Monday, June 29, 2009
The New York Times
June 28, 2009
My Son's Gamble
By LUCY FERRISS
Just past dawn one morning last August, I pulled myself from bed, bleary from ragged sleep. I headed downstairs to make coffee and settle at my computer. There, I booted up Firefox and accessed an online card room, Full Tilt Poker, from which I downloaded a program to play Texas Hold ’Em and other games. Once the program was open, I tried to log on with the screen name my 18-year-old son, Dan, had shown me on a different site called PokerStars. Full Tilt Poker, unsurprisingly, rejected the name.
Following the plan I outlined as I lay awake in the wee hours, I opened up Dan’s college e-mail account. Weeks before, he read his e-mail via my computer and asked Firefox to save the password. I clicked “Enter.” There before me were all the e-mail messages from university officials, from his tennis coach, from teachers. Most prevalent were e-mail messages from Full Tilt Poker, addressed to a screen name I did not recognize. Grimly satisfied, I read none of these. I simply returned to Full Tilt, entered the screen name from the e-mail and clicked “Forgot my password.” I expected the program to ask me the name of my favorite rock band, at which point my foray into the role of Internet spy would cease. To my surprise, the window on the screen read, “We have sent your new password to the e-mail address on record.” I re-entered Dan’s e-mail account, fetched the new password and entered it into the Full Tilt log-in window.
By now, my fingers were trembling. I had never invaded someone’s virtual space like this before, never stolen a password, never found myself on such forbidden ground. But driven by the urgency of the moment, I pressed on.
We were having a terrible summer. Anticipating Dan’s return from college, I set up “house rules” that I hoped would improve on the previous summer, when the fragile family life I had pieced together since my divorce four years before was on the verge of breaking apart. The new house rules called on all those who lived in the house to have some sort of activity or employment in the world; they set quiet hours for weeknights; they prescribed consequences for abusive behavior. Fairly quickly, Dan incurred the loss of car privileges, the loss of Internet privileges and the loss of the privilege of living in my home. From my point of view, my son’s recalcitrance lay at the heart of the problem. He stayed up nearly all night, sometimes heading for bed just as the rest of the family was rising. He rarely ate with us, and he didn’t relate to his older brother or to my partner, Donald, who had been living with us for two years, or participate in any way with the family. The stench of his room, with its unwashed clothes spilled out from his suitcase onto the floor, filled the upstairs even when the door was shut, which was most of the time. Dan spent some of his time with a shrinking number of his former high-school friends. Mostly, he logged onto his computer. He refused counseling, either for himself or with the family.
From Dan’s point of view, the problem was my futile and suffocating attempt to control him — insisting that he get a job, that he conform to my idea of a sleep schedule, that he feign a family bond he did not feel. When I booted him out, he went at first to his father, who had disparaged my concerns over Dan’s Internet poker playing. Thirty-six hours after Dan arrived, his dad called me. “My God, he is out of control,” he said. He cut off Internet access at his home.
Dan spent part of a night on a park bench before he agreed at last to my putting a gambling block on his computer. I had researched such programs, which apparently no one could remove for the duration of the contract. On this understanding, Dan came back home. Five days after I installed the block, he had somehow managed to rid himself of it.
Thus we limped into August. Dan had not had the most successful freshman year at college, where he played Division 1 tennis and attended classes only when he had incentive to do so. Given his new lifestyle, which did not seem to include daylight, I could not see how he would make it as a scholar-athlete in the fall. I informed him that if he wanted to return to college, he would have to ice the poker playing or else pay for his own tuition from his winnings. To my shock, he insisted that, all this time, he had not been playing poker. He had been watching poker videos and movies.
“All night?” I asked. “Every night?” He nodded. He looked me in the eye. Though thin and pale, he was a lean, handsome young man, his gaze blue and intense. “Prove it to me,” I said. “Show me all your accounts. PokerStars, European bank, American bank.”
He fetched his laptop. He showed me the account on PokerStars, where I thought he had been playing. There was no balance. He showed me the European account — an option for players in the U.S., where banks are not allowed to process money for online gambling — and the American one, where he kept his regular checking account. He had $242 in his checking account. I was flummoxed. “Well, I can’t ask you to pay tuition if you have no money,” I said. “I can’t ask you to stop gambling if you haven’t been playing. But I’m still concerned. I can’t see how you’ll study or attend class or show up for practice.”
“You need to have more faith in me,” he said.
That evening he went over to a friend’s house. Near midnight, I called him. “This isn’t adding up,” I said. “You’re up past dawn. You’ve been spending money on restaurants. Other parents tell me you do nothing but gamble at their houses.”
He had shown me everything, he insisted. I reiterated my concern and my determination to get to the truth. We hung up. I lay awake. Around 4 a.m., I remembered hearing Dan and a friend debate the merits of PokerStars versus Full Tilt Poker. He could be playing, I realized, on another site. Somewhere, perhaps in his e-mail, I could find a Full Tilt account; I could call his bluff.
So there I was, the sun just rising, logging onto Full Tilt Poker in the guise of my son. I clicked the tab for “My Account.” The balance read $12,000. I clicked “Recent Activity.” He had been playing hundreds of games and tournaments, all summer long. I went to “Contact information” and changed the password and the e-mail address. I logged off, returned to Dan’s e-mail account, deleted the messages from Full Tilt and emptied the Deleted Items folder. My entire body shaking at this point, I went upstairs to tell Donald what I had done.
From the moment he could move puzzle pieces into place, Dan loved games. In preschool, entranced by Mario Bros. on Nintendo, he invented and acted out competitions with Mario and Luigi, whom he called “the Widgie.” When he couldn’t settle down for nap time in kindergarten, the computer teacher led him to the lab, where he spent the hour racking up magic coins. At home he discovered Monopoly; when everyone else was sick of the game, he played against his own imaginary opponent. At 6, when basketball grabbed his attention, he hung around the court across the street from our house and hustled free-throw competitions with older kids; if none showed up, he pretended to be Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman and played one on one against himself. By fourth grade, he spoke in terms of “winning the test” at school.
By then, too, Dan had shown himself a gifted athlete and switched from basketball to tennis, where he could fight it out all by himself and take home the prize. Eventually he would garner a national ranking and player-of-the-year trophies. Although tennis distracted him from college preparation, the physical fitness and confidence it gave him assuaged — just barely — a mother’s worries.
Between tennis matches and on nontennis weekends, Dan and his friends played cards. They were part of a national craze set off by the televised World Series of Poker and its sudden elevation of poker players to media stars. Some parents worried about the $5 buy-in games of Texas Hold ’Em that were held in various basements, including mine. I countered that I was glad the boys were talking to one another rather than staring at a video screen; that those who lost would play Ping-Pong or foosball. I actually taught Dan his first casino game, blackjack. When he was learning arithmetic, we had a jar of pennies on the kitchen counter, and one day I asked Dan and his brother if they’d like to learn a game in which they counted to 21 — and if they won, they got to keep the other players’ pennies. In short order, Dan owned the whole jar.
The college Dan chose to attend, Old Dominion University in Virginia, wasn’t his first choice. While many schools wanted his tennis prowess and high SAT scores, they balked at his grades. Old Dominion, a commuter school in Norfolk with a crack tennis team, was willing to take him. To me, Dan seemed to be going to college for all the wrong reasons. There was nothing he wanted to learn. He wanted only to get away from home and to follow the same path that his tennis competitors were on. But when Dan would not consider a “gap year,” even at a prestigious tennis academy, I stipulated that he take out a private student loan in the amount of the scholarship that he could have received from Old Dominion had his grades been better. If he finished the year in good standing, I would repay the loan.
By April, following a rough first semester, Dan had been suspended from the tennis team for missing study halls. He was unhappy at the school. Though he brought his grades up to the point where I would repay his loan, he spoke of wanting to transfer to a college where he might thrive. But when he came home in May, it was soon clear that he had no time to research and prepare any transfer applications. He was too busy with the activity that had replaced tennis: Internet poker.
After accessing Dan’s online account, I spent the day in a welter of guilt. I reminded myself that someone had to confront my son, and I was the only one who cared enough to do so. Yet through the warm afternoon, I listened nervously for any sign that he was waking, was trying to log on, was discovering that he had been frozen out. Finally, around 5 p.m., three of my friends gathered in my driveway to drive to a dance performance in the Berkshires. As we packed picnic supplies into my trunk, Dan came barreling out of the house. “Give it back!” he shouted. “Give me back my money!”
“I don’t have your money,” I told him.
He called me names. I told him we would talk later. I invited my friends to get into the car. As I managed to get into the driver’s seat and start the engine, Dan ripped the windshield-wiper arm from the back window; he banged on the roof, on the windshield. Finally he planted himself behind the car as I began to back out, shouting: “Go ahead! Kill your son!”
Gradually, using a 12-point turn, I managed to maneuver the car away from Dan and out of the driveway. My friends were white-faced. One, a psychologist, said as calmly as she could manage, “Is your son by any chance an addict?”
The question of addiction has moved through my responses to Dan’s poker playing ever since it became a noticeable habit. His is a laserlike personality. When he was very small, his grandfather called him Mr. Focus. Years later, when I expressed relief that at least my son wasn’t snorting or popping pills, one family counselor suggested that tennis was Dan’s “drug.”
After the explosion that followed my amateur computer hacking, Dan and I did negotiate, albeit uncomfortably. He had persuaded Full Tilt Poker to restore the account to him. We resolved the issue of his return to college by agreeing that he would use some of his poker earnings to help pay his tuition until he had proved himself capable of balancing poker, tennis and school. Then he went to Virginia, and I went looking for answers.
I started with gambling help lines and support groups like Gam-Anon. At first the addiction model they used made sense; the notion that a gambling win caused a brain-stimulus pattern like that of a cocaine high explained Dan’s wild-eyed attack on the car when I locked up his account.
But when I consulted the much-used South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS), I felt less clarity than confusion. I imagined Dan’s answers to, say, SOGS question No. 11, “Have you ever hidden betting slips, lottery tickets, gambling money, i.o.u.’s or other signs of betting or gambling from . . . important people in your life?” (“Yes, because she equates poker betting with problem gambling”); or to SOGS No. 15, “Have you ever lost time from work (or school) due to betting money or gambling?” (“I’ve lost time from school because this is the wrong school for me”). He might score as a “probable pathological gambler,” but the questions, it seemed to me, centered on others’ — on my — idea of a problematic life, not on Dan’s. Other questions (“Have you ever borrowed from someone and not paid them back as a result of your gambling?”) didn’t apply to the player who was consistently in the money.
Dan’s second year of college saw him losing out on things other than profits. His grades took another nose dive. Reinstated on the tennis team, he quit after a few months. Yet he was winning, consistently, at poker, amassing a big enough bankroll by December to fly himself and a friend to Aruba and have plenty left over to buy a car, support himself and start planning a life of international travel. Since he no longer valued being a scholar-athlete, the loss of grades and sports prowess were, from Dan’s point of view, insignificant. In February, having paid spring tuition himself, he made the belated but rational decision to drop out of school. Were these the actions and decisions of a gambling addict or, as he now saw himself, of a poker professional?
The question was emotional for me. Confronted head-on by the gambling-addict camp, I felt desperate either to justify my son’s course of action or to mount an all-out rescue attempt. So I did what any self-respecting, psychically torn professor would do. I went to the library. And I learned many things.
I learned, for instance, that what I thought of as the addict-versus-pro argument (what other people might call the chance-versus-skill argument) is working itself out now in our legislatures and courts, in particular around a 2006 federal law, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. The U.I.G.E.A. prohibits Internet gambling businesses from accepting money for “unlawful” gambling. But this term turns out to be clear as mud; the definition of unlawful gambling varies according to state laws. An important concern for many opponents of the U.I.G.E.A. — which means most poker players — are those states that use the “dominant-factor test,” wherein chance, rather than skill, must dominate for a game to be considered gambling. As one article I read put it, if “poker is a game of skill and thus not a game subject to chance,” online poker sites would be free to do business with U.S. customers.
Thus went my rationalizing: If poker is a game in which skill predominates — like chess or Scrabble — then it isn't “just gambling.” Perhaps it really does sharpen the mind, as Charles R. Nesson, a Harvard law professor, has argued in promoting the game as “an environment for experiencing the dynamics of strategy.” My son is not being sucked into a zero-sum addictive game of luck that gives nothing back to society; he is benefiting from a challenging form of entertainment for which other rational adults are willing to pay.
Countering this nifty argument were the studies correlating compulsive poker playing with mood disorders, with substance abuse, with other risky or criminal behaviors. Even Charles Humphrey, a poker-law expert who has advised the Poker Players Alliance in its efforts to repeal the act, acknowledges the luck involved in poker when he observes that no one has ever repeated as Poker Player of the Year from one year to the next. “Indeed,” he writes, “few repeat in the Top 10 of those lists.”
I contacted Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. I wanted an answer, I told him — and at first, he gave me one. “Poker is gambling,” he said flatly. “It involves the same three things all gambling involves — prize, chance and consideration.” What’s more, I learned as I perused The Journal of Gambling Studies, most of us tend to risk more on the outcome of a task involving chance when it also requires just a dollop of skill — a not-inaccurate description of poker.
For many nights after Dan withdrew from school, I lay awake considering the life he was choosing — a life in which he is reduced from a toned athlete to a pale ectomorph, in which his social life is sporadic and mostly virtual, in which the possibility of a liberal education may be forever lost, in which steady romantic relationships (not to mention family) will be extremely difficult to maintain, in which he lives mostly apart from a society based on employment, wages and the rest of the social compact. I prayed that he would win enough to stop, or lose enough to stop, or grow bored and stop.
Slowly I began to realize how my original disapproval was truly anxiety writ large. Dan’s poker playing frightened me not because I condemned the game but because of where I feared it might lead. I was not going to be able to argue myself out of such fears. I remembered Keith Whyte’s response when I told him I was educating myself about state and national laws regarding poker. “The legal lens is the least helpful way to view this issue,” he advised me. “How and why you gamble — those are the important questions.” How was clear, at least for the moment: daily, nightly, online, alone and with some success. The key to acceptance came to me in considering why.
“He needs to separate,” a counselor once said of Dan — to separate, that is, from me, the person who had been there for him as an emotional and practical resource throughout his adolescence. This bond, for parents of college-age children, often takes the form of money. We are able to say to a son or daughter, “Yes, you are an adult now, but I pay your bills and so you must” — fill in the blank — “or I will reduce my support.” The bills we pay are our last measure of control over young people who may not yet be ready to take control of their own lives, and our wielding of the power of the purse is a measure of our love.
Now Dan has taken that power unto himself. He was no longer a college student or my dependent. He was, for the moment at least, not only self-supporting but looking at six months’ earnings that were more than my annual salary. Yes, he was playing poker because he loved the competition, because it had a bad-boy appeal, because his peers looked up to his success. (From The Journal of Gambling Studies: 92 percent of college students agree that gambling makes a person look smart.) But he was also playing poker because the financial independence it could yield allowed him to separate. Here, then, was something I could seize on: a small benefit, a morsel of sanity in what had seemed a feast of madness.
Nightmare outcomes still stalk my waking dreams:
Dan loses all his money; cannot quit playing; comes to me for funds; I tell him no; he borrows from the Mob and loses his kneecaps.
Dan makes millions; lives in a world of casinos, cocaine and one-night stands; wakes up one morning in middle age to discover his life is empty.
Dan is reduced to grinding online until it sets his teeth on edge; cannot bring himself to return to school or take a low-wage job; withdraws from human relationships.
I had these awful visions. Then, one by one, with boulder-heaving effort, I let them go. They will return, and I will push them away again. I feel I have no other power in the situation right now. Any railing against the evils of poker will only drive him into hiding and out of contact. Whatever my worries for my son, all I can do is love him.
As Dan has sensed the melting of my disapproval, the frozen sea that was our medium of communication has begun to melt as well. “Am I allowed to say I told you so?” I said when Dan called to say he had withdrawn from all his classes.
“It was a mistake to think I could play poker at this level and still study,” he admitted. “But you know, it’s not like I’m leaving college for poker. It’s more that poker’s allowed me to leave a situation that wasn’t good for me.”
On this, Dan and I wholeheartedly agree. Would he have been happier at a smaller school, on a team where he was a better fit, closer to home? Dan says he doesn’t know. He talks of returning to college while he’s still part of the traditional age cohort; he’s convinced that he could put poker aside to write a research paper if he wanted to. But Mr. Focus has a good deal more poker to focus on before any such possibility becomes realistic.
Like anyone who has been through a personal cataclysm, Dan and I cling to shreds of normalcy in our relations, aware always that his fierce assertion of autonomy and my concern over his lifestyle are land mines. Two weeks after withdrawing from school, Dan took off with a group of poker buddies for the European Poker Tournament in Germany, a face-to-face poker round leading up to the World Series of Poker. Some players at these tournaments have sponsors, their fees paid by companies or individuals in exchange for a percentage of their winnings; but like most of the 667 competitors — 31 of them from the United States — Dan paid the 5,300-euro buy-in himself, along with all the expenses of the trip.
On the second day of the tournament, I found a report online. A third of the entrants remained in the draw, only six from the U.S., and Dan was among them. I couldn’t help feeling a flash of joy, knowing how happy he must be, how confident and eager for the next round. Twelve hours later, he had lost. “But my friend Jake won the $2K event,” he said over the phone the day he flew back.
“You mean he won $2,000?”
“No, Mom. That’s the buy-in. He won like $140,000.”
The idea of such a sum — $140,000! — dropping into the lap of a 19-year-old gave me the fantods. What’s the relation between work and wage here? I wanted to ask my son — but this time I held back. He wasn’t thinking of work or wages but of freedom.
These days I don’t ask if Dan has won or lost. I do ask how he feels. He admits to loneliness. Rising from his computer after eight hours of playing between four and six tables of Texas Hold ’Em while I.M.-ing his friends and checking his opponents’ stats, he feels drained. But he also finds life lessons in his new vocation. “I have learned more about people,” he tells me, “sitting at my computer playing poker than doing anything else.”
This insight is hard for me to fathom. By now, Dan has moved back to our Connecticut town, subletting a chic furnished studio. I’ve watched him play poker — the little icons sitting around the bright green “felt” on the screen, the numbers blinking, the cards flipping at lightning speed. “But you don’t see any people,” I say.
“And in life, I don’t wonder if I have two aces,” he agrees. “But the deeper processes apply. Like, what do I want this person to do, or what am I going to do because they’re thinking this or that? When I’m dealing in real life with something I want to accomplish, I focus on what the other person’s thinking and try to react positively to get what I want. Plus my whole outlook has matured. I keep better control of my emotions. I know how to combine factors to make the most levelheaded decision. That’s what life is, isn’t it? Using pros and cons to make the best decision you can?”
Well, no, I think. That isn’t life. Life is more than winning, more than manipulating others. I remember another opinion Dan has ventured — that young men find poker more exciting and successful than young women because women think, Do I have cards that can win? whereas men think, How can I get this person to think I have the best cards? Not knowing anything about my cards, I step onto land-mined turf. What about relationships? I ask Dan. What about people you care about, people you don’t want to beat?
He thinks a minute. Then he says: “Playing poker does help you focus more on what other people might need from you. You might not be right all the time, but that’s where your thought process goes. If you care about someone else’s goal, then you can help them.”
As a parent accustomed to the narcissism of young men, this statement takes my breath away. I’m not yet ready to promote online poker as a straight path toward the compassionate life. Caring about someone else’s goal is not the same as caring about that person. Still, in my eagerness for positive signs, I manage to glimpse a thin, frail line linking strategy and empathy.
We don’t talk much about last summer. It’s understood between us that if Dan returns to school and needs renewed parental support, he’ll have to offer some evidence of a change in outlook. And it is understood, I think, that I can love him without accepting everything he does. When I ask Dan what he wants now, from his parents, he’ll say only, “What I don’t want is negativity.”
Neither, I realize, do I. On the rare occasion when another adult learns that my son is a poker shark and says, “Good for him!” I feel a twinge of orphaned hope. Maybe his path is good; maybe it’s foolish to second-guess all my decisions going back to that first day I pulled out the penny jar and explained blackjack, not just because nothing I could have done would have changed Dan’s trajectory but also because Dan’s trajectory may bend toward a free and happy future. Now and then I still consider trying to influence that trajectory. In the end I find the best I can manage is to hold steady. Even if, years hence, I can name and pinpoint the moment when I might have changed my son’s course and did not, surely self-recrimination carries no purpose unless a way opens for positive action. I worry daily about the path my son has chosen. Daily, I remind myself that I can neither remove its rocks nor predict its forks.
Recently Dan stopped by my house. He was on his way to a tournament at Turning Stone casino in New York. “But my cellphone’s not working,” he complained. He’s on my family plan, a last vestige of dependence, and would have been eligible for an upgrade, but he didn’t have time to stop by the store.
“Why don’t you just take my phone?” I said. “I’m not going on any trips. I don’t really need it.”
While I worked my SIM card out of my phone and slid his in, I asked casually if he was paying his own way into this tournament. “I’m in the first couple rounds on my own,” he said. “After that, I’m backed.”
“Sounds good,” I said. I focused on replacing the battery, snapping the back of the phone on. “How’s the money holding up?”
“I’ve still got some.”
I didn’t ask more. I waved him off from the driveway. I was glad to know that, whether he ran into trouble on the road or with the cards, he’d have a way to get in touch.
Lucy Ferriss is a writer in residence at Trinity College and the author of the memoir “Unveiling the Prophet.”
June 28, 2009
My Son's Gamble
By LUCY FERRISS
Just past dawn one morning last August, I pulled myself from bed, bleary from ragged sleep. I headed downstairs to make coffee and settle at my computer. There, I booted up Firefox and accessed an online card room, Full Tilt Poker, from which I downloaded a program to play Texas Hold ’Em and other games. Once the program was open, I tried to log on with the screen name my 18-year-old son, Dan, had shown me on a different site called PokerStars. Full Tilt Poker, unsurprisingly, rejected the name.
Following the plan I outlined as I lay awake in the wee hours, I opened up Dan’s college e-mail account. Weeks before, he read his e-mail via my computer and asked Firefox to save the password. I clicked “Enter.” There before me were all the e-mail messages from university officials, from his tennis coach, from teachers. Most prevalent were e-mail messages from Full Tilt Poker, addressed to a screen name I did not recognize. Grimly satisfied, I read none of these. I simply returned to Full Tilt, entered the screen name from the e-mail and clicked “Forgot my password.” I expected the program to ask me the name of my favorite rock band, at which point my foray into the role of Internet spy would cease. To my surprise, the window on the screen read, “We have sent your new password to the e-mail address on record.” I re-entered Dan’s e-mail account, fetched the new password and entered it into the Full Tilt log-in window.
By now, my fingers were trembling. I had never invaded someone’s virtual space like this before, never stolen a password, never found myself on such forbidden ground. But driven by the urgency of the moment, I pressed on.
We were having a terrible summer. Anticipating Dan’s return from college, I set up “house rules” that I hoped would improve on the previous summer, when the fragile family life I had pieced together since my divorce four years before was on the verge of breaking apart. The new house rules called on all those who lived in the house to have some sort of activity or employment in the world; they set quiet hours for weeknights; they prescribed consequences for abusive behavior. Fairly quickly, Dan incurred the loss of car privileges, the loss of Internet privileges and the loss of the privilege of living in my home. From my point of view, my son’s recalcitrance lay at the heart of the problem. He stayed up nearly all night, sometimes heading for bed just as the rest of the family was rising. He rarely ate with us, and he didn’t relate to his older brother or to my partner, Donald, who had been living with us for two years, or participate in any way with the family. The stench of his room, with its unwashed clothes spilled out from his suitcase onto the floor, filled the upstairs even when the door was shut, which was most of the time. Dan spent some of his time with a shrinking number of his former high-school friends. Mostly, he logged onto his computer. He refused counseling, either for himself or with the family.
From Dan’s point of view, the problem was my futile and suffocating attempt to control him — insisting that he get a job, that he conform to my idea of a sleep schedule, that he feign a family bond he did not feel. When I booted him out, he went at first to his father, who had disparaged my concerns over Dan’s Internet poker playing. Thirty-six hours after Dan arrived, his dad called me. “My God, he is out of control,” he said. He cut off Internet access at his home.
Dan spent part of a night on a park bench before he agreed at last to my putting a gambling block on his computer. I had researched such programs, which apparently no one could remove for the duration of the contract. On this understanding, Dan came back home. Five days after I installed the block, he had somehow managed to rid himself of it.
Thus we limped into August. Dan had not had the most successful freshman year at college, where he played Division 1 tennis and attended classes only when he had incentive to do so. Given his new lifestyle, which did not seem to include daylight, I could not see how he would make it as a scholar-athlete in the fall. I informed him that if he wanted to return to college, he would have to ice the poker playing or else pay for his own tuition from his winnings. To my shock, he insisted that, all this time, he had not been playing poker. He had been watching poker videos and movies.
“All night?” I asked. “Every night?” He nodded. He looked me in the eye. Though thin and pale, he was a lean, handsome young man, his gaze blue and intense. “Prove it to me,” I said. “Show me all your accounts. PokerStars, European bank, American bank.”
He fetched his laptop. He showed me the account on PokerStars, where I thought he had been playing. There was no balance. He showed me the European account — an option for players in the U.S., where banks are not allowed to process money for online gambling — and the American one, where he kept his regular checking account. He had $242 in his checking account. I was flummoxed. “Well, I can’t ask you to pay tuition if you have no money,” I said. “I can’t ask you to stop gambling if you haven’t been playing. But I’m still concerned. I can’t see how you’ll study or attend class or show up for practice.”
“You need to have more faith in me,” he said.
That evening he went over to a friend’s house. Near midnight, I called him. “This isn’t adding up,” I said. “You’re up past dawn. You’ve been spending money on restaurants. Other parents tell me you do nothing but gamble at their houses.”
He had shown me everything, he insisted. I reiterated my concern and my determination to get to the truth. We hung up. I lay awake. Around 4 a.m., I remembered hearing Dan and a friend debate the merits of PokerStars versus Full Tilt Poker. He could be playing, I realized, on another site. Somewhere, perhaps in his e-mail, I could find a Full Tilt account; I could call his bluff.
So there I was, the sun just rising, logging onto Full Tilt Poker in the guise of my son. I clicked the tab for “My Account.” The balance read $12,000. I clicked “Recent Activity.” He had been playing hundreds of games and tournaments, all summer long. I went to “Contact information” and changed the password and the e-mail address. I logged off, returned to Dan’s e-mail account, deleted the messages from Full Tilt and emptied the Deleted Items folder. My entire body shaking at this point, I went upstairs to tell Donald what I had done.
From the moment he could move puzzle pieces into place, Dan loved games. In preschool, entranced by Mario Bros. on Nintendo, he invented and acted out competitions with Mario and Luigi, whom he called “the Widgie.” When he couldn’t settle down for nap time in kindergarten, the computer teacher led him to the lab, where he spent the hour racking up magic coins. At home he discovered Monopoly; when everyone else was sick of the game, he played against his own imaginary opponent. At 6, when basketball grabbed his attention, he hung around the court across the street from our house and hustled free-throw competitions with older kids; if none showed up, he pretended to be Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman and played one on one against himself. By fourth grade, he spoke in terms of “winning the test” at school.
By then, too, Dan had shown himself a gifted athlete and switched from basketball to tennis, where he could fight it out all by himself and take home the prize. Eventually he would garner a national ranking and player-of-the-year trophies. Although tennis distracted him from college preparation, the physical fitness and confidence it gave him assuaged — just barely — a mother’s worries.
Between tennis matches and on nontennis weekends, Dan and his friends played cards. They were part of a national craze set off by the televised World Series of Poker and its sudden elevation of poker players to media stars. Some parents worried about the $5 buy-in games of Texas Hold ’Em that were held in various basements, including mine. I countered that I was glad the boys were talking to one another rather than staring at a video screen; that those who lost would play Ping-Pong or foosball. I actually taught Dan his first casino game, blackjack. When he was learning arithmetic, we had a jar of pennies on the kitchen counter, and one day I asked Dan and his brother if they’d like to learn a game in which they counted to 21 — and if they won, they got to keep the other players’ pennies. In short order, Dan owned the whole jar.
The college Dan chose to attend, Old Dominion University in Virginia, wasn’t his first choice. While many schools wanted his tennis prowess and high SAT scores, they balked at his grades. Old Dominion, a commuter school in Norfolk with a crack tennis team, was willing to take him. To me, Dan seemed to be going to college for all the wrong reasons. There was nothing he wanted to learn. He wanted only to get away from home and to follow the same path that his tennis competitors were on. But when Dan would not consider a “gap year,” even at a prestigious tennis academy, I stipulated that he take out a private student loan in the amount of the scholarship that he could have received from Old Dominion had his grades been better. If he finished the year in good standing, I would repay the loan.
By April, following a rough first semester, Dan had been suspended from the tennis team for missing study halls. He was unhappy at the school. Though he brought his grades up to the point where I would repay his loan, he spoke of wanting to transfer to a college where he might thrive. But when he came home in May, it was soon clear that he had no time to research and prepare any transfer applications. He was too busy with the activity that had replaced tennis: Internet poker.
After accessing Dan’s online account, I spent the day in a welter of guilt. I reminded myself that someone had to confront my son, and I was the only one who cared enough to do so. Yet through the warm afternoon, I listened nervously for any sign that he was waking, was trying to log on, was discovering that he had been frozen out. Finally, around 5 p.m., three of my friends gathered in my driveway to drive to a dance performance in the Berkshires. As we packed picnic supplies into my trunk, Dan came barreling out of the house. “Give it back!” he shouted. “Give me back my money!”
“I don’t have your money,” I told him.
He called me names. I told him we would talk later. I invited my friends to get into the car. As I managed to get into the driver’s seat and start the engine, Dan ripped the windshield-wiper arm from the back window; he banged on the roof, on the windshield. Finally he planted himself behind the car as I began to back out, shouting: “Go ahead! Kill your son!”
Gradually, using a 12-point turn, I managed to maneuver the car away from Dan and out of the driveway. My friends were white-faced. One, a psychologist, said as calmly as she could manage, “Is your son by any chance an addict?”
The question of addiction has moved through my responses to Dan’s poker playing ever since it became a noticeable habit. His is a laserlike personality. When he was very small, his grandfather called him Mr. Focus. Years later, when I expressed relief that at least my son wasn’t snorting or popping pills, one family counselor suggested that tennis was Dan’s “drug.”
After the explosion that followed my amateur computer hacking, Dan and I did negotiate, albeit uncomfortably. He had persuaded Full Tilt Poker to restore the account to him. We resolved the issue of his return to college by agreeing that he would use some of his poker earnings to help pay his tuition until he had proved himself capable of balancing poker, tennis and school. Then he went to Virginia, and I went looking for answers.
I started with gambling help lines and support groups like Gam-Anon. At first the addiction model they used made sense; the notion that a gambling win caused a brain-stimulus pattern like that of a cocaine high explained Dan’s wild-eyed attack on the car when I locked up his account.
But when I consulted the much-used South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS), I felt less clarity than confusion. I imagined Dan’s answers to, say, SOGS question No. 11, “Have you ever hidden betting slips, lottery tickets, gambling money, i.o.u.’s or other signs of betting or gambling from . . . important people in your life?” (“Yes, because she equates poker betting with problem gambling”); or to SOGS No. 15, “Have you ever lost time from work (or school) due to betting money or gambling?” (“I’ve lost time from school because this is the wrong school for me”). He might score as a “probable pathological gambler,” but the questions, it seemed to me, centered on others’ — on my — idea of a problematic life, not on Dan’s. Other questions (“Have you ever borrowed from someone and not paid them back as a result of your gambling?”) didn’t apply to the player who was consistently in the money.
Dan’s second year of college saw him losing out on things other than profits. His grades took another nose dive. Reinstated on the tennis team, he quit after a few months. Yet he was winning, consistently, at poker, amassing a big enough bankroll by December to fly himself and a friend to Aruba and have plenty left over to buy a car, support himself and start planning a life of international travel. Since he no longer valued being a scholar-athlete, the loss of grades and sports prowess were, from Dan’s point of view, insignificant. In February, having paid spring tuition himself, he made the belated but rational decision to drop out of school. Were these the actions and decisions of a gambling addict or, as he now saw himself, of a poker professional?
The question was emotional for me. Confronted head-on by the gambling-addict camp, I felt desperate either to justify my son’s course of action or to mount an all-out rescue attempt. So I did what any self-respecting, psychically torn professor would do. I went to the library. And I learned many things.
I learned, for instance, that what I thought of as the addict-versus-pro argument (what other people might call the chance-versus-skill argument) is working itself out now in our legislatures and courts, in particular around a 2006 federal law, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. The U.I.G.E.A. prohibits Internet gambling businesses from accepting money for “unlawful” gambling. But this term turns out to be clear as mud; the definition of unlawful gambling varies according to state laws. An important concern for many opponents of the U.I.G.E.A. — which means most poker players — are those states that use the “dominant-factor test,” wherein chance, rather than skill, must dominate for a game to be considered gambling. As one article I read put it, if “poker is a game of skill and thus not a game subject to chance,” online poker sites would be free to do business with U.S. customers.
Thus went my rationalizing: If poker is a game in which skill predominates — like chess or Scrabble — then it isn't “just gambling.” Perhaps it really does sharpen the mind, as Charles R. Nesson, a Harvard law professor, has argued in promoting the game as “an environment for experiencing the dynamics of strategy.” My son is not being sucked into a zero-sum addictive game of luck that gives nothing back to society; he is benefiting from a challenging form of entertainment for which other rational adults are willing to pay.
Countering this nifty argument were the studies correlating compulsive poker playing with mood disorders, with substance abuse, with other risky or criminal behaviors. Even Charles Humphrey, a poker-law expert who has advised the Poker Players Alliance in its efforts to repeal the act, acknowledges the luck involved in poker when he observes that no one has ever repeated as Poker Player of the Year from one year to the next. “Indeed,” he writes, “few repeat in the Top 10 of those lists.”
I contacted Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. I wanted an answer, I told him — and at first, he gave me one. “Poker is gambling,” he said flatly. “It involves the same three things all gambling involves — prize, chance and consideration.” What’s more, I learned as I perused The Journal of Gambling Studies, most of us tend to risk more on the outcome of a task involving chance when it also requires just a dollop of skill — a not-inaccurate description of poker.
For many nights after Dan withdrew from school, I lay awake considering the life he was choosing — a life in which he is reduced from a toned athlete to a pale ectomorph, in which his social life is sporadic and mostly virtual, in which the possibility of a liberal education may be forever lost, in which steady romantic relationships (not to mention family) will be extremely difficult to maintain, in which he lives mostly apart from a society based on employment, wages and the rest of the social compact. I prayed that he would win enough to stop, or lose enough to stop, or grow bored and stop.
Slowly I began to realize how my original disapproval was truly anxiety writ large. Dan’s poker playing frightened me not because I condemned the game but because of where I feared it might lead. I was not going to be able to argue myself out of such fears. I remembered Keith Whyte’s response when I told him I was educating myself about state and national laws regarding poker. “The legal lens is the least helpful way to view this issue,” he advised me. “How and why you gamble — those are the important questions.” How was clear, at least for the moment: daily, nightly, online, alone and with some success. The key to acceptance came to me in considering why.
“He needs to separate,” a counselor once said of Dan — to separate, that is, from me, the person who had been there for him as an emotional and practical resource throughout his adolescence. This bond, for parents of college-age children, often takes the form of money. We are able to say to a son or daughter, “Yes, you are an adult now, but I pay your bills and so you must” — fill in the blank — “or I will reduce my support.” The bills we pay are our last measure of control over young people who may not yet be ready to take control of their own lives, and our wielding of the power of the purse is a measure of our love.
Now Dan has taken that power unto himself. He was no longer a college student or my dependent. He was, for the moment at least, not only self-supporting but looking at six months’ earnings that were more than my annual salary. Yes, he was playing poker because he loved the competition, because it had a bad-boy appeal, because his peers looked up to his success. (From The Journal of Gambling Studies: 92 percent of college students agree that gambling makes a person look smart.) But he was also playing poker because the financial independence it could yield allowed him to separate. Here, then, was something I could seize on: a small benefit, a morsel of sanity in what had seemed a feast of madness.
Nightmare outcomes still stalk my waking dreams:
Dan loses all his money; cannot quit playing; comes to me for funds; I tell him no; he borrows from the Mob and loses his kneecaps.
Dan makes millions; lives in a world of casinos, cocaine and one-night stands; wakes up one morning in middle age to discover his life is empty.
Dan is reduced to grinding online until it sets his teeth on edge; cannot bring himself to return to school or take a low-wage job; withdraws from human relationships.
I had these awful visions. Then, one by one, with boulder-heaving effort, I let them go. They will return, and I will push them away again. I feel I have no other power in the situation right now. Any railing against the evils of poker will only drive him into hiding and out of contact. Whatever my worries for my son, all I can do is love him.
As Dan has sensed the melting of my disapproval, the frozen sea that was our medium of communication has begun to melt as well. “Am I allowed to say I told you so?” I said when Dan called to say he had withdrawn from all his classes.
“It was a mistake to think I could play poker at this level and still study,” he admitted. “But you know, it’s not like I’m leaving college for poker. It’s more that poker’s allowed me to leave a situation that wasn’t good for me.”
On this, Dan and I wholeheartedly agree. Would he have been happier at a smaller school, on a team where he was a better fit, closer to home? Dan says he doesn’t know. He talks of returning to college while he’s still part of the traditional age cohort; he’s convinced that he could put poker aside to write a research paper if he wanted to. But Mr. Focus has a good deal more poker to focus on before any such possibility becomes realistic.
Like anyone who has been through a personal cataclysm, Dan and I cling to shreds of normalcy in our relations, aware always that his fierce assertion of autonomy and my concern over his lifestyle are land mines. Two weeks after withdrawing from school, Dan took off with a group of poker buddies for the European Poker Tournament in Germany, a face-to-face poker round leading up to the World Series of Poker. Some players at these tournaments have sponsors, their fees paid by companies or individuals in exchange for a percentage of their winnings; but like most of the 667 competitors — 31 of them from the United States — Dan paid the 5,300-euro buy-in himself, along with all the expenses of the trip.
On the second day of the tournament, I found a report online. A third of the entrants remained in the draw, only six from the U.S., and Dan was among them. I couldn’t help feeling a flash of joy, knowing how happy he must be, how confident and eager for the next round. Twelve hours later, he had lost. “But my friend Jake won the $2K event,” he said over the phone the day he flew back.
“You mean he won $2,000?”
“No, Mom. That’s the buy-in. He won like $140,000.”
The idea of such a sum — $140,000! — dropping into the lap of a 19-year-old gave me the fantods. What’s the relation between work and wage here? I wanted to ask my son — but this time I held back. He wasn’t thinking of work or wages but of freedom.
These days I don’t ask if Dan has won or lost. I do ask how he feels. He admits to loneliness. Rising from his computer after eight hours of playing between four and six tables of Texas Hold ’Em while I.M.-ing his friends and checking his opponents’ stats, he feels drained. But he also finds life lessons in his new vocation. “I have learned more about people,” he tells me, “sitting at my computer playing poker than doing anything else.”
This insight is hard for me to fathom. By now, Dan has moved back to our Connecticut town, subletting a chic furnished studio. I’ve watched him play poker — the little icons sitting around the bright green “felt” on the screen, the numbers blinking, the cards flipping at lightning speed. “But you don’t see any people,” I say.
“And in life, I don’t wonder if I have two aces,” he agrees. “But the deeper processes apply. Like, what do I want this person to do, or what am I going to do because they’re thinking this or that? When I’m dealing in real life with something I want to accomplish, I focus on what the other person’s thinking and try to react positively to get what I want. Plus my whole outlook has matured. I keep better control of my emotions. I know how to combine factors to make the most levelheaded decision. That’s what life is, isn’t it? Using pros and cons to make the best decision you can?”
Well, no, I think. That isn’t life. Life is more than winning, more than manipulating others. I remember another opinion Dan has ventured — that young men find poker more exciting and successful than young women because women think, Do I have cards that can win? whereas men think, How can I get this person to think I have the best cards? Not knowing anything about my cards, I step onto land-mined turf. What about relationships? I ask Dan. What about people you care about, people you don’t want to beat?
He thinks a minute. Then he says: “Playing poker does help you focus more on what other people might need from you. You might not be right all the time, but that’s where your thought process goes. If you care about someone else’s goal, then you can help them.”
As a parent accustomed to the narcissism of young men, this statement takes my breath away. I’m not yet ready to promote online poker as a straight path toward the compassionate life. Caring about someone else’s goal is not the same as caring about that person. Still, in my eagerness for positive signs, I manage to glimpse a thin, frail line linking strategy and empathy.
We don’t talk much about last summer. It’s understood between us that if Dan returns to school and needs renewed parental support, he’ll have to offer some evidence of a change in outlook. And it is understood, I think, that I can love him without accepting everything he does. When I ask Dan what he wants now, from his parents, he’ll say only, “What I don’t want is negativity.”
Neither, I realize, do I. On the rare occasion when another adult learns that my son is a poker shark and says, “Good for him!” I feel a twinge of orphaned hope. Maybe his path is good; maybe it’s foolish to second-guess all my decisions going back to that first day I pulled out the penny jar and explained blackjack, not just because nothing I could have done would have changed Dan’s trajectory but also because Dan’s trajectory may bend toward a free and happy future. Now and then I still consider trying to influence that trajectory. In the end I find the best I can manage is to hold steady. Even if, years hence, I can name and pinpoint the moment when I might have changed my son’s course and did not, surely self-recrimination carries no purpose unless a way opens for positive action. I worry daily about the path my son has chosen. Daily, I remind myself that I can neither remove its rocks nor predict its forks.
Recently Dan stopped by my house. He was on his way to a tournament at Turning Stone casino in New York. “But my cellphone’s not working,” he complained. He’s on my family plan, a last vestige of dependence, and would have been eligible for an upgrade, but he didn’t have time to stop by the store.
“Why don’t you just take my phone?” I said. “I’m not going on any trips. I don’t really need it.”
While I worked my SIM card out of my phone and slid his in, I asked casually if he was paying his own way into this tournament. “I’m in the first couple rounds on my own,” he said. “After that, I’m backed.”
“Sounds good,” I said. I focused on replacing the battery, snapping the back of the phone on. “How’s the money holding up?”
“I’ve still got some.”
I didn’t ask more. I waved him off from the driveway. I was glad to know that, whether he ran into trouble on the road or with the cards, he’d have a way to get in touch.
Lucy Ferriss is a writer in residence at Trinity College and the author of the memoir “Unveiling the Prophet.”
Saturday, June 27, 2009
June 25, 2009, 10:10 pm
NYT
When the Heart Pays the Price of Anger
By Robert Allan
Not long ago, a cardiac patient in a cardiac support group I was leading told of his response to a recent incident: He and a female friend were on the plaza at Lincoln Center after seeing a performance of Verdi’s opera “Il Trovatore” when a car nearly hit the woman. She ran after the vehicle, which was slowly moving away, and slammed the trunk with her rolled up program. The driver emerged from the car hurling expletives in her direction. The patient then hit the driver with his cane. The driver shoved the patient into a fender, at which point, the patient insisted, he had no choice … It was no ordinary cane he was carrying, but a beautiful 19th-century model with a sleek, sharp sword concealed within. He then insisted that the driver “apologize at swordpoint” in front of a small crowd that had gathered. The characters in “Il Trovatore,” he added, proudly brandished swords.
The patient shared this story at his first — and only — session of the support group. (He terminated treatment, insisting that the others needed my help with their anger far more than he did.) Even after deliberating for several weeks, the patient felt justified and vindicated, totally satisfied by his actions.
Many of us harbor the “make my day” fantasy, emblazoned into the American psyche by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. Americans get mad — and get even. However, when people pursue such satisfaction they run the risk of triggering someone else’s thirst for revenge, and so begins a recurring, sometimes escalating, cycle. Soon, one always has to look behind his or her back in fear that a former adversary will find an opportunity for the proverbial knifing.
Not many people on earth can claim regular, deep, long-lasting satisfaction. Satisfaction is fleeting, and often whittled away by recorded telephone menus, rude waiters and any number of other indignities of contemporary society. And of course, this has particular currency today. Many of us are justifiably angry at our former employers for loss of jobs or at the financial service industry’s inability to protect our life savings.
Challenging times certainly increase the tendency for negative moods and aggressive behavior (this dynamic was described in the “frustration-aggression hypothesis” first put forth in the 1940s.[1] However, giving way to an angry impulse makes nearly any situation worse.
The aforementioned patient’s life, in spite of considerable intelligence, advanced degrees, and a personable demeanor, was one of mere survival in a cramped studio apartment. When we met, he was selling some of his few remaining valuables to make the next month’s rent. This patient’s career was marked with disappointments – in others who disappointed him. Moreover, he was a cardiac patient with a bad family history and suffered a heart attack at a young age. The swordsman was keenly aware of the link between chronic anger and heart disease. Indeed, a recent meta-analysis of 44 prospective studies in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology[2] confirms a strong relationship between anger and both the onset and outcome from coronary heart disease; moreover, approximately 1.5 percent of heart attacks are “triggered” by intense anger.
While it is not possible to make a definitive causal connection between the swordsman’s actions and unfortunate life circumstances, the experience of a 35-year practice as a clinical psychologist and abundant literature on the subject all inform me that the sort of satisfaction of which he was so fond ultimately did him in, both in health and life. Expressing his anger didn’t benefit him at all.
People often challenge this view with the idea that unexpressed anger “builds up,” leading to resentment, high blood pressure, a heart attack or stroke. Many of us conceive of anger just as we fill a balloon with (hot) air. We get angry, the balloon expands. An injustice befalls us, we get angrier — the balloon gets larger. Something else “bad” happens and the balloon gets so big that it … bursts! The comedian Jonathan Katz described a moment like this in a joke about having dinner with his father: “I meant to say, ‘Can you pass me the salt, please?’ But it comes out, You creep, you ruined my childhood!”
Jokes aside, anger is not a measurable substance. There is no organ, gland, or other repository in our bodies for anger. Yet, we have myriad terms that make reference to anger as an accumulating substance. Anger “builds up,” “leaks out,” and is sometimes transformed into “explosive rage.” The idea that anger accumulates is a myth that can sometimes lead to the sort of “satisfaction” achieved by my patient. He didn’t “bottle-up” his anger; he “released” it (“it,” in his thinking, transformed into a substance). My patient obtained “real satisfaction” by drawing his sword — but ultimately slashed his existence to a sliver of what he might have become.
When faced with frustrating disappointments, we may all secretly wish to advise our money managers, as well those with whom we are close, about their expanding waistline, receding hairline, or the pimple that has suddenly sprung up in the middle of their forehead. But such “satisfaction” inevitably comes back to haunt us as others are even more likely to remember our insult than we are to relish getting the best of them. To quote another patient, “life is very lonely when you are always right.”
References:
[1] The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis, Neal E. Miller (1941) (with the collaboration of Robert R. Sears, O.H. Mowrer, Leonard W. Doob & John Dollard), Institute of Human Relations, Yale University. First published in Psychological Review, 48, 337-342
[2] The association of anger and hostility with future coronary heart disease: a meta-analytic review of prospective evidence. Chida Y, Steptoe A., Journal of the American College of Cardiology 2009 Mar 17;53(11):936-46. PMID: 19281923
Also:
Anger-induced T-wave alternans predicts future ventricular arrhythmias in patients with implantable cardioverter-defibrillators. Lampert R, Shusterman V, Burg M, McPherson C, Batsford W, Goldberg A, Soufer R., Journal of the American College of Cardiology 2009 Mar 3;53(9):774-8. PMID: 19245968
DESCRIPTION
Robert Allan is a clinical psychologist, the author of “Getting Control of Your Anger” and co-editor of “Heart and Mind: the Practice of Cardiac Psychology” (American Psychological Association), currently under revision. Dr. Allan holds appointments at Weill Cornell Medical College and New York Presbyterian Hospital. His Web site is RobertAllanPhD.com
NYT
When the Heart Pays the Price of Anger
By Robert Allan
Not long ago, a cardiac patient in a cardiac support group I was leading told of his response to a recent incident: He and a female friend were on the plaza at Lincoln Center after seeing a performance of Verdi’s opera “Il Trovatore” when a car nearly hit the woman. She ran after the vehicle, which was slowly moving away, and slammed the trunk with her rolled up program. The driver emerged from the car hurling expletives in her direction. The patient then hit the driver with his cane. The driver shoved the patient into a fender, at which point, the patient insisted, he had no choice … It was no ordinary cane he was carrying, but a beautiful 19th-century model with a sleek, sharp sword concealed within. He then insisted that the driver “apologize at swordpoint” in front of a small crowd that had gathered. The characters in “Il Trovatore,” he added, proudly brandished swords.
The patient shared this story at his first — and only — session of the support group. (He terminated treatment, insisting that the others needed my help with their anger far more than he did.) Even after deliberating for several weeks, the patient felt justified and vindicated, totally satisfied by his actions.
Many of us harbor the “make my day” fantasy, emblazoned into the American psyche by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. Americans get mad — and get even. However, when people pursue such satisfaction they run the risk of triggering someone else’s thirst for revenge, and so begins a recurring, sometimes escalating, cycle. Soon, one always has to look behind his or her back in fear that a former adversary will find an opportunity for the proverbial knifing.
Not many people on earth can claim regular, deep, long-lasting satisfaction. Satisfaction is fleeting, and often whittled away by recorded telephone menus, rude waiters and any number of other indignities of contemporary society. And of course, this has particular currency today. Many of us are justifiably angry at our former employers for loss of jobs or at the financial service industry’s inability to protect our life savings.
Challenging times certainly increase the tendency for negative moods and aggressive behavior (this dynamic was described in the “frustration-aggression hypothesis” first put forth in the 1940s.[1] However, giving way to an angry impulse makes nearly any situation worse.
The aforementioned patient’s life, in spite of considerable intelligence, advanced degrees, and a personable demeanor, was one of mere survival in a cramped studio apartment. When we met, he was selling some of his few remaining valuables to make the next month’s rent. This patient’s career was marked with disappointments – in others who disappointed him. Moreover, he was a cardiac patient with a bad family history and suffered a heart attack at a young age. The swordsman was keenly aware of the link between chronic anger and heart disease. Indeed, a recent meta-analysis of 44 prospective studies in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology[2] confirms a strong relationship between anger and both the onset and outcome from coronary heart disease; moreover, approximately 1.5 percent of heart attacks are “triggered” by intense anger.
While it is not possible to make a definitive causal connection between the swordsman’s actions and unfortunate life circumstances, the experience of a 35-year practice as a clinical psychologist and abundant literature on the subject all inform me that the sort of satisfaction of which he was so fond ultimately did him in, both in health and life. Expressing his anger didn’t benefit him at all.
People often challenge this view with the idea that unexpressed anger “builds up,” leading to resentment, high blood pressure, a heart attack or stroke. Many of us conceive of anger just as we fill a balloon with (hot) air. We get angry, the balloon expands. An injustice befalls us, we get angrier — the balloon gets larger. Something else “bad” happens and the balloon gets so big that it … bursts! The comedian Jonathan Katz described a moment like this in a joke about having dinner with his father: “I meant to say, ‘Can you pass me the salt, please?’ But it comes out, You creep, you ruined my childhood!”
Jokes aside, anger is not a measurable substance. There is no organ, gland, or other repository in our bodies for anger. Yet, we have myriad terms that make reference to anger as an accumulating substance. Anger “builds up,” “leaks out,” and is sometimes transformed into “explosive rage.” The idea that anger accumulates is a myth that can sometimes lead to the sort of “satisfaction” achieved by my patient. He didn’t “bottle-up” his anger; he “released” it (“it,” in his thinking, transformed into a substance). My patient obtained “real satisfaction” by drawing his sword — but ultimately slashed his existence to a sliver of what he might have become.
When faced with frustrating disappointments, we may all secretly wish to advise our money managers, as well those with whom we are close, about their expanding waistline, receding hairline, or the pimple that has suddenly sprung up in the middle of their forehead. But such “satisfaction” inevitably comes back to haunt us as others are even more likely to remember our insult than we are to relish getting the best of them. To quote another patient, “life is very lonely when you are always right.”
References:
[1] The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis, Neal E. Miller (1941) (with the collaboration of Robert R. Sears, O.H. Mowrer, Leonard W. Doob & John Dollard), Institute of Human Relations, Yale University. First published in Psychological Review, 48, 337-342
[2] The association of anger and hostility with future coronary heart disease: a meta-analytic review of prospective evidence. Chida Y, Steptoe A., Journal of the American College of Cardiology 2009 Mar 17;53(11):936-46. PMID: 19281923
Also:
Anger-induced T-wave alternans predicts future ventricular arrhythmias in patients with implantable cardioverter-defibrillators. Lampert R, Shusterman V, Burg M, McPherson C, Batsford W, Goldberg A, Soufer R., Journal of the American College of Cardiology 2009 Mar 3;53(9):774-8. PMID: 19245968
DESCRIPTION
Robert Allan is a clinical psychologist, the author of “Getting Control of Your Anger” and co-editor of “Heart and Mind: the Practice of Cardiac Psychology” (American Psychological Association), currently under revision. Dr. Allan holds appointments at Weill Cornell Medical College and New York Presbyterian Hospital. His Web site is RobertAllanPhD.com
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
June 14, 2009, 10:00 pm
NYT
Stanley Fish
Fathers, Sons and Motorcycles
What is it about motorcycles? I have never been on one for the same reason that I don’t go on roller coasters or other amusement-park rides. I’m terrified.
Yet every so often motorcycles come into my life. When I met my wife in the middle ’70s her primary mode of transportation was a motorcycle (a small Honda). She specialized in terrifying situations. She rode it to and from work in South Philadelphia and was once robbed at an intersection while waiting for the light to turn green. She took the bike onto the Baltimore Beltway, where I felt nervous driving a car. She says now that she got it because something was missing from her life. And she bought it immediately after having read Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values” (1974).
Pirsig’s book is an extended meditation on philosophy, rhetoric and fatherhood. The narrative follows a long motorcycle journey the author takes with his son and two friends. Another main character (present only in thought and imagination) is named Phaedrus. He is at once Pirsig’s alter-ego, a questing philosopher of daunting and destabilizing intellect, and the foil of Socrates in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name.
The philosophy Pirsig and Phaedrus wrestle with is a variant of the holism associated with phenomenology and with thinkers as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Michael Polanyi, Martin Heidegger, Donald Schön, Thomas Kuhn, Erving Goffman and the later Wittgenstein (with Kant in the background). Different as they are in many respects, these philosophers share a conviction that knowledge of the world cannot be achieved by inventorying its discrete parts. Rather, they contend, the world must first be conceived or assumed whole and entire (don’t ask how) and the emergence of its parts and the possibility of describing them then follows.
Pirsig’s example is describing the parts of a motorcycle, an exercise that has no natural stopping point. But, he insists, no matter how much data the exercise heaped up, true comprehension would still not have been achieved, for the motorcycle “so described is almost impossible to understand unless you know how it works.” Rather than building up from particulars to generals (the empiricist method), you must begin with generals — with an in-place, intuitive awareness of what motorcycles are for, of what can go wrong with them, of what can go right with them — and within that tacit knowledge you will know where to direct your analytic attention. You can’t just begin with analytic attention, with “mere” or “pure” observation, and expect to get anywhere; you must already, in a sense, be there.
The problem is that once the parts or facts are made to appear, they seem to possess an independence, and it is (literally) tempting to rest in them and to believe that they are the foundation of things. (In theology this mistake is called idolatry.) “The division of the world into parts,” says Pirsig, “is something everyone does,” but in doing it, “something is always killed” — and what is killed is an awareness of and contact with the world before analytic thought has done its (necessarily) reductive work.
If we think of the world as a handful of sand sorted into separate piles, there are, Pirsig tells us, two ways of understanding it. “Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and relating them” while “romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting began.” But (and here’s the rub) the handful of sand is only known as something that exceeds the sortings we have made of it; the whole world can never be grasped directly, and so we are always in danger of occupying ourselves with the wrong things. “What has become an urgent necessity,” Pirsig announces (he is hardly the first in history to do so), “is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one.”
A tall order and Pirsig’s efforts to rise to it literally drive him crazy and lead him first to disengage from his family and then to undertake this journey in the hope that both his relationship with his son and the fractured pieces of his thought can be made whole.
Now, in 2009, comes the story of another father and son who try to heal a broken relationship through the medium of motorcycles. This time it is the son who takes the lead. The book is “Big Sid’s Vincati: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Motorcycle of a Lifetime,” by Matthew Biberman. A former student, Biberman is a professor of English at Louisville University and he lives his life in the very large shadow of his father, Big Sid, a 6-foot five-inch, 300-pound legend (certified as such by Jay Leno) who is “one of the best motorcycle tuners in the country if not the world.” The opposition Persig draws out between the analytic “knife” and the tactile, mobile reality it always kills is played out in the tension between the great motorcycle tuner who says things like “This is joyous work” and the Duke-educated academic who cannot find that joy in his research and teaching, but finds it, unexpectedly, in the work of saving his father, which is also (though he doesn’t know it at the beginning) the work of saving himself.
As the narrative opens, both men are in a state of frustration, the father because his time of accomplishment has apparently passed, the son because the accomplishments he can put on his resume are not the ones he had contemplated. (He wanted to write the great American novel but has had to settle for writing a book on Shakespeare and Milton.) Writing was to have been Matthew’s escape from his father and the world of motorcycles. Motorcycles had been Sid’s escape from his own father. Each has said in a moment of dejection “I’m finished.”
They are revived and brought together by an unlikely intervention of fate: Big Sid has a heart attack. Sensing that his father’s will to live is waning, Matthew visits him in the hospital and blurts out, “I was thinking we could build a Vincati together.” The Vincati is an amalgam of two legendary bikes, the British Vincent and the Italian Ducati. The task is a formidable one, but neither can do it alone; Matthew because he doesn’t have the skill, Sid because he no longer has the strength. The son immediately knows that this is what his father has always wanted — “Sid has been waiting my whole adult life for me to ask him . . . to work with him and learn all he knows about motorcycles” — but he fears that it may be too late because his father is “convinced he’s dying.”
It turns out that it is not too late, but the road is full of bumps, detours and obstacles and before they reach the end of it Sid suffers debilitating injuries, Matthew withdraws from his own family (replicating the behavior he so resented in his father) and the laws of physics keep saying no. All the while, building the bike is inextricable from the rebuilding of the filial relationship.
Father and son now run a motorcycle repair shop together. In an interview Matthew has said, “What I most wanted to run away from is exactly where I ended up.” When the job is finished and the Vincati stands there Sid says this “is the best thing I ever did.” Matthew looks over at his father and understands: “I wanted to live to be his age and say that about the last thing I write.” Amen.
Biberman acknowledges a debt to Pirsig, but his book is short on philosophy. Not so Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work” (an obvious tip of the hat to his predecessor.) Crawford too is driven by a vexed father-son relationship. This time the father is an intellectual — he is a physicist — and the son initially follows in his footsteps by getting a Ph.D. in political philosophy, but he finds more satisfaction in the work of repairing motorcycles. One day when he comes home “filthy, frustrated and reeking of gasoline,” his father makes a theoretical pronouncement he finds singularly unhelpful. “It began to dawn on me that my father’s habits of mind, as a mathematical physicist, were ill suited to the reality I was dealing with in an old Volkswagen.”
In time, this realization leads him to a position like Pirsig’s, but he holds it polemically and without anxiety: “To regard universal knowledge as the whole of knowledge is to take no account of embodiment and purposiveness.” We should not, he says, “separate knowing from doing,” and it makes sense that his model of the true “knowledge worker” is not his father the theoretician, but the mechanic or craftsman whose knowledge resides in his hands and in his hands-on experience.
It follows then that the modern tendency to move further and further from the site of physical labor (by, for example, designing automobiles on a computer or teaching people to fly in a simulated cockpit) is disastrously wrong. As computer diagnosis takes the place of fiddling around with the machinery, “we have too few occasions to do anything because of a certain predetermination of things from afar.”
Crawford associates this kind of “remote control” knowledge with liberalism, a way of thinking that has at its center the individual self unburdened “by attachments to others and radically free,” a self whose chief commitment and obligation is to its own “creativity.”
Crawford prefers to the ethic of individual creativity and its “rhetoric of freedom” the ethic of submission to facts “that do not arise from the human will.” It is that submission, he says, that characterizes the work of craftsmen, artisans and musicians. “One can’t be a musician without . . . subjecting one’s fingers to the discipline of frets or keys.” Whereas craftsmanship “means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it,” the “preferred role model” of the radically free liberal self “is the management consultant, who swoops in and out and whose very pride lies in his lack of particular expertise.”
Obviously there is a recommendation and even an agenda here. Unlike Pirsig and Biberman, Crawford has an axe, actually a bunch of axes, to grind. He tells us that high schools should reinstitute shop. He tells us that what mechanics and craftsmen do cannot be outsourced to China. He tells us that white collar work too often involves speaking corporate double talk and being without a core commitment (liberalism’s goal). He tells us that the ascendency of remote control knowledge has delivered the current economic crisis with its ever-proliferating, attached-to-nothing derivatives.
One might say that Crawford’s book offers more than Pirsig’s and Biberman’s because it has a social message, indeed several messages. But that would be wrong, for the spirit saveth while the message killeth. Sometimes you have to have a message (I’ve been guilty of peddling a few myself). Sometimes people need to hear it. But messages are always reductive and have the effect of limiting horizons and hobbling the imagination, two things Biberman and Pirsig never do.
While I have been writing this column I have been experiencing the insights these three books share. A month ago, I took my old Jaguar to an automotive center that is part of a huge tire chain. Something was wrong with the air conditioning, and the mechanics there dutifully consulted the online specifications and did what the manuals directed them to do.
This past weekend the air conditioning failed again. I took it to a Jaguar repair shop, where the proprietor and sole employee didn’t consult anything. He poked and prodded and turned this and that switch on and off in (what was to him) a significant order, and then after about a minute he pronounced: The guys at the big computerized shop had indeed charged the unit with the specified amount of freon; but with this car that what was not what you’re supposed to do, because when it gets hot out, too much pressure is exerted and the compressor shuts off. The air system in this model is quirky and not very reliable, he said, and he said it affectionately.
At a similar moment in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” someone in my position asks, “How do you know all that?” The answer is, “You have to have some familiarity.” I’ll remember that, although, all by itself, it won’t be of much help.
NYT
Stanley Fish
Fathers, Sons and Motorcycles
What is it about motorcycles? I have never been on one for the same reason that I don’t go on roller coasters or other amusement-park rides. I’m terrified.
Yet every so often motorcycles come into my life. When I met my wife in the middle ’70s her primary mode of transportation was a motorcycle (a small Honda). She specialized in terrifying situations. She rode it to and from work in South Philadelphia and was once robbed at an intersection while waiting for the light to turn green. She took the bike onto the Baltimore Beltway, where I felt nervous driving a car. She says now that she got it because something was missing from her life. And she bought it immediately after having read Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values” (1974).
Pirsig’s book is an extended meditation on philosophy, rhetoric and fatherhood. The narrative follows a long motorcycle journey the author takes with his son and two friends. Another main character (present only in thought and imagination) is named Phaedrus. He is at once Pirsig’s alter-ego, a questing philosopher of daunting and destabilizing intellect, and the foil of Socrates in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name.
The philosophy Pirsig and Phaedrus wrestle with is a variant of the holism associated with phenomenology and with thinkers as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Michael Polanyi, Martin Heidegger, Donald Schön, Thomas Kuhn, Erving Goffman and the later Wittgenstein (with Kant in the background). Different as they are in many respects, these philosophers share a conviction that knowledge of the world cannot be achieved by inventorying its discrete parts. Rather, they contend, the world must first be conceived or assumed whole and entire (don’t ask how) and the emergence of its parts and the possibility of describing them then follows.
Pirsig’s example is describing the parts of a motorcycle, an exercise that has no natural stopping point. But, he insists, no matter how much data the exercise heaped up, true comprehension would still not have been achieved, for the motorcycle “so described is almost impossible to understand unless you know how it works.” Rather than building up from particulars to generals (the empiricist method), you must begin with generals — with an in-place, intuitive awareness of what motorcycles are for, of what can go wrong with them, of what can go right with them — and within that tacit knowledge you will know where to direct your analytic attention. You can’t just begin with analytic attention, with “mere” or “pure” observation, and expect to get anywhere; you must already, in a sense, be there.
The problem is that once the parts or facts are made to appear, they seem to possess an independence, and it is (literally) tempting to rest in them and to believe that they are the foundation of things. (In theology this mistake is called idolatry.) “The division of the world into parts,” says Pirsig, “is something everyone does,” but in doing it, “something is always killed” — and what is killed is an awareness of and contact with the world before analytic thought has done its (necessarily) reductive work.
If we think of the world as a handful of sand sorted into separate piles, there are, Pirsig tells us, two ways of understanding it. “Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and relating them” while “romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting began.” But (and here’s the rub) the handful of sand is only known as something that exceeds the sortings we have made of it; the whole world can never be grasped directly, and so we are always in danger of occupying ourselves with the wrong things. “What has become an urgent necessity,” Pirsig announces (he is hardly the first in history to do so), “is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one.”
A tall order and Pirsig’s efforts to rise to it literally drive him crazy and lead him first to disengage from his family and then to undertake this journey in the hope that both his relationship with his son and the fractured pieces of his thought can be made whole.
Now, in 2009, comes the story of another father and son who try to heal a broken relationship through the medium of motorcycles. This time it is the son who takes the lead. The book is “Big Sid’s Vincati: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Motorcycle of a Lifetime,” by Matthew Biberman. A former student, Biberman is a professor of English at Louisville University and he lives his life in the very large shadow of his father, Big Sid, a 6-foot five-inch, 300-pound legend (certified as such by Jay Leno) who is “one of the best motorcycle tuners in the country if not the world.” The opposition Persig draws out between the analytic “knife” and the tactile, mobile reality it always kills is played out in the tension between the great motorcycle tuner who says things like “This is joyous work” and the Duke-educated academic who cannot find that joy in his research and teaching, but finds it, unexpectedly, in the work of saving his father, which is also (though he doesn’t know it at the beginning) the work of saving himself.
As the narrative opens, both men are in a state of frustration, the father because his time of accomplishment has apparently passed, the son because the accomplishments he can put on his resume are not the ones he had contemplated. (He wanted to write the great American novel but has had to settle for writing a book on Shakespeare and Milton.) Writing was to have been Matthew’s escape from his father and the world of motorcycles. Motorcycles had been Sid’s escape from his own father. Each has said in a moment of dejection “I’m finished.”
They are revived and brought together by an unlikely intervention of fate: Big Sid has a heart attack. Sensing that his father’s will to live is waning, Matthew visits him in the hospital and blurts out, “I was thinking we could build a Vincati together.” The Vincati is an amalgam of two legendary bikes, the British Vincent and the Italian Ducati. The task is a formidable one, but neither can do it alone; Matthew because he doesn’t have the skill, Sid because he no longer has the strength. The son immediately knows that this is what his father has always wanted — “Sid has been waiting my whole adult life for me to ask him . . . to work with him and learn all he knows about motorcycles” — but he fears that it may be too late because his father is “convinced he’s dying.”
It turns out that it is not too late, but the road is full of bumps, detours and obstacles and before they reach the end of it Sid suffers debilitating injuries, Matthew withdraws from his own family (replicating the behavior he so resented in his father) and the laws of physics keep saying no. All the while, building the bike is inextricable from the rebuilding of the filial relationship.
Father and son now run a motorcycle repair shop together. In an interview Matthew has said, “What I most wanted to run away from is exactly where I ended up.” When the job is finished and the Vincati stands there Sid says this “is the best thing I ever did.” Matthew looks over at his father and understands: “I wanted to live to be his age and say that about the last thing I write.” Amen.
Biberman acknowledges a debt to Pirsig, but his book is short on philosophy. Not so Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work” (an obvious tip of the hat to his predecessor.) Crawford too is driven by a vexed father-son relationship. This time the father is an intellectual — he is a physicist — and the son initially follows in his footsteps by getting a Ph.D. in political philosophy, but he finds more satisfaction in the work of repairing motorcycles. One day when he comes home “filthy, frustrated and reeking of gasoline,” his father makes a theoretical pronouncement he finds singularly unhelpful. “It began to dawn on me that my father’s habits of mind, as a mathematical physicist, were ill suited to the reality I was dealing with in an old Volkswagen.”
In time, this realization leads him to a position like Pirsig’s, but he holds it polemically and without anxiety: “To regard universal knowledge as the whole of knowledge is to take no account of embodiment and purposiveness.” We should not, he says, “separate knowing from doing,” and it makes sense that his model of the true “knowledge worker” is not his father the theoretician, but the mechanic or craftsman whose knowledge resides in his hands and in his hands-on experience.
It follows then that the modern tendency to move further and further from the site of physical labor (by, for example, designing automobiles on a computer or teaching people to fly in a simulated cockpit) is disastrously wrong. As computer diagnosis takes the place of fiddling around with the machinery, “we have too few occasions to do anything because of a certain predetermination of things from afar.”
Crawford associates this kind of “remote control” knowledge with liberalism, a way of thinking that has at its center the individual self unburdened “by attachments to others and radically free,” a self whose chief commitment and obligation is to its own “creativity.”
Crawford prefers to the ethic of individual creativity and its “rhetoric of freedom” the ethic of submission to facts “that do not arise from the human will.” It is that submission, he says, that characterizes the work of craftsmen, artisans and musicians. “One can’t be a musician without . . . subjecting one’s fingers to the discipline of frets or keys.” Whereas craftsmanship “means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it,” the “preferred role model” of the radically free liberal self “is the management consultant, who swoops in and out and whose very pride lies in his lack of particular expertise.”
Obviously there is a recommendation and even an agenda here. Unlike Pirsig and Biberman, Crawford has an axe, actually a bunch of axes, to grind. He tells us that high schools should reinstitute shop. He tells us that what mechanics and craftsmen do cannot be outsourced to China. He tells us that white collar work too often involves speaking corporate double talk and being without a core commitment (liberalism’s goal). He tells us that the ascendency of remote control knowledge has delivered the current economic crisis with its ever-proliferating, attached-to-nothing derivatives.
One might say that Crawford’s book offers more than Pirsig’s and Biberman’s because it has a social message, indeed several messages. But that would be wrong, for the spirit saveth while the message killeth. Sometimes you have to have a message (I’ve been guilty of peddling a few myself). Sometimes people need to hear it. But messages are always reductive and have the effect of limiting horizons and hobbling the imagination, two things Biberman and Pirsig never do.
While I have been writing this column I have been experiencing the insights these three books share. A month ago, I took my old Jaguar to an automotive center that is part of a huge tire chain. Something was wrong with the air conditioning, and the mechanics there dutifully consulted the online specifications and did what the manuals directed them to do.
This past weekend the air conditioning failed again. I took it to a Jaguar repair shop, where the proprietor and sole employee didn’t consult anything. He poked and prodded and turned this and that switch on and off in (what was to him) a significant order, and then after about a minute he pronounced: The guys at the big computerized shop had indeed charged the unit with the specified amount of freon; but with this car that what was not what you’re supposed to do, because when it gets hot out, too much pressure is exerted and the compressor shuts off. The air system in this model is quirky and not very reliable, he said, and he said it affectionately.
At a similar moment in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” someone in my position asks, “How do you know all that?” The answer is, “You have to have some familiarity.” I’ll remember that, although, all by itself, it won’t be of much help.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
June 7, 2009, 10:35 pm
NYT
The Joy of Less
By Pico Iyer
“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.
I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park
In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.
So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.
I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).
When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who
Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.
have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.
If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.
[Editor's note: an earlier version of this post included an inaccurate reference to the constitution of Japan. It has since been removed.]
NYT
The Joy of Less
By Pico Iyer
“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.
I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park
In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.
So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.
I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).
When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who
Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.
have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.
If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.
[Editor's note: an earlier version of this post included an inaccurate reference to the constitution of Japan. It has since been removed.]
Friday, June 05, 2009
The New York Times
June 6, 2009
Patient Money
Cost-Effective Ways To Fight Insomnia
By LESLEY ALDERMAN
HOW much would you pay for a good night’s sleep?
If the sleep peddlers have their way, quite a bit. Sleep is a $23.9 billion industry — if you count things as diverse as mattresses, white noise machines and prescription pills — and it has more than doubled in the last decade, according to Marketdata Enterprises, a research firm in Tampa, Fla.
The market for insomnia drugs alone is expected to grow 78 percent, to nearly $3.9 billion, by 2012, as drug makers scramble to bring more pills to market to compete with name brands like Lunesta, Sonata and Ambien CR.
There is even a new event, the National Sleep Foundation’s Big Sleep Show, to promote sleep-inducing products and services to the tired masses. It occurs several times a year, and the next one is set for August in Dallas.
Sleeping is a serious problem for millions of people. The National Sleep Foundation (which receives financial support from pharmaceutical companies) estimates that 20 percent of Americans, up from 13 percent eight years ago, sleep fewer than six hours a night. The lucky few who sleep a full eight hours or more dropped to 28 percent, from 38 percent, the foundation said.
Being chronically sleep-deprived is more than just tiring. It can lead to depression, high blood pressure and lower productivity, both on and off the job.
If the problem is pure insomnia — rather than sleep apnea or another medical issue — there are smart and affordable options. Here are some of the most cost-effective ways to get the sleep you need, and a few things you should avoid altogether.
Patient Money You have probably heard these sleep dos and don’ts before, but they bear repeating. If you have been tossing and turning, do not drink caffeine after, say, 2 p.m. And avoid downing more than a glass of wine or the equivalent amount of other alcohol in the evening.
Save stressful activities, like arguments with your children or a review of your finances, for early in the day.
Get into bed a half-hour before you plan to turn out the lights, and read a calming book. No TV, BlackBerry or electronic diversion of any kind an hour or so before bed, because they tend to be stimulating, not relaxing.
Exercise regularly, and reduce the overall level of stress in your life. (Free, yes. Easy? Not always.)
For more tips and suggestion, try the consumer site (www.sleepeducation.com) of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Do not waste your money on herbs like Valerian or fancy mattresses. There is no proof that herbs or special bedding help chronic insomnia.
Over-the-counter medications that contain sleep-inducing antihistamines are fine for a night or two, but that is all. They typically do not work over the long term, and they bring unpleasant side effects like dry mouth and grogginess, says Dr. Alex Chediak, a past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and an associate professor of medicine at the University of Miami.
If you still cannot sleep, see a doctor.
FIND A SLEEP SPECIALIST If you have mild insomnia, see your primary care physician. But if you have been having trouble sleeping for months and feel tired most days, Dr. Chediak advises finding a board-certified sleep doctor.
Doctors with that certification — there are about 3,500 in this country — have passed a rigorous exam and have a thorough knowledge of sleep medicine. Your physician can give you a referral or you can go to the American Board of Sleep Medicine’s sleep center site (www.sleepcenters.org). All accredited sleep centers are required to have one certified sleep doctor on staff.
A sleep doctor will first try to rule out an underlying medical condition that would require treatment by a different type of specialist. If you have primary insomnia, a medical condition in its own right, your doctor will probably begin treating you right away.
TRY A GENERIC DRUG Your doctor may prescribe a so-called hypnotic drug to help you sleep through the night. Ask for a generic option— such as zolpidem, the generic version of Ambien — which will be much cheaper than brand-name medications like Ambien CR or Lunesta, which can cost $2 to $3 a pill.
If your main problem is falling asleep in the first place, zolpidem is very effective and works quickly, Dr. Chediak says. But if your problem is waking too early, he might suggest a longer-duration drug like temazepam, the generic version of Restoril.
CONSIDER A NONDRUG OPTION When your insomnia is chronic, meaning it has been going on for months, your doctor might also recommend cognitive behavioral therapy, or C.B.T.
C.B.T. for insomnia is meant to help patients change the behaviors and thoughts that can get in the way of a good night’s sleep. Proponents say that it is remarkably effective and that once you learn it you may never have to spend a dime on medications again.
The cognitive part of the process teaches you to change anxiety-producing thoughts that interfere with your ability to sleep, says Gregg Jacobs, who has a doctorate in behavioral medicine and is an insomnia specialist at the Sleep Disorders Center at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Mass. You might lie awake worrying, “I have to get eight hours of sleep or I will be a wreck tomorrow.” Most people, however, can function fine on seven hours, he says.
The behavioral part aims at actions that impair your ability to sleep, like spending too much time in bed or not exercising at all during the day.
“C.B.T. should be the first-line therapy for people with chronic insomnia,” says Dr. John Winkelman, medical director of the Sleep Health Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and a consultant to several pharmaceutical companies. “It’s fabulous.”
It typically takes about four to five sessions over six weeks to learn the therapy and reap the benefits. A study published in the May 20 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association looked at the effectiveness of behavioral therapy alone and therapy in conjunction with zolpidem. The study found that patients who used both therapy and zolpidem fared better during the first six weeks of the study. But by the six-month mark, subjects who relied on behavioral therapy alone made the most progress.
“In the short run, medication is helpful,” said the study’s primary author, Charles Morin, a professor of psychology at Laval University in Quebec. “But in the long run, people need to change their actual sleep habits — that’s what C.B.T. helps them do.”
Your sleep doctor may be able to do the therapy with you or may refer you to a psychologist who is trained in behavioral sleep medicine. If your insurer covers your visits, you will have only a co-payment. If it does not, it may cost $100 to $150 a session. You can also learn cognitive behavioral therapy online at www.cbtforinsomnia.com for a $25 fee. The program was designed by Mr. Jacobs of the Sleep Disorders Center.
While in-person therapy is usually preferable, a study published in the current issue of the journal Sleep found that 81 percent of 118 subjects who used online behavioral therapy reported improved sleep.
Check with your doctor before trying an online behavioral therapy program. It may not be helpful for people with certain conditions like depression, anxiety or bipolar disorder, for example.
STICK WITH IT “The most wasteful thing is not doing anything,” Dr. Winkelman said. “The cost of living with insomnia can be far more than the cost of treating it.”
June 6, 2009
Patient Money
Cost-Effective Ways To Fight Insomnia
By LESLEY ALDERMAN
HOW much would you pay for a good night’s sleep?
If the sleep peddlers have their way, quite a bit. Sleep is a $23.9 billion industry — if you count things as diverse as mattresses, white noise machines and prescription pills — and it has more than doubled in the last decade, according to Marketdata Enterprises, a research firm in Tampa, Fla.
The market for insomnia drugs alone is expected to grow 78 percent, to nearly $3.9 billion, by 2012, as drug makers scramble to bring more pills to market to compete with name brands like Lunesta, Sonata and Ambien CR.
There is even a new event, the National Sleep Foundation’s Big Sleep Show, to promote sleep-inducing products and services to the tired masses. It occurs several times a year, and the next one is set for August in Dallas.
Sleeping is a serious problem for millions of people. The National Sleep Foundation (which receives financial support from pharmaceutical companies) estimates that 20 percent of Americans, up from 13 percent eight years ago, sleep fewer than six hours a night. The lucky few who sleep a full eight hours or more dropped to 28 percent, from 38 percent, the foundation said.
Being chronically sleep-deprived is more than just tiring. It can lead to depression, high blood pressure and lower productivity, both on and off the job.
If the problem is pure insomnia — rather than sleep apnea or another medical issue — there are smart and affordable options. Here are some of the most cost-effective ways to get the sleep you need, and a few things you should avoid altogether.
Patient Money You have probably heard these sleep dos and don’ts before, but they bear repeating. If you have been tossing and turning, do not drink caffeine after, say, 2 p.m. And avoid downing more than a glass of wine or the equivalent amount of other alcohol in the evening.
Save stressful activities, like arguments with your children or a review of your finances, for early in the day.
Get into bed a half-hour before you plan to turn out the lights, and read a calming book. No TV, BlackBerry or electronic diversion of any kind an hour or so before bed, because they tend to be stimulating, not relaxing.
Exercise regularly, and reduce the overall level of stress in your life. (Free, yes. Easy? Not always.)
For more tips and suggestion, try the consumer site (www.sleepeducation.com) of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Do not waste your money on herbs like Valerian or fancy mattresses. There is no proof that herbs or special bedding help chronic insomnia.
Over-the-counter medications that contain sleep-inducing antihistamines are fine for a night or two, but that is all. They typically do not work over the long term, and they bring unpleasant side effects like dry mouth and grogginess, says Dr. Alex Chediak, a past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and an associate professor of medicine at the University of Miami.
If you still cannot sleep, see a doctor.
FIND A SLEEP SPECIALIST If you have mild insomnia, see your primary care physician. But if you have been having trouble sleeping for months and feel tired most days, Dr. Chediak advises finding a board-certified sleep doctor.
Doctors with that certification — there are about 3,500 in this country — have passed a rigorous exam and have a thorough knowledge of sleep medicine. Your physician can give you a referral or you can go to the American Board of Sleep Medicine’s sleep center site (www.sleepcenters.org). All accredited sleep centers are required to have one certified sleep doctor on staff.
A sleep doctor will first try to rule out an underlying medical condition that would require treatment by a different type of specialist. If you have primary insomnia, a medical condition in its own right, your doctor will probably begin treating you right away.
TRY A GENERIC DRUG Your doctor may prescribe a so-called hypnotic drug to help you sleep through the night. Ask for a generic option— such as zolpidem, the generic version of Ambien — which will be much cheaper than brand-name medications like Ambien CR or Lunesta, which can cost $2 to $3 a pill.
If your main problem is falling asleep in the first place, zolpidem is very effective and works quickly, Dr. Chediak says. But if your problem is waking too early, he might suggest a longer-duration drug like temazepam, the generic version of Restoril.
CONSIDER A NONDRUG OPTION When your insomnia is chronic, meaning it has been going on for months, your doctor might also recommend cognitive behavioral therapy, or C.B.T.
C.B.T. for insomnia is meant to help patients change the behaviors and thoughts that can get in the way of a good night’s sleep. Proponents say that it is remarkably effective and that once you learn it you may never have to spend a dime on medications again.
The cognitive part of the process teaches you to change anxiety-producing thoughts that interfere with your ability to sleep, says Gregg Jacobs, who has a doctorate in behavioral medicine and is an insomnia specialist at the Sleep Disorders Center at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Mass. You might lie awake worrying, “I have to get eight hours of sleep or I will be a wreck tomorrow.” Most people, however, can function fine on seven hours, he says.
The behavioral part aims at actions that impair your ability to sleep, like spending too much time in bed or not exercising at all during the day.
“C.B.T. should be the first-line therapy for people with chronic insomnia,” says Dr. John Winkelman, medical director of the Sleep Health Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and a consultant to several pharmaceutical companies. “It’s fabulous.”
It typically takes about four to five sessions over six weeks to learn the therapy and reap the benefits. A study published in the May 20 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association looked at the effectiveness of behavioral therapy alone and therapy in conjunction with zolpidem. The study found that patients who used both therapy and zolpidem fared better during the first six weeks of the study. But by the six-month mark, subjects who relied on behavioral therapy alone made the most progress.
“In the short run, medication is helpful,” said the study’s primary author, Charles Morin, a professor of psychology at Laval University in Quebec. “But in the long run, people need to change their actual sleep habits — that’s what C.B.T. helps them do.”
Your sleep doctor may be able to do the therapy with you or may refer you to a psychologist who is trained in behavioral sleep medicine. If your insurer covers your visits, you will have only a co-payment. If it does not, it may cost $100 to $150 a session. You can also learn cognitive behavioral therapy online at www.cbtforinsomnia.com for a $25 fee. The program was designed by Mr. Jacobs of the Sleep Disorders Center.
While in-person therapy is usually preferable, a study published in the current issue of the journal Sleep found that 81 percent of 118 subjects who used online behavioral therapy reported improved sleep.
Check with your doctor before trying an online behavioral therapy program. It may not be helpful for people with certain conditions like depression, anxiety or bipolar disorder, for example.
STICK WITH IT “The most wasteful thing is not doing anything,” Dr. Winkelman said. “The cost of living with insomnia can be far more than the cost of treating it.”
Thursday, June 04, 2009
June 2, 2009, 9:38 pm
Reprieve
By Tim Kreider
Fourteen years ago I was stabbed in the throat. This is kind of a long story and it’s not the point of this essay. The point is that after my unsuccessful murder I wasn’t unhappy for an entire year.
Winston Churchill’s quote about the exhilaration of being shot at without result is verifiably true. I was reminded of an old Ray Bradbury story, “The Lost City of Mars,” in which a man finds a miraculous machine that enables him to experience his own violent death over and over again, as many times as he likes — in locomotive collisions, race car crashes, exploding rockets — until he emerges flayed of all his free-floating guilt and unconscious longing for death, forgiven and free, finally alive.
I’m not claiming I was continuously euphoric the whole time; it’s just that, during that grace period, nothing much could bother me or get me down. The sort of horrible thing that I’d always dreaded was going to happen to me had finally happened. I figured I was off the hook for a while. In a parallel universe only two millimeters away from this one (the distance between the stiletto and my carotid), I had been flown home in the cargo hold instead of in coach. Everything in this one, as far as I was concerned, was gravy.
My friends immediately mocked me out of my self-consciousness about the nerve damage that had left me with a lopsided smile. I started brewing my own dandelion wine in a big Amish crock. I listened to old pop songs too stupid to name in print. And I developed a strange new laugh that’s stayed with me to this day — a loud, raucous, barking thing that comes from deep in the diaphragm and makes people in bars or restaurants look over at me for a second to make sure I’m not about to open up on the crowd with a weapon.
I wish I could recommend this experience to everyone. It’s a cliché that this is why people enjoy thrill-seeking pastimes ranging from harmless adrenaline fixes like roller coasters to suicide attempts with safety nets, like bungee jumping. The catch is that to get the full effect you have to be genuinely uncertain that you’re going to survive. The best approximation would be to hire an incompetent hit man to assassinate you.
It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, sort of the same way some of us only appreciate our girlfriends after they’re exes. I saw the same thing happen, in a more profound and lasting way, to my father when he was terminally ill, and then to my mother after he died; an almost literal lightening, a flippant indifference to the silly, quotidian nonsense that preoccupies most of us and ruins so much of our lives. A neighbor was suing my father for some reason or other during his illness, but if you tried to talk to him about such “serious” matters he’d just sing you old songs like “A Bird In a Gilded Cage” in a high, quavering old-man falsetto. When my mother, who’s now a leader in her church, sees people squabbling over minutiae or personal politics, she reminds them, diplomatically I’m sure, to focus on the larger context.
It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than a sort of hysterical high. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace.
It didn’t last, of course. You can’t feel grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever — or grieve forever, for that matter. Time forces us all to betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living in the world. Before a year had gone by the same dumb everyday anxieties and frustrations began creeping back. I’d be disgusted to catch myself yelling in traffic, pounding on my computer, lying awake at night wondering what was going to become of me.
Once a year on my stabbiversary I remind myself that this is still my bonus life, a free round. But now that I’m back down in the messy, tedious slog of everyday emotional life, I have to struggle to keep things in what I still insist is their true perspective. I know intellectually that all the urgent, pressing items on our mental lists — taxes, car repairs, our careers, the headlines — are so much idiot noise, and that what matters is spending time with people you love. It’s just hard to bear in mind when the hard drive crashes.
I was not cheered, a few years ago, to read about psychological studies suggesting that most people inevitably return to a certain emotional baseline after circumstantial highs and lows. You’d like to think that nearly getting killed would be a major, permanently life-altering experience, but in truth it was less painful, and occasioned less serious reflection, than certain breakups I’ve gone through. If anything, it only reinforced the illusion that in the story of my life only supporting characters would die, while I, its protagonist and first-person narrator, would survive. I’ve demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience.
I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best ones, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d experience after being clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace. It’s like the revelation I had when I was a kid the first time I ever flew in an airplane: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold onto and take back with you when you descend once more beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.
Author photo
Tim Kreider’s articles have appeared in Film Quarterly and The New York Times and his cartoon “The Pain — When Will It End?” has appeared in the Baltimore City Paper since 1997. His Web site is thepaincomics.com.
Reprieve
By Tim Kreider
Fourteen years ago I was stabbed in the throat. This is kind of a long story and it’s not the point of this essay. The point is that after my unsuccessful murder I wasn’t unhappy for an entire year.
Winston Churchill’s quote about the exhilaration of being shot at without result is verifiably true. I was reminded of an old Ray Bradbury story, “The Lost City of Mars,” in which a man finds a miraculous machine that enables him to experience his own violent death over and over again, as many times as he likes — in locomotive collisions, race car crashes, exploding rockets — until he emerges flayed of all his free-floating guilt and unconscious longing for death, forgiven and free, finally alive.
I’m not claiming I was continuously euphoric the whole time; it’s just that, during that grace period, nothing much could bother me or get me down. The sort of horrible thing that I’d always dreaded was going to happen to me had finally happened. I figured I was off the hook for a while. In a parallel universe only two millimeters away from this one (the distance between the stiletto and my carotid), I had been flown home in the cargo hold instead of in coach. Everything in this one, as far as I was concerned, was gravy.
My friends immediately mocked me out of my self-consciousness about the nerve damage that had left me with a lopsided smile. I started brewing my own dandelion wine in a big Amish crock. I listened to old pop songs too stupid to name in print. And I developed a strange new laugh that’s stayed with me to this day — a loud, raucous, barking thing that comes from deep in the diaphragm and makes people in bars or restaurants look over at me for a second to make sure I’m not about to open up on the crowd with a weapon.
I wish I could recommend this experience to everyone. It’s a cliché that this is why people enjoy thrill-seeking pastimes ranging from harmless adrenaline fixes like roller coasters to suicide attempts with safety nets, like bungee jumping. The catch is that to get the full effect you have to be genuinely uncertain that you’re going to survive. The best approximation would be to hire an incompetent hit man to assassinate you.
It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, sort of the same way some of us only appreciate our girlfriends after they’re exes. I saw the same thing happen, in a more profound and lasting way, to my father when he was terminally ill, and then to my mother after he died; an almost literal lightening, a flippant indifference to the silly, quotidian nonsense that preoccupies most of us and ruins so much of our lives. A neighbor was suing my father for some reason or other during his illness, but if you tried to talk to him about such “serious” matters he’d just sing you old songs like “A Bird In a Gilded Cage” in a high, quavering old-man falsetto. When my mother, who’s now a leader in her church, sees people squabbling over minutiae or personal politics, she reminds them, diplomatically I’m sure, to focus on the larger context.
It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than a sort of hysterical high. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace.
It didn’t last, of course. You can’t feel grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever — or grieve forever, for that matter. Time forces us all to betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living in the world. Before a year had gone by the same dumb everyday anxieties and frustrations began creeping back. I’d be disgusted to catch myself yelling in traffic, pounding on my computer, lying awake at night wondering what was going to become of me.
Once a year on my stabbiversary I remind myself that this is still my bonus life, a free round. But now that I’m back down in the messy, tedious slog of everyday emotional life, I have to struggle to keep things in what I still insist is their true perspective. I know intellectually that all the urgent, pressing items on our mental lists — taxes, car repairs, our careers, the headlines — are so much idiot noise, and that what matters is spending time with people you love. It’s just hard to bear in mind when the hard drive crashes.
I was not cheered, a few years ago, to read about psychological studies suggesting that most people inevitably return to a certain emotional baseline after circumstantial highs and lows. You’d like to think that nearly getting killed would be a major, permanently life-altering experience, but in truth it was less painful, and occasioned less serious reflection, than certain breakups I’ve gone through. If anything, it only reinforced the illusion that in the story of my life only supporting characters would die, while I, its protagonist and first-person narrator, would survive. I’ve demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience.
I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best ones, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d experience after being clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace. It’s like the revelation I had when I was a kid the first time I ever flew in an airplane: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold onto and take back with you when you descend once more beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.
Author photo
Tim Kreider’s articles have appeared in Film Quarterly and The New York Times and his cartoon “The Pain — When Will It End?” has appeared in the Baltimore City Paper since 1997. His Web site is thepaincomics.com.
