The New York Times has an excellent antidote to the recently much-linked-to paean to narcicism and high time preference in Atlantic Monthly.
The Atlantic writer exemplifies values that seem to me unfortunately all too common these days:
* The tendency to evaluate one’s life and the life of others in light of archetypes: the ideal metrosexual husband, the career wife, the suburbanite, the rage-against-the-Man radical. If we think we wouldn’t fit into a slot in Central Casting, we feel like failures. Why not evaluate our lives as unique and valuable in their idiosyncracies, rather than as instances of shared templates whose main purpose seems to be competition? I’m a better Ideal Husband (TM) than Joe, so I must be doing OK. If the Atlantic writer’s marriage is humdrum, and she becomes attracted to another man, then she switches parts, from the Ideal Wife to the Liberated Woman of Eat, Pray, Love (whose behavior, by the way, if indulged in by a man, would elicit universal condemnation).
Who cares if I’m the Prototypical Hacker or the Ideal Husband? I enjoy playing with computers at home and at work, my wife brings me happiness and I hope I bring some to her, we have a little girl who is bright and energetic and growing and changing every day. Who cares if our life might not make a prototypical Hollywood domestic drama?
* The idea that one’s feelings must be acted upon immediately to obtain some nearby pleasure or avoid some current pain. My perspective on this is informed both by being an introvert prone to introspection and having experienced lengthy periods of depression. On any given day I have to evaluate my feelings in light of the whole context of my life. What would happen to me, and those people and things I am committed to, in the long run if I acted on those feelings?
People seem to think that one is being “untrue” to oneself by not immediately acting. But what if the feelings go contrary to those things that bring me good in life, and those ways I am committed to bringing good to others?
The author of the New York Times article recognized that her husband’s emotional pain was in fact untrue to his whole self — the self that was defined by the trajectory of his life — that it was blinding him to those things that had been for the good in the past and would again.
This is of course predicated on the idea that all parties are of good will. The writer’s husband was not an habitual abuser of their relationship, in which case, good riddance. His feelings were temporal and contingent and a form of displacement, and what he needed was exactly what the writer gave him: time. So often we want to resolve things right now. This is natural — we don’t like living in uncertainty and irresolution.
But sometimes we need time to evaluate and let our “self” — the sum of the trajectory of our experiences and choices — and our new experience of pain or desire, settle into a new synthesis, as it were. When they did for the writer’s husband, he realized that those things he had found valuable in the past about his marriage and family were in fact still valuable to him.