disappointment – Pith Rant

Successful Outcome

Content note: animated gifs

A square with an orange filter over a photograph of college students rappelling on a climbing wall. In the upper right hand corner are the hashtags #momentummonday and #uwec, the educational institution that shared the post. In white sanserif letters, it says, "It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome." -William James — A square with an orange filter over a photograph of college students rappelling on a climbing wall. In the upper right hand corner are the hashtags #momentummonday and #uwec, the educational institution that shared the post. In white sanserif letters, it says, “It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.” -William James

I originally wrote this post in early 2020.

At that point, I had heard of coronavirus, but people were dismissing whispers about lockdowns.

More recently, here in mid-2022, I was reading the book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Amelia and Emily Nagoski, and I was struck by their chapter on “persistence.”

The perspective they present there is much more nuanced and thoroughly researched than my blog post here (which makes sense, because they wrote a whole book), but I’ll go ahead and admit that I was chuffed to see a well-rounded argument by people I respect with some thematic parallels to my burned-out thoughts from two years ago.

Back in the before-times, I was feeling especially salty about this featured quote because I had just received a long-overdue confirmation of rejection for a job that I was extraordinarily confident about my ability to perform, that I was ridiculously prepared for, that I was eminently qualified for, and for which I made an exceptionally strong argument for myself for in both preliminary and final interview stages.

I also received my poorly-handled rejection notification the day after Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the 2020 presidential race.

It wasn’t a great day to see an inspirational quote about attitude.

My attitude had varied over the months of the academic job application and interview process, but overall, I remained uncharacteristically positive.

I mean, I was still fundamentally me.

Of course I experienced bouts of doubt and anxiety.

But for once, my professional self-doubt felt like a lie that could be countered with evidence.

When I saw the original advertisement for the position, I thought, “Well, that’s me. I can do all of that, and I can do it well.”

(It was far more common for me to read the bulleted Preferred Qualifications list and feel great about three of them, okay about four or five, ambivalent about a couple, and terrified by at least one.)

When I started pulling my materials together, I told myself, “I will turn in an application that they can’t ignore. They may not actually contact me for an interview, because that’s out of my hands, but by god, they’ll have to work hard to justify keeping me out of the running if that’s the case.”

And they contacted me pretty promptly to schedule an interview.

And when I prepared for the interview, I told myself, “I will not give them any reason to second-guess choosing my application, and by god, they’ll have to sweat if they don’t put me through to the next round.”

And I made it to the next round.

Every other time I had a campus visit, I’d leaned into a “fake it ’til you make it” approach to get me through, but this time, I just felt a qualified colleague.

It would be unfair for me to resent the fact that another person existed with pertinent qualifications, which they proceeded to show off to good advantage in their own interview. The person who got the job was presumably confident, prepared, and qualified, and capable of making a strong argument on their own behalf.

Awareness of this fact didn’t do much to alleviate the sting.

So, back to William James (and those who like to quote him out of context):

How does “attitude at the beginning” really come into play when we arrive at an unsuccessful outcome?

I admit that I threw myself a big old pity party when I got the rejection, and I stand by that. Pretending not to be bitter will only exacerbate bitterness.

I also admit that my above question originally arose from a place of resentment and frustration.

But once the emotional lava has hardened, the issue still stands: what’s the connection between attitude and success?

The quote in this macro is being used in service of this broader Power of Positivity enterprise that blames individuals’ thought patterns for individual failures (or successes), rather than engaging more meaningfully with the social infrastructures that reinforce patterns of success (or failure).

If we’re looking to define an attitude that helps to determine success, it seems like confidence, persistence, and resilience are good personal qualities to have, eh?

I don’t know Elizabeth Warren personally, and I’m in no position to ever speak meaningfully about her mental or emotional state.

But at least in terms of her public image, she remained engaged, forward-thinking, and determined. She shows it when she’s angry, but she remains broadly “positive,” and does not appear unconfident or underprepared.

Elizabeth Warren’s own attitude wasn’t the problem with her campaign. Her attitude was demonstrably on point.

Of course she’ll persist. Of course she’ll be resilient. Of course she isn’t going to stop working altogether. She knows the drill. She’ll stay on her feet.

But still.

Fucking hell.

I’ve focused a lot on that word “attitude” in the original macro, but here I’ll start folding in that idea of “successful outcome.”

A “successful outcome” for a job interview – both at the local and national level – is a job offer.

That’s what it looks like your own attitude is mirrored by that of a larger system (which may or may not be rigged in your favor).

Now, I promise that I know that “not achieving a desired outcome” is not the same thing as either “failure” or “total lack of institutional support.”

When multiple people are competing for only one position, it’s obviously not possible for everyone to “succeed” in the sense outlined above, and so of course there’s going to be disappointment somewhere.

Toxic Positivity encourages us to elevate the lesson at the expense of acknowledging the disappointment, though.

Sure, I get to practice resilience this way, and I can identify opportunities for growth, but “someone else got the job” still wasn’t a “successful outcome” for me. (Or Elizabeth Warren.)

It’s a reasonable outcome.

It’s a manageable outcome.

It’s not a total failure, and it’s not the end of the world.

I’ll persist. I’ll be resilient. I won’t stop altogether. I know the drill. I’ll stay on my feet.

We can’t all have successful outcomes all the time, and that’s normal.

Now, I think that’s a reasonable attitude to have at the disappointing conclusion of a difficult task.

Cognitively, I know that this is my baseline “actual” attitude, even though I may struggle to stick with it as circumstance and emotions fluctuate.

This “attitude determines outcome” framing doesn’t seem to encourage a healthy, balanced response to unsuccessful outcomes, but then again, what do I know from healthy?

There are a couple of ways to justify this relationship between “attitude determines outcome” and what “a successful outcome” actually looks like compared to an “unsuccessful” one.

1) Play with the definition of “attitude.” If you have an unsuccessful outcome (e.g., not getting the job, not winning the race, not nailing the performance, etc.), it must be because your initial attitude wasn’t truly what was needed for that particular kind of success in that particular situation. Your attitude was always the problem, rather than anything circumstantial, and you need to try harder to have a more situationally-appropriate attitude if you want to achieve your goals. (Okay, I’ve been a bit flippant there, but then again I never promised not to be.)

2) Play with the definition of “success.” If you don’t achieve your desired outcome (the job, the medal, the gig, etc.), it’s okay to retrofit your idea of success to accommodate whatever actually happened. That sounds a lot like the ol’ “Everyone’s a winner” schtick that never made anyone feel any better in elementary school.

“You succeeded because you tried.”

(Don’t tell Yoda.)

Animated gif of the shriveled green character Yoda from Star Wars (specifically The Empire Strikes Back, for the nerds) saying his iconic line, "Do or do no. There is no try." — *Animated gif of the shriveled green character Yoda from Star Wars (specifically The Empire Strikes Back, for the nerds) saying his iconic line, “Do or do no. There is no try.”*

Now, I’ve offered several either/ors here, and you know how I feel about binaries.

Of course success is not an absolute binary, and it’s reductive to treat most outcomes as “SUCCESS” vs. “FAILURE” with nothing in between.

At the same time, of course it’s disingenuous to act like “NOT SUCCESS” has so much overlap with “SUCCESS” that the difference is functionally negligible.

I have a background in social science research, but I’ve really only dabbled in psychology. I’ve spent more time engaging with popular psychology resources than digging into the academic theory and history of the discipline.

So I’ll admit that I wasn’t sure who William James was when I initially snagged this screenshot.

In fact, when I started writing, I was thinking of Henry James, and I was all ready to lay into him.

Wrong James, though.

It turns out that William James is often referred to as “the father of American psychology.”

The history of the philosophical tradition of Pragmatism, as James defined it and as it has since evolved, wasn’t exactly light reading, and I’ll be upfront about the fact that I just don’t feel like summarizing it here.

And at any rate, this blog isn’t a great space to develop a lengthy and well-researched essay on the history of ideological debates that have influenced contemporary psychological practice. I’m just here to pick apart their outcomes.

I liked the sound of “pragmatism,” though, so I considered the possibility that his quotable quote was pulled from a context that could offer some illumination.

I briefly searched for that original context.

Early efforts to identify the source beyond the author’s name were fruitless. This sentence has been macroed a LOT:

Screenshot of the many results of a Google image search for the William James quote "It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome." There are many different treatments in terms of font, color scheme, and imagery. 14 are represented here, but that's just what fit in the screenshot. — Screenshot of the many results of a Google image search for the William James quote “It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.” There are many different treatments in terms of font, color scheme, and imagery. 14 are represented here, but that’s just what fit in the screenshot.

I have just a couple highlights to bring in from my very brief historical review.

“Pragmatism” as a movement has been paraphrased as “a return to common sense.”

Well, that sounds less promising. Naturally, I wondered whose senses were considered to be most common, and naturally, I have some hunches, William James, but we’ll table that for now.

(*cough* abled-ish financially secure cis het white dudes who were likely to have been raised with broadly Christian values if not beliefs *cough*)

I didn’t find the original context, but I came across another James quote that seems like a helpful expansion: “a belief can be made true by the fact that holding it contributes to our happiness and fulfillment.”

I.e., “fake it ’til you make it.”

It seems a little on the nose to me that the “father of American psychology” advocated for magical thinking that he preferred to rebrand as “pragmatism.”

Admittedly, I’ve presented a judgement about an influential figure and the significance of his entire career based on just a couple of Google searches and the brief perusal of a few articles. I stand 100% ready to be educated by the perspectives of those more familiar with his work (as I pretend that multiple people with relevant and informed opinions are reading this blog).

Shortly after writing an early draft of this post, I read a chapter from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America that expanded more on the historical context that led to the emergence of William James’ psychological philosophy. In short:

it seems like James approached the then-emerging pseudoscientific fad known as “new thinking” (the idea that people could manifest things simply by thinking about them) with a reasonable degree of skepticism.

His original motivation seems to have been practical enough. I respect anyone who is driven by a desire to disprove popular bullshit; yet the outcome has led to terribly impractical results (i.e., more people in contemporary society who lump his eventual admission that “thinking positive thoughts can in some cases seem to correlate with positive outcomes” into the same kind of magical thinking he was contesting in the first place).

So in that sense, his optimistic attitude at the outset does not seem to have resulted in a particularly successful outcome for his theories.

Just sayin’.

I write a lot here about what I don’t believe and not as much about what I do believe.

I want to stress that I believe deeply in the value of acceptance.

I can and always will learn from disappointment.

I know my Bob Ross, y’all.

Animated gif of painter Bob Ross from his '90s TV show "The Joy of Painting," standing in front of a nature-scape with his palette in hand, saying, "We don't make mistakes - we just have happy accidents." — Animated gif of painter Bob Ross from his ’90s TV show “The Joy of Painting,” standing in front of a nature-scape with his palette in hand, saying, “We don’t make mistakes – we just have happy accidents.”

I absolutely appreciate the value of being able to identify positive potential after a negative situation has unfolded.

I comprehend and respect the idea that the anticipation of success can have benefits that the anticipation of failure may not.

I recognize the ways in which negative thinking can perpetuate cycles of self-sabotage.

But.

Attitudes don’t exist in vacuums.

Having a good attitude IN A SYSTEM THAT PRIVILEGES AND PRIORITIZES YOUR ABILITY TO MAINTAIN THE IDEA THAT YOUR OWN ATTITUDE IS THE BEST ONE will, indeed, probably encourage successful outcomes.

You can have the best damn attitude in the world, but that’s not the primary thing determining your success. It just helps.

Know your strengths, know your limits, and know your value. That’s in your control.

But also know that there are plenty of folks out there who want you to be fully responsible for the “failures” that you encounter, just so that they can justify their own relative comfort and “success.”

I feel like this post turned out more ranty than usual. That’s not what I planned for when I started, but that’s where it ended up.

Unintended and unexpected outcomes are normal and fine.

It is possible to turn your mistakes into birds.

But that doesn’t have to mean that your attitude was always going to lay eggs in the first place.

Expect Nothing

A photo of a silhouette of two hands holding up something heart-shaped (the common Valentine's Day-style heart icon, not like the shape of a human heart, in case you needed the clarification) in front of a sunset. The heart is aligned with the sun, so the sunbeams and color gradation appear to be radiating from the heart. The white serif font says, "Do everything with a good heart and expect nothing in return and you will never be disappointed." The source is "Power of Positivity." — A photo of a silhouette of two hands holding up something heart-shaped (the common Valentine’s Day-style heart icon, not like the shape of a human heart, in case you needed the clarification) in front of a sunset. The heart is aligned with the sun, so the sunbeams and color gradation appear to be radiating from the heart. The white serif font says, “Do everything with a good heart and expect nothing in return and you will never be disappointed.” The source is “Power of Positivity.”

Did you ever read The Giving Tree?

It’s the story of a tree that is happy to become a useless stump after a little boy has used up all its resources without ever reciprocating her kindness or apologizing for the impact of his actions.

The tree doesn’t feel disappointment or regret about all the apples it could have produced, because that would mean that it expected something in return from the person who stripped it of its vitality, and that would mean that the tree couldn’t really have been good-hearted!

We need the tree to be good-hearted in order to want it to be happy, because happiness should only belong to those who we think deserve it, right?

People who insist on interpreting that lovely little story as “unhealthy” just have bad, bitter hearts.

The message in this macro suggests that ultimately, it’s your motives that really matter more than your actions. If your heart feels good when you do something, that is 100% of the battle.

Also, your (lack of) expectations should really outweigh other people’s actual responses to what you’ve done with all your good-heartedness.

Your expectation of no reciprocation or acknowledgment is more important than the possibility that the person/people you’re doing goodness at might want to a) do something nice for you in return or b) express dissatisfaction with what you so well-meaningly chose to do in the first place.

Why should their feelings matter? We’re talking about your inner peace!

At any rate, the real end game here is avoiding disappointment. Disappointment is the worst! You don’t want to have any more of that in your life than absolutely necessary, am I right?

Expectations lead to disappointment, which is bad, so don’t expect things.

Not having to learn how to deal productively with disappointment is an important part of becoming a well-rounded and responsible person.

While originally working on this post, I had the vague sense of having read that Shel Silverstein himself was kind of ambivalent about The Giving Tree. I thought that he may have viewed it as sad, or at least didn’t necessarily see it as the easy-breezy life advice it’s often taken for.

This New York Times article is the best I could come up with to validate my fuzzy semi-recollection, and the only relevant Silverstein quote it provides is simply that the book was “about a relationship between two people; one gives and the other takes.”

Not exactly a resounding endorsement of the tree’s caring nature, but also not a condemnation of the boy.

It’s not ethical to speculatively diagnose people with mental illnesses (particularly dead people (and even more particularly dead people I never met)) and yet I would not be shocked if Silverstein struggled with depression.

His child-directed work typically counterbalances its fundamental darkness with humor, hope, and whimsy, but that darkness is pervasive. Even his simplest pieces often have multiple layers, and the overall ethos of his poetry collections feels subversive in a way that is unlikely to have stemmed from a life of persistent contentment.

My reason for bringing up his background is that the person behind the creation of The Giving Tree, a book that is famously used to reinforce the message from this macro, probably didn’t view it as a saccharine or straightforward text.

The fact that people tend to view the book as either sweet or wholly unsavory just demonstrates our cultural tendency to disengage from nuance.

We can’t know his thoughts for sure, but it seems unlikely that The Giving Tree was just a weirdly earnest exception to his characteristically winking jadedness.

The poignancy of the ending isn’t because the tree always did the right thing or because the boy-turned-old-man learned a valuable lesson.

It’s sad because it’s an honest, descriptive representation of a common and bittersweet dynamic.

The tree is a metaphor (gasp!) but the literal story rings true. Givers are at risk of giving themselves to death to takers who never questioned their own right to have.

It seems to me that the moral of the story is not to lionize either character, but to question them both. You don’t really want to be the dead, devoted stump or the oblivious ingrate.

(Note: I actually don’t have a copy available for reference, so I’m relying on my memory. I don’t think there’s a message on the last page that says something direct like, “the moral of the story is…” but if there is, I grant that this would affect my interpretation.)

A few years ago, I revisited another short Silverstein favorite from my childhood: The Missing Piece Meets the Big O.

I cried a lot more than I expected to (which had been “not at all”).

To summarize:

The Missing Piece is a little sentient triangular wedge that doesn’t know where it fits in. The world around it is populated by rolling Pac-Man-like circles. The eponymous Piece hopes to complete one of these circles by fitting perfectly into its empty slice-of-pie space. Once that happens, it will know where it belongs. There is always some reason why it’s not a good fit with the available options, though. At one point, the Missing Piece is picked up by a rolling Pac-Man with a gap that complements its shape. Together, they create a perfectly round circle and enjoy rolling happily along.

But that’s not the end.

Unexpectedly, the Missing Piece begins to grow. It no longer fits into what it thought was its intended place. Both Piece and Pac-Man are disgruntled. They had expected everything to stay the same, but once that becomes unsustainable, they go their separate ways. Or rather, the Pac-Man goes its own way, because the Missing Piece is shaped like a doorstop and has limited mobility. Then the Big O rolls by. It’s already a perfect circle with no evident gaps or missing bits. They get to talking, and the Missing Piece is drawn to the Big O, but there doesn’t appear to be a place for it to fit. The Big O is already complete and self-sufficient. The Piece asks if it can come along anyway, and the O simply states that they’re not currently able to move in the same way at the same pace. It’s matter-of-fact rather than condescending or discouraging. The O notes it would be nice to meet again some day, and then goes on its way. The Missing Piece proceeds to pull its angular body up until it flops over, time and again, and as it moves forward its pointy edges begin to wear off. It’s awkward and difficult and it takes some time, but the Missing Piece becomes a circle capable of rolling on its own. It no longer needs to wait for a perfectly complementary Pac-Man to pick it up and carry it around, and in this way, it’s able to rejoin the Big O.

It’s possible to read this as a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative, but as with The Giving Tree, I think that’s too simplistic.

It would also be possible to read this as a suggestion to adapt yourself until you’ve become more palatable for someone you like, but that also misses the point.

This story is about co-dependence, self-determination, and agency.

Unspoken expectations also come into play. Part of the reason that the Piece is consistently disappointed with its own loneliness is that it isn’t really communicating its expectation of completion to the various Pac-Men it meets. The Piece expects them to complete it just as much as it completes them, which is a pretty big ask.

The Piece has presumably never seen wholeness and self-sufficiency represented as a viable option before, so it’s not entirely the Piece’s fault for concluding that it must have been incomplete.

The character of the Big O demonstrates the necessity of representation.

Once the Piece sees that it’s actually possible to travel around without having the perfect partner, that’s the choice it makes.

Its physical changes aren’t superfluous cosmetic accommodations as much as they are the practical consequences of changed behavior.

So what does The Missing Piece have to do with The Giving Tree and this message of benevolent subservience?

Expectations, communication, and complexity.

Whether the author intended it or not, the absence of real, honest communication is one of the quiet little tragedies in The Giving Tree.

Suggesting that “The tree made her choices, so if she didn’t want to be used up and hollowed out, she should have said so” is the kind of rationalization used by people who have been unreasonably demanding.

The boy never had to experience disappointment in his relationship with the tree because his requests were always indulged.

What if he had checked in on the tree more often? What if he had declined to accept something that she offered? It’s the fact that he isn’t shown to communicate any kind of awareness of the needs of others that leaves many readers cold.

At the same time, it’s possible to interrogate the patterns of seemingly kind choices made by some people (or anthropomorphic trees) and call attention to the ways that they aren’t really all that helpful or supportive.

As always, context matters.

The tree never deflected by saying anything like, “I’d love to help you, but this isn’t a good time for me right now” or “I like to feel useful and needed, so it’s easy for me to say ‘yes’ to things that might actually overextend the resources I need to take care of myself.”

She may well have been disappointed and felt abandoned if the boy didn’t ask such significant favors of her.

The macro message suggests that you should behave in ways that will help you avoid the disappointment of unmet expectations.

And it’s true that there can be value in lowering expectations, because maintaining unreasonably high or unspecified expectations can be incredibly frustrating and disappointing.

But disappointment is part of life. You can’t avoid it forever.

It happens, and then you need to move on.

The Giving Tree is often (mis)used as advice for avoiding disappointment.

The Missing Piece Meets the Big O is about moving forward after it happens.

And both stories are about the things we don’t say that might be better off said.

Happy Valentine’s Day!