Lifelines

Murder, Malice, and Hope

Gordon S. Livingston — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:22:01 +0000

      We are made uncomfortable by the radomness in our lives. When something terrible happens we search for explanations in the same way that primitive people did when puzzled by the complexity of the universe. Why does one person kill another, or 13 others? The fact that murder has always been a routine phenomenon of human existence does not dispel the horror that it implies or our desire to reassure ourselves that we are less likely to die this way if only we can understand the "motive" for such acts.
      We can better grasp the idea of murder in certain contexts. We accept that jealousy, or greed, or hatred drives some people to kill. We expect a certain amount of killing on the streets of the inner city perpetrated by those with criminal records. What can be said of a mass murder by a high-status professional trained to help others?
      The events in Texas are not unique. We don't have to look far to find plenty of examples of alienated loners who finally become so angry at their inability to get what they want from other human beings that they purchase a gun and start killing those who they see as being what they cannot be. Columbine and Virginia Tech come to mind as do, more recently, a Pittsburgh health club and an immigrant center in Binghamton, NY. Eighteeen years ago Killeen, Texas, nearby Ft. Hood, was the scene of one of the most deadly shootings in American history when George Hennard crashed his truck into a Luby's cafeteria and began shooting, killing 23 people and wounding 20. The fact is that we live in a murderous society. These mass killings are simply the worst examples. The United States has the highest homicide rate of any advanced democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom. Still, guns are freely available and we, almost alone among the nations of the world, cling to the death penalty. Since 1976 more than a thousand people have been executed in this country, ironically a third of them in Texas.
      Does the shooter's Muslim heritage explain this crime? Or, born and raised in Virginia, is he as American as the rest of us? He apparently lived his life at the lethal intersection of religion and politics, unhappy at the stories he was told by returning veterans of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is PTSD something a psychiatrist can catch from his patients like a virus? Or did his faith finally bring him to see his fellow soldiers as the enemy. "Allahu Akbar!" (God is great!) he is said to have shouted as he fired on unarmed men and women. One imagines these same final words on the lips of the 9/11 hijackers. Was this American doctor, who apparently wrote an Internet post sympathetic to suicide bombers, a terrorist?
      I fear we will be disappointed in our search for a moral to this awful story, an answer that will allow us "to make sure this does not happen again." It will happen again, of course. (As I write this, it appears to be happening in Orlando.) All manner of hatred is abroad in the land. On the same day as the Ft. Hood massacre, thousands of our fellow citizens gathered at the Capitol to wave signs accusing the president of simultaneously being a Nazi and a Socialist and threatening to come armed next time.

We are all hanging by a thread. Any of us could be a victim of inexplicable violence perpetrated by someone with a festering grievance who loves death more than life. All we can do is contribute in our own way to maintaining a respect and tolerance for those who are different from us or disagree with us. The madmen and fanatics who populate the fringes of our world retain their random ability to hurt and horrify us. But they will not prevail.

Relinquish Dignity Last

Gordon S. Livingston — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:06:20 +0000

     Fact: In the United States there are now thirty-five million people over the age of sixty-five, 13 percent of the population. Their numbers are increasing and, with the reluctant help of the baby boom generation, there will be seventy million elderly by 2030.
      For obvious reasons, I've been paying more attention to the aging process lately. As a psychiatrist, I see a select sample of the elderly, but I also have the experience of friends and contemporaries to draw upon. It's not, in general, an attractive prospect.
      One of the risks we run throughout life is that of becoming a cultural cliché. We can do this at any age: the rebellious teen, the naïve newlywed, the acquisitive yuppie, the overburdened parent, the cautious mid-lifer, the indolent retiree. But it is in the final stage of life that we are most at risk of surrendering to the depredations of time and loss and becoming the irrelevant aged whom we pitied in our youth.
      The passing of the years strips us of many of the pretenses with which we disguise our true selves. Of all that we fear, it is infirmity and death that terrify us the most. The billions of dollars spent on cosmetics, reconstructive surgery, and an absurd collection of "food supplements" bear testimony to our futile attempts to expunge the visible evidence of our mortality. What we need, of course, is the courage to face (so to speak) what we have become: old.
      Marginalized by society, tolerated by adult children who can bear our company only in small doses, the elderly tend to live with others who also have more leisure than imagination. When jobs and family responsibilities are at an end, we run the risk of becoming extraneous, both to society and to ourselves.
      This, I think, is why the old have such a deserved reputation as complainers. If we become preoccupied with our physical selves when we are young we are thought of as hypochondriacs. When we think (and speak) primarily of our aches when we are old, we are just bad company. I frequently encounter adult children who dread conversations with their parents simply because they know they will be subjected to a litany of infirmities that they have already heard many times before. Nothing could be less interesting, even in someone we love, than a repetitious recitation of ailments that are beyond the reach of both medical science and the trapped listener. If boring others is not enough, what happens when we start to bore ourselves?
      I know one middle-aged woman who has grown so tired of listening to complaints and unsolicited advice from her mother that when they have a phone conversation, she holds the receiver at arm's length so that she can hear the sound of her mother's voice but can't quite make out the words. When her mother stops talking, the woman says, "Yes, Mom," into the receiver and holds it out again as her mother goes on. And on. And on. I have actually recommended this technique to some desperate adult children whose conversations with their parents are devoid of what is usually meant by the word "communication."
      As we age and our physical world shrinks, often so does our range of enthusiasms. It is amazing to me, for example, how few older people I encounter who are computer literate. In one survey of people over sixty-five, only 31 percent had ever been online, even to send and receive email. (The corresponding figure for the next generation of elderly, now fifty to sixty-five, was 70 percent.) To have television as one's primary window on the world is almost unbearably sad.
      Herewith are a few suggestions for those whose wishes for longevity have been granted:
     1. Stop complaining. A couple of generations earlier, you would have been dead for ten years.
     2. If you don't have an activity in your life that causes you to lose track of time, you need to find something.
     3. If you go to the doctor more than ten times per year and don't have a terminal illness, get a new hobby.
     4. It's true that they haven't written any good music for thirty years. Neither your children nor your grandchildren want to hear about it.
     5. If anyone wants to know what life was like when you were their age, they'll ask.
     6. Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.
     7. Never mind dying with dignity, try living with dignity.

Beauty

Gordon S. Livingston — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:19:46 +0000

     It seems amazing that a quality this subjective should have become in our time so narrowly defined: a face with a certain symmetry, a body of a certain shape. So few of us can meet the standard, so few, no matter the content of their souls, feel beautiful in the eyes of others. Beauty becomes an accidental virtue, the result of good genes and little else.
      Like intelligence, however, beauty manifests itself in many ways apart from physical appearance. Spiritual, intellectual, interpersonal, artistic, emotional are a few of the areas in which some people can demonstrate ugliness, plainness or exquisite beauty. To appreciate these qualities, however, requires more than a casual glance. It is common in college catalogs to see courses called "art appreciation" or "musical theory." These appear to promise, not that you will become more skilled artistically or learn to play an instrument, but that you will be better able to discern what qualities make one painting or composition "better" than another. Even though these are matters of taste, there is an assumption that there are at least general rules about what can be classified as "art," that is, work that has some lasting value. (I note here that without a trace of irony, today's pop musicians, including the most profane of rappers, are referred to as "artists.")
      We all understand the evanescence of physical beauty in human beings. "As we grow old, the beauty steals inward," said Emerson. What he meant was that certain attributes of character replace the good connective tissue that is the sole property of the young. These traits, fortunately for those wise enough to appreciate them, are usually discernible early in our lives, certainly by late adolescence. The problem for most of us is that we are too imperceptive (or uninformed) to recognize them, especially since we are blinded and deafened by our hormonal impulses and by the lopsided emphasis on physical attractiveness encouraged by our superficial culture.
      Just as a morsel of food is beautiful to a starving person, it is our most strongly felt needs that determine what and whom we are drawn to. If we require the admiration of others (and who does not covet this) and are uneasy about our own acceptability, we will likely conform our sense of what is attractive to the cultural norm. This may cause us to overlook the fact that conventionally beautiful people are frequently treated in ways that undermine the development of other characteristics that turn out to be more durable.
      In the end we are forced to the realization that beauty exists at the intersection of the two great longings that dominate our lives: love and happiness. The mistakes in judgment to which we are prone are related to our underdeveloped ability to judge accurately who has the capacity (and inclination) to love us and who evokes similar feelings on our part. Then there is the widespread confusion of the concepts happiness and pleasure; the latter omits the crucial component of meaning in any definition of what it signifies to be fulfilled over time.
      We are genetically programmed to seek excitement; the survival of the species demands it. In the process we are drawn to certain people who induce in us feelings of desire. In many ways our responses to others are culture-bound and "automatic." We are likely to focus attention toward similar images of physical attractiveness. We are in this way prisoners of our senses and subject therefore to mistakes about what it is that we want and need. Whether we are able to see clearly with our minds and hearts, however, depends on whether we have learned what it is that we truly require.
      One of the things that makes this learning difficult is that the stories we are told, our cultural myths, about what it means to be good, to be strong, to be heroic are told by actors, people who embody the narrow but agreed upon standards of physical beauty. We are prone to forget that they are speaking words and expressing emotions crafted for them by others. (Why are there no photo spreads in popular magazines of the Writers Guild Award Show?) No wonder there is so much confusion about how to detect qualities such as intelligence or empathy and distinguish them from the superficial attributes manifested by the people who populate our movie and television screens.
      We suffer mightily from this deficit in discernment. Our beholders' eyes are not equal to the task of separating gold from dross. We have, in effect, been trained to be insensible about the relationship between image and reality. We can only overcome this disability by learning through experience that our eyes do indeed deceive us and are unreliable guides to what we seek. The great deception is not just that we thoughtlessly adopt the societal consensus about what is beautiful. Our mistake is to neglect an unsparing inventory of our own desires so that we can recognize which of them are shallow and momentary and which are worthy of lifetime pursuit.
      And where is beauty in all of this? If people are drawn together by some shared combination of need and longing, how do we account for the fact that so often our choices are unsatisfying in the long run? There are those who believe that all behavior, even the most apparently altruistic, is the product of self-interest. Generosity, especially if publicly disclosed, is potentially self-serving. Only a small percentage of those who give to good causes choose to do so anonymously. Much of the money privately raised for the least fortunate in the society comes from opulent events that are in part advertisements for the wealth of the donors. Does this make them any less generous or public-spirited? Perhaps not.
      Still, this conflation of wealth, beauty and charity further confuses us who are faced with the more prosaic task of deciding whom we are drawn to. If lust for the perfect face or figure is an unreliable guide, what standard can we apply in choosing not just the person we want to sleep with but the one we want to wake up next to for the rest of our lives? I would argue that we need to look closely at another, larger question: When I am around this person do I feel beautiful? If the answer is "yes" (especially in the face of contrary evidence provided by any available mirror) then there may be something occurring other than self-delusion.
      In fact, this question could be applied to any of the virtues we seek in others. The best indication that our search is over is whether we feel more inclined to exhibit these traits in ourselves. It is one explanation for the old saw that like attracts like (and a refutation of the equally well known adage that opposites attract). It is not simply that we spend our lives with those in similar circumstances, social, economic, occupational and so naturally are drawn to people who resemble us, but that when we spend time with others we become more like them. Just as soldiers can become brave by being with courageous comrades, so couples who have spent years in each other's company tend to share emotional, and sometimes even physical, characteristics. This is, perhaps, the best argument for choosing for a partner the person you want to become.

Unanswered Prayers

Gordon S. Livingston — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:04:57 +0000

In a society in which at least 9 of 10 people identify themselves as believers in a Supreme Being it is natural for people to pray for what they want and identify good outcomes as God's affirmative response. This is especially true in situations in which the stakes are life or death.

And so when a plane crashes or a boat sinks it is common for the survivors to attribute their good fortune to God's response their prayers. Similarly, when a person is facing life-threatening illness it is routine to solicit the prayers of others for recovery. While there is little experimental evidence that such pleas for divine intervention are effective, insofar as such beliefs affect the attitude of the ill person positively there may be some contribution to healing.

Here is the problem. If one gives God credit for saving one person, what can be said of those who did not survive? Were they less deserving or is the question meaningless since the ways of God are simply beyond our limited powers of comprehension? These are the central questions behind the mystery of unanswered prayers.

This issue was brought home to me in a recent conversation with a father whose premature child survived several health catastrophes in a way that appeared to him "miraculous." Like many in his situation he credited the many prayers that he and others had offered on his daughter's behalf. This was a comfort for him, an affirmation of the power of his faith, and a reassurance of God's benign presence and accessibility.

I am a bereaved parent. As my 6 year-old son, afflicted with leukemia, fought for his life through chemotherapy and ultimately a bone marrow transplant many prayers were offered on his behalf. These came from me and all who loved him, most of whom had a much more confident relationship with God than did I. Was his death a commentary on my skepticism? Was he, in his innocence, somehow less deserving of life? I cannot, of course, answer these questions. All I can say is that I find it difficult to have those whose children had a happier outcome rejoice in their good fortune by implying that their prayers were more pleasing to God than my own.

"God gives us only what we can bear" and "What does not kill us makes us stronger" are popular faith-based statements of consolation for the bereaved (along with the ever-popular, "He's in a better place.") Why do these bromides not console? Why is our emptiness and sense of amputation still overwhelming? And what do we do when the next person attributes their child's survival to the power of their faith?

There is something self-satisfied about imagining that one is saved or uniquely blessed by their particular beliefs. We live in a world in which the evidence of random outcomes is all around us. We accept that an inch or a fraction of a second can be the difference between living and dying. Why does the tornado obliterate a house and all inside while leaving the house next door intact? Why did the drunk driver swerve into one car and not the one ahead or behind? We are made uncomfortable by such apparently indiscriminate occurrences and so it is natural that we try to imagine some divine order that will explain them. If only we can believe in something, anything to explain the vagaries of chance, then we will be able to go on in the expectation that it will all be explained to us in the next life.

For it is death itself that puzzles and frightens us. How can we face the inevitable loss of ourselves and all that we love without being paralyzed with dread? The easiest way to avoid this is to believe in some divine design that will guarantee us immortality in return for praise and worship. With this kind of incentive it is not surprising that we choose some system of belief that gives us a sense of control through faith and prayer along with the promise of eternal salvation. That we may become a bit self-satisfied in the process is only natural. The implication is clear enough: we are among the chosen

But if the process of being saved leads us to believe that we are more deserving of God's intervention on our behalf than those with a different view of causality, think of what it means to others not so lucky. If you (or your child) survives while someone else did not, please consider the impact on them of your certainty that your prayers were answered.

Love

Gordon S. Livingston — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 18:44:31 +0000

     It is in the nature of love that it eludes explanation. After all the attempts to rationalize it in terms of mutual need and shared interests, we still lack the ability to describe why two people feel themselves drawn to each other in a fashion that defies rationality but is, while it lasts, the most powerful force in the universe. In an attempt to explain the unexplainable people speak of "chemistry," that indefinable variable that separates friendship from love. Like all forms of experimentation with chemicals there is the risk of mistakes, which can sometimes be explosive. If what we are hoping for when we join our life to another's is an enduring commitment, statistics suggest we will be wrong more than half the time.
     What can we do to improve the chances that the attraction we feel when young will persist when the sex becomes routine and the flaws of our beloved have all been exposed? When our good looks have fled and when the dreams of our youth have dwindled, how can we keep our disappointment with ourselves from spilling over onto the person who has been witness to all of it, who is a constant reminder of the losses we have suffered, and who may have turned out to be less persistently enamored of us than we had hoped.
     The bond that appeared so romantic in the early stages of our relationship has changed into a kind of open-eyed realism that the longing we felt has been replaced by some combination of obligation and convenience that seems more like a contract for services than a promise of undying delight. Perhaps it is the sense that our future lacks anticipation, that most the surprises that await us are likely to be bad news.
     Am I being unduly cynical about marriage? Look around you at people who have managed to stay together for more than 20 years, whose children are grown and who now are confronted with 30 or 40 years with only each other. I read recently the obituary of a man who died at 76. Among his survivors was his wife of 55 years from whom he was divorced the year before he died. Did he complain too much about his final illness? Did she fall in love with someone else? Or did they do something they had been contemplating for decades but had kept putting off?
     And yet we all know of good marriages that have both endured and remained satisfying. The nature of the attraction may have changed, but what remains can legitimately be characterized as love and the ties that bind them together consist of a sense of shared fate that has endured through the pleasure and pain that the years together have contained. These are mature attachments that depend in equal parts on the character traits of both parties, especially kindness and loyalty. Were these values discernible when they first met? How were they astute enough to see in the other person this capacity for commitment? Perhaps they were just lucky.
     We stumble through life without the owner's manual that we should have been issued at birth. We try to learn what it is we need to do, how we should act, to get our physical and emotional needs met. We attempt to learn from our frequent and painful mistakes. We suffer the sting of rejection and loneliness. And through it all we try to discover whom to avoid and whom to cherish as if our very lives depended on it.
     We also struggle to a greater or lesser degree to make sense of our existence. I have listened to many people talk about the ways that their searches for happiness and meaning have gone awry. Most often, they have been trying to answer important existential questions having to do with why we are here and what it is we must do to meet our responsibilities, live honestly according to our best conception of the truth of our existence, and increase the ratio of pleasure to pain in our lives.
     This I have come to believe is the human condition: uncertain, confusing, often absurd, and full of anxiety in the face of an indifferent universe that can, and frequently does, crush our best hopes and dearest loves. Still we push on into a future we cannot imagine nor control, with nothing to guide us but some words we share with each other and a faith that we are not alone.

More People to Avoid

Gordon S. Livingston — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 18:45:26 +0000

      When we consider the people to avoid in our search for relationship happiness we naturally think of the terminally self-absorbed: the narcissists, sociopaths, and hysterics who are so difficult to be around. But there is another, much larger, group who do not fit into any specific category of personality disorder. They do not, in general, seek to manipulate or disadvantage others. They are not necessarily selfish or unkind, and their intentions are usually benign. And yet they are hard to be around for long. They are seldom insightful or reflective, though they may be intelligent and capable of useful work. They tend toward a certain loquaciousness and are not often good listeners. It is the quality of their thoughts combined with an irresistible need to communicate them that are defining characteristics. They are fools.
      As we pass through life, experiencing success and failure, acceptance and rejection, each of us is trying to apprehend how the world really works. Everything that happens to us, everything we know or believe is integrated into this perception and has some effect on our subsequent behavior. Intolerance in areas of ethics, politics, or religion is the hallmark of fools. In its worst manifestations it may lead to violence against others who hold alternative beliefs.
      Examples of imperfect understanding are people who carry around misconceptions of what works and what doesn't in any important area of their lives. If one imagines, for example, that there exists a conspiracy on the part of modern medicine to ignore the benefits of herbal supplements and "natural" cures, one is prone to making decisions about one's health that do not comport with scientific evidence. In its most benign form this can result in the consumption of all manner of substances with no health benefits. It can also lead to a desperate and futile pursuit of expensive and unproven remedies for serious illnesses like cancer. Similarly, the decision of some parents to not immunize their children against common childhood diseases because of an unfounded fear of vaccines endangers their kids and places us all at risk for the return of illnesses previously on their way to extinction.
      Since foolishness depends on context and represents deviance from some social norm, it is not necessarily a permanent affliction. We are all familiar with the person who is an outcast in high school but a major success in later life. The deficits that define a fool - a lack of understanding, judgment, or common sense - are also remediable by experience and learning. Nevertheless, an established inability as a teen-ager to think clearly is an attribute frequently encountered that makes one a poor candidate for a lasting relationship. People with unconventional beliefs, for example, UFO spotters or conspiracy theorists, tend to cluster together for mutual support. Membership in such groups is often a signal that one is in the presence of someone given to alternative and marginal views of how the world works.
      The important component of true foolishness is a contempt or lack of understanding for the scientific method as a means of explicating the world, combined with irrational beliefs that are simply exercises of faith. The capacity to think clearly about one's experience is a crucial component of a successful life. If we believe that human affairs are governed by an alignment of the stars and that our fate is determined by our date and time of birth, we are prone to decision making that is not based on reality
      Our brains can entertain a limited number of ideas simultaneously. If our consciousness is cluttered by beliefs in magic, ghosts, paranormal phenomena, alien abduction, or the conviction that we are influenced by past lives, it is difficult to consider the variables that actually affect us.
There is a school of thought that truth is a flexible construct, elusive and subject to interpretation. There is at least one area in which this is demonstrably not the case. Nature and its laws are intolerant of fools. When Timothy Treadwell chose to live among the Alaskan grizzlies for extended periods, he imagined that they reciprocated the affection and respect that he felt for them. He even gave them names. It turned out that while he was indulging his naïve delusions about these wild creatures they had also given him a name. That name was "food" and his life was ended by a hungry bear. Timothy was a friendly, well-meaning person, eager to talk endlessly into a video camera in an effort to educate others about these animals. The saddest part of his story is that he persuaded a young woman to accompany him on his last trip to live among them. She was also killed.
      Often mistaken for stupidity, foolishness can be the province of highly intelligent people. Recently, a past recipient of the Nobel Prize revealed sentiments about racial differences that were widely condemned and caused him to lose his job. It is common to hear opinions from public people (usually in areas outside their expertise) that are demonstrably absurd. When a US Senator described the internet as "a series of tubes," this was deeply revealing about his grasp of the world.
      Perhaps we would do well admit that we are all subject to superstitions, misconceptions, and delusional ideas and so are capable of acting like fools at times. As with any human failing foolishness is a matter of degree. Still, it is sobering to imagine spending any considerable portion of one's life in the company of a judgmental, bloviating, talkative fool who is unable to profit from experience and whose opinions are not reality-based. If you seek examples of this personality type you need only to spend a little time watching the opinionated blather that passes for most cable television commentary on current events. Our primary defense against such people, the remote control, is ineffective if we happen to live with them.

The most dangerous food to eat is a wedding cake.

Gordon S. Livingston — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:06:41 +0000

      The long process of figuring out why we are often drawn to people who turn out not to be good for us leads us to the conclusion that there is something deeper going on here, some rule of living that makes us want what we do not want. One way to understand this is as a learning problem. Since we cannot predict future behavior with any accuracy, even our own, how can we expect the choices we make in our youth to be satisfying in our middle age? We need to think about improving our decision making ability by contemplating those traits of character that are likely to endure and cause us either endless joy or pain.
      We must acknowledge that we regularly confuse pleasure with happiness and are as a consequence drawn to people and pursuits that provide us with more of the former than the latter. This tendency is sometimes described as hedonism but the tension it creates between short-term and long-term gratification constitutes one of the recurrent themes of human behavior.
      In its simplest form the abuse of substances is a study in the hazards of immediate gratification. No one who has tried drugs can deny that they produce temporarily pleasurable sensations that most of us would like to repeat. It is also is apparent to nearly everyone that long-term use results in unwanted, degrading, and soul-destroying outcomes that render us unable to function, the very antithesis of the pleasure that we seek to replicate. We can label this "addiction" and turn it into a disease to diminish stigma and facilitate treatment and yet we must admit that the misuse of substances is a manifestation of a larger paradox: the mindless pursuit of pleasure brings pain.
      And so it is with relationships. Those qualities - physical attractiveness, the promise of excitement, social status - that seem so important at one stage of our lives usually do not persist indefinitely. Attributes that do endure may not be so appealing in the long run, leading to disillusionment and confusion. Since we are bombarded by images of youth and beauty it is easy to become confused about the value of more lasting traits. There are few magazines or television shows devoted to telling the stories of people doing constructive work or living lives of fidelity and determination. Such people are seen as unexceptional and a little dull in a society preoccupied with entertainment. Just as the universal human tendency is to slow down to observe the carnage of an auto accident, so we will always be fascinated by misbehavior and other forms of distraction.
      If we confuse success with fame and accomplishment with notoriety we sacrifice any belief in the power of thought or reflection. One of the reasons that going to school is seen as an onerous burden by young people is that the entertainment value of most instruction is very low, especially when compared to movies, video games, and other activities that occupy their free time. The boredom that characterizes school is good preparation only for work that is also seen as an unpleasant necessity to generate the money needed to enjoy those possessions and activities that do bring us pleasure.
      This perspective on school and work commonly includes the belief that satisfaction of our needs requires a tradeoff in which everything has its price. The implication is that every person has desires that may require some sacrifice from their partner who has requirements of his or her own. No one is expected to get everything they want and achieving even partial satisfaction in the relationship requires a continual process of negotiation of differences.
      While this approach meets some superficial test of fairness, it is laborious and requires a lot of scorekeeping. With the advent of the women's movement in the last half of the twentieth century it became an article of faith in some circles that "no one relinquishes power willingly" and much of the shift from the patriarchal system to greater equality was accompanied by a certain competition in the relationship between the sexes leading to an atmosphere of compromise and negotiation. A divorce rate hovering around 50 percent suggests, among other things, that these negotiations may not be going well.
      Perhaps there is another model for success in intimate relationships that might stand a better chance than the contractual approach currently in favor. What if your choice of partner involved an informed evaluation of their ability to give themselves generously to marriage? What if they expected only that their kindness would be matched by yours? Does this sound hopelessly naïve or difficult? Would such a person be defenseless and subject to exploitation? Your answers to these questions reveal a lot about you, your assumptions about the world, and, most important, your estimate of your own ability to respond with a reciprocal and giving spirit.
      The advantage of such an approach is that it provides a model for relating to another person that requires a lot less negotiation. You are required, however, to become both insightful about yourself and an exceptional judge of character since not everyone is capable of such emotional surrender.
      There is a story about a man's lengthy search for the perfect woman. When he found her they could not connect since she was searching for the perfect man. This is the primary issue in constructing a relationship based on generosity and placing the needs of another at the level of our own. The question is not just where would you find such a person, but are you prepared to give what you wish to receive?

Optimism

Gordon S. Livingston — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:22:46 +0000

What is it that allows some of us to be hopeful in a world full of tragedy and injustice, where time and chance have their way with everyone, and where we face defeat in the end? Apart from a comforting religious faith it requires some trick of the mind to be able to derive pleasure and significance from the moment. Not everyone can do it. The lifetime prevalence of depression in the population has been estimated at 15-20%, while at any given moment around 10% of us are so beset by sadness and loss of personal significance that we qualify for a formal diagnosis of depression

Given the state of the world it is hardly surprising that many people harbor doubts about the future. Pessimists, those most prone to depression, almost invariably consider themselves "realists," and watching the news it's hard to argue against the proposition that things are bad and getting worse. And yet our individual happiness in the present moment is largely dependent on what we anticipate. Our beliefs about the future constitute self-fulfilling prophesies: we get not what we deserve but what we expect. This truth can be seen most vividly in our interactions with other people. Those we approach with trust and openness tend to respond helpfully. Conversely, if we treat people with suspicion, they are likely to reciprocate.

To be hopeful is not unselfish. On the contrary it is in our self-interest to risk the occasional disappointment that optimism implies in order to benefit from the more frequent experience of realized hopes. The habitual mask of the pessimist is similar to that of the depressive: a fixed frown of discontent and unhappiness. In fact, the triad of perfectionism, pessimism, and discouragement is a familiar precursor to and accompaniment of clinical depression. The logic is unavoidable: those who demand too much of themselves and others are bound to be unhappy in an imperfect world. Like most emotions (anger, anxiety, love), unhappiness is contagious; it feeds on itself and demands to be shared. There is a story of two girls assigned to clean a stable. One focuses on the material she is shoveling, the other thinks that, "There must be a pony around here somewhere."

To some extent hope or the lack of it is, like many of our attitudes, a product of our experience. There is an area of psychology called "learned helplessness" that concerns itself with the consequences to people when they conclude that they have little choice in what happens to them. If we assume that our efforts are unrelated to the outcomes in our lives we develop an outlook of pessimism and passivity. Optimism requires that we believe that we can favorably influence our fates.

How we react to setbacks in our lives is a particularly good test of how hopeful we are. If we see some bad outcomes as being inevitable in a world in which our control is limited, we can nevertheless retain our confidence in our ability to change things for the better. If we react to adverse events by feeling discouraged and powerless and engage in a process of self-blame, we are unlikely to imagine that we can improve the situation. Eventually, our skepticism about changing things for the better hardens into an habitual attitude. Or as one bookstore visitor said, "I almost bought a book about how to think positively, but then I thought, ‘What good would that do?'"

It usually doesn't take long to find out whether you are in the presence of an optimist or pessimist. One of the best indicators of how someone else is feeling is the mood they evoke in us. If being around another person causes us to feel discouraged, it is a fair bet that this is, at least in part, a reflection of their outlook. Conversely, optimism is also transmittable. Sometimes this takes the form of a reinterpretation of events. Recently I was on a tour bus whose driver was the recipient of the truck driver's salute from an irritated motorist. Rather than express anger or insult, the driver suggested, "Look. That guy thinks I'm number one." As with all of life's adversities a working sense of humor is an invaluable defense. The situation may be critical but not serious.

Optimism is highly correlated with success. What do you suppose a major league hitter is telling himself before he bats? Even the best of them make an out two-thirds of the time. Do you suppose that this statistic is weighing on him as he approaches the plate? Or is he likely to be imagining a happier result. People who never developed a belief in themselves, no matter their intrinsic talent, are unlikely to appear on major league rosters; they have long since been encouraged to pursue other occupations. The same might be said of successful salespeople. There is also a role here for recognizing that, since our pasts are largely stories of our own creation, we have the power of selective recall. Optimists are more likely to remember good outcomes while pessimists are discouraged by memories of failure. Optimists are also skilled at using the psychological defense of "reinterpretation" of events.

On a hot day many years ago my then-middle school daughter Emily, one of the most optimistic people I know, was paddling with me in a cardboard boat race. As we began to take on water and the boat dissolved beneath us, I thought of the hours I had spent sealing and painting the fragile craft to prevent this outcome. Finally it sank and we became swimmers. Emily, seeing my disgust, said to me, "Oh Dad, doesn't that cool water feel good?"

The school of "positive psychology" has demonstrated that optimism, like helplessness, can be learned. Using cognitive techniques and stress management Martin Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have shown conclusively that pessimists can be taught to be optimists with beneficial effects on school and occupational success, even health.

In one of the frequent examples of overlap between virtues, optimism is heavily dependent upon courage. Pessimism, like depression, is a "safe" position. Pessimists may be discouraged but they are seldom disappointed. If situations turn out badly, they expected as much. If things go better than predicted, they can only be pleasantly surprised. Optimists, on the other hand, risk disappointment, or worse yet, being taken advantage of and looking foolish. This is why we seek the middle ground, presumably occupied by true realists. Since we lack the power of foresight, however, we are all subject to surprise. So who would you rather spend your life with: those who brace themselves for the worst or those who anticipate the best?

Love and Time

Gordon S. Livingston — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:53:09 +0000

      It is in the nature of love that it eludes explanation. After all the attempts to rationalize it in terms of mutual need and shared interests, we still lack the ability to describe why two people feel themselves drawn to each other in a fashion that defies rationality but is, while it lasts, the most powerful force in the universe. In an attempt to explain the unexplainable people speak of "chemistry," that indefinable variable that separates friendship from love. Like all forms of experimentation with chemicals there is the risk of mistakes, which can sometimes be explosive. If what we are hoping for when we join our life to another's is an enduring commitment, statistics suggest we will be wrong more than half the time.
      What can we do to improve the chances that the attraction we feel when young will persist when the sex becomes routine and the flaws of our beloved have all been exposed? When our good looks have fled and when the dreams of our youth have dwindled, how can we keep our disappointment with ourselves from spilling over onto the person who has been witness to all of it, who is a constant reminder of the losses we have suffered, and who may have turned out to be less persistently enamored of us than we had hoped.
      The bond that appeared so romantic in the early stages of our relationship has changed into a kind of open-eyed realism that the longing we felt has been replaced by some combination of obligation and convenience that seems more like a contract for services than a promise of undying delight. Perhaps it is the sense that our future lacks anticipation, that most the surprises that await us are likely to be bad news.
      Am I being unduly cynical about marriage? Look around you at people who have managed to stay together for more than 20 years, whose children are grown and who now are confronted with 30 or 40 years with only each other. I read recently the obituary of a man who died at 76. Among his survivors was his wife of 55 years from whom he was divorced the year before he died. Did he complain too much about his final illness? Did she fall in love with someone else? Or did they do something they had been contemplating for decades but had kept putting off?
      And yet we all know of good marriages that have both endured and remained satisfying. The nature of the attraction may have changed, but what remains can legitimately be characterized as love and the ties that bind them together consist of a sense of shared fate that has endured through the pleasure and pain that the years together have contained. These are mature attachments that depend in equal parts on the character traits of both parties, especially kindness and loyalty. Were these values discernible when they first met? How were they astute enough to see in the other person this capacity for commitment? Perhaps they were just lucky.
      We all have undiscovered abilities. When we are young and untested they may not be apparent or perhaps simply not valued when compared to the qualities that appeal to the young. When I was in high school it was considered good sport among the boys to make fun of the elderly janitor who cleaned the school. One of our number, who was something of an outcast himself, refused to participate and, in fact, went out of his way to be kind to the old man. It wasn't until much later that I came to know this person, now grown, and observe the kind of man he had become. It became apparent that his capacity for generosity still exceeded our own and he was living a rewarding life: a good career, attentive friends, a satisfying marriage. It had been right in front of us all the time had we had the eyes to see. I told him so at our last reunion; he looked at me with surprise both that I remembered and as if it had never occurred to him to behave otherwise.
      We stumble through life without the owner's manual that we should have been issued at birth. We try to learn what it is we need to do, how we should act, to get our physical and emotional needs met. We attempt to learn from our frequent and painful mistakes. We suffer the sting of rejection and loneliness. And through it all we try to discover whom to avoid and whom to cherish as if our very lives depended on it.
      We also struggle to a greater or lesser degree to make sense of our existence. I have listened to many people talk about the ways that their searches for happiness and meaning have gone awry. Some of them appear to have had some biological basis for their discouragement or anxieties. More often, however, they have been trying to answer important existential questions having to do with why we are here and what it is we must do to meet our responsibilities, live honestly according to our best conception of the truth of our existence, and increase the ratio of pleasure to pain in our lives.
      This I have come to believe is the human condition: uncertain, confusing, often absurd, and full of anxiety in the face of an indifferent universe that can, and frequently does, crush our best hopes and dearest loves. Still we push on into a future we cannot imagine nor control, with nothing to guide us but some words we share with each other and a faith that we are not alone.

Kindness

Gordon S. Livingston — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:18:54 +0000

      Kindness is the indispensable virtue from which most of the others flow, the wellspring of our happiness. If the definition of love is raising the needs and desires of another to the level of our own, then kindness implies an ability to weigh these needs in every interaction with people. It assumes, but does not demand, that others will reciprocate and is in that way determinedly optimistic. It also reflects a belief in the essential decency of other human beings and so it must be tempered with an ability to recognize those who are unwilling or unable to respond and instead wish to take advantage of people naïve enough to believe that a capacity for kindness resides within each of us. The ability to love is not randomly distributed in the population and can be overwhelmed by a devotion to one's own self-interest.
      Under its umbrella kindness shelters a variety of other traits - empathy, generosity, unselfishness, tolerance, acceptance, compassion - that are highly valued and easily recognizable. Implied in all of these is the conviction that the quality of our relationships with other people is the primary determinant of our own happiness. Beyond that, however, is the belief that in our efforts to live successful lives we cannot do so at the expense of others. The notion of people prospering together is frequently submerged in the competition to achieve our share (and more) of whatever is valuable and advantageous to us: money, prestige, power. If these things are obtained at the expense of others it is difficult to assign meaning to our lives that will sustain us.
      We must be able in the end to reconcile our past behavior, derive pleasure from the moment, and envision a purpose to our future if we are to be happy. An ability to do all of these tasks requires that we learn to be kind. The linear story of our lives, past and future, viewed in the present, constitutes a story that we both write ourselves and contemplate as time rushes past. We want our narrative to make sense, to express something about us that is uniquely valuable, that leaves some footprint in the hearts of those whom we care about. Few of us can take satisfaction from a life that does not include some sense that others have benefited from our time on earth.
      To be in the presence of another person who accepts us as we are, gives us the benefit of the doubt, cares what we think, and assumes we will act generously is an immensely gratifying experience. We are drawn to such people, both because they are unusual and because they encourage us toward similar behavior. True kindness blurs the line between giving and receiving. It is the opposite of the "contractual" view of relationships in which we trade favors and keep score to insure that we give no more than we receive. The latter construction, unfortunately, describes most marriages. Typically, the division of responsibility in such relationships is carefully negotiated so neither partner feels taken advantage of.
      The point is that dissatisfaction with whatever bargain is struck is frequent and the subject of a lot of renegotiation in search of the elusive balance point of "fairness." This need to be self-protective is burdensome and is the antithesis of a relationship in which kindness prevails. When I hear with some frequency from married people that they "love" their partner but are "not in love with them," I never know what to make of this distinction. It sounds as if people are talking about some obligation that they are forced to discharge without enthusiasm or excitement.
      If kindness begets love why is it not more prevalent? The simplest answer is that we do not value it sufficiently as a culture. We are from an early age taught the importance of material success and encouraged to compete to achieve it. The multi-billion dollar advertising industry bombards us with images that encourage dissatisfaction with what we have or how we look and perpetuates fantasies that we can purchase some better version of ourselves. Implied in this view of the world is that we must win a series of competitions involving academic success, occupational achievement, and status-enhancing relationships. In each of these areas we are expected to compete as if we can succeed only at the expense of others. Is it any wonder, then, that our lives are guided by self-interest and a fear of failure? Our attitudes toward relating to others are shaped by a similar apprehensive striving, which is why our mating dances are so complex and fraught with mistrust.
      Picture the alternative. In the presence of one disposed to kindness you will notice an absence of guile, an ability to listen, and a disinclination to compete. If you can reciprocate, you will experience a growing feeling of safety and trust. You may find yourself disclosing things about yourself that you have previously been at pains to conceal: fears and vulnerabilities. The need for self-protection drops away as does the requirement to appear to be something other than you are. You feel, paradoxically, a growing satisfaction with yourself combined with a desire to become a better person. You feel that a great burden has been lifted from you. You are, at last, good enough. In fact, the image of yourself that you see reflected in your loved one's eyes may be nearly perfect. You would like this moment to last forever. Imagine that.