’re raising a brat!” she hollers. My mother laughs and shakes her fist in the air. The girl cousin goes back down the sidewalk and triumphantly shows her mother the cookies before getting in. They pull away from the curb and my mother waves as they head down the street, then says, “I’d like to slap that mouth right off her face.” Linda and Pattyann come into view on the other side of the street. They look both ways and then hop across the street on one foot. “I can’t wait to see what’s in here,” my mother says brightly, setting the sack on the coffee table. She checks all her pockets, looking for her lighter, then puts a cigarette in her mouth and heads to the kitchen to light it on the stove. They got that sack at the store. Outside, a lady is walking by with a dog, and Linda and Pattyann pet the dog so fervently the lady has to pull him away and keep going. The sack is folded over at the top and it’s pretty big but not that big. Linda and Pattyann start playing hopscotch on the front sidewalk, using soda crackers for markers. My mother is all excited about the sack. She sits down with her ashtray and pats the couch next to her. I climb up and then lie down with my eyes closed. She can’t figure out why we aren’t more curious about our new present. It must be something very special or they wouldn’t have brought it all the way over here. You know, there just might be something inside that will make Jo-Jo forget her troubles. So. Is somebody ready to go down for her nap, or is she ready to sit up here right now and see what’s in the sack? It’s a box with a picture of girl on it. She’s wearing an apron over her dress and a pearl necklace. Her hair is curled and she has lipstick on. Inside the box are a broom, a dustpan, and a vacuum cleaner. “Christ,” my mother snorts.