Another Week Ends

1. The big read from this week features one of our favorite writers tackling one of our least favorite ideas.

Remember when “grit” was a household idea back in 2016? Everyone wanted a gritty personality, to raise gritty kids, and to hire gritty employees, because success was linked to drive and willpower. Grit made the pre-pandemic world go round. Since then, a mix of new social science research failed to replicate grit studies, and a mix of pandemic and smartphone fatigue and GLP-1 drug access changed the social tune. Grit is out, and the author who coined the term, Angela Duckworth, has backpedaled on many of her original claims.

In her latest book, Situated, Duckworth suggests that the new frontier for self-help is not willpower and drive but control of our environment around us. Our wills, writes Duckworth, are the products of our situations, and so by changing our situation, we can realign our wills. Meghan O’Gieblyn has doubts. Reviewing the book for the New Yorker, O’Gieblyn asks whether we’re actually rejecting willpower if we apply it to our situation and not our own decision-making:

For all its attempts to disavow the cult of effort, “Situated” will likely rankle the same critics who accused “Grit” of advocating a crude bootstrap logic. “Very often, the greatest obstacle to getting situated has nothing to do with money or privilege or power,” Duckworth writes. “Rather, it’s assuming it can’t be done.” A major impediment to goal fulfillment, she contends, is “status quo bias,” our preference for things to stay the same. She cites David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, “This Is Water,” which opens with a parable in which a young fish is asked “How’s the water?” and replies, “What the hell is water?” The story, she argues, illustrates how difficult it is to practice “situational awareness,” the art of seeing how our environment, and other people, inflect our behavior.

Duckworth peppers her book with aphorisms about the importance of collaboration and community: “the real hero’s journey is from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ ” Or: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” She also suggests that personal growth requires constantly uprooting oneself and challenges the common wisdom that you cannot run away from your problems. Duckworth considers this objection, but her response is tautological: “Wherever you go, there you are — so choose where you go wisely.”

This tautology arguably lies at the very heart of Duckworth’s book. If motivation is conditioned by environment, then all you have to do is change your situation to get what you want out of life. But the decision to change one’s environment is presumably itself subject to some previous desire. “A man can do what he will, but not will what he will,” Arthur Schopenhauer wrote. We can pursue our desires, in other words, but our desires themselves are shaped by our environment and our personal history — a problem that extends backward ad infinitum. Duckworth sees this recursiveness as a virtuous circle that can be harnessed to one’s advantage: change your situation, and you change your thoughts and desires—which changes your actions, leading to better situations, better thoughts and desires, and so on. This framework, which she calls a “flywheel,” is presented with utter authority and an accompanying diagram, and no acknowledgment that it can also work in reverse.

A grit mindset says that our motivations are good, and therefore they should be pursued to all ends at full strength. A Situated mindset says that our motivations are influenced by our environments, and so we need to shift our environments to align them with our desired goals. But if our willpower isn’t strong enough to change our behaviors, do we think it is strong enough to change our environments and situations? And what if our desires are the actual problem? O’Gieblyn continues:

It’s hard to spend much time with “Situated” without sensing a sleight of hand. Although the book insists on the futility of will power, it offers a vision of human agency that is virtually omnipotent, capable of defying all obstacles — class, geography, milieu — and drafting peers into the supporting cast of one’s own heroic narrative. Duckworth calls it “situational agency.” In a 2024 interview, riffing on the famous line from William Henley’s poem “Invictus”(“I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul”), she offered a slight amendment to the poem’s message: “The seas that you decide to sail are part of your agency, too.” […]

Duckworth would likely argue that situational awareness requires thinking, too: assessing one’s environment, taking stock of the external factors that prevent you from fulfilling your desires. What it does not ask you to do, however, is to question whether your desires are fair or just — or are even your own. […]

Self-interrogation, of course, is often unpleasant and is not a prescription that is likely to sell many books. But the alternative — the freedom to perpetually abandon difficult circumstances — is, in the long run, the more wearying path. One could argue, in fact, that the current popularity of self-binding is a response to the anxiety and exhaustion many of us feel amid the relentless invitations to reimagine our lives. We have more opportunities than ever to eject ourselves from trying situations. Peers can be unfriended; politicians can be unfollowed. Marriages are easily dissolved, and jobs are no longer meant to last your entire life. The ropes that tie us to the mast are made of straw. Although Duckworth presents situational agency as a revolutionary form of self-mastery, it may be another instance of status-quo bias, cleverly disguised. It is simply the water in which we swim.

The fundamental problem, as outlined by Christian theology and not the Wharton School’s Behavior Change for Good Initiative, is that human desire is not neutral. It is bent toward selfishness, and that bent often leads to self-sabotage. The only two ways that these desires change are through the pain of bottoming out or the affections of a holy love. This is why, despite its popularity among the chattering class between 2016 and 2020, you won’t find much in the way of “grit” in our archives here on the site.

2. Earlier this week, I had a chance to share about my own struggle to rage against The Machine despite my inability to free myself from it (to put it in Duckworth’s terms, I lack the grit to alter my technological situatedness!). Stephanie H. Murray shares that same struggle in the New York Times this week, writing, “My Dumbphone Made My Life Better. It Made Everyone Else’s Worse.”

Even in real-life social situations, the fact that I don’t have a smartphone means I am often little better than dead weight. Who’s going to take the card payments at the school fund-raiser? Who’s going to double-check the restaurant’s hours? Who’s going to message the Airbnb owner to let her know we’re on our way from the airport? The answer is always: not Steph. To forgo smartphones in a world optimized for them is to become someone in constant need of accommodation, but for totally self-imposed reasons. Like adopting a highly restrictive diet without any of the health issues that might justify the need to organize every dinner out around it.

At Ms. Marquette’s children’s preschool, parents are expected to scan a QR code when they drop off and pick up their kids. Without a smartphone, she had to interrupt a teacher to manually check her children in and out. “It really wasn’t fair to them, frankly,” she said.

Notably, it was not hardhearted employers or faceless corporate overlords whom Mr. Dobrenko and Ms. Marquette worried they were letting down. It was the people looking after their children, fellow parents, neighbors and friends. More than anyone, it was their families.

This is perhaps why, though family considerations were often the impetus for putting the smartphone down, they were also the reason for picking it back up. Forgoing a smartphone may allow you to feel more present with your loved ones in any given moment, but it also hamstrings your ability to actually be there for them during times of need.

Living in small-town Pennsylvania, I am happy to share that my life isn’t nearly as tech saturated as what Murray describes (yet!). We have no Ubers, no DoorDashes, and some people still lack broadband internet. The tension she describes is nonetheless present: How do we guard our own sanity and mental health when society has organized itself around technologies that challenge our sanity and mental health? How do we create firm boundaries around technology when they hinder our most important life relationships? (Again, I have thoughts to this end!)

3. Checking in on last week’s 9/11 anniversary reflections, Arthur Brooks at The Free Press asks a good question: Why is it that New York seemed to come together after the 9/11 attacks, but subsequent tragedies, like Hurricane Katrina or the pandemic, inspired all sorts of division and vitriol? The answer, suggests Brooks, is the role of blame, offering a reflection on relationship and survival that comes right out of Genesis 3.

What explains the difference between 9/11 and every crisis that came later? Why does one kind of tragedy bring the world together in kindness and mutual trust, and another tear us apart? With few truly national catastrophes to study, a proper statistical comparison that controls for these events’ many differences is not possible. But a parallel line of research suggests a compelling theory.

I am referring to work done at a familial level. Obviously, collective crises are very different from individual ones. But the research is still informative, particularly when it comes to data about the worst family catastrophe imaginable: the death of a child.

Many family counselors believe that bereavement over a child tends to disrupt a marriage — and indeed, one statistical analysis from 2008 shows that such a loss increases the likelihood of divorce by about a third. But there’s nothing predetermined about that outcome. As one meta-analysis of studies published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies in 2016 shows, the loss of a child can also bring a couple together in their grief.

What decides which it will be? Blame. In the face of tragedy, blame can function as a short-term protective mechanism for parents to make sense of their terrible loss. But when that blame is directed at one’s spouse, the consequences are dire: It stimulates resentment and bitterness, ruins communication, and causes the marriage to be far less likely to survive. But when no blame is cast, shared pain can become relationship glue. In that 2016 study, parents who avoided blame by communicating well and trying to understand and accept each other’s grieving, tended to protect — and even strengthen — their marriage. And what predicts blame in the face of tragedy? Dysfunctionality in the marriage before the event: poor communication, resentment over other complaints, and low unity. In other words: a bad marital culture.

It follows logically that a public tragedy for which no fellow citizen is to blame would tend to unite a nation. The 9/11 attacks brought America together because it was an experience of shared national pain.

When blame becomes a tool for the expiation of our own negativity, not only is justice passed over, but our most important relationships suffer. It’s a tale as old as Adam and Eve. To quote the immortal lyrics of The Hold Steady: “The dude blamed the chick. I heard the chick blamed the snake. I heard they were naked when they got busted. I heard things ain’t been the same since.”

4. A few years ago, my short video feeds dipped into Judge Judy clips. When Ryan Zickgraf at UnHerd offers a eulogy for Judge Judy’s famous TV courtroom drama, dubbing her “America’s last great moralist,” he’s not being ironic. There is something remarkable about the fact that her 25-year-long show kept the attention of tens of millions of viewers, and her departure from daytime TV into retirement signals a shift in America’s moral vanguard.

To be clear, Judge Judy was never prestige TV, and her judgments weren’t sermons delivered from upon high. It was lowbrow reality fare: the litigants agreed to binding arbitration and received appearance fees, while the production paid the monetary awards. But the artifice of the production didn’t make the underlying disputes less recognizable, which is precisely what made her effective as a public moralist. She met Americans in the muck, amid the petty resentments and creative accounting of everyday life, where lofty principles hit headlong into concrete questions about whether someone owed their cousin $500. Viewers could tune in for the humiliation and accidentally absorb a lesson about keeping your word, which is probably more moral instruction than most of us get from prestige television.

Judy’s creed essentially fitted on an index card: pay your debts, show up when you said you’d show up, and don’t co-sign a car loan for a boyfriend you’ve known for five weeks. And above all, an excuse for your wrongdoing doesn’t make you right. She didn’t quote scripture or ask about defendants’ relationship with their father or whether they voted for Donald Trump or Joe Biden. She asked for their receipt, and in the 90 seconds it took them to explain why they didn’t have it, she had already decided they were guilty, told them so, banged her gavel, and moved on.

These principles sound banal until one considers how much of Judy’s career coincided with the erosion of authority among the institutions that once delivered such judgments. We remain deep in our “Do what thou wilt” era, in which self-expression is sacred and any restraint on it requires an explanation, preferably accompanied by an apology. Everyone is encouraged to live “their truth” while abandoning universal truth.

We certainly haven’t abandoned moralizing, but these judgments usually concern the wickedness of people we already dislike. The harder task is persuading people to accept a standard that might find them wanting, which was the premise of Judy’s courtroom: people could arrive convinced of their righteousness and leave having been told, in front of millions of people, that they were wrong.

Wait a sec … I knew that the “litigants” in the show came for binding arbitration, and I knew the show compensated them for their TV appearance. I didn’t know, however, that the show promised to pay the compensatory damages that Judge Judy awarded. I think that I, too, would show up before a judge to answer for my misdeeds if I knew someone else was going to pay for my consequences for me. Pardon the youth minister theology juke, but I know of only one other Judge who bears the cost of the judgments he renders.

5. In laughs this week: “One Hour at Friend’s Vacation Home Undoes Lifetime of Class Consciousness,” and “‘I Would Never Survive in the Suburbs,’ Says Woman Also Not Surviving in the City” hit home from Reductress. Also fun: “‘It’s Such A Red Flag If You Don’t Like Cats’ Says Owner Of Evil Cat That Won’t Let Anyone But Her Touch Him,” and “Local woman betrays family history by eating at different chain restaurant.”

But top form this week goes to McSweeney’s laugh-out-loud exploration of the new tech startup Rumpelstiltskin:

For some, having a baby can be prohibitively expensive, but the cost of living shouldn’t mean that starting a family is just a fairy tale. That’s where Rumpelstiltskin comes in.

Rumpelstiltskin isn’t your typical fertility startup. Rumpelstiltskin is here for your child.

Our founders took years of experience in casino design and timeshare sales and swaddled them together into a first-of-its-kind solution that asks: Do poor people deserve to have kids?

The business is revolutionary, but the concept isn’t. It’s a simple exchange introduced by German academics that dates back to the early nineteenth century. We’ll cover the complete cost of IVF to help you build your family — yes, really — and then, on your child’s first birthday, we might take your baby.

6. The last word this week goes to J. D. Peabody at Christianity Today and his reflection on meaningful work. What do we do with the fact that Jesus spent some 20 years of his life working in a trade before his rabbinical ministry kicked off? There is no evidence of his labor, no furniture that he made and rested upon nor table that he made and ate at that preserves his first decades of work. Does that mean those years of toil pre-baptism were insignificant because they didn’t build anything that lasted? Peabody’s insight, that Jesus himself knows the experience of unappreciated work, is good for anyone dealing with the overlap of existential meaning and vocation.

The answer may lie in the question, for nearly all of us will, at some point — or many points — ask the same thing. Research has shown that more than we want other benefits, even promotions and raises, we want our work to be meaningful. Like the author of Ecclesiastes, we have a visceral need to matter. And most of the time, we aren’t sure that what we’re doing with all those hours has any lasting value.

Even when the significance is more readily apparent, it’s rarely permanent. People in all kinds of professions pour their hearts into worthwhile endeavors, only to watch them be systematically dismantled upon their retirement. Employees who were once thought invaluable leave and are replaced or made obsolete. Long-term import becomes impossible to measure. “Soon you will have forgotten the world,” observed Marcus Aurelius, “and soon the world will have forgotten you.”

The world has most certainly forgotten the countless hours Jesus invested in his builder days. No matter how skillfully he worked or how great his creativity, the fruit of his labor is all lost to history.

This truth is perhaps the most poignant and personal to me now: The church that my wife and I planted and pastored for more than two decades is gone. It no longer exists as a community. We loved and were loved by that congregation to the end, and we can hardly wrap our minds around its absence.

Was our work there a failure because it didn’t outlast us? Did it have any enduring significance? And how am I now employed in such a different field, where eternal significance feels even harder to see?

I can’t answer those questions fully. But I come back to Jesus and the world’s ignorance of what he did for so many years. I think about how he took all his humanity back to heaven with him. He still remembers that season of his life, when he poured his best energies into projects no one now recalls. Christ is still actively experiencing the world’s perception that how he spent most of his life was irrelevant.

Strays:

• “The standard for live singing isn’t human anymore.” Despite wanting to talk about things other than technology, this reflection about live Auto-Tune and perfectionist expectations is eye-opening and ear-opening.
• For the Annie Dillard fans out there, Image Journal’s “Annie Spans the Gap” from a few years ago is worth a read.
• And this reflection on literary criticism from the Hedgehog Review is great. I appreciated its frankness about how literary theory led to a generation of “disappointed, maladaptive skeptics” and “admirably uncommitted ironists,” and how theory can sate the desire to leave the body and reality all together.