Another Week Ends

1. Starting on a light note, last week we said that revenge was the deadliest addiction. This week, we’re talking about what may be the most common: workaholism. In his latest piece for the Atlantic, Arthur Brooks (whom we cite with some frequency) suggests that workaholism is often rooted in a deeper (and mostly unconscious, though systemic) belief that love, affection, and one’s sense of worth must be earned through achievement and productivity.

Life offers two kinds of reward, which social scientists define as intrinsic and extrinsic. The first kind involves immaterial things that can’t be bought, such as love and happiness. The second kind involves material things that can be procured, such as money and goods. We want both kinds of reward, of course — even though we all know what research has shown over and over again: that once we have achieved a basic standard of living, we gain much greater life satisfaction from intrinsic rewards.

And yet, millions of seemingly successful people act as if extrinsic rewards are all that count. Although they may not be totally bereft of loved ones, they live almost as if they were so, neglecting family and friends in favor of work, earning far more than their household needs to survive, even thrive. You can think of this as a crossed psychological circuit, resulting in a false conviction that intrinsic rewards can be bought with extrinsic currency. If I work hard enough and am sufficiently successful, thinks the workaholic, albeit unconsciously, then I will be worthy of the love I truly crave.

This tendency should surprise absolutely no one. The compulsion to earn love is old as love itself. But only in the last few decades, perhaps, has workaholism been so handsomely rewarded by the market, which makes it impossible to resist — even if managing your inbox hurts your marriage.

If you’re tending toward workaholism, you may very well be discovering that the returns to work are falling below the costs to your life. You are likely defensive about your heavy work habit, and confused about why such a noble virtue is earning complaints at home, instead of praise.

But there is always a way out. And, as is the case with other addictions, relief comes from a surprising place: surrender. Give up. Or better yet, give in. “Practice presence” as the armchair psychologists say. Your wife probably doesn’t need you to get that promotion as much as you think she does. She probably needs you to watch a romcom about a Neil Diamond cover band with her on the couch after you put the kids to bed. It feels so much better to give affection away than it does to earn it.

2. In her newsletter Ask Polly, Heather Havrilesky is talking about something similar: a self-defeating tendency towards perfectionism and overachievement.

Are you …  someone who often bounces between doing too much and hiding from everything? If so, chances are that your mind has been trained, from an early age, to work like a tireless factory that changes impressions into stories, stories into problems, problems into puzzles, and puzzles into panic.

The story you’ll tell yourself about this process is that it’s focused on solutions, on fixing what’s wrong, on addressing the matter at hand. Strangely, though, most of the impressions you feed into your factory don’t become solvable problems. Beautiful solutions are not flowing out of this factory. Instead, all that appears is more and more panic that has nowhere to go.

If your guiding imperative in life is to push through the panic and get things done, make things happen, keep people happy, keep everything moving forward, then chances are that there are warehouses of panic stacking up under your skin.

You are overwhelmed and exhausted. Your nerves are frayed. But the factory keeps chugging away.

Sound like you? Exhale.

When your mind is focused on constant forward progress, when you’re propelled by anxiety and fear and the darkness that inevitably rises up around your choices, your losses, and the unnervingly uncertain path ahead, you’re always essentially accumulating new impressions that immediately become problems and puzzles and panics.

In order to shift your perspective and stop accumulating new panics that never dissipate, leaving you frazzled and confused, you have to power down the factory.

Havrilesky suggests that these anxiety spirals come from living in the delusion that our lives are in our control. Accepting that control resides elsewhere might slow the downward spiral, which isn’t unique or exceptional or rarified, even if it feels like it.

This darkness isn’t yours alone, it’s not unique, it’s natural, and the longer you stare directly at it, without shame or any need to control it, the more quickly the dawn arrives.

You don’t need a factory to save you from darkness. You don’t need to tell stories about why this darkness is here or what you need to do about it. You don’t require strategies. Tolerate this uncertainty. The hard parts are also the good parts. Stay in it.

This is good advice and worth taking. But anyone who’s been afraid, who’s rehearsed every mistake they’ve made in isolation, knows how hard it is to follow. And that’s why the gospel is such specifically good news, because the contours of our suffering are known by God. Self-help, however energizing, isn’t the solution. Our neuroses and regrets are quelled from the outside by a Spirit of surprise.

3. I’ve nothing new to add to either side of the discussion of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but I can say that, in my neck of the woods, there has been hefty cynicism about the sincerity of Erika Kirk’s forgiveness of the man who murdered her husband. I watched video of the funeral with squeamishness, knowing too well how Christians can perform their holiness in self-valorizing ways. And then I got to thinking, “Who cares if Erika Kirk’s forgiveness is performative when everyone around her is exacting retribution?” In that way, Kelsi Klembara at 1517 is spot on:

Christians confess that Christ has both the first and the final word when it comes to judgment, sin, and forgiveness. Your identity in Christ — given through his word of promise — is more fundamental and eternal than any evil done to you. Christ secured this identity for you when he went willingly to suffer and die on account of your sins, rising again to remake you according to his righteousness. No matter how small and unassuming, or mighty and profound it may seem, we can and should give thanks anytime we see God’s forgiveness enacted in our world because all true forgiveness flows from the forgiveness Christ has won for you on the cross. This is the inheritance of all who confess him in word and deed.

Forgiveness is the centerpiece of the Christian faith. And yet, that doesn’t make it any less shocking when we witness it, especially when vengeance and blame rule the day.

Ross Douthat at the New York Times reminds us that Erika Kirk’s act of graciousness was both essential and instructive: “There will be no lasting revival unless Christians are known not just for their strength or their belief but for their love.”

4. Next up, Ashley Hales interviewed Elizabeth Bruenig, who has served as a media and personal witness in several executions, about her reporting on abuses in US prison systems, racialized executions, her Catholic faith, and the alien nature of mercy and forgiveness.

Bruenig on why she is upfront about her faith in her reporting:

I think that it’s important to be honest with the reader about my actual interest here and that my interest is not strictly as a news reporter who’s trying to contribute to democracy. That’s part of it. Connecting with these guys [on death row] has been very spiritually enriching. It’s more of a witness to faith to the reader. I hope that readers understand this is what Christianity is really about. Right? It’s about the infinite mercy of God expressed through the salvation of humankind. The reason that I’m so upfront about being Christian in the article is not just to be honest, but I hope this leaves an impression that Christianity has a lot to offer the world. 

On the radical strangeness of forgiveness:

One of my favorite things about Christianity is the utter alien weirdness of the Christian approach to evil and wrongdoing.

If you took someone who had never had any contact with Christianity and was a perfect blank slate with average, reasonable assumptions about reality and you said, “What should you do in response to someone who kills people, someone who kills a lot of people?” the last thing someone would come up with is you recognize your shared humanity with this person and that there is something valuable about their unique life.

That that’s not what would come to mind reveals divinity to me, because it indicates how different the divine consciousness is from the human. Part of how you know that you’re dealing with the will of God is that it’s foreign to men. 

5. Absolution is a miracle. And people want it!

Lauren Jackson has started a newsletter series at the New York Times exploring themes related to religious belief. This week she explores the psychological value of repentance. Every major world religion has a process for moral accounting, something rarely talked about in secular society.

Islam teaches tawbah, or a private reckoning with one’s wrongdoing. Hinduism has prāyaścitta, a process of moral purification that can involve fasting, bathing and pilgrimage. Buddhism encourages ethical self-correction through mindfulness and repentance rituals.

Studies have shown that getting things off your chest (especially acts of contrition and shame) reduce, Jackson notes, “depression and anxiety, lower blood pressure, a strengthened immune system and improved sleep.” But what do we do with our wrongdoings when we’ve let go of the religions that facilitate them?

Religious rituals facilitate moral accountability in a way that is rare in secular society. Without religion, “there’s no real, formalized way to do it,” said David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University. And in the absence of religion, people are finding ways to clear the decks. James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, has spent decades studying the value of “expressive writing,” especially about shame and experiences people try to forget.

“We found simply bringing people in the lab and having them write,” Pennebaker told me, “produced improvements in physical and mental health.” Writing about wrongdoing, he added, can help people reflect and ‘come to some understanding of what’s happened.’

It can also help people release shame. Fred Luskin, the director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, has found that sharing pain “was required before you could be fully open to the ability to release it.”

Though it can be tempting to read this through a moral lens — “This proves that people have an intuitive sense of right and wrong,” I think it’s more helpful to read it through a relational lens: “I have to admit my wrongs to someone so they don’t eat me alive.”

6. In humor this week: Jimmy Kimmel is back on air, “a move cheered by free speech advocates and even more so by exhausted parents who cancelled their Disney+ subscriptions to make a point and then immediately regretted it.”

Also, how many times did you go to the red panda enclosure at your zoo this summer? Not as many as this guy:

I am a drowning man, sinking under the weight of expectation, pulled toward the murky depths of adult fallibility. I’m glad my children love going to this zoo every weekend, but with each trip around their favorite enclosure, I’m reminded of my mortal limitations.

While you were at the zoo, maybe your sister-in-law was in Portofino?

Freshly back in Sydney after a three-week jaunt to Italy, reports say that a 32-year-old woman will not stop saying the word “ciao” to friends, family members, and at times, even retail staff.

7.  I loved Robert Redford. For most of my twenties, a black and white photo of him hung in my bathroom, the idea being, “Put your smile on, Meg. Jeremiah Johnson (or the Sundance Kid, or Jay Gatsby, or the narrator’s voice from A River Runs Through It, or Bob Woodward, lol) might be right outside your apartment — you never know.” In recent years, Mockingbird has sent me to the Sundance Film Festival, always with the hope that I might see Mr. Redford on the street, so I was especially bummed to learn of his passing a few weeks ago. Sally Jenkins gets at his appeal:

His decades of work contain a theme so pronounced that once you notice it, you see it everywhere in his films: the hollowness of an easy victory.

But — and this is significant in naming Redford’s staying power, in why he’ll have such an intelligent and meaningful legacy — all of these characters are a little too deft for their own good, and didn’t Redford know it, and play it. “If you’re in a position of being viewed iconically, you’d better have a mechanism to take yourself down to keep the balance,” he once wrote in Time magazine.

She goes on to say,

To Redford, winning was a dangerous deception, as perilous to the heart as equating gorgeousness with character. “All good things — trout as well as eternal salvation — came by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy,” Norman Maclean wrote in A River Runs Through It, a book Redford clearly revered.

Strays:

• Freya India and Ayishat Akanbi discuss the insincerity of therapy-speak.
• There are many real things to fear in the world (and many more imagined ones). Worse than these dangers, though, is what fear can do to us.
• The real enemy in the culture wars is nihilism, say Michael Reaneu and Kevin Brown at The Dispatch.