So M. M. got me thinking about denial...and at first I was denying that there was a lot of denial, a lot of running from the truth about ourselves. In the classic sense, I'm not a relativist, but I do not believe there is a THE TRUTH about a lot of things. I see no call for despair about creative or career failures because I don't think they exist. I mean, sure, a book may be undeniably unsuccessful commercially, but I do not believe I can definitively say I have done bad work.
Because take the converse. Sometimes, I will get very high on myself, but the next day I come crushing down and question the grounds for my confidence. I go back and forth, trying to summon proofs of my abilities. No amount of examples or remembered past positive reinforcement can establish beyond a shadow of a a doubt that I am what I would like to be. My feedback and experience is simplify too complex to pin down, and at bottom, ability is all relative. The more I think about it, the more slippery it becomes.
I thought about relationships. Can the state of a relationship be factual, and therefore something we can deny? I don't know. It does seem that we can make a statement about whether we are happy, at least. But I was so moved by Kathryn Schulz's article in the New York Times (adapted from her book) that spoke of the multiplicity of emotional experience.
In contemplating denial, I did eventually locate it, and there is no question that we are built to deny, and deny in a self-favoring way. I avoid going to the doctor until I cannot deny any longer that I have worrisome symptoms. When I was in college, there was one class where I got farther and farther behind. I probably had four-fifths of the curriculum to do with one one-fifth of the semester remaining, and some of the work was collaborative and could not be crammed. The teacher finally did the math for me. I was the man counting on living to be 200 years old. Time is a big source of denial; Daniel Kahneman talks of this, and when I give people estimates for how long something will take, or even when I will be able to meet them after I shower and so forth, I always build in extra time, and find later that I needed to.
When I began, I saw M. M.'s two paths of anxiety and suffering as separate, but now I see how they are inextricably linked. Indeed, for psychological comfort, sometimes we pronounce more than we know, and sometimes we do not see what we can very well know.
So M. M. got me thinking about denial...and at first I was denying that there was a lot of denial, a lot of running from the truth about ourselves. In the classic sense, I'm not a relativist, but I do not believe there is a THE TRUTH about a lot of things. I see no call for despair about creative or career failures because I don't think they exist. I mean, sure, a book may be undeniably unsuccessful commercially, but I do not believe I can definitively say I have done bad work.
Because take the converse. Sometimes, I will get very high on myself, but the next day I come crushing down and question the grounds for my confidence. I go back and forth, trying to summon proofs of my abilities. No amount of examples or remembered past positive reinforcement can establish beyond a shadow of a a doubt that I am what I would like to be. My feedback and experience is simplify too complex to pin down, and at bottom, ability is all relative. The more I think about it, the more slippery it becomes.
I thought about relationships. Can the state of a relationship be factual, and therefore something we can deny? I don't know. It does seem that we can make a statement about whether we are happy, at least. But I was so moved by Kathryn Schulz's article in the New York Times (adapted from her book) that spoke of the multiplicity of emotional experience.
In contemplating denial, I did eventually locate it, and there is no question that we are built to deny, and deny in a self-favoring way. I avoid going to the doctor until I cannot deny any longer that I have worrisome symptoms. When I was in college, there was one class where I got farther and farther behind. I probably had four-fifths of the curriculum to do with one one-fifth of the semester remaining, and some of the work was collaborative and could not be crammed. The teacher finally did the math for me. I was the man counting on living to be 200 years old. Time is a big source of denial; Daniel Kahneman talks of this, and when I give people estimates for how long something will take, or even when I will be able to meet them after I shower and so forth, I always build in extra time, and find later that I needed to.
When I began, I saw M. M.'s two paths of anxiety and suffering as separate, but now I see how they are inextricably linked. Indeed, for psychological comfort, sometimes we pronounce more than we know, and sometimes we do not see what we can very well know.