Category: Life Lessons

A couple of months ago I had dinner with Ilan, who runs a company worth about a billion dollars, and I came home from it feeling small. I kept wondering about what I’d done with my life.

Then we had two dinners last month that shouldn’t have had anything to do with each other.

In high school there was always an answer. It sat in the back of the textbook or in a folder on the teacher’s desk. Knowing it was there shaped how I thought. Every question had an answer. If two people disagreed, one of them just hadn’t found it yet. My job was to be the one who found it first.

This is the way I thought when I entered Yale in the fall of 1995.

I love weird words, especially the ones with strange histories.

This one comes from Ancient Greece. Pliny the Elder, the Roman writer who later died getting too close to Vesuvius, tells a story about Apelles, the most famous painter of his day, who liked to hide behind his paintings while they were on display and listen to what people said about them. A shoemaker walked by and pointed out that a sandal in one of the pictures had the wrong number of straps, and Apelles fixed it. The next day the shoemaker came back and started in on the leg. Apelles told him, from behind the painting, that a cobbler shouldn’t judge above the sandal.

The line became the maxim ne sutor ultra crepidam. Eighteen hundred years later, William Hazlitt wrote an open letter to William Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly Review, and called him an ultra-crepidarian critic. Gifford had been apprenticed to a shoemaker as a boy. This was Hazlitt using his knowledge of Latin to insult Gifford as just a shoemaker’s apprentice.

I know what it feels like to do this. In high school my hand went up before the question was finished. My reasoning was that either I knew the answer or nobody else did, so I may as well take the chance, because I might be right. I never thought about the rest of the class, that they might know it too, or that one of them might have an answer I didn’t.

I had opinions about foreign policy and the national debt, and I’d tell anyone who cared to listen and many who didn’t, even though I knew nothing about them.

I was the smart kid. I was the one with the answers. Even if I knew nothing about the topic.

I got to Yale and found out how much I didn’t know. In high school I’d always been the best in math. In college it was different. My uncle, who’d been a math major at the University at Albany, told me once that he was good at math until all the numbers went away, and I took it as a joke. It wasn’t a joke. In college there are classes like real analysis, complex analysis, and abstract algebra that don’t have numbers in them, and the people who could do them were so much better at math than I was.

Serge Lang taught analysis. He was one of the top professors in the department, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and he’d written the textbooks these subjects were taught out of, more than forty books in all. His courses were understood to be incomprehensible to everyone but the true math people, and he was, by all accounts, very good at teaching them.

He also kept files. A friend of mine worked on them. I never knew what was in those files. I knew that she’d go, and that they worked hard, and that among the math people it was a prestigious thing to have been asked.

The file I knew about was from 1986. Lang had mounted what the Times called a one-man challenge to keep Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist, out of the National Academy, on the grounds that Huntington dressed political opinions in equations. Lang called it pseudoscience, a language that gave “the illusion of science without any of its substance.” Huntington said the equations were shorthand. It didn’t matter. He was voted down twice, the second time on the floor in front of five hundred members.

All of this looked a little bit funky to me, but he’d written the books and won the prizes, and my friend was in the room, and I assumed a man that smart must be onto something.

A few years after I left, I was reading about Linus Pauling on the internet. My grandparents were always sucking on vitamin C drops, in the winter or whenever anybody had a cold, because of Linus Pauling.

He’d won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962, the only person ever to win two on his own. In 1970 he published a book saying that large doses of vitamin C would prevent colds. Later he said it would treat cancer. The science didn’t back him up. Reading it as an adult, what he was proposing was a crackpot theory. Two Nobel Prizes, and the thing my family knew him for was wrong.

Lang seems to have done something similar. In the last twelve years of his life he’d decided that HIV hadn’t been proven to cause AIDS. He published articles saying so in Yale Scientific in 1994 and 1995, which means he was already writing them while my friend worked on the files. He protested Yale’s hiring of AIDS researchers and wrote letters to the administration about the university’s role in what he saw as a conspiracy. He died in 2005 still believing it.

Pauling and Lang weren’t stupid and they weren’t lying. They kept opining on topics well past where their knowledge ended. A chemist knows where chemistry stops. A man who’s been told for fifty years that he’s the smartest person in every room doesn’t have a stopping place, because being smart was never about any one thing. That was the identity I’d built too. Not a chemist, not a mathematician, just smart, and smart doesn’t come with a sandal.

It’s been a long time since I was the kid who put his hand up every time. Now I’ve learned that I can get more from listening to someone than from talking, because I already know everything I’m going to say. The other person is the only one in the room I might learn something from.

One of the most interesting ways I’ve approached this is in a group when they ask for questions. My first instinct is to raise my hand and ask something I want to know. What I try now is to ask a question I have that I also think most of the room wants answered.

Appendix

Here’s a weird appendix I just had to add. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx says:

“Ne sutor ultra crepidam.” This nec plus ultra of handicraft wisdom became sheer nonsense, from the moment the watchmaker Watt invented the steam engine, the barber Arkwright the throstle, and the working jeweler Fulton the steamship.

Kark Marx, Das Kapital

To explain this a bit, Marx is saying, “In our time, we don’t need to stay in our lane anymore. Look at the people who did great things out of their lane.” Watt trained as an instrument maker (though Marx called him a watchmaker), and was fixing a broken model steam engine for a university when he redesigned it and made it useful. Arkwright was a barber and wigmaker who built the throstle or water frame, the machine that mechanized spinning and made him one of the richest men in England. Fulton apprenticed to a jeweler as a teenager, painting miniature portraits for lockets, before he ever touched a steam engine, and he’s the one who made the commercial steamboat work.

In seventh or eighth grade there was a science teacher, who I’ll call Professor Plum. I never had a class with him, and I never spoke to him, but everyone knew him by his hair. He had maybe three strands left, combed over his head like a Quonset hut. We would talk about him as he walked by, “Does he know how absurd this looks, that he’s standing up there pretending he’s not bald?”

Around the same time I was playing gin rummy with my grandmother on the patio of her apartment in West Palm Beach. She was in her seventies and had been dyeing her hair blonde for as long as I’d been alive. At some point between hands I asked her, “Why do you dye your hair? Why are you pretending to look younger than you are?” She hadn’t asked me. I just said it, with the certainty of a middle schooler who had recently discovered honesty. She considered it and said, “If Robert doesn’t want me to dye my hair, I’m going to stop dyeing my hair.” She loved me so much, but she shouldn’t have taken fashion advice from a seventh-grade boy.

And she did. She kept going to the salon. She just stopped getting the color. Her hair came in a shocking white, and she wore it in a classy hairdo, and I thought it looked good. It looked honest. It also made her look her age, where the blonde had probably bought her a decade. For years I thought I gave her good advice. Why not be honest?

About a decade ago, I was in a conference room full of people, bored, while someone droned on. I found myself looking at a friend of mine. From behind, he had a large bald spot. In front, his thinning hair was propped up with thickener and mousse, so that straight on he had a full head of hair, and from the side you could see how it was assembled, like the fake fronts of buildings on a movie set.

The seventh grader in me asked the old question, “Does he know?” And then I understood that in the morning, when he looks in the mirror, he sees the straight-on version, and that he was doing this for himself as much as for anybody else. It made him feel good. I didn’t say anything. I realized there was nothing to say. What mattered was the man he saw in the mirror. How he looked to the rest of us came second. Reality came third.

It’s not that I got the facts wrong on that patio. It’s just that it was the perspective of a kid who loved his grandma. What I missed is that the world is made up of more than facts. It’s also relationships, and the way we see ourselves and each other. The blonde was doing something for her, the way the mousse was doing something for my friend. But I hope that when she looked at herself in the mirror with her white hair, she was proud of herself, and thought, “My Robert likes me looking like this.”

About a month before my son graduated from preschool, I was walking through the park, thinking about the last walk that I would take. I wanted to really experience it, because it would be the last morning walk through the park. I wouldn’t have this opportunity to drop him off and have this nice walk through Central Park. Then it occurred to me that on the last day, it might rain, or I might be running late. So I figured I should really celebrate the second-to-last day instead. But then I thought about it more, and that second-to-last day might not be so nice either. In fact, every day might be a nasty one, so my best strategy was to treat today as the last day I’d get to do this. So every day after that, until the last day of class, I tried to experience each one as if it were the last.

I was letting myself experience today, rather than waiting for some future version of it. I was acknowledging the little death in things. Everything ends, even the small things. This particular morning, with my son at this particular age, in this particular preschool, would never come back in exactly this form. It’s like Heraclitus said, you can never step in the same river twice. The rivers are always flowing, and never quite the same river as they were a moment ago. The same is true of most of what we move through. We tend to fight that, to treat the world around us as stable and permanent. But when we accept that things are always moving and changing, something loosens. There’s more room to actually experience it.

Someone I know had a near-death experience not long ago—the real kind, the kind with a hospital in it. No one should ever have to be in that kind of circumstance, but there was a positive side to it. What she described afterward wasn’t fear. People came to see her, showed who they really were, and ordinary days came back handed over as a gift rather than an assumption. Things she used to walk right past, she suddenly couldn’t stop noticing. Irvin Yalom, who spent his career as a psychiatrist thinking about exactly this, put it plainly, “Though the physicality of death destroys an individual, the idea of death can save him.”

You don’t need a hospital to get there. Harold Kushner has a story about the Garden of Eden that changed the way I think about this. We tend to hear it as crime and punishment. Man eats from the tree of knowledge, man is sentenced to die, man is expelled from the garden. But Kushner reads it differently. Knowledge is the thing that makes us individuals, and only individuals die. A herd of cattle is interchangeable, one steak the same as the next, one egg the same as another. We’re not. Each of us is an individual, and we can’t be replaced by someone else. The same goes for each experience. It’s special, and can’t be replaced by any other one.¹

I’m not obsessed with death, and I wouldn’t recommend it as a hobby. What I have noticed is how hard we lean the other way, how much of ordinary life is arranged around pretending that things are stable and will never change. We behave as though the mornings come in an endless supply, and the supply being endless is exactly what makes any single one of them feel cheap. The real danger isn’t death so much as wasting time,² letting the days just go by, watching them pass without ever being in them. That’s a far worse existential problem than we tend to admit.

John Maynard Keynes, the economist, had a name for one shape this takes.³ He wrote about the “purposive” man, forever shoving the value of his life out ahead of himself into the future. This fellow doesn’t love his cat, Keynes said, but his cat’s kittens, and not really the kittens either, but the kittens’ kittens, and so on to the end of cat-dom. For him jam is never jam today, only the standing promise of jam tomorrow. You can pass a whole life like that, boiling the jam and never once eating it, saving the good morning for a last day that keeps backing away from you. Better to appreciate the cat you actually have today.

William James, one of the earliest psychologists, said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” He doesn’t say what happens to me. He says what I agree to notice. By that count, most of what crosses in front of us never becomes our life at all, because we never noticed it. The more I attend, the more I’ve lived. The mornings I walked through on autopilot are gone in a way the bright ones simply aren’t.

I don’t remember my son’s last day at that preschool. It didn’t matter whether it rained. What matters are the Tuesdays somewhere in the middle, and those days were awesome.

Footnotes

1. It’s worth noting that no one would actually want to live in the Garden of Eden, beautiful as it sounds. Without challenge, without loss, without anything being particular or finite, it would be unbearably dull. The Twilight Zone made this point in a 1960 episode called “A Nice Place to Visit,” in which a criminal dies and wakes up getting everything he wants. After a month of winning every hand and having every wish granted, he’s going crazy with boredom and begs to go somewhere else. His guide’s response: “Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea you were in Heaven, Mr. Valentine? This is the other place.” ↩︎
2. When we waste time, we often call it killing time. And if time is all we really have, then killing it is a pathological thing to do. ↩︎
3. From Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, a 1930 essay in which Keynes imagined a future where the economic problem had been solved and people would finally be free to figure out how to actually live. The purposive man is his example of the mindset that gets in the way. ↩︎

Similar Article

“Making the Most of This Ugly Year” makes a related argument from a different angle. Written during the pandemic, it uses the same Twilight Zone episode to argue that challenge and impermanence are what give life its texture. If this essay is about accepting that things end, that one is about finding the beauty in the ugly year that forced the lesson on us.

Walking around Yale’s Old Campus in the late 1990s, I got an idea stuck in my head that wouldn’t leave for decades. I’m exceptional. Everyone at Yale is exceptional. There’s a line they used to tell us in some form or another, “You can graduate from Yale and become a garbage man, but you’d better be the best garbage man in the world.”¹ The assignment was clear. Live up to your potential. Don’t waste it.

It’s not Yale’s fault. This idea had been ground into me since childhood. I grew up in the self-esteem moment of the 1980s, where every kid was told they could grow up to be president. Yale just supercharged it.

There’s that feeling of “I am special” that we all have. Alfred Adler, the great twentieth century psychologist, talked about this as inferiority, the universal sense that we are not yet what we could be.² The danger of inferiority, Adler said, is when we turn it into a pathology, something we think is wrong with us. That’s what was happening to me. I kept chasing this amorphous potential that was always somewhere out ahead of me.

The specialness was a real problem for me. For example, I had a real problem with the dishes. For years. Standing at the sink with my hands in soapy water, I would feel something close to physical pain, because every minute scrubbing a pan was a minute I was not using my specialness to the greatest of its potential. Some part of me believed, quite seriously, that I shouldn’t have to do the dishes. I had too much potential. I was so much more special than other people. This wasn’t a good thing. My sense of what was important was clearly out of whack.

My kids have a word for the rest of the people in this kind of story: NPC. Non-player character. The bit characters in a video game who say their one line and stand around waiting for the protagonist to walk past. It’s one thing when it’s in a video game. It’s another thing when you take that concept and move it into real life.

Adler called the alternative Gemeinschaftsgefühl. There’s not a good English translation for this word. English translators generally render it as community feeling, but Adlerians just leave it there, untranslatable. The concept is something like the felt sense that you belong to the world and the world belongs to you, that other people are real in the same way you are real, that the goodness of a life shows up in how you participate rather than in what you accumulate.

It’s worth knowing some of Adler’s history. He converted to Christianity from Judaism, not because he wanted to, but because Vienna at the time was known as one of the most virulently anti-Semitic cities in Europe. At the same time, the Haskalah movement was giving Jews an intellectual framework for secularism, a way of stepping back from religious observance and traditional Jewish life in order to integrate into broader European society. After converting, Adler kept what he found important in Judaism, the moral architecture of community and obligation, and tried to turn that into something powerful in the secular world. Gemeinschaftsgefühl is a feeling or a concept more than something we can really pin down. No wonder it reads as mystical.

Here’s what it looks like when someone gets it wrong.

A rabbi in the neighborhood really hates Donald Trump. She can’t resist working it into her sermons, into her remarks on the holidays, into the moments when a congregation gathers and looks up at the bimah hoping to be lifted somewhere. This past Purim, her comments about Trump hit a bit harder than they needed to. People were upset. A group of congregants asked to meet with her, and several of them, including some who had been members their whole lives, told her plainly that this was not okay. Her response was that she hated Trump and that, as the leader of the congregation, she wanted to express her opinions and educate the people in her pews.

She’s right that she’s allowed to have her opinions. She’s a person. But she’s also a rabbi, and a congregation is not the place to bring your individual self and your individual hatred and use the bimah as the amplifier. A congregation is one of the few places left in modern life that exists to do Gemeinschaftsgefühl, to be a community feeling itself into being together.

There are moments when hatred is warranted. Some things deserve it. But most of the time the better answer is love and understanding. That’s what Adler was pointing at. That’s what community feeling actually means in practice.

I’ve been trying to do something like this at home with my kids, and it’s harder than it sounds. The temptation is to guide them to the person you think they’re supposed to become, to give them the benefit of all of your experience, to help them lead the best possible life for them. We all want what’s best for our kids. Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish wrote a book in the 1980s called How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, and the whole thing, four hundred pages of it, is just one idea. See the kid in front of you as a person who has their own interior life, and respond to that person, not to the parenting outcome you want. It sounds obvious. It is obvious. It is also extremely hard.

When I support them instead of correcting them, when I see them as people rather than as parenting outcomes, something shifts. They are growing. My job, as far as I can tell now, is closer to what you do with anything that grows. Pay attention to what it needs, get out of its light, help it become resilient enough to make its own choices.

This is what life is really about. Most of life is the boring, everyday things, and the question is what we do with them. Whether it’s the rabbi at the bimah, or me at the sink with the dishes, or my wife and I at the dinner table with our kids, or the people I work with on a Tuesday morning. The question is how I bring Gemeinschaftsgefühl into every one of those rooms. How I create environments where people get to be people, at home, at work, at shul, wherever I am. How I spread some sense of loving and caring to more people than I did yesterday. The aim is building a better world at home, at work, and even with people I meet in the elevator.

Footnotes

1. This line sounds very much like it was lifted from Martin Luther King, who said something close to it in a 1967 sermon. Whether Yale knew that or not, I can’t say. ↩︎
2. My way into Adler this year was Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s two books, The Courage to Be Disliked and The Courage to Be Happy, which present his ideas as a dialogue between a philosopher and a young man. ↩︎