The Psychological Equivalent Of Standing Knee-Deep In Mud
As a psychologist, teacher, and writer, Adam Mastroianni has had a lot of people ask him for advice. “I’ve realized,” he writes, “that most of these folks have something in common: they’re stuck.” They’re stuck in a job that’s “bleh,” they’re stuck in a relationship that’s “meh,” they’re stuck in a town that’s “ho hum,” they’re stuck with a head of hair that’s “no thanks.” “Being stuck,” Mastroianni writes, “is the psychological equivalent of standing knee-deep in a fetid bog,”—wet muddy ground in which it’s difficult to maneuver. Of the many ways to end up in the bog, one of the most common is what Mastroianni calls “the mediocrity trap.” “About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs,” Mastroianni explains, “so they’re moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap: situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.” Some ways to get in the bog and some ways to get out of the bog—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Feeling That We Should Have Done It Years Ago
Hugh Howey is now a full-time writer. He now writes novels that sell millions of copies worldwide. His stories now get honored with prestigious awards, optioned by celebrated filmmakers, and adapted into hit TV shows. “But for 20 years,” Hugh said, he was in the bog: “from age 12 to 32, I tried to write novels and short stories and gave up every time. For 20 years!” An avid reader, when he began trying to write, Hugh compared his writing to the quality of writing in his favorite books. The quality gap “drove me nuts,” Hugh said. “I’d write a chapter or 2 before walking away in disgust.” To try to close that disgusting gap, Hugh stopped writing fiction and began studying it. He didn’t just read novels—he dissected, analyzed, and wrote reviews about them. He interviewed authors. He went to conferences and book festivals. As the years went by, more than being disgusted by the quality of his writing, Hugh became increasingly bogged down by regret, by the feeling that the period of his life in which he was best positioned to pursue a writing career was years and years in the past. He had a full-time job, other hobbies, family and friends—it felt like his life had settled into a knee-deep bog that would take something drastic to get out of. “Often,” he said, “the feeling that we can’t break our stasis and launch our lives in a different direction is really due to the feeling that we should have done it five or ten or twenty years ago.” Then, at the 2009 Virginia Festival of the Book, he got advice “that finally broke 20 years of not writing.” In a Q&A session with the mystery novelist Caroline Todd, an audience member asked, “How do I write my first novel?” Todd stood up, slapped the table, and shouted, “You stop thinking about writing. You stop dreaming about writing. You stop talking about writing. And you just write. You sit down and you write!” When Todd “yelled—not even at me, basically near me—to just write,” Hugh said he realized that instead of doing something drastic, he could “start nudging his life in a new direction,” by simply writing a little before work and on his lunch break. He analogized it to sailing around the world. “You can’t get to where you want to be in one day,” he says, “just like you don’t sail around the world in a day. You just look at the horizon and say, ‘I can sail that far.’ Sailing around the world is just sailing to the horizon over and over again. Writing a novel is just writing a sentence over and over again.” In the margins of his day, Hugh began writing a sentence or two. By doing that over and over again, he said, “I accumulated a lot of words, and in a five or six year period, I wrote about 15 novels.”
The Feeling That We’ll Do It Years From Now
And then, on the tails side of the feeling that we should have done something years ago, is the feeling that we’ll do it years from now. This is what the poet David Whyte refers to as “working in a dynamic of conditionality”—I’ll get to my happiness when I’m done with this project. I’ll do what I really want when the kids are through school. I’ll make the change when the house is paid off, when I’m in a better relationship, when I’ve got this amount of money in the bank, when I’m retired. Conditional thinking can sink one deeper and deeper into the bog, Whyte explains, “because you are harvesting your identity in whatever it is you’re dedicating yourself to in the hours of the day. It’s not a passive process to work. You’re shaping an identity. It’s like practicing.” If you practiced a musical instrument for 8, 9, 10, 11 hours a day—even if you had no musical proclivity, you would become incredibly good at the clarinet, at the piano, at the saxophone. “So you’re becoming incredibly good at whoever you’re practicing at being in the hours of the day,” Whyte continues. “[Ask yourself], by the way I am in my every day, who am I practicing at becoming? Do I actually want to become that person?”
The Fear of What Others Might Think or Say
When he was 19, Andre Agassi started losing his hair. Deeply ashamed of his receding hairline, to hide it, Agassi started wearing a hairpiece. Not long after, at the 1990 French Open, Agassi made it to his first Grand Slam final. “The night before the final,” Agassi writes, “Catastrophe strikes.” As he was taking a shower, Agassi felt the hairpiece disintegrate in his hands. He summoned his brother, who was able to clip the hairpiece back together with 20 bobby pins. The next morning, Agassi writes, “warming up before the match, I pray. Not for a win, but for my hairpiece to stay on…My tenuous hairpiece has me catatonic…With every lunge, every leap, I picture it landing on the clay. I can picture millions of people suddenly leaning closer to their TVs, turning to each other and in dozens of languages and dialects saying some version of: Did Andre Agassi’s hair just fall off?” At times, he looks into the stands and sees fans sporting hairdos just like his. This only exacerbates his sense of shame. “I can’t imagine all these people trying to be like Andre Agassi,” he writes, “since I don’t want to be Andre Agassi.” Because of this fixation on his hairpiece, though he was the heavy favorite, Agassi lost three sets to one. After, his girlfriend, aware of the hairpiece catastrophe, says, “I think you should just get rid of that hairpiece.” “Impossible,” Agassi replies, “I’d feel naked.” “You’d feel liberated,” she says. He thought it over for a few days: “I thought about the pain my hair has caused me, the hypocrisy and the pretending and the lying.” And then he went back to his girlfriend, “Let’s do it…Let’s cut it all off.” His first tournament with a bald head was another Grand Slam, the Australian Open, and, “I come out like the Incredible Hulk. I don’t drop one set in a take-no-prisoners blitz to the final.” You were right, he told his girlfriend before the final, “my hairpiece was a shackle.” In the final, he won three sets to one. “Everyone says it’s my best performance yet, because it’s my first victory over Pete [Sampras]. But I think twenty years from now I’ll remember it as my first bald victory.” The fear of what others will think or say can keep us in the bog. Keeping in mind that Agassi was so worried about what others would think or say about his shaved head, I went searching for what others thought or said after he shaved his head. All I could find was a passing mention in a 1995 Washington Post piece (“The wild mane of hair he sported at the tournament last season has been replaced with his new no-nonsense buzz cut.”) It made me think of a line from the philosopher Seneca, who writes in a letter titled On Groundless Fears: “We suffer more in our imagination more often than in reality.” In his head, Agassi thought people would think or say nasty things about him. In reality, no one really cared. “The most precious thing we have in life is time,” Agassi says, “so any time you spend worrying about something, get rid of it.”
The Wanting It To Be Like A Trip To Pluto
The writer Morgan Housel points out the importance of distinguishing between two categories: fields of precision and fields of uncertainty. Astrophysics, for instance, is a field of precision: On January 19, 2006, NASA launched the space probe New Horizons to do a flyby of Pluto. On July 14, 2015, New Horizons made its approach to Pluto. “New Horizons’ almost 10-year, three-billion-mile journey,” NASA explained that day, “took about one minute less than predicted when the craft was launched in January 2006.” Astrophysicists, in other words, were able to predict New Horizons’ almost ten-year journey with 99.99998% accuracy. Before launch, astrophysicists were 99.99998% sure about what the next ten years held for New Horizons. We’d like for everything in life to be like a trip to Pluto. We’d like to be 99.99998% sure—before writing a novel, pivoting careers, moving to a new city, or starting a business—that it will work out. But most things in life, as Housel writes, “are fields of uncertainty, overwhelmingly driven by decisions that can’t easily be explained with clean formulas, like a trip to Pluto can.”
The Hugeness Of The Task Ahead
When she’s stuck or feeling overwhelmed by a big project, the writer Anne Lamott likes to think of a story “that over and over helps me get a grip.” When her brother was ten years old, he was stuck on a school project for which he had to write a report on birds. “He was at the kitchen table close to tears,” Lamott writes in Bird by Bird, “surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’” Don’t try to map out the whole 9 innings. Don’t be paralyzed by the delusion of certainty. Don’t think about the hugeness of the task ahead. Just start. Just throw the first pitch. Just take it bird by bird.