Relief

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 In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  What saved me from developing these symptoms was the ability to bring down my fight-or-flight activation by discharging the immense survival energy through spontaneous trembling. This contained discharge, along with my awareness of the self-protective impulse to move my arms and shield my head, helped return my organism to equilibrium. I was able to surrender to these powerful sensations while remaining fully aware of my spontaneous bodily reactions, and with the pediatrician’s steady presence and “holding of the space,” I could restore my nervous system to equilibrium. By staying aware while “tracking” my spontaneous bodily reactions and feelings,‡ I was able to begin the process of moving through and out of the biological shock reaction. It is this innate capacity for self-regulation that let me regain my vital balance and restored me to sanity. This capacity for self-regulation holds the key for our modern survival—survival beyond the brutal grip of anxiety, panic, night terrors, depression, physical symptoms and helplessness that are the earmarks of prolonged stress and trauma. However, in order to experience this restorative faculty, we must develop the capacity to face certain uncomfortable and frightening physical sensations and feelings without becoming overwhelmed by them. This book is about how we develop that capacity. Shake, Rattle and Roll … Shiver, Quiver and QuakeThe shaking and trembling I experienced while lying on the ground and in the ambulance are a core part of the innate process that reset my nervous system and helped restore my psyche to wholeness. Without it I would have surely suffered dearly. Had I not been aware of the vital purpose of my body’s strange and strong sensations and gyrations, I might have been frightened by these powerful reactions and braced against them. Fortunately, I knew better. I once described, to Andrew Bwanali, park biologist of the Mzuzu Environmental Center in Malawi, Central Africa, the spontaneous shaking, trembling and breathing that I and thousands of my therapy clients have exhibited in sessions as they recover from trauma. He nodded excitedly, then burst out, “Yes … yes … yes! This is true. Before we release captured animals back into the wild, we try to be sure that they have done just what you have described.” He looked down at the ground and then added softly, “If they have not trembled and breathed that way [deep spontaneous breaths] before they are released, they will likely not survive in the wild … they will die.” His comment reinforces the importance of the ambulance paramedic’s questioning the routine suppression of these reactions in medical settings.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Thus, it soothed and helped to stabilize my organism just enough so that I could experience the difficult sensations and take steps toward restoring my balance and equanimity. What Goes Up … Can Come Down In 1998, Arieh Shalev carried out a simple and important study in Israel, a country where trauma is all too common. 2 Dr. Shalev noted the heart rates of patients seen in the emergency room (ER) of a Jerusalem hospital. These data were easy to collect, as charting the vital signs of anyone admitted to the ER is standard procedure. Of course, most patients are upset and have a high heart rate when they are first admitted to the ER, since they are most likely there as victims of some terrifying incident such as a bus bombing or motor vehicle accident. What Shalev discovered was that a patient whose heart rate had returned to near normal by the time of discharge from the ER was unlikely to develop posttraumatic stress disorder. On the other hand, one whose heart rate was still elevated upon leaving was highly likely to develop PTSD in the following weeks or months. † Thus, in my accident, I felt profound relief when the paramedic in the ambulance gave me the vital signs that indicated my heart rate had returned to normal. Briefly, heart rate is a direct window into the autonomic (involuntary) branch of our nervous system. A racing heart is part of body and mind readying for the survival actions of fight-or-flight mediated by the sympathetic-adrenal nervous system (please see Diagram A after this page for a detailed depiction of the physiological pathways underlying the classic fight or flight response). Simply, when you perceive threat, your nervous system and body prepare you to kill or to take evasive countermeasures to escape, usually by running away. This preparation for action was absolutely essential on the ancient savannahs, and it is “discharged” or “used up” by all-out, meaningful action. In my case, however, lying injured on the road and then in the confines of the ambulance and the ER—where action was simply not an option—could have entrapped me. My global activation was “all dressed up with nowhere to go.” If, rather than fulfilling its motoric mission in effective action, the preparation for action was interfered with or had lain dormant, it would have posed a great potential to trigger a later expression as the debilitating symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. What saved me from developing these symptoms was the ability to bring down my fight-or-flight activation by discharging the immense survival energy through spontaneous trembling.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The other direction is harder to take, but it is the only path that leads to true power and the formation of a superior character. It works in the following manner: You examine yourself as thoroughly as possible. You look at the deepest layers of your character, determining whether you are an introvert or extrovert, whether you tend to be governed by high levels of anxiety and sensitivity, or hostility and anger, or a profound need to engage with people. You look at your primal inclinations—those subjects and activities you are naturally drawn to. You examine the quality of attachments you formed with your parents, looking at your current relationships as the best sign of this. You look with rigorous honesty at your own mistakes and the patterns that continually hold you back. You know your limitations—those situations in which you do not do your best. You also become aware of the natural strengths in your character that have survived past adolescence. Now, with this awareness, you are no longer the captive of your character, compelled to endlessly repeat the same strategies and mistakes. As you see yourself falling into one of your usual patterns, you can catch yourself in time and step back. You may not be able to completely eliminate such patterns, but with practice you can mitigate their effects. Knowing your limitations, you will not try your hand at things for which you have no capacity or inclination. Instead, you will choose career paths that suit you and mesh with your character. In general, you accept and embrace your character. Your desire is not to become someone else but to be more thoroughly yourself, realizing your true potential. You see your character as the clay that you will work with, slowly transforming your very weaknesses into strengths. You do not run away from your flaws but rather see them as a true source of power. Look at the career of the actress Joan Crawford (1908–1977). Her earliest years would seem to mark her as someone extremely unlikely to make it in life. She never knew her father, who abandoned the family shortly after her birth. She grew up in poverty. Her mother actively disliked Joan and constantly beat her. As a child she learned that the stepfather she adored was not really her father, and shortly thereafter he too abandoned the family. Her childhood was an endless series of punishments, betrayals, and abandonments, which scarred her for life.

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

  And I had done a lot of convincing of people to come work on this project, to leave whatever they were working on before, quit their job, get poorly paid in exchange for equity. . . .” Despite all this, he knew quitting was the right decision. He told his investors, “I think I knew this six weeks ago and I mistook denial for prudence (in the sense of making sure that we didn’t give up too early). But there are just too many things in the ‘against’ column.” To everybody else, it felt like he was quitting too soon. But to Stewart Butterfield, peeking into the future, he recognized that maybe he hadn’t quit soon enough. After he explained his reasoning to the others, it is unclear whether or not he persuaded them to see what he saw. But it didn’t much matter. If he was no longer on board, there was no point in continuing. Most people in that position would not do what Butterfield did. Despite everything that makes sticking the easier choice—his years of commitment to the project, the encouraging recent results, his cofounders and investors wanting to continue, the pain he felt at having to follow through on this decision and what that meant for his employees—he was able to quit. This may seem like an unhappy ending. Butterfield was so passionate about his concept of a collaborative multiplayer game that he devoted a decade to trying to make it happen. Now he had fallen short for a second time. But quitting effectively, when the context warrants it, ought to be the definition of a happy ending. It is just hard for us to see it that way because we process quitting as failure. Stewart Butterfield saw that he had a losing hand and he decided to fold before he had burned through Tiny Speck’s remaining capital. He stopped the company from throwing $6 million at a bad investment, freeing that money up to invest in other things that would be more likely to win. He also spared Tiny Speck’s employees from being trapped in a failing business, working for little money and the promise of equity, by promptly acting when he determined that equity wouldn’t be worth their effort. These things were good for Butterfield, good for his investors and cofounders, and good for his employees. Shouldn’t we view that as a happy ending on its own? This raises another valuable lesson about quitting. When you quit, you live to fight another day, sometimes literally. Hutchison, Taske, and Kasischke, by turning around, lived to continue with the rest of their lives. When poker players fold a hand, they are cutting their losses so they have chips to invest in another, better hand. If they walk away from the table when they’re not playing well, they don’t go broke and leave themselves without a bankroll to play in another game where they have a better chance to win.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  This kind of playful social engagement is possible only when the ventral vagal system, discussed in Chapter 6 , is online.) She fiddles with the equipment and then indicates that it might be a false reading. A minute or two later she tells me that my heart rate is 74 and my blood pressure is 125/70. “What were my readings when you first hooked me up?” I ask. “Well, your heart rate was 150. The guy who took it before we came said it was about 170.” I breathe a deep sigh of relief. “Thank you,” I say, then add: “Thank God, I won’t be getting PTSD.” “What do you mean?” she asks with genuine curiosity. “Well, I mean that I probably won’t be getting posttraumatic stress disorder.” When she still looks perplexed, I explain how my shaking and following my self-protective responses had helped me to “reset” my nervous system and brought me back into my body. “This way,” I go on, “I am no longer in fight-or-flight mode.” “Hmm,” she comments, “is that why accident victims sometimes struggle with us—are they still in fight-or-flight?” “Yes, that’s right.” “You know,” she adds, “I’ve noticed that they often purposely stop people from shaking when we get them to the hospital. Sometimes they strap them down tight or give them a shot of Valium. Maybe that’s not so good?” “No, it’s not,” the teacher in me confirms. “It may give them temporary relief, but it just keeps them frozen and stuck. ” She tells me that she recently took a course in “trauma first-aid” called Critical Incident Debriefing. “They tried it with us at the hospital. We had to talk about how we felt after an accident. But talking made me and the other paramedics feel worse. I couldn’t sleep after we did it—but you weren’t talking about what happened. You were, it seemed to me, just shaking.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  You will train yourself to discern their insecurities and never inadvertently stir them up. You will think in terms of their self- interest and the self-opinion they need validated. Understanding the permeability of emotions, you will learn that the most effective means of influence is to alter your moods and attitude. People are responding to your energy and demeanor even more than to your words. You will get rid of any defensiveness on your part. Instead, feeling relaxed and genuinely interested in the other person will have a positive and hypnotic effect. You will learn that as a leader your best means of moving people in your direction lies in setting the right tone through your attitude, empathy, and work ethic. Fifth, the Laws will make you realize how deeply the forces of human nature operate within you, giving you the power to alter your own negative patterns. Our natural response to reading or hearing about the darker qualities in human nature is to exclude ourselves. It is always the other person who is narcissistic, irrational, envious, grandiose, aggressive, or passive-aggressive. We almost always see ourselves as having the best intentions. If we go astray, it is the fault of circumstances or people forcing us to react negatively. The Laws will make you stop once and for all this self-deluding process. We are all cut from the same cloth, and we all share the same tendencies. The sooner you realize this, the greater your power will be in overcoming these potential negative traits within you. You will examine your own motives, look at your own shadow, and become aware of your own passive-aggressive tendencies. This will make it that much easier to spot such traits in others. You will also become humbler, realizing you’re not superior to others in the way you had imagined. This will not make you feel guilty or weighed down by your self-awareness, but quite the opposite. You will accept yourself as a complete individual, embracing both the good and the bad, dropping your falsified self- image as a saint. You will feel relieved of your hypocrisies and free to be more yourself. People will be drawn to this quality in you. Sixth, the Laws will transform you into a more empathetic individual, creating deeper and more satisfying bonds with the people around you. We humans are born with a tremendous potential for understanding people on a level that is not merely intellectual. It is a power developed by our earliest ancestors, in which they learned how to intuit the moods and feelings of others by placing themselves in their perspective. The Laws will instruct you in how to bring out this latent power to the highest degree possible. You will learn to slowly cut off your incessant interior monologue and listen more closely. You will train yourself to assume the other’s viewpoint as best you can.

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

  Well before his conflict with Neusner, Sanders challenged age-old Christian readings of Judaism, but he did so by exploring how its “members” understood their place in this “religion.” 37 Against long-standing Protestant imaginings, he compellingly argued, Jews were not worried about earning their God’s favor, or membership in Judaism. As he famously put it: “A pattern of religion … is the description of how a religion is perceived by its adherents to function … of how getting in and staying in are understood: the way in which a religion is understood to admit and retain members is considered to be the way it ‘functions.’ ” Jews were in by free divine election or choice, not by their efforts to gain entry. They kept the laws (covenant obligations) as a function of membership in this religious system, failure being remedied by repentance and atonement. Whereas Sanders was concerned to clarify how one got in and stayed in, it was only a matter of time before others would take up the corresponding phenomenon of leaving the religion of Judaism.38 Such questions would not arise, however, if one did not impose “Judaism” on first-century texts and real-life conditions. We could then breathe fresher air and spare ourselves the stress of having to fit real people in a fictional category. Let us try a thought experiment. What would happen if we took a leaf from Martin Goodman’s magisterial Rome and Jerusalem, which methodical y compares these two “ancient civilizations, ”39 and applied our linguistic habit for speaking of Judaea to Rome? Could we ask: “How did one get in and stay in Romism?” Or, “How did one leave Romism?” Such questions would seem absurd, and no one asks them. Why, then, should we not study Judaeans, their mother- polis, lawgiver, laws, customs, and individual characters such as Paul in the way we study other contemporary cultures, using the categories familiar to ancient writers? The lexical categories known to Paul and his contemporaries, which had been around for centuries, permitted practical y infinite individual variation. One belonged to a birth group ( genos, ethnos) that had its peculiar laws and customs but humanity was gloriously diverse, a point that many writers from Herodotus to Julian celebrated. How individual Persians, Romans, or Spartans behaved in relation to their ancestral 35 See Aaron W. Hughes, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2016), 48, 106–8, 137, 145–7. 36 E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (London: SCM, 1992). 37 E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London: SCM, 1977), 17. 38 Stephen G. Wilson, Leaving the Fold: Apostates and Defectors in Antiquity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2004). 39 Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London: Penguin, 2007). 22 22 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles

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

  Yet, around midnight (which is when summit day begins), there they were, part of what was now an unusually large group of thirty-four, setting out from Camp 4 at the same time. Hutchison, Taske, and Kasischke had gotten stuck at the back of the pack, behind some climbers from that group. Those climbers were slow and difficult to pass because they were clumped together, which was a problem since you have to go much of the way along a single fixed rope (experienced climbers know to spread out to allow faster climbers to pass). Also stuck with them was Adventure Consultant’s expedition leader, whom Hutchison asked at one point how long it would be until they reached the summit. The reply was about three hours. At that point, the expedition leader started climbing faster, trying to get past the clump of incompetent climbers in front of them. Hutchison held Taske and Kasischke back for a talk. Looking at their watches, it was nearly 11:30 a.m. They’d been climbing for almost twelve hours. All three climbers remembered that their expedition leader said back at Base Camp that 1 p.m. would be the turnaround time on summit day. Hutchison announced his opinion: Their summit attempt was done. It would be well past 1 p.m. when they reached the summit, even accounting for wiggle room. They all understood that the turnaround time was meant to protect them from the dangers during the descent. Because of the harshness of the environment at 26,000 feet and above, a likely enough outcome of most of those dangers was, obviously, death. Taske agreed to turn back, but Kasischke was reluctant to quit. He needed to summit Everest to complete the last of “Seven Summits,” climbing the highest mountain on every continent. Achieving the Seven Summits requires a significant expenditure of time and money. Several of the peaks are in remote, difficult-to-reach areas. (If you think it’s hard to get to Everest, try planning a trip to the Vinson Massif, the highest point in Antarctica.) Quitting would mean giving up on that goal for at least a year. Hutchison and Taske managed to persuade Kasischke and, at 11:30 a.m., they gave up on their summit attempt. They turned around and made it—safely, uneventfully—back to Camp 4 and, later, off the mountain. It’s probably obvious to you why this isn’t a famous story. It’s pretty uneventful, after all. The heroes of our story got within three hours of the summit of Mount Everest, followed the rules, and abandoned their summit attempt. They never faced the brink of death. Instead, they turned around and lived. It feels anticlimactic. Not the stuff movies are made of. But the funny thing is that if you’ve read books about Everest or seen any of the movies, I’d be willing to bet that you have already heard the story of Hutchison, Taske, and Kasischke. It’s just that you don’t remember them.

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

  For Paul, however, as important as it was to affirm this, it did not resolve the question of his political identity. Conclusion: Letting the Cat Out of the Bag The question therefore becomes, once again, why Paul’s earthly identity as someone who obviously was “carnal y” Ioudaios did not remain his only identity. In other words, why did the early Christian apostle eventual y welcome or acknowledge and continue to explore another possible identity for himself in excess of his ancestral one? Obviously not everyone who, like Paul, was Ioudaios did this. But, for some reason, Paul did, claiming for himself in addition a “heavenly citizenship” whose most notable effect would be to render Paul’s earthly (ancestral) identity neither irrelevant nor nugatory but decidedly displaced from center stage. I would argue—very schematical y—that the main reason why Paul’s ancestral identity did not remain the only self he knew had everything to do with Paul’s “subaltern” social status. Finding himself also “in Christ” was appealing because it provided a way out of some of the constraints and deprivations that otherwise evidently had marked his al too earthly flesh. These constraints and deprivations, just to be clear, had nothing to do with being Ioudaios. But, like that ancestral identity, those constraints and deprivations also were a function of Paul’s earthly flesh. By contrast, the experience of “Christ” was understood by Paul to take him out of the regime of the flesh into another possible mode of existence, which Paul described as having a “heavenly” nature, not least of al because it entailed, for Paul, an experience of “spirit” ( pneuma; see, e.g., Gal 3:2). The problem now becomes what exactly Paul’s subaltern “flesh” had known together with its evident “Jewishness.” Once more, this problem has nothing specifical y to do with “Jewishness” as such since for Paul the possession of this kind of “flesh” was effectively synonymous with his own existence as a human being on the face of the earth. But evidently that flesh did not describe or circumscribe for Paul the only kind of life that also a human body of this kind could and ought to be able to know. 36

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

  Admiral McRaven offered a unique, high-stakes application of this concept of states and dates when describing the planning for Operation Neptune Spear, the raid on Osama bin Laden. The operation was broken down into 162 phases. Each phase told you what state you would have to achieve to continue, and what state you might be in that would cause you to quit during that phase. Because this was all planned out in advance, it left McRaven, as he told me, with only about five command decisions he might have to make on the fly once the mission had commenced and they were already in it. He gave two examples of the criteria that would cause them to kill the mission. If at any point they fell an hour behind schedule, they would abort. Or, if they discovered that, at any time up to 50% of the way to bin Laden’s compound, they had been detected and compromised by the Pakistani government, they would turn around. If they were compromised beyond the 50% mark, that would be a command decision McRaven would have to make on the fly. The raid, of course, was a success and McRaven never had to exercise the kill criteria. But that’s not true of all missions. A famous example is “Operation Eagle Claw,” the 1980 attempt during the Carter administration to rescue American hostages being held by Iran. One of the kill criteria set for the operation was that if the aircraft inventory fell below six operational helicopters (owing to mechanical troubles, accidents, or other causes), they would abort the mission. They sent eight helicopters to the first staging area, but only five arrived operational, triggering that kill criterion, so they aborted. Had they not set such conditions in advance, one can easily imagine how difficult it would be in the moment, with the stakes so high, to make the decision to abandon the attempt. The importance of thinking about states and dates in setting kill criteria in advance has been developed and tested in situations with the highest possible stakes, affecting large numbers of people and gigantic, world-changing decisions. But the concepts are broadly applicable to your personal decisions, where you are trying to spend your resources on things that matter and avoid pedestal-building when you ought to be quitting. Kevin Zollman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a game theory philosopher, offered up an excellent example of states and dates as it applies to seeking academic jobs. There are relatively few tenure-track positions for those who have earned PhDs in the humanities. That limited supply is pretty well known, and not likely to change by much. There are two big problems a newly minted PhD faces in their quest for a tenure-track position that make setting out kill criteria in advance of their search crucial. The first is that, within the humanities, leaving academics is considered a one-way decision. If you choose to quit academia, it’s incredibly hard to go back.

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

  Indeed, those are the same obstacles that we all have to overcome. Obstacles like sunk cost, the ten years of time and effort she’d put into pursuing her degree. Her endowment to the research programs she had created and conducted, as well as all the awards, fellowships, and degrees she had earned along the way. What came along with those degrees was a PhD after her name, which was very much a part of her identity. Dr. Maya Shankar. I suspect that one of the reasons she was able to walk away and overcome all those things gaffing the scale was that her previous experience with forced quitting had taught her that whenever you’re pursuing a goal, there are always other opportunities you’re neglecting. You simply don’t see them because you’re not looking for them. Having quit, she was once again in a position of having to figure out what to do next. There was no easy or natural next move for Shankar. As she told me, “What does a postdoc in cognitive neuroscience do when you realize you don’t want to be an academic or become a general management consultant? The paths were not obvious.” At a wedding, she ran into her adviser from Yale, Dr. Laurie Santos, and they arranged to meet for tea. Santos told her about incredible work in applied behavioral economics that was happening in the government, specifically using the power of defaults to encourage positive behavior. These defaults are known as nudges, made famous in the bestseller Nudge , by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Santos connected Shankar to Sunstein, who introduced her to President Obama’s science advisor, Tom Kalil, deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. She pitched Kalil the idea of creating a new position for her, putting together a team of behavioral science experts to advise federal agencies on policies based on behavioral insights. He liked her ideas and hired her as a senior behavioral science adviser. She initially had no budget, no mandate, and no team. But within a year, she had put together a cross-agency group of behavioral scientists, policy experts, and program makers, founding and chairing the White House’s first-ever Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. When Obama left office in January 2017, Shankar also departed, moving on to become Google’s global director of behavioral science. In 2021, she also became the creator, host, and executive producer of the podcast “A Slight Change of Plans ,” no doubt inspired by the significant, far-from-slight changes in her own plans. Maya Shankar’s career has been punctuated by abrupt changes and, whether she was forced to quit or quit voluntarily, she has more than landed on her feet. Obviously, things don’t always work out that well. A torn tendon doesn’t always end up with a Rhodes scholarship. Walking away from academics doesn’t always end up with a job in the White House or a senior position at Google.

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

  competed in the 2010 U.S. Championships. She needed a top-two finish to qualify for the Vancouver Olympics, but finished fourth. She was finally done with figure skating, though it was more through circumstances than choice. The competitive window for female figure skaters closes at twenty-five. She aged out, which she “didn’t interpret as quitting. It just seemed like I’m free.” Although her skating career is in her distant past, her legacy remains. Because of her 2006 silver medal, which extended the streak of U.S. success in women’s figure skating to eleven consecutive Olympics, she remains, as of 2022, the last American woman to earn an Olympic singles figure skating medal. After she was forced to quit skating, she created a happy life for herself. At twenty-six, she started college, fifteen years after her last time in a classroom. She earned her degree from Columbia University in 2016, the same year she was inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame. She became an investment manager at Morgan Stanley, married, and is mother to two children, born in January 2020 and August 2021. There is a lot to be learned about quitting from Sasha Cohen’s story. There is the obvious accumulation of sunk costs from all the time, money, and effort devoted to her career, both by herself and her family. There was loss aversion and an inability (until she was forced) to visualize her life on the other side. But as we will explore in section III, there are broader lessons from her experience having to do with identity. Sasha Cohen had much in common with many others in this book, including the climbers trying to reach the summit of Everest, like the late Doug Hansen: so much already devoted to the endeavor, the emphasis on an all-or-nothing goal, and a feeling that coming close was a failure that had to be addressed by trying again. In large part, we are what we do, and our identity is closely connected with whatever we’re focused on, including our careers, relationships, projects, and hobbies. When we quit any of those things, we have to deal with the prospect of quitting part of our identity. And that is painful. SECTION III Identity and Other Impediments CHAPTER 7

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

  That meant that a lot of commuters were forced to explore alternate routes. So what happened when many of these commuters, just for those two days, had to find a new way to get to work? Shaun Larcom of Cambridge, with colleagues Ferdinand Rauch of Oxford and Tim Willems of the International Monetary Fund, looked at the data to find out the answer to this forced-quitting question. What they found was that, prior to the strike, a lot of people had been taking the long way to work. It might seem surprising that so many commuters had not found the shortest possible route, but one look at the London Underground map and you can understand why. The map is clearly not drawn to scale. Its simplicity, orderliness, and symmetry have made it one of the world’s most recognizable transit maps, but it’s impossible to use as a means of comparing the distance or time from point A to point B on different lines. When this big disruption happened, 70% of commuters had to find a new route to work for those two days. After the strike ended, about 5% stuck with the new commute they had discovered. Those people reduced their travel time, on average, by more than six minutes per journey. Given an average journey of thirty-two minutes, those who permanently switched cut their commuting time by approximately 20%, meaning they saved twelve minutes a day, a full hour a week, and four hours a month. Those alternate routes were right under those commuters’ noses the whole time. But it took being forced to quit their usual way to work for them to explore a better one. Imagine how many more people might have made a switch if the strike had lasted longer and they had to explore for more than two days. That’s a valuable lesson in why we should be exploring even if we’re not forced to. Many Londoners apparently learned that lesson because, in addition to the 5% who permanently switched, the researchers found that even after the strike there was increased exploration of alternatives among commuters. Having had the experience of being forced to quit, the commuters started behaving more like ants. Just One DayMike Neighbors is a legendary women’s college basketball coach. In his first eight seasons as head coach (2013 through 2021), including four years at the University of Washington and four at the University of Arkansas, his accomplishments are nearly unmatched by NCAA Division I coaches of that tenure: 176 wins (second all time) and six players drafted into the WNBA, which no other coach has achieved within that period. Coach Neighbors attributes a lot of his success to quitting. After more than a decade of working his way through the ranks at several schools as an assistant coach, he finally got his chance as a head coach at the University of Washington in 2013.

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

  Do you find it fulfilling? Is there something else that would make you happier? It might seem that people would ask themselves those questions all the time, but it often takes being forced to walk away for people to take a second look. Third, when you’re currently employed, you have a mental account open. Being forced to quit caused all those people to close those accounts. We know that when you have an account open, it’s difficult to walk away. You feel like a failure, that you fell short, or that you gave up. There are so many cognitive forces working against you. But when there was this mass layoff, those people who were forced to quit got to close those mental accounts, wiping the slate clean. When that happens to you, your katamari goes back to being a small clump. Now you’re more like the ants entering a new territory, exploring the area to see what’s there. Relieved by forced quitting of all that debris, it was easier for those who lost their jobs to ask themselves, “How much do I really like what I’m doing?” It was also easier for them to rationally answer that question, especially because they were essentially forced to explore alternatives. A lot of people found out that they didn’t want to keep doing the thing they were doing, and they wanted to switch to new opportunities. Of course, you can only switch to something new if there are opportunities to switch to, and alongside the Great Resignation was the Great Reopening. When things opened back up, that came with record job creation. For those people who had wanted to switch, there were lots of opportunities to switch to. The Great Reopening essentially created a more diversified portfolio of opportunities for people who were looking for them. This greatly accelerated growth in new jobs occurred across many industries, but the surge in voluntary quitting and switching was more concentrated among the people who had been forced out of their jobs during the beginning of the pandemic. Like the riders of the London Underground after the lines opened back up, those who had lost their jobs continued to explore even after those jobs came back online. They learned the lesson the ants have down pat: Don’t wait to be forced to quit to start exploring alternatives. Left to our own devices, we tend to focus on the thing we’re doing, practically to the exclusion of anything else. It’s not just that we don’t explore other opportunities. We don’t notice them when they’re right in front of us. We become myopic. That inability to see other things that might be available, on top of all the other forces gaffing the scale against quitting, makes it hard to switch what we’re doing because, after all, how can you switch to something that you don’t even know exists? That myopia is what we’re going to turn our attention to next.

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

  16The History of Christianity II õThe key factor is that Luther said the pope did not have the control over Purgatory that he claimed to have. Only God could grant forgiveness. When the pope at the time, Pope Leo X, got wind of this, he wasn’t too concerned at first. He only started to worry when Luther began gathering followers all over Germany and seriously cutting into his profits from indulgences. õThe 95 Theses are famous, and the day Luther made them known, October 31, 1517, is commonly called Reformation Day and marked as the start of the Protestant Reformation. But the insight that truly caused Luther to break from the Catholic Church was a personal revelation. õLuther’s personal revelation, which came after studying the Bible for hours and days on end, was this: Good works alone can’t earn you a place in heaven. Luther concluded that when we believe that Jesus is our savior, then God decides to view us differently, even though we remain as sinful as ever. We can sum up Luther’s idea with the slogan sola fide, meaning “by faith alone.” Following the law doesn’t save people, but faith, which is a gift by God’s grace, does. õLuther found this liberating. He gave up the monastic life and married a former nun—he noted, as many reformers did, that there was nothing in the Bible saying priests had to be celibate. And he let his dirty mouth run wild, insulting his targets with colorful language. õLuther taught that the priesthood is a profession just like any other; clergy are not special. Catholic theology elevated priests and monks above laypeople, but according to Luther, priests were just as depraved as everyone else, and if works don’t save people, then there was no longer any rationale for monasticism at all.

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

  Stephanie, consumed by motherhood, was too quick to dismiss the inherent value of Warren’s persistence. The way I see it, Warren provides a consistent reminder that erotic intimacy matters. With him, and through him, she potentially can begin to disentangle from the bond with her children and transfer some of her energy back to herself and her relationship with Warren. When the father reaches out to the mother, and the mother acknowledges him, redirecting her attention, this serves to rebalance the entire family. Boundaries get drawn, and new zoning regulations get put in place delineating areas that are adult only. Time, resources, playfulness, and fun are redistributed, and libido is rescued from forced retirement. My work with gay and lesbian couples has led me to recognize that these dynamics are replicated whenever one parent, gender notwithstanding, takes charge of the kids. Since same-sex couples are not constrained by a traditional division of labor—women at home, men at work—they offer a useful basis for comparison. What I see over and over is that the person who takes on the role of primary caretaker almost always undergoes changes similar to Stephanie’s: a total immersion in the lives and rhythms of the children, a loss of self, and a greater difficulty extricating himself or herself from chores (a compulsion that is simultaneously frustrating and grounding). The role of the more autonomous parent is to help the primary caregiver disengage from the kids and reallocate energy to the couple. “Leave the toys for now, nobody is going to give you a medal, go take a nap.” “You don’t have to make these pecan pies from scratch, you’ve done enough today.” “The nanny is here, let’s sit down for ten minutes and share a glass of wine before she leaves.” It’s a different approach from the traditional division of labor, one which emphasizes shared responsibility and mutuality and honors the interdependent agency of both partners. When Warren asks, “Want to?” and Stephanie finally answers, “Convince me,” their dynamic begins to shift. This puts a halt to the grinding antagonism and introduces an overdue mutuality. Asking him to help her is, in itself, an expression of sexual assertiveness. And Warren, finally relieved of being the supplicant, can set out to get his wife back. His role as keeper of the flame is given new meaning. Lifting the Erotic Embargo

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

  When Olstyn Martinez finally did give her notice, her boss was actually very understanding. By the end of the talk, he apologized for failing her, for not making the job less stressful so that she could have persevered. Her operations director said the same thing, which was very validating to hear. We may quickly outgrow the made-up childhood tales of frightening ogres, dragons, and witches. The scary stories that replace them, about the judgments of others, continue to torment us as adults but are no more real. A Ray of Hope For all the stories of those unable to quit, whether due to identity, sunk cost, status quo bias, or any of the forces that gaff the scale, you are not doomed to succumb. We know that Stewart Butterfield, Sarah Olstyn Martinez, and Alex Honnold are just three of the examples that offer us hope. For businesses, like Sears or Blockbuster or ABC Stores, we can see identity’s hand in the death of an enterprise. But, again, not every business is destined for that fate. There are notable examples of companies that turned away from the core businesses that were synonymous with their identities, and built enduring success by doing so. As strongly as Sears was identified in the public mind as a retailer, Philips was known as the company that sold light bulbs. That was their identity. After all, for many of us growing up, when you had to change a light bulb, the name “Philips” was right there on the carton. The bulb itself had “Philips” printed on it. Both Sears and Philips were founded in the 1890s. In 2012, decades after Sears started its death spiral, Philips was the world’s largest manufacturer of lighting products, selling in 180 countries. Since the 1960s, Philips has also been famous for its consumer electronics, having invented cassettes, CDs, VCRs, and DVDs. Not only were they endowed to those products, having developed the technology, but again, their name was right there on them. Despite all that potential for the company’s identity to cause resistance to change, as of 2020 Philips no longer sold any lighting products. Its three

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  But as he prepared for his coronation, to take place in the spring of 1775, Louis began to feel differently. He had decided to study the coronation ritual itself so that he could be prepared and not make mistakes; and what he learned actually filled him with the confidence that he desperately needed. According to legend, a dove sent from the Holy Spirit had deposited some sacred oil that was kept at a church in the town of Reims and was used to anoint all kings of France from the ninth century on. Once anointed with this oil, the king was suddenly elevated above the ranks of mere mortals and imbued with a divine nature, becoming God’s lieutenant on earth. The ritual represented the marriage of the new king with the church and the French people. In his body and spirit, the king would now embody the entire populace, their two fates intertwined. And, sanctified by God, the king could depend on the Lord’s guidance and protection. By the 1770s, many French people and progressive clergymen had come to see this ritual as a relic of a superstitious past. But Louis felt the opposite. To him, the ancientness of the rite was comforting. Believing in its significance would be the means to overcome his fears and doubts. He would be buoyed by a profound sense of mission, his divine nature made real by the anointment. Louis decided to reenact this sacred ritual in its more original form. And he would go even further. At the palace of Versailles he noticed that many of the paintings and statues of Louis XIV associated him with Roman gods, a way to symbolically strengthen the image of the French monarchy as something ancient and unshakable. The new king decided he would surround himself with similar imagery for the public part of the coronation, overwhelming his subjects with the spectacle and the symbols he had chosen. — Louis XVI’s coronation took place on June 11, 1775, and in the crowd outside the cathedral that warm day was a most unlikely tourist—a fifteen-year-old youth named Georges-Jacques Danton. He was a student at a boarding school in the town of Troyes. His family had come from the peasantry, but his father had managed to become a lawyer, raising the family up into the expanding French middle class. His father had died when Danton was three, and his mother had raised him with the hope that Danton would continue in his father’s footsteps, securing a solid career. Danton was quite strange-looking, if not downright ugly.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Though a surprise, it would not have seemed so remarkable; only my failure to warn Gavin would have been thought odd. But to warn him would have been a treacherous concession. I showed Gavin the phone, on the bedside table. The curtains were closed, as always, but I had put on the overhead light, and as the duvet was thrown into a heap at the foot of the bed, the rumpled green sheets and pillows showed their shamingly stained and fucked-over countenance; Gavin remained standing as he phoned. I wandered back into the hall, where Rupert was standing, an expression of the utmost apprehension on his face. ‘Isn’t that boy …’ he mouthed, his eyebrows raised and then biting his lower lip, which I laid my finger across in a gesture of silence. The bed came down to within an inch or two of the floor. He must be behind the curtains. ‘Thanks, Will,’ said Gavin as he emerged, with a slightly amazed look. ‘Everything OK?’ I enquired, with extreme casualness. ‘We’ll be off now, young feller.’ I saw them to the door of the flat. ‘Thanks, Will,’ said Gavin again. ‘See you soon. You must come round or something …’ He laid a hand fraternally on my shoulder. ‘Bye, Roops,’ I said, expecting my normal kiss but getting instead a handshake, which, nevertheless, I recognised as a sign of greater intimacy. Farce is always more entertaining to watch than to enact, and I was relieved to hear the house door slam and a car start. I turned back to the bedroom, crossing to the window as I said, ‘It’s all right, they’ve gone.’ But when I tweaked open the curtains, it was my own face, with a silly hide-and-seek smirk on it, that I saw reflected in the window. ‘Funny,’ I said aloud. There was a rustle behind me, and I swung round to see the flung-back duvet heave, lurch upwards, and after a further convulsion, bring forth Arthur. He had been curled up there like a young stowaway, his flexible body folded so as to be almost imperceptible. He hammed up his recovery rather, flustered at the alarm, boastful of his ingenuity. ‘Man, you didn’t know where I bloody was!’ He fell back giggling, then clutched his head, still leaden from his hangover. I sat by him on the bed and drummed my fingers on his belly. ‘I’m surprised you let him in,’ I said, ‘after all the never going out.’ ‘He just kept ringing the bell, man. I stuck me head out the lav window, and there was this little nipper. He must a rung the bell ten times, fifteen times. So I thought, no ’arm in a little kid. So I went down. Very sure of ’imself, he was, come up ’ere, asked me who I was and that. Just a friend of Will’s, I said.’

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  was lazy, and he had believed it, but now he was not so sure. Each day represented a challenge to find more work and put food on the table. He was succeeding in this. He was not some miserable worm who needed a beating. Besides, the work was a way to get outside himself and immerse his mind in the problems of his students. The books he read took him far away from Taganrog and filled him with interesting thoughts that lingered in his mind for entire days. Taganrog itself was not so bad. Each shop, each house contained the oddest characters, supplying him endless material for stories. And that corner of the room—that was his kingdom. Far from feeling trapped, he now felt liberated. What had actually changed? Certainly not his circumstances, or Taganrog, or the corner of the room. What had changed was his attitude, which opened him up to new experiences and possibilities. Once he felt this, he wanted to take it further. The greatest remaining impediment to this sense of freedom was his father. No matter what he tried, he couldn’t seem to get rid of deep feelings of bitterness. It was as if he could still feel the beatings and hear the endless pointed criticisms. As a last resort, he tried to analyze his father as if he were a character in a story. This led him to think about his father’s father and all the generations of Chekhovs. As he considered his father’s erratic nature and his wild imagination, he could understand how he must have felt trapped by his circumstances, and why he turned to drinking and tyrannizing the family. He was helpless, more a victim than an oppressor. This understanding of his father laid the groundwork for the sudden rush of unconditional love he felt one day for his parents. As he glowed with this new emotion, he finally felt completely liberated from resentments and anger. The negative emotions from the past had finally fallen away from him. His mind could now be completely open. The sensation was so exhilarating that he had to share it with his siblings and free them as well. What had brought Chekhov to this point was the crisis he had faced when left alone at such a young age. He experienced another such crisis some thirteen years later, when he became depressed about the pettiness of his fellow writers. His solution was to reproduce what had happened in Taganrog, but in reverse—he would be the one to abandon others and force himself to be alone and vulnerable. In this way he could reexperience the freedom and empathy he had felt in Taganrog. The early death sentence from tuberculosis was the last crisis. He would let go of his fear of death, and the bitter feelings that came with having his life cut short, by continuing to live at full tilt. This final and ultimate freedom gave him