**The Hannalyst will be off through Labor Day – enjoy the rest of summer!**

Some years ago, I worked with a person I’ll call Sam. Sam was smart, proactive and genuinely wanted to serve our mission and improve our work. One day, we were in a meeting where someone suggested a moonshot idea – something that would push us way outside our comfort zone, but also have an outsized impact if we actually pulled it off. Sam raised his hand with gusto, and then listed all of the reasons that it would never work. I remember having weekly check-ins with him and he always came prepared with bullet point after thoughtful bullet point of hedges. Here’s how we could avoid this. Here’s why we should be careful of that. After each session, I felt as deflated as he felt triumphant. Because he felt like he was making a real contribution, while I thought he was constantly making us smaller. Crucially, he never, ever offered solutions. He was what I like to call a red flagger.

Everyone has worked with a red flagger. Some of us have been the red flaggers. Maybe you’re reading this piece and realizing that…[gulp]...you are the red flagger. And it’s a relatable disposition, right? Red flagging looks like agency and it looks like rigor. That person is usually viewed as responsible, sometimes even moral in what they’re doing, regardless of whether or not what they’re saying is useful or correct.

It’s easy for this to become a pattern because there is no accountability for what didn’t happen. There is no scoreboard for the essays that didn’t get written, products that didn’t get built, treatments that were never developed. Which is why being a red flagger is so appealing. Individually, you’re rewarded by that feeling in the moment that you’re making a contribution. Institutionally, you’re rewarded by absolving yourself of any responsibility should something go wrong.

Still, you might think that the person who raises all the flags but never figures out the solutions would always be viewed poorly, but in fact that’s not the case. In reality, we judge action more harshly than inaction. And to be clear, in many cases that makes sense. If you push someone into a lake and they drown, you’re definitely at fault. But if you just happen to walk by the drowning person and opt not to jump in and save them, that’s not great but you’re not going to be prosecuted.

But the weird thing is that even when intentions, motivations and consequences are all exactly the same, we still tend to view harmful inactions as less immoral, and as better decisions, than equally harmful actions. It’s called omission bias and it explains why the person who does something that blows up is always pegged as guilty. While the person who fails to prevent the blow up, even if they definitely could have, is usually just pegged as unlucky.

There’s a better way to dissent

That asymmetry is why red flaggers think they’re contributing something real and confuse their habit for productive dissent. We all know that real, authentic and thoughtful dissent is crucial to progress – great organizations (not to mention societies) can’t function without it. But productive dissent requires engaging with an idea in earnest and then ultimately proposing a way through it, two characteristics not usually found in red flagging.

There is some interesting research testing the difference between red flaggers and productive dissenters and it found that only productive dissenters actually help create new lines of thought within the group. Red flaggers may provoke a discussion, but only one that serves to reinforce the original position. In other words, rather than triggering new and original thinking, red flaggers cause others to double down on what they already thought. On the other hand, productive dissenters force a true kicking of the tires, and in doing so open up the conversation to new ways of thinking about the problem.

The authors’ theory about this is that red flaggers carry no real risk, so they don’t inspire anyone else to carry risk either. They aren’t putting any real stakes in the ground (i.e. new ideas), so no one else feels pushed to do that either. Instead, the conversation devolves into circles of performance between the people pointing out problems without solutions or substance, and the ones defending what they already believe to be true.

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The problem is that red flagging has become culturally dominant.

This is most obvious at work – everyone knows a Sam. He’s not hindering progress intentionally, he’s playing to a system that rewards his style. Most organizations have too many nervous stakeholders looking over their shoulders to act with anything other than caution. Whether you’re looking at an earnings call that is max only a few months away or staring down a grant agreement that’s up for renewal in a year, it’s hard to justify taking even a medium swing, much less a big one. Even if you know that’s the only way to make a meaningful impact. The risk feels like it’s right in front of you, while the benefit feels distant at best because that’s how the system is structured.

But it’s become prevalent in society too. Take AI – flagging the danger is seen as the responsible act, no matter how true it is. So both the narrative and the focus has turned towards containment instead of towards productivity, as if this is a choice we have to make. And to be clear, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be cautious, but I wonder what would happen if we approached building (and policymaking) for extreme benefits with the same zeal that we have for containing the worst.

I recently had a conversation with someone at a very well-funded philanthropy about an idea some colleagues and I have to build a process to help young people figure out how to design their own futures through the AI transition. She said she loved the concept but that they had made the decision to focus all of their efforts and money on preventing the most catastrophic AI scenarios they could think of. And while that’s a worthy cause, it struck me that a lot of possibility is getting left on the table with an approach like that. They were mistaking vigilance for vision, forgetting that it’s possible – and necessary – to have both. Basically, the whole organization had become a Sam.

Which brings me to the biggest problem that I think a red flagging culture creates: we forget what we’re for because we only focus on what we’re against.

My problem with Sam wasn’t that he didn’t work hard, or that he wasn’t professional, or that I didn’t see him genuinely trying to achieve the mission. It’s that by becoming the person who only saw the problems, he’d lost the ability to develop convictions, analysis and ideas of his own.

And I worry that this is happening to us collectively. I feel clear on what we don’t want as a society because I read about it every day. AI that takes every job. A planet so hot it’s uninhabitable. Politics so broken that we hate each other. Disease so rampant that we can’t contain it. These are as easy to articulate as they are to understand and fear.

What is so much harder to grab onto these days is what we do want. It has to be more than the opposite of those catastrophic hypotheticals. It requires vision and thoughtfulness, imagination and – especially right now – productive dissent.

I saw a great quote the other day:

“It’s amazing how many people choose the certainty of a miserable situation over the uncertainty that might get them out of it”

Sam would never say that he’s in a miserable situation but the trade is similar. He’s choosing the certainty of being seen as responsible over the risk of being wrong on something that matters. But in doing that, he makes himself a benign player – never breaking anything. But never building anything either.

Five-ish years ago, I started looking for jobs knowing that I wanted to do what LinkedIn calls a “career pivot.” I had worked for ten years in the immigration space and pretty much the only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to work on that (extremely meaningful and important) topic anymore. In issue advocacy, as in everything else, you can get pigeonholed as being able to do only one thing and after a decade, it seemed like the right time to show the world and myself that I could do something different.

Dozens of coffees, even more phone calls and one overpriced “resume coach” later, I still basically had no idea what I wanted to do next. And then I met N and A. They were longtime friends who were several years into co-founding a start-up trying to build a media ecosystem that was…(wait for it)...genuinely informative, balanced and good for society (!). Journalism based on hope, not fear! A comment section dominated by deep, respectful debate! A business model where the word ‘clicks’ never appeared! It was, I thought, a near impossible task that would be an incredible use of my time and energy.

The premise already had me excited, but then I met the two of them and it was like an amazing first date.

We traded philosophies about how media had curdled and what it would take to bring the industry – and the consumer – to a place that actually served people and society. I remember scrambling to take notes on what we were talking about because it felt like there were so many sparks I’d want to remember only to look up and realize that they were each doing the same thing. Yes, that’s right, we had chemistry even on zoom. (Chemistry that transcends technology: that’s when you know it’s real).

The more we talked, the more I realized that this was something I was really, truly passionate about. And that there was absolutely zero security in this potential job. And by “zero security”, I mean they didn’t even have money to hire me full-time for at least several months. Still. How could I walk away from something I could do to better the world, something that ignited passion in me that I hadn’t felt in too long, something with people who made me think and dream and learn? I couldn’t possibly let things like logistics or money get in the way of that.

Except that it turns out I could – and I did. The risk felt too great, financially and otherwise. I joined ENSO instead. Not two years later, the start-up folded.

Did I make the right decision?

Obviously, when I heard that the start-up had folded, I felt a dash of sadness amidst a wave of relief. That relief felt like vindication, but it was actually just bias. To this day, I don’t know why that start-up folded and it could have been totally unrelated to the shakiness I felt. And hearing that it went under didn’t give me any information about whether or not joining ENSO was a smart move. Still, it felt like a verdict, one that justified my instincts at the time.

We’re really bad at disentangling the decision itself from the outcome.

For example, people rate a surgeon who decides to perform a risky surgery better if the patient lives than they do if the patient dies, even if the known factors and probabilities are exactly the same at the point of decision. In fact, the decision was exactly the same both times, one just got luckier than the other after the fact. But once we see the outcome, we don’t see it that way. The outcome and the decision collapse into one judgement (poker player Annie Duke calls this ‘resulting’).

In my case, the start-up is the patient, and it died. Had it lived, this would be a story about the train that I missed and the moment I played it too safe. Same information, same decision point, different lesson learned. Because in both cases, I’d be judging myself entirely on an outcome I had no real view of at the time of my decision, not on the evidence that I did.

Contrary to the expression, hindsight is definitely not 20/20

In the early 1970s, researchers asked a group of people what they expected to happen on President Nixon’s upcoming trip to China and the USSR – would Nixon meet with Mao, would the US and USSR agree to a joint space program, things like that. Then, after the trip, the researchers surprised the participants at different times (weeks later, months later) with a memory test. Did their predictions come true? How confident were they at the time of their guesses? Overwhelmingly, people misremembered predicting the things that actually happened, and overestimated their own confidence at the time of the prediction. The researchers wrote up their results, and coined the term hindsight bias, a phenomenon that has been replicated again and again since.

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Hindsight bias is why I felt relief when that start-up folded. As if I called that loss accurately instead of making a bet and then getting lucky. And it’s so interesting because it’s not actually a forecasting problem, it’s a memory one. Our memories are deeply imperfect and the further away we get from things actually happening, the harder it is for us to recall how we felt about the possibilities beforehand.

One way this shows up is that when surprising things happen – things we gauged as really unlikely beforehand – we forget that we were surprised. This might be why a disproportionate number of people say they knew they’d found their forever partner the second they met them. Or why you’ll hear people say that when they first met, say, Barack Obama or Taylor Swift, they knew there was something exceptional there, they knew they would end up in the vicinity of greatness.

They’re not lying but memories get revised according to the outcome, and not equally. We tend to think that when something goes right, we knew it would all along, but when something goes wrong, we don’t like to admit that we never saw it coming. My relief when the start-up folded came from an underlying story that I always knew it would. When in fact, I had no idea. Which means it’s harder for us to learn from our forecasting mistakes because we end up thinking our prediction instincts are much more accurate than they actually are. And we think that hindsight is 20/20.

Well, this is awkward

Let’s say that you are a person who loves to examine your own experiences to better understand yourself, the people around you and your fellow humans generally. Let’s say you’ve actually made this a habit, publicly on the internet, in the form of a weekly Substack. Let’s say your pieces tend to start with something personal and end with something that might even approach a life lesson but at the very least adds up to a better understanding. Those essays are built on the premise that hindsight is trustworthy enough to be instructive. And that we can view moments in time, especially pivotal ones, with accuracy and insight, despite whatever the outcome was that came later. So imagine the awkwardness this person might feel if, say, she wrote an essay that led her to the realization that in fact, hindsight isn’t as static a foundation as she thought it was. Awkward.

I just wrote and then erased this next sentence: Knowledge of your vulnerabilities is power. I actually believe that but I just fell into the exact trap that this essay describes: I looked back and created a tidy line about what writing this piece taught me. And it’s not always that straightforward.

I’m going to keep writing these essays anyways. I’m going to keep mining my past for paths that I can forge to help me understand myself, my present and my future. But I understand that the insights I’m gaining might be built on stories that were shaped in my mind after the fact. This isn’t a bias that self-corrects once you know about it. But now I know that when I look back, or when I see someone else look back, there is less certainty than may appear. Less certainty, but maybe more to learn.

In the fall of 1998, I entered 7th grade and faced a serious choice. Did I want to learn Spanish, French or German? I thought about it for approximately four seconds and chose Spanish, largely because I thought it would be easier and I had a vague notion that it might be more useful than the other two. Thus began eight straight years of continuous Spanish education which got me a smidge further than ‘Hola, como estas?’ but not nearly as far as you might imagine after all that time. It didn’t help that I opted to study abroad in Italy instead of a Spanish speaking country because my love of pizza and desire to say I had lived in Italy (Italy!) far outweighed any yen to become bilingual.

Anyways, like millions of my peer American millennials, I completely miscalculated how much speaking another language might help me in life. So I did the bare minimum to get As in my classes (I didn’t care about Spanish, but I’m still an eldest daughter), while also managing to pick up embarrassingly little of the language I was studying. All to say, I left school having learned no mucho.

Of course, we now understand that the American foreign language education approach is all wrong – we should start kids at 3 not 13, and work on conversation rather than grammar exercises. And as I got older I experienced pangs of regret, like when I ran an immigration reform advocacy organization for ten years and my lack of Spanish felt particularly glaring. But it wasn’t until I moved to a Hispanic neighborhood and enrolled my kids in a Spanish immersion elementary school that I understood the depths of my mistake. As my three year old son corrected my pronunciation on the word ‘tierra’, I decided it was time to restart my studies.

With memories of worksheets and vocabulary flashcards swirling in my brain, I dragged myself to my first zoom session with Ana, a lovely Costa Rican teacher a neighbor had recommended (with all our kids in immersion school, there are many parents frantically trying to brush up on their Spanish while Google translating homework assignments).

Honestly, the beginning was a slog. Like surfing or skiing, languages are so much harder to learn as an adult and the potential embarrassment of trying and failing to get the words and the accent right in conversation is a real barrier. We’re all afraid of being this person. But three times per week, I logged on and (very) slowly, the grind started to feel less like self-imposed punishment and more like taking my brain to the gym. It wasn’t always fun and it was usually pretty hard, but I began to feel great afterwards. And, like the fitness people we all love to hate, I started talking about how good it made me feel constantly (lo siento to my friends and family).

Learning to love the unfamiliar thing

I could write an entire essay about how great learning and knowing another language is. But the skill I’m most proud of developing actually isn’t the language piece – it’s the fact that, as an adult, I learned to like an unfamiliar thing.

This skill is as crucial as it is underrated. One of the most damaging side effects of our technological progress has been the incredible ability we all now have to stay inside of our comfort zone permanently. Do you only want to listen to the music you loved as a teenager? Do you want to read opinions that exclusively mirror your own? Read books similar to the ones you already love? Buy products based on the preferences you’ve already honed? Our technological landscape not only allows this, it enables it automatically. Tech has built a wall around our comfort zones and the longer we stay inside, the harder it becomes to leave. Starting those lessons made me realize that facing the unfamiliar – on purpose – was something I hadn’t forced myself to do in awhile.

We’ve come to dread the unfamiliar like we do the uncertain, a dangerous formula for thriving in the world today.

As usual when it comes to negative versus positive, part of this is biology working against us. In foods, as in most things, we acquire dislikes much more easily than we acquire likes because our brains are wired to identify threats and eliminate them immediately, even if the threat isn’t exactly existential. I have a cousin who tried tofu once years ago and it made her nauseous. Since then, no more tofu for her. But there’s no equivalent positive experience. Think about your kid at the dinner table – one tiny bite of broccoli is enough to make them declare that they hate it. But force them to eat it 10 times and they may shift from hatred to tolerance. Getting them to like it is an exercise in patience and repetition because disliking the unfamiliar is our default (and because kids are extremely stubborn).

Fortunately, learning to like the unfamiliar is a skill that can be cultivated. One way is just to turn it from unfamiliar to familiar. The broccoli example is the mere exposure effect in action, the well documented and widespread phenomenon that shows when people are repeatedly exposed to food, music, places, people or anything else unfamiliar, they often grow to like it simply because it becomes familiar and we love familiar things (for better and worse). This is the same insight behind contact theory, which shows that repeated interactions between different types of people and groups (in-groups and out-groups) increases positive perceptions and reduces negative ones.

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But there’s a catch: the mere exposure effect is much more likely to happen if people don’t have a pre-conceived negative notion about whatever it is they’re trying, or whoever it is they’re meeting. Sometimes we have to push past the initial negativity, and acquire the taste.

Compared to other animals, humans are actually primed to do that. We have quite a few acquired likes, including for things that we logically shouldn’t. For example, many people acquire a taste for chili peppers, either by learning that the initial pain doesn’t lead to actual harm, thus transforming it into a thrill instead of a threat. Or because we observe people we love and respect – in our families or cultures or in sacred rituals – enjoying the peppers. Kids in particular observe that kind of behavior and eventually acquire the taste themselves. This might explain why most people learn to love coffee despite the fact that it objectively tastes bitter. How many kids watched their mom or dad sip coffee every day while they lovingly made breakfast? That association is one way to acquire a taste.

These effects go beyond just food

Did you know that there is a word for loving and embracing cultures, people and traditions different from your own? It’s called xenophilia and I bet you’ve never heard of it. On the other hand, I’m sure you have heard of its opposite, xenophobia. And that’s part of the problem.

As I mentioned, I used to run an immigration reform advocacy organization. We talked about xenophobia constantly, as you can imagine. There is no shortage of news stories, policy papers and messaging campaigns calling out xenophobia for the problem that it is. But in my decade working on that issue, I never once heard the term xenophilia.

We are fantastic, truly, at forming language for the negative. But we have very little for its inverse. In this case, the thing that we should be striving for – a love of things different from what we know – is a word that most people have never even heard of. And without a shared language, we’re not going to get a shared belief shift, much less one in behavior.

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As one writer framed well, there is a difference between tourism and real contact.

Learning to love unfamiliar things is not about trying tapas once in Spain without ever bothering to meet someone from the town you’re staying in. Tourism is fun, it’s easy and there’s nothing wrong with doing it. But it’s not going to deliver the results that real contact will.

Xenophobics aren’t casually hateful – they have an active relationship to their aversion, and they act on it. In my immigration days, we would constantly read polls showing that a majority of Americans were generally in favor of having lots of immigrants here. But the finding was specious because that opinion was real but it was low priority. For the majority in favor, immigration was always their 10th important issue. The minority, though, was a different story. Their aversion had become an ideology, one that they would fight for and cultivate wherever they could. It was so potent that it became the organizing principle for a national political movement, one that nurtured fear with intention.

There was – and is – no comparable counterforce. And whether we’re talking about immigration or simply about our future as a society, we have to develop a passion for learning to love each other with the same ferocity that’s been used to teach us that we hate each other. We have to learn to love the unfamiliar thing, especially if that thing is each other. We need a genuine push to acquire some new tastes.

I am 2+ years into my Spanish lessons with Ana.

I’m not fluent yet, but I’m getting there. Yet it requires more than just showing up to the zooms. I did my son’s parent-teacher conference in Spanish – the teacher’s preference that I could finally honor. I helped my daughter with her math homework (nothing more humbling than attempting 3rd grade math problems in Spanish). I watched the Netflix telenovela El Accidente. Every year, we go to a Spanish speaking country for a week and I force myself to speak it the whole time. I find that even when I can’t find the right word, or my accent sounds horrible, people appreciate it. They see it for what it is: an expression of love for their culture.

Last year, I ran into the mother of one of my son’s friends – a Spanish speaker. We started chatting and she asked about my job; I asked about her family. And somewhere in that conversation, I realized the coolest thing: I can actually connect with this woman. Ten years coasting through Spanish classes, followed by 17 years speaking only English and then two years playing catch up on zoom. A long road for sure, but I can feel that the payoff is just beginning.

When I landed my first job out of graduate school, I had two overwhelming thoughts: 1/ I really hit the jackpot with this well-paid (for a nonprofit) gig and a boss I liked a lot, and 2/ I am ridiculously unqualified for this role.

After leaving journalism to get a Master’s in public policy, I had gotten an internship at the NYC Mayor’s Office under Bloomberg thanks to a guy I met at a wedding who ended up hiring me. (Don’t ever let anyone tell you that luck doesn’t play a massive role in success – these anecdotes are a dime a dozen, but they feel rare because people like to sand them away as they refine their ‘how-I-got-here’ stories.)

Our project fighting to achieve comprehensive immigration reform had generated enough success that after the Bloomberg administration ended, we were offered the chance to launch a nonprofit with financial, legal, accounting and HR support, not to mention excellent office space. It was an unbelievable opportunity – the only problem was I had no idea how to build or run a nonprofit. Luckily, I didn’t let that stop me. I was offered the role of Chief of Staff, despite the fact that we had no staff. I took the job.

My boss, J, was typically the smartest guy in every room. He was book smart, but he also thought about the politics (of the office) and the Politics (of DC) just as much as he thought about the substance, which – for better or worse – is what’s necessary to have some real impact. And he moved fast. He talked fast, thought fast and reveled in trying to be 3 moves ahead on the chess board all the time. On our first trip together to DC, he planned so many meetings back to back he forgot to schedule time for us to even stop at a vending machine, much less eat lunch. By the end of that day, I was starving and intimidated, the gaps in my knowledge so glaring I was positive that everyone knew what a fraud I was.

I knew I needed to step up. So I tried to be just like him. I tried to learn everything about immigration policy so I could spout facts in meetings (who doesn’t love facts in meetings!?). I tried to brainstorm ideas on the spot even though I had no helpful experience to draw on. I tried to be the second smartest person in the room (I’m not an idiot – I wasn’t trying to outshine him, I was trying to emulate him). And it all fell flat. I could feel myself inadvertently throwing sand in the gears just as we were trying to launch this organization.

You know when one person decides they’re done with a relationship but they haven’t ended it yet? And the other person can feel it but doesn’t want to admit it, so they keep trying more and more desperately to hang on even though everyone can see it’s just making things worse? It felt like that. (Minus the romance). I didn’t realize it but I was performing the wrong skill entirely, and I was afraid I was about to get dumped.

We love to look competent at work

We humans have a long history of trying to show competence above all in professional settings. And it makes sense because from a young age, we’re taught to perform it constantly. We’re measured in grades, SAT scores and resumes so of course we think that “hard” skills equals strength at work. If you’re the kind of person who manages to be well-liked and respected in school, you’re rewarded with a lot of friends and a good reputation. But none of that has anything to do with whether or not you get an A in calculus. And As are what carry forward to the next big hurdle: getting into college.

From there, it’s the same story: soft skills dictate your experience but the grading system overindexes on the hard skills. Ask a group of people how many of them took economics 101 versus the art of communicating effectively (a class that I just made up but hope actually exists) and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

The problem is that this flavor of optimization doesn’t account for human nature. It’s great if you know how to read a P&L, but if you don’t know how to explain it to people in a way that they understand and trust, and then formulate a strategy off of it that your team actually follows, you’re going to be limited in your ability to get things done.

It turns out it’s really hard to be an a**hole who is also considered a good leader – the chances are about 1 in 2,000. Despite the disproportionate number of stories we hear about the toxic geniuses of the world, they are actually much rarer than their fundamentally decent counterparts.

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As I wrote about last week, we judge each other much more on our warmth than on our competence, and that extends to leaders.

But it’s not just about likeability – there are real, downstream outcomes that improve too. It’s economically beneficial to be warm towards other people, in part because it makes you more trustworthy and trust is what makes people invest.

Beyond reputation and money, warmth also impacts health. Studies show that when surgeons treat patients and their families with decency, care and respect, the on-the-table outcomes are better. In other words, not being an a**hole before surgery means that the surgery itself is actually more likely to be successful. And yet, when the psychologist Susan McDaniel, who also happens to be my mom, did an analysis of surgeon behavior, she found it was, um, sub-par. Among other things, she found that they rarely use empathy when delivering bad news, criticize other physicians to patients and talk about themselves in ways that are both irrelevant and unhelpful. Building on those findings, she created a coaching program where psychologists teach surgeons how to be better at their jobs by being better, warmer communicators with their patients. I’m biased, but this seems like the type of leadership training we need more of across industries.

In contrast, one of the best sources on the topic of warmth in leadership, Connect, Then Lead, has a ton of excellent research pushing back on our culturally created instinct that performing competence is the answer at work. But it also has an entire section giving instructions on how to be warm. Their suggestions aren’t necessarily wrong but if you are reading the Harvard Business Review to learn how to be a decent human being, especially if you’re only doing it in service of raising your own influence, I don’t think you’re going to get very far. I’m imagining a young Mark Zuckerberg being coached to “lean forward” “make eye contact” and “avoid appearing rigid or tense”. We all know how well that worked.

Depending on some combination of your natural disposition, your parents, the way your first love treated you, how good your therapist is and/or your high school experience, you may or may not be particularly good at “warmth.” But it’s these kinds of ‘how-tos’ in one of the top business journals that make me think maybe we’ve lost the plot. Call me crazy but I think it’s less about not standing with your chin pointed down and more about generally learning to communicate well and treat others with respect. This is a good rule of thumb for just being in the world and maybe the problem is that we treat work as a separate universe where we compartmentalize our humanity in favor of looking competent and hope we get promoted.

Back to my rocky start at the new job

Finally, I phoned a friend. The bride of the wedding where I had originally met J was close to him and I needed someone who knew both of us to tell me what I was doing wrong. Over dinner, she listened as I relayed this tale of me blowing the best career opportunity I’d ever had. And then she gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received. “Your superpower,” she said, “is that you are an excellent friend. You two are trying to start an organization. He doesn’t need you to be him, he needs to feel like someone has his back, like he’s supported and like you’re in this together. Do that, and the rest will come.”

This might all sound obvious, but it was a lightbulb moment for me. She wasn’t telling me to just ‘be myself’, she was telling me to resist the urge to perform competence and instead focus on what I could reliably provide right then – emotional and social support and intelligence. And she reminded me that those skills are not only useful, but essential at work.

I didn’t know how to build a nonprofit (yet), I wasn’t an immigration policy expert (yet) and I hadn’t done advocacy work (yet). I needed to learn those things eventually, sure. But be a friend? A support? An emotional center at the start of something new? Those are things I knew how to do now. Those are things I could nail. And those could be my initial contributions to this work.

The next day, I changed my approach.

When things got stressful, I made jokes. I gave support. I ideated on how to collaborate best with our partners because I wasn’t yet ready to ideate on the policy itself. I gave some good pep talks. It’s not necessary to be genuine friends with all colleagues, but if you’re starting an organization together it really really helps. So I focused on solidifying our partnership, and things changed almost immediately. We became a team and the rest flowed from there.

Often, the skills that matter most at work aren’t the ones we’re measured against. Which means that many of us are walking around significantly underestimating our own professional value – and performing the wrong skill. Our culture gives us the tools and feedback to master the hard skills. But that’s – at most – half of the equation. The skills that actually got you where you are – the same ones that will take you where you need to go – were probably never on your resume. That doesn’t make them any less powerful.

When I was in college, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up (still don’t, but I’m more comfortable with that than I used to be). So I was pretty open, and in the summer between my junior and senior years, I interned at a network morning TV show in New York. It was fun and interesting – I did crowd work in Times Square, I met Ringo Starr and Rascal Flatts, I kept my bosses caffeinated and up to date on the latest headlines. But I didn’t imagine I’d be able to get an actual job somewhere like that after graduation.

In the fall of 2006, I returned to campus just in time for it to become the epicenter of the biggest news story in the country (maybe you remember it). And this was back before the news cycle spun at 100 mph so this story held the nation’s attention for weeks. Imagine news trucks lining your walk to class and reporters shouting at you like paparazzi. That was my senior year.

So I called my old boss at the network show. I reminded her that I went to the school they were frantically covering and I could be helpful as a stringer (stringer = freelance reporter, emphasis on the *free* part, in my case). I could even write an op-ed about what it was like to be a student during this time, which might be a useful perspective for readers. And then I said that after all of this, maybe she would consider giving me a job after graduation. That same one I never thought I could get. To my surprise, she said yes on the spot, and she kept her promise. That’s how I got my first job.

I’d love to say that my experience then taught me that people actually say yes a lot, even to big requests like Will you give me a job? But somehow, I seem to have gotten less skilled at asking for things as I’ve gotten older. At 21, I was the perfect mix of ignorant and savvy, with the confidence of a young person mixed with the anxiety of possible unemployment. Truthfully, making that call didn’t feel like courage and it definitely wasn’t strategy. It was more like I need a job and here is an opening, why don’t I just ask for it? In other words, I didn’t think about it too much, I just asked.

Actually, people say yes

There have been a bunch of experiments testing how likely people think it is that a stranger will help them. If your cell phone was dead, would someone let you borrow theirs? If you asked someone to fill out a 1-page questionnaire, would they do it? What if it was 10 pages? What if someone asked you to vandalize a library book by writing the word ‘pickle’ in pen on one of the pages (#science)? All of these are real pieces of research, though don’t worry, the book wasn’t actually a library book. And on average, people underestimated others’ willingness to say yes 48% of the time. In other words, we are way more willing to help each other than we think we are.

In fact, we misunderstand pretty much everything about asking for help. You might think that more people said no when the questionnaire request went from 1 page to 10 pages, but in fact it didn’t matter. You might think that once a person says no to a request, they will definitely say no to the next one, but actually the first no often paves the way to an eventual yes. You may think that offering money as an incentive will help and while it’s true that the money makes you, the asker, feel better, it turns out that the person being asked was usually ready to do it for free. And you might think that if you hint at what you want (“I could really use a snack”), you’re more likely to get it. But actually, a direct ask (“Can I have that granola bar?”) is the surer bet.

People like to say yes. Because they really hate to say no. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an exchange with someone about something where we just traded convoluted niceties, foregoing efficiency altogether – perhaps you can relate. And researchers used to think this was the primary reason why people help each other – because they hate the awkwardness of saying no. But more recent work has found that theory didn’t hold up. In reality, people say yes to helping someone else because…drumroll…they genuinely just want to help.

Breaking news: We’re not as bad as we think we are

I don’t want to be dramatic here, but maybe the source of all of our problems is that we have no faith in one another. We underestimate not only strangers’ willingness to help, but our friends’ and even our romantic partners’ willingness to help too. We underestimate how good helping makes the helper feel. And we overestimate how annoyed or burdened they’ll feel by the ask. We underestimate how much other people like us, and how much we’ll enjoy talking to a stranger, how good we can make someone feel just by saying thanks, how impactful a compliment really is and how much people appreciate being offered support. Why are we so bad at all of this?

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One reason is that we get nervous about how someone will respond to an ask and our brain does that scenario-building thing that it does, where it lays out a bunch of possible ways this could go. The problem is most of those are negative, when the reality is much more likely to be positive. (Negativity bias strikes again).

Another is that we evaluate ourselves differently than we evaluate other people. We tend to judge our own social acts in terms of competence (how effective we were at achieving X), whereas we judge other people’s social acts based on warmth. This isn’t just true of favors, it also shows up in kindness that has nothing to do with asking for help at all.

Take compliments. The best part of writing this blog is that sometimes I get DMs, texts or - in one case - someone coming up to me at a wedding and telling me that they love my writing. And there are two things that are always true about these exchanges: 1/ they always make my day, and 2/ the person always starts with a hedge. “This is a little awkward but…” and it’s clear that they feel weird, they’re worried about how it’s coming out, they want to choose the right words, etc. But of course I don’t care about any of that. It’s the genuine kindness that gets me. Ask for a favor or offer a compliment — in both cases, there is the same mismatch. One person is worried about their performance while the other is just happy to be part of the exchange.

All of these insecurities and biases add up to one thing: we often don’t ask for what we want. And as a result, we don’t learn that people usually say yes. So we carry on with our false assumptions and the cycle of mutual skepticism continues.

The world feels like it’s happening to us, not by us

At ENSO, where I’m a Partner, we have a mantra: The future happens by default or by design. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot because there is a pervasive feeling for too many people that we don’t have agency over what’s happening here. It’s like the world is happening to us, not by us. And I think that buried in that tangled knot of a feeling is the fact that we have stopped asking for what we want. Because we assume that people don’t want to help. Agency is individual but you can only do so much alone. So we feel powerless, even though we’re not. We just have to help each other if we’re going to get where we want to go. The good news is, most of us are up for collaborating, if we can all just get over ourselves and ask.

If I’ve learned anything from researching this piece, it’s this: People want to help one another. People will probably say yes. We don’t suffer from a lack of generosity, we suffer from a misperception about what we’re all willing to give. And that makes us believe we have less agency than we actually do because collectively, we can do a lot. Imagine if everyone’s default orientation was that whatever we all asked of one another, we were likely to get. What would you do? Who would you call?

After that first job, I ended up staying at the network for six years. While I was there, I met a woman who became a lifelong friend. Later, at her wedding, I met a guy who I went to work for just a year later. Eventually, we built an organization together – and the arc of my career changed completely, for the better. Ask for what you want. You might actually get it, and you have no idea what else the answer will bring.

When I was in third grade, I did something that I still cringe about to this day. I’d had a doctor’s appointment in the morning so I arrived at school late one day and by the time I got to the cafeteria for lunch (third graders ate at 10:30am), everyone had already found their seats. My friends were seated at a table for six and every seat was filled. The only option I had was to sit at a separate table by myself, which is exactly what I did (cue sad core memory forming). At eight years old, this turn of events was mildly traumatizing.

But then, my best friend saw me all alone and did the kind thing – she left the table of friends and came to join me. I was relieved and grateful and please believe me when I tell you that I wish this is where the story ended because I am deeply ashamed of what came next. I should have thanked her and enjoyed our lunch together. Obviously. But for some reason, a wave of elementary school evil came over me because instead of doing that, I stood up and took her empty seat at the table with our friends, leaving her to eat lunch by herself.

I know, I KNOW! It was an awful thing to do, and I swear it was out of character for me, but that’s what happened. Please don’t unsubscribe from this newsletter – I’m not a bad person. And let me say now that she forgave me and we remain best friends to this day (so sorry again, Allison! I hope it helps that I still think about this).

I don’t have a particularly long list of regrets but this is definitely one of them. And yet there is this weird thing in culture now where we’re not supposed to have any regrets and we’re supposed to brag about that.

‘No regrets’ is a favorite among the wellness crowd

But its modern origin in America goes back to the 1950s when a conservative Protestant pastor named Norman Vincent Peale wrote a bestseller you might have heard of called The Power of Positive Thinking. In it, he urges readers to forget about regret entirely, and he equates negative thoughts with spiritual failure. “Definitely practice emptying your mind of fears, hates, insecurities, regrets, and guilt feelings,” he says, and “never think of yourself as failing.” Within a few years, he doubled down, saying that to think poorly of oneself is actually “an affront to God”. I’m generally for positive thinking but imagine if you never considered where you went wrong? You might end up like one of Peale’s biggest admirers, Donald Trump.

But it’s not just extreme religious figures that grabbed onto the ‘no regrets’ mantra. As the positive psychology movement took off in the 2000s, the modern wellness industry grabbed onto one legitimate scientific finding – that ruminating on a problem is unproductive and harmful (which then got bastardized down to ‘no regrets’) – and ran with it. Conveniently, they forgot to elevate another scientific finding, which shows that useful reflection isn’t just healthy, it’s necessary.

It’s not about never looking back or never examining your mistakes, it’s about doing so in a productive way. But that nuance didn’t grab culture in quite the same way and now, everyone from Elena Kagan to Jennifer Aniston has preached the gospel of no regrets, while trite expressions peddling the same idea have become more and more common. Release what doesn’t serve you, says the “art” on sale at Target. Let go of the past, says the Instagram wellness influencer. Everything happens for a reason, says the bumper sticker in the gift shop.

These aren’t bad mantras, when applied correctly. Ruminating is unproductive, but ruminating and reflection aren’t the same thing and the wellness industry likes to conflate them. Which means the underlying message to all those sayings is often just No regrets and that’s a missed opportunity.

Research shows that regret is adaptive

That uneasy feeling of knowing you could have done something different actually motivates behavior change. You better believe that I’ve never taken someone else’s seat at the lunch table again. In fact, regret is especially pronounced in areas where people feel there is the most opportunity for change, which means that there is real value in looking at your regrets because they are actually a map to your opportunities.

Regrets are useful, but exactly how they’re useful shifts through the years because the shape of our regrets changes over time. When we’re younger, we tend to regret things that we did. But as we get older, we tend to regret things that we didn’t do. I’m 41 and my regrets are moving beyond taking someone’s seat in the cafeteria. I also regret not recording stories from my grandparents. And I regret not saying the thing I should have said when I was treated as less than what I’m worth. With a bit of experience behind me, these are the types of regrets I find myself thinking about.

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The truth is, we couldn’t have zero regrets even if we tried – we’re wired for it. When we experience regret, two parts of the brain work simultaneously to create that visceral feeling that you made the wrong choice. The orbitofrontal cortex, which helps us weigh risks and make choices, not only analyzes what happened but also constructs the alternate reality from the path not taken. Meanwhile, the amygdala, the brain’s center of emotion, steps in to provide the feelings that go along with that alternate reality. When I think about ditching my friend in the cafeteria, my brain helps me feel extra guilty because I can both see and feel what it would have been like if I’d just stayed and ate lunch with her. That’s regret.

So ‘No regrets’ is neither a real possibility nor a healthy one and to pretend otherwise is to ignore the opportunities right in front of you. Maybe people are starting to realize this – according to one industry blog, ‘No regrets’ is one of the tattoos that people (ironically) most regret getting (along with ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ and ‘YOLO’).

The hardest type of regret

The writer and researcher Daniel Pink conducted a World Regret Survey where he asked people to share their regrets and tens of thousands of people responded (if you click on that link, you can zoom into any area of the country and read what people wrote). He found that above all, the type of regrets people had most often were what he calls connection regrets. I wish I’d reached out was one of the most common refrains he heard. Whether it’s about a friendship that ended, a romance that crumbled or a cafeteria seat taken, it’s these connection regrets that really keep us up at night.

But here’s the great thing about connection regrets: They are usually reparable. They are opportunities. When my husband was in high school, he was bullied ferociously by one angry kid. He moved on relatively unscathed, but the memory remained. But fifteen years later, well into their 30s, he got a call from this guy. They hadn’t spoken since high school, but he’d called to apologize. He regretted what he’d done – he explained he was going through something and while it wasn’t an excuse, it gave context to a situation that seemed randomly cruel. He’d thought about it since and decided to say sorry.

Pink decided to build the World Regret Survey after sharing a few of his own regrets in private conversations and discovering that people were quick to share their own back. It turned out that people were not only willing but eager to share their regrets, alongside what they did about it and what they learned (reflection > rumination). Sharing your regrets is a form of catharsis and – like in the case of my husband’s bully – a way to remedy your mistake.

I’d apologized to Allison within the week of taking her seat and she forgave me quickly. But somehow the regret itself has stuck with me and that’s not a bad thing. Thirty years later, it’s a small but useful reminder of who I want to be, and who I don’t.

In my thirties, I had a handful of years that were exceptional in both directions.

My husband and I both had bona fide health crises (13 surgeries in two years between us). But we also had a son and a daughter, and our lives changed unequivocally for the better. I took a new and exciting job, but I also faced a global pandemic that hit while I was six months pregnant. We bought our dream house but my family also went through an unthinkable geopolitical crisis. As Dickens said, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

I felt the joy of the good things and the stress of the bad things but it was the dissonance between them that really got me. It wasn’t just a period of high highs swinging to low lows, it was a period of both of those things happening simultaneously. And in some ways, that was harder than if it had just been one or the other.

The same thing is happening now, but on a societal level

AI is fueling industry growth at unprecedented levels, but a majority of Americans don’t like it. GLP-1s are on their way to helping with just about everything, we may soon have a blood test that can screen for 50 different kinds of cancers and gene editing is moving from science fiction to curing disease. But we are also feeling more anxious, more depressed and lonelier. Globally, we’re in a period of historic conflict; domestically, we’re looking at record lows in violent crime.

And then there’s the economy – boy are we pissed about that, and yet the reality is more complicated. It’s true that we’re having fewer children, buying fewer homes and not moving up at work. But as the economic journalist Annie Lowery points out, 96 out of every 100 Americans who want a job have one; the unemployment rate is low; the labor market participation rate is high; disposable personal income is at a record high, and inequality has actually eased. It’s not perfect out there economically, but to say the stats don’t match the sentiment is a huge understatement.

The temptation for everyone from leaders to journalists to your neighbors is to resolve the tension — to pick the story that’s most convenient in that moment and tell it confidently. There’s a reason for this. Psychologist Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory says that we really, really hate to sit with things that don’t jive. Instead, we look to resolve that tension. We either pick a side and double down, even if the different realities aren’t actually mutually exclusive. Or we invent new rationalizations, however illogical, to justify the inconsistencies. Festinger theorized that cognitive dissonance is actually a drive state, meaning it’s like hunger or thirst. So we can’t just sit with it – we have to resolve it, even if we sacrifice the facts in the process.

One of his particularly vivid experiments around this was a study he did of doomsday cults. He found that even when the big event (say, the rapture) failed to occur, members actually dug deeper into their own beliefs. That, he saw, was easier for them than confronting the dissonance that they’d built their lives around something that turned out to be false.

The doomsday cult part is (hopefully) not relatable, but this thread of experiments continued in different contexts, eventually showing that overall, failed predictions usually don’t correct beliefs, all for that same reason: dissonance is really hard to live with.

So we pick a story.

These days, it’s usually the doomer story though occasionally an optimist breaks through. AI is going to take all the jobs or AI is going to create all the jobs. We will cure all diseases in our lifetime or we’ll be faced with another pandemic that we’re totally unprepared for. The social fabric has irrevocably frayed or IRL experiences are bringing everyone together again. And so on.

The truth is we’re not living in a period of unprecedented breakthroughs nor a period of existential threats – we’re living through a period where both of these things are happening. These aren’t phenomena running on opposite axes, it’s not a good news-bad news story. This is a story about parallel trajectories, where we are experiencing incredible acceleration in both directions at the same time. And that’s a whole different animal.

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I think that this extreme collective dissonance is the defining condition of the current era.

It’s not just about uncertainty, everyone’s favorite buzzword. There are actually plenty of certainties, but they seem to contradict each other, and that’s harder to sit with than not knowing. That’s what’s messing with us.

Collective dissonance has impacts that are showing up in all kinds of ways. We humans are meaning-making beings and we’re always crafting a story of what’s happening in the world to satiate that need. But when the story doesn’t make sense, at least instinctively, we need to find the meaning elsewhere. This is why you see people who are totally checked out from world events, but hugely invested in their kid’s soccer team, for example. Or you’ll get people who have opted out of voting, but made it their mission to get the local library renovated. This isn’t all bad – our national narrative is so fragmented that we’re being forced to look for meaning in new places and that has some benefits. But those places tend to be smaller and siloed, which can exacerbate the larger divisions we already face.

Which brings us to the trust problem – the foundational issue of our time. We’ll never all agree completely on what’s happening in the world. But living with collective dissonance means we don’t know how to feel, we don’t know what our story is and we don’t know which direction we’re heading. A confused narrative means we don’t have a shared story and that breeds distrust, in our institutions, our neighbors, even ourselves.

The psychologist Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss to name the specific feeling for a loss without closure (like a soldier who never comes home). Now, she’s expanded that definition to all kinds of losses that feel hard to grasp, like the feeling of losing trust in the world as a safe and predictable place. The story of this era isn’t solely about loss but I think her answer to tackling it holds. We have to build the skill of sitting with two competing ideas at once, she says. She called this “both and thinking” and argues that it reduces stress, perhaps because it brings us closer to seeing things as they are. It might look something like this: The planet is in trouble, and there are people making real progress towards saving it.

During my individual period of extreme dissonance, I struggled to articulate what was happening to myself.

But when I look back, I think about the peaks much more than the valleys: the 13th surgery worked, the kids arrived healthy, my family came home. That period forced me to learn the skill of holding multiple truths. I couldn’t pick a side even if I’d wanted to – I couldn’t ignore the good (kids) or the bad (health) so I involuntarily practiced carrying them both at the same time. But I graduated to a new level of resilience after that time, and it’s served me well ever since.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” gets the most airtime but the rest of that Dickens passage is worth a read too. “It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

I think that the people and institutions that will succeed in the long run are the ones who can acknowledge the contradictions honestly and stick to their values regardless. Collective dissonance is uncomfortable but it is a shared experience, and that’s valuable even when it’s hard. Instead of picking a narrow story and telling it confidently, the most credible thing you can say right now is the core of the reality: both things are true.

**A housekeeping note: I’m turning on the paid option for The Hannalyst today, but all of my content (weekly essays) will still be free for everyone.

That’s the short version, here’s the long one:

I’m ~9 months into writing this blog and it’s so much more fun than I anticipated. My next door neighbor said she’s gotten to know me better because of it. A woman I grew up with wrote to say the stories resonate. A stranger DMed and said she saw herself in what I wrote. It’s been an awesome exercise in human connection and it’s made me realize that I want to reach more people.

From what I understand about Substack, turning on the paid tier will allow me to do just that. So I’m giving it a try. But the essays will remain free for everyone. The paid tier is truly optional and it won’t get you anything extra — it’s just a way to support the work. Give if you want to and you can, don’t if you don’t want to or you can’t. The real thing I want is to reach more readers, writers and listeners. Thanks for letting me experiment with this journey.

When I moved to DC three years ago, my biggest fear was that everyone would only want to talk about work and politics. I imagined neighborhood gatherings with policy debates, or dinners that felt more like networking than like socializing. Instead, I’ve found the opposite – no one wants to talk about either of those things. At dinner party after BBQ after school event, I’ve noticed that work and politics don’t dominate conversation; in fact people often avoid those topics entirely. This has become the company town that doesn’t want to talk about the company anymore.

Maybe that doesn’t seem surprising for DC, but I don’t think this is just a DC phenomenon and I don’t think it’s just about politics. This past weekend, I was sitting by the pool with a close friend when she mentioned a camping trip she’d been on recently. There, by the fire and under the stars, one of the other people on the trip asked about her work, and she felt some of the magic of the mood slip away. My friend has an interesting and important job that she likes, and this person was being curious and genuine. Still, she said, the last thing she wanted to do in that moment was talk about work. This anecdote resonated completely. I also have an interesting and meaningful job that I love and yet, I’ve found that outside of specific contexts, I often don’t really want to talk about it.

This is a change. I’m ambitious and career driven, as are most of my friends and family. I was raised listening to my parents talk about their (important and meaningful) work and in my 20s and 30s, talking about work felt like both a necessity and a default. I’ve spent my adult life in New York City, Boston and Washington DC, all places where talking about work is almost a biological tic – you couldn’t avoid it if you tried. But I didn’t try, if I’m honest I didn’t want to try, and neither did anyone around me. Until recently.

Living to work

In 2019, Derek Thompson coined the term workism to describe the way that my cohort specifically (college-educated professionals) has evolved to worship at the altar of the office. Work routinely became the bulk of our identity and we flocked to jobs where the reward for working hard was (unlike past generations) more work.

This orientation also raised our expectations for what work should offer. There is a famous parable where someone walks by a construction site and asks three bricklayers the same question: What are you doing? The first answers that he’s laying bricks, the second answers that he’s constructing a wall and the third responds proudly that he is building a cathedral. The idea is that the first sees his work as a job, the second is pursuing a career and the third is answering a calling. We millennials don’t want to be laying bricks – ever. We always want to be building the cathedral. And that isn’t a bad thing. Answering a calling as a way to make a living is a great gig if you can get it, and we should look for that when it’s possible. But we’ve created an expectation that if work isn’t a calling, every minute of every day, it carries no meaning. The problem is, as Thompson says, it’s hard to self-actualize on the job all the time – even in mission-focused or knowledge work, much less if you’re a cashier or a truck driver.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with seeing your work as a job or a career. I’m lucky enough to do work that I would describe - on the good days - as a calling. But lately I’ve noticed that in my circles of professional, college-educated millennials – whether we see our work as a job, a career or a calling – we’re bringing it up in social contexts a lot less. We helped build work into a religion so consuming that it bled into our social lives, and now we’re reconsidering that last part. We may have helped create workism, but we’re opting out of talking about it.

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The professional class is decoupling work identity from the performance of work identity – and that’s changing our relationship to work itself.

We are not less ambitious, nor necessarily less career oriented. But the performance of it all: the long discussions about what we do, the humble-brags about how busy we are and the rush to find out what everyone around us does for a living seem to be falling out of favor. It’s about time.

One thing I’ve realized in retrospect is that when I was in a job that I didn’t enjoy, or the workplace was toxic, or my boss was terrible, it was usually the thing I talked about the most. Like the person who can’t stop talking about her crush, I found a way to bring it up in every conversation. It consumed me so it became a huge part of my identity, but not in a particularly healthy way. Research shows that bad emotions take up more bandwidth than good ones, and we love to share them (vent), even though it doesn’t provide lasting relief. In other words, in these situations, it’s easy to obsess rather than process and move on.

In contrast, when I’ve been happy at work, I’ve found that I talk about it more deliberately, at specific times and with a lot of care. As a bonus, the sharing makes me feel good. Which makes sense – unlike when we’re venting, sharing positive experiences increases wellbeing. Work is still a huge part of my identity, but in a different, healthier way.

It’s about AI – but not just AI

As you might have noticed, we’ve been riding a pretty intense roller coaster these past handful of years. And all of that has added up to an ambient feeling of uncertainty that permeates almost everything, including, and sometimes especially, work.

I think part of what’s happening is that talking about work has become a gateway to talking about all of that uncertainty, and everyone’s a little weary of that topic. This is well documented in other areas – we’re talking less about politics and less about the news in social contexts, because they provoke anxiety. Perhaps in this era of mass collective transition, the same thing is happening to work-talk.

We’ve also been forced to reassess work again and again over the last couple of decades. The Great Recession, the pandemic and now AI, with the latter bringing some college-educated workers who could whistle through the first two into the uncertainty swirl. It’s not a comfortable place to live, but maybe being forced to constantly reimagine work is changing our relationship to it for the better. More uncertainty, yes, but also less performing. It’s hard to worship at the altar of the office when you find yourself working from home. And it’s hard to find the energy for hustle culture when you’re trying to figure out what’s next.

In my three years in DC, I’ve met dozens of new people. I’ve learned about the history of the neighborhood, the evolution of the school, the best breweries in the area and the secret trails near our house. I’ve discovered new music from my musician neighbors and I used a pottery wheel for the first time with a friend who loves ceramics. These days, I’m hearing a lot of World Cup hot takes as we all sit in the plaza on our main drag and watch the games on a projector that someone convinced the city to set up. Work comes up but it usually takes awhile. And it doesn’t consume or dominate, at least not without intention.

This doesn’t feel like a retreat from work and its importance but rather a redistribution of social energy towards different things.

Friendship, community and shared experiences carry certainty that work often doesn’t. And certainty is exceptionally valuable these days. But those things also feel durable and worthy – investments with an obvious return.

This is not an argument for becoming the person who views herself as a bricklayer rather than a cathedral builder (though if that works for you, great). And it’s not a push against finding work that’s meaningful – people still care deeply about that, and for good reason. But I think it’s possible to find meaning and identity in your work without talking about it all the time – without performing the workism culture that we’re all realizing doesn’t really serve us.

Historically, what do you do? has functioned as a default status sorter, and it’s been so embedded culturally we don’t even realize we’re doing it. But whether you consider yourself a bricklayer, a wall constructor or a cathedral builder, we are all realizing that the status work provides is slippery at best. Maybe it’s time to relate to each other in different, deeper ways.

When my friend was relaying her campfire story, she said something interesting. “It’s not that I don’t ever want to talk about work,” she said. “But these days, I’m more interested in exploring how it makes me feel than the mechanics of what I’m doing.” She wasn’t opting out of work as a subject. But now she’s choosing to have a different conversation.

**quick housekeeping note: If you're getting emails for every little thing I post, instead of just these weekly articles, you can turn that off by going to your settings in Substack 1/Clicking the notification bell or “Manage preferences” and 2/ Turning off email notifications for Notes specifically.

Let’s start with a far too relatable story. Years ago, I had a boss who was addicted to his own power, limited as it was in the grand scheme of things. Conversations were less like a dialogue and more like a cross-examination – he worked hard to poke holes in anything I brought to him, interrupting me before I could finish and barking out objections like a frustrated adolescent yelling at their parents, as disdainful as he was arrogant. He was the first boss I had who screamed directly into my face when he was especially angry, which is when I discovered that I was not the calm and clear-headed professional I imagined myself to be in these moments, but rather a crumbly mess with no good answers for him (until they would come to me hours later in the shower —ah! That’s what I should have said!).

He reveled in making people feel awful – you could almost see the transfer of energy from the person being berated straight through to him. Afterwards, while the unlucky recipient of his ire edged away to the nearest bathroom, he stood a little straighter, walked with a little more purpose and basked in the hushed horror that always followed these kinds of incidents. His power battery had been recharged.

In fact, I was observing something real – research shows that bosses who are jerks actually feel mentally restored after berating an employee, because for them it takes energy to suppress that urge. But the relief is short-lived. Over time, that behavior is still a huge net-negative for everyone, not to mention the organization.

But let’s get back to the story because here’s where it gets a little less relatable. At the same time, in the same job, I had another boss – and this one was exactly the opposite. Even now, I have yet to meet a leader who better understands the mantra that your people’s success is also your success. When we first started working together, I was deferential to his ideas until he pulled me aside and corrected that habit. He pushed me into the spotlight even when it should have been him because he understood that if I got better, we could do more together and serve the organization in a more effective way. He gave feedback in a kind and clear manner (!), and when I had feedback for him, he took it to heart and changed his ways (!!). Perhaps most importantly, he taught me that we could do great work and also have fun. After a particularly high stakes meeting that went well, he suggested we take the rest of the day off and go see a movie.

As I got older, I discovered that when it came to the first type of boss, I wasn’t that special. If you’ve worked for awhile, you’ve probably had a boss who was a total a**hole. The conventional wisdom seems to be that in that situation, it’s our job to grow thicker skin, figure out how to perform under pressure and/or talk through these issues with your therapist so that absolutely none of it actually leaks through at work. Conceptually, I think all of that sounds ridiculous – why should we have to put up with people like this?! But practically, it’s the truth. Horrible bosses are a part of life.

The other thing I realized is that when it came to the second type of boss, I was unique. Having a great boss – and I don’t mean a nice-enough boss or a leaves-you-alone boss, I mean a truly great boss – is rare. If I have one piece of career advice to give, it’s that if you end up working for this kind of person, stick with them for as long as possible because you may not find them again.

How bad is it really to have a terrible boss?

To get scientific about it, it’s really, really bad. The foundational study on this only came out in 2000, which is funny because I’m pretty sure awful bosses have been around much longer than that. Before that, this kind of behavior was only discussed anecdotally, which helps explain why the enabling system of horrible bosses has yet to be dismantled. Still, now we know: having a terrible boss makes you miserable at work, but the worst part is it also makes you miserable in life. We spend so many of our waking hours working that the bleed is inevitable, which means that people who have bad bosses also have lower life satisfaction, greater conflict within their families and at work, and higher rates of anxiety, depression and emotional exhaustion. In other words, don’t underestimate the power of a bad boss to, literally, ruin your life.

Bad bosses are an extremely contagious virus

Here is another grim reality about having a bad boss: the behavior can spread well beyond the directly affected individuals. Research on the impact of a terrible boss found that when managers behave badly, it negatively affects their direct reports’ wellbeing but also those employees’ own behavior. Sometimes it causes them to start behaving badly too – to each other and to their direct reports, and the cycle continues. It’s called social learning theory and it stems from the fact that we subconsciously look to our bosses as role models – we internalize what works and what doesn’t, we follow their templates, we learn what they teach us. Basically – the bad boss virus is airborne, and it’s very possible for one person’s toxic habits to infect an entire organization.

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How great is it really to have an excellent boss?

In 1968 psychologist Robert Rosenthal did a groundbreaking study in elementary schools where teachers were led (falsely) to believe that certain students were “intellectual bloomers” – on the precipice of greatness. The designation was completely arbitrary and yet by the end of the term, these students had outperformed their peers. The designation changed how the teachers treated these students – more opportunities, more difficult challenges but also more belief in their capabilities. In turn, that changed how the students saw themselves, and ultimately how they performed.

The phenomenon, called the Pygmalion Effect, was so successful that it has been replicated and eventually taught in many other places, including at work. My great boss gave me a lot while we worked together but his greatest gift was his unwavering belief in my own skills and potential. He didn’t put me in the spotlight because it was the right thing to do – it was much more matter of fact. He did it because it would help him, help the organization and because he knew I could do it. As a young, new leader, seeing that made me understand he was right.

That perspective changed my life but it also changed the lives of the people working under me. Because social learning theory applies just as strongly with good bosses as it does bad ones. People with great bosses are more likely to replicate that behavior, improving quality of life and quality of work for everyone at the organization. The good boss virus is airborne too.

What shapes the kind of boss you become?

Here’s the best piece of research in this article: Most people who have a terrible boss don’t become one. The bad boss virus is real, but it’s not pre-destined. And it turns out a lot of people defy it. The question, in a world of horrible bosses, is how does that happen? The answer lies in something called disidentification. While some people become their worst bosses, more people disidentify with them, which is to say they strongly internalize the idea that they are not like them. Essentially, those awful bosses can be great teachers of what not to do (even though that’s a costly lesson to learn). And the research shows that it’s the people who have a strong moral identity – a grounded sense of who they are, and a strong code of ethics – who can disidentify with horrible bosses most effectively. For those people, rejecting the set of behaviors their boss exhibits can paradoxically lead them to be even better bosses themselves.

It’s a bit like the people you know who had terrible parents, yet turned out to be excellent ones themselves. This makes sense to me. Back in that job, whenever my heart rate had slowed enough to think clearly after being reamed out by my own horrible boss, I had one constant drumbeat of a thought: I will never be like him. Sometimes, the lessons on what not to do can be the most effective ones around.

But here’s the part that’s hard: many of us have our worst bosses when we’re young, inexperienced and impressionable. We might have a set of ethical standards, but they may not have been truly tested yet. And a grounded sense of self? At 27? That’s a tall order. We are easy prey – and the worst of the bosses knows it.

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I got really lucky

Because yes, I disidentified with my horrible boss and that helped ensure I didn’t become him. But I also had a really strong counterforce at work – my great boss. I remember one meeting with the bad boss that was especially brutal, and my good boss was there too. He was so pissed at us that he wasn’t even yelling, he was seething, delivering his wrath through gritted teeth while we sat there frozen. But afterwards, my good boss walked me straight out of the building and to the coffee shop next door. We took a beat, we debriefed, we caffeinated. The bad boss had struck, but the good one immediately showed me a different way.

You wouldn’t know it from all the talk about “leadership development,” but we generally don’t do a lot to prepare our leaders. Only 44% of managers report receiving any formal training for how to lead their teams. Which means that your experiences with your own set of bosses heavily informs the type you become.

Someday, I hope we will have a culture that doesn’t tolerate berating people to the point of tears, especially at work. But until that day comes, take comfort in the fact that most people have had a terrible boss. And in between the roughest moments, you can practice disidentifying, and remember that you are not this person. In fact, you can be the opposite.

During my tenure under the good boss and the evil one, I had the opportunity to be a boss myself to many different people. I remember once, after mediating a tricky conflict between two of my team members, one of them said, “Thank you for really listening to me.”

Which is largely a credit to my excellent boss, the person who gave me the template for how to lead well and who changed the way I thought about myself. But I guess if I’m honest, the other guy gets a little credit too. Not because he deserves any praise for his behavior. But because once I learned to turn my anxiety about him into a commitment to be something different, I became the kind of boss who will walk you to the coffee shop when you need it, instead of yelling in your face.

On a brisk northeast day in the fall of 2011, I walked into a mediocre Chinese restaurant and sat down at a round table with ten people I hardly knew. It was my first semester in graduate school and I was desperate to make friends without looking desperate to make friends. Grad school is weird because most people have been in the working world for a few years already. You’ve been playing the role of “adult” even while you’re young enough to still bask in the freedom of not having homework anymore. And then, just as you’ve learned how to cook something besides tacos, just as you’ve mastered having a couple of glasses of wine instead of 7 poured from a pitcher, just as you’ve broken the habit of raising your hand before speaking…bam! You’re back in school. And the regression begins.

In my case, classes had begun but friendships were nascent. So when I was invited to a group dinner by someone I’d met during orientation, I eagerly said yes and then wondered how this would go. We all walked into the restaurant – five women and six men, all of us glad to have been invited, none of us really knowing each other or what to expect. It felt like we were about to start competing on a weird, academically rigorous reality show and the first test was: have a good time at this dinner.

But then we started talking and something interesting happened – we all just clicked. It was like this group had been waiting to form, even though none of us really knew each other. Because the rapport was easy, the jokes bounced seamlessly off one another and the conversation was immediately both flowing and raucous. The vibe was more family reunion than school orientation and we all recognized it immediately. Our collective first date was a huge success, and a friend group was born.

What turns a collection of people into a bona fide crew?

That’s what I’ve been thinking about lately – why does one group of people gel and another doesn’t? We are all thrown together in groups all the time and rarely do they truly sparkle. Why?

There are some clues. We are animals after all so biology plays a role, though in this case it’s a weird one. In one study, researchers found that they could predict friendship based on how similar people smelled – in other words, people with similar body odors are attracted (platonically) to each another.

And there is the propinquity effect, a fancy way of saying that the closer you are physically, and the more random encounters you have, the more likely you are to become friends (ie you’re more likely to become friends with someone in your dorm than someone in the dorm across the quad – don’t ask me why we needed science to prove this point, but here we are).

But there is one finding that I think points towards at least part of the answer and it’s pretty simple: humor. Laughter meaningfully increases pain tolerance – which means our endorphins go up. Have you ever made a joke in a tense moment and it has instantly lightened the mood? That’s why. And we laugh more in groups, so the chemical effect is amplified. It’s a specific and biological form of bonding. At dinner with my new friends, everyone was laughing. And when that happened, our bodies were releasing endorphins simultaneously – chemical bonding in real time. That’s why laughing together doesn’t just make you feel good, it actually makes you feel closer to the people you’re with.

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So – people you laugh with, people you see often and people who smell like you.

But the rest of it just feels like pure chemistry, which I thought was impossible to measure. Turns out, it’s not. A 2022 study looked at small groups of people doing activities together and measured their heartbeats. The groups that said they felt more cohesive at the end – like they had gelled – had heartbeats that came into sync throughout the activity. That synchronicity wasn’t there at the beginning and it never showed up among groups that never gelled. But for the ones who did, they physiologically became something linked.

Which means group alchemy is real, detectable and measurable. What’s impossible to do is predict when and with whom it will actually happen.

The truth is there aren’t many studies on the alchemy of friend groups. But there is plenty on what makes a team work well together. Google’s Project Aristotle looked at 180 teams across the company and found that what made them gel wasn’t about any individual’s personality or skillset – it wasn’t even about how much they did or didn’t like each other. The number one predictor of high performance among a team was psychological safety. If people felt comfortable with one another, they worked well together.

I think the same is true of friend groups, but what’s interesting is that friend groups don’t share the purpose and goals that a group of colleagues does. They arguably start out further apart, and psychological safety isn’t there the minute you sit down with a group of strangers at a restaurant. But – unlike at work – it either generates quickly or it doesn’t. Within 20 minutes or so, you’re either going to feel comfortable or you’re not. And that’s going to dictate whether or not you act like yourself, make the joke, ask the question or smell the person next to you for similarities (kidding – ideally, you do that one subconsciously).

Fourteen years after that first group sparked, I got lucky again.

This time, my husband and I – new to our neighborhood – were invited to a dinner with five other families. These were familiar faces, but most weren’t people we really knew. And this time, we all had kids in tow, with their own group alchemy to figure out.

We all arrived, sent our kids down to the basement, and looked around. It felt similar to walking into that Chinese restaurant – a looming question hovering amongst the adults, so present you could almost hear it out loud: will this work? And it did. In this phase of life, I always think one sign of a successful meal with friends is that you don’t talk about work and you don’t talk about kids. Those topics can be crutches, and if your conversation is so dynamic that neither come up, you are probably with your people.

So when we left that night not knowing anyone’s job or kid’s favorite sport, I knew it had happened again. We had passed the collective chemistry test. The group had formed.

About 15 years ago, I went to a birthday party at a bar in Nolita called Firefly.* Dark and musty, it was filled with mid-20-somethings like myself ordering vodka sodas with a splash of cranberry and buzzing on that kind of nightlife energy only accessible in New York. I was nervous because I knew I would run into a close friend who ghosted me. So I’d invited a friend to come along for reinforcement and she brought a friend who brought a friend – a guy in a black shirt and those “I’m smart but also stylish” kind of glasses. Gradually, all the friends and friends-of-friends arrived, and the party started to hum.

I had just gotten into graduate school so I knew that I would be leaving my stressful job and New York in five short months. With that knowledge came the luxurious mindset of having a plan – the one where everything feels low stakes because you already know what the next chapter holds. Secure in knowing where my next station would be, there was nothing left to do but enjoy the ride.

So when that guy with the glasses offered to buy me a drink, I said sure.

And when he asked to take me out to dinner the next week, I thought why not? As every girl who has ever lived in New York knows, the chances the guy actually follows up are slim, but with only a few months left in the city, I figured it didn’t hurt to say yes.

And then a few days later he called – yes, called – and I panicked. Not at the fact that it was him, but rather that he apparently wanted to talk live. It was 2011! Hadn’t we moved beyond that except in cases of emergency or calls with grandparents?! I grabbed my roommate and we both stared at the screen watching it ring like the phone might explode at any moment. Maybe you should pick it up…?, she suggested with audible hesitation, both of us equal parts shocked and suspicious. He left a message. He wanted to know if I liked sushi. The gall of this guy.

In the fifteen years since, I and everyone else I know has pretty much moved entirely away from spontaneous phone calls.

Texting is king but like all digitization of our social lives, it does that neat trick where it leaves us technically more in touch but emotionally less connected all at the same time.

Texting opened up a world of convenience when it came to, say, planning a coffee. But it’s one more way that we get to be just a little less vulnerable with each other – and that has a cost. Studies show the obvious, which is that phone calls produce much stronger feelings of connection than texting. But they also show that phone calls don’t produce more feelings of awkwardness – and that’s where we get it wrong.

As I’ve written about before, we are constantly underestimating each other. That extends to texting – we often text not for the connection, but to avoid the discomfort of a call. Even though the reality is, the call rarely ends up being awkward. The problem is that our collective misperception means that we almost always resort to text.

In fact, voice connections are uniquely resonant. One study found that voice-only communication is actually the best way to understand one another, holistically and emotionally – even better than when visual cues (like faces) are involved. In other words, adding someone’s face actually reduces emotional understanding.

The theory is that when faces are involved, people can perform. Imagine getting fired from a job – your face might project calm, stoic resignation. But you’ll probably work to say as little as possible because your voice – shaky, soft and strained – betrays your true feelings. There’s something about a voice-only conversation that strips away the ability to perform. Sometimes, the truth is in what you hear, not what you see.

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The sociologist Rich Ling has written about the evolution of technology to allow for better coordination. It took us 200 years to fully adopt clock time, which meant we had a lot of space for trial and error around norms, usage, and spiritual and cultural arguments for how this technology might help or hurt us. In contrast, texting took hold over about 20 years – the first text was sent in 1992 and it was off to the races from there. Before we had the chance to consider what we were losing in this evolution, adoption was so high that it became (and remains) socially prohibitive not to text.

Which is how we ended up here:

WHO IS THIS?!, yells my daughter into her Tin Can, an ingenious gadget clearly invented by a millennial parent who read The Anxious Generation. It’s like a hybrid between a walkie-talkie and a landline that lets my daughter talk with anyone else who has one, but it looks like the phones of yore (no screen, plugs into the wall, real buttons). And let me tell you, I have never felt older than when I have watched my kid talk on this thing because she has zero phone etiquette at all.

Despite being a generally well-mannered eight-year-old, when she’s on it she speaks in a voice I’ll call ALL CAPS. As if talking to someone who has recently betrayed her, she demands to know who it is and why they could possibly be calling. There are no niceties or small talk, nor a friendly wind-down at the end. When the necessary information has been exchanged, she slams down the phone with a force totally disproportionate to the three minutes of playdate planning she just did. CASE CLOSED, I imagine her muttering to herself because I swear that’s the vibe she gives off.

After asking around, I learned that all of the kids are like this. After a lifetime of watching their parents text instead of talk, they know how to be on a zoom but an old fashioned call? Not so much.

I am not anti-texting. But it has occurred to me that even this seemingly benign technological evolution has left us a little more lost from one another than we were before. It’s less about the addition of texting to our lives – sometimes, it really does make sense. But in too many cases, it has displaced the phone calls that were part of the connection infrastructure we didn’t know we needed until it was gone.

What does it look like to raise a generation who never learns the skills that the phone teaches?

What does it look like when the most resonant and vulnerable way of communicating is hardly even in the repertoire, much less the default? We’re about to find out.

Ling’s theory is that texting has brought us close to our inner circle and further from everyone else. I think that’s because it supplements the strong ties – your inner circle will be people you see, call or have history or other foundational infrastructure to sustain. Texting with them is an additional channel but it’s not responsible for fortifying the relationship. But with weak ties, it’s different. We think texting sustains them, but if nothing else is in place, any depth that relationship had can erode quickly until it’s not really a connection at all. It’s why you can have a phone conversation with someone you haven’t talked to in months and feel the friendship rekindling immediately. But a flurry of text exchanges can only take you so far.

Somewhere along the way, we loosened what turns out to be one of the most important threads in the social fabric. And we didn’t even realize it because in the moment, it feels like convenience, like efficiency. It feels like a win. Until one day you realize that while you text with someone pretty regularly, you don’t actually know them anymore.

Slowly, I’m teaching my daughter the lost art of the phone. I’ve told her that I spent hours talking on the phone when I was young, building the foundation for friendships that have lasted for decades. And I told her that the best guy I ever dated thought to call after we met, and that even though I didn’t pick up at first, I’m so glad I called him back. Because many phone calls later, we got married. Without that phone call, she wouldn’t be here.

When I was a kid, my family and I were on a long flight when a woman walking down the aisle collapsed and passed out right next to our row. Most of the passengers were asleep so no one really noticed but my dad, a doctor, jumped up to help and cared for her throughout the rest of the flight. In the end she was fine and so grateful that she offered to send us free pet food from Iams, where she worked. We had/have a turtle (Phredd, 34 years old and thriving) and Iams doesn’t do turtle food, but it was a nice offer nonetheless.

My dad was a hero to that woman but I’d like to think that anyone in that situation would have done the same. Yet the truth is a little more complicated – we think we’ll help in a crisis but often, we don’t. The bystander effect shows clearly that people intervene in these situations far less than they think they will, and the presence of others actually reduces the chances of intervention, presumably because people think someone else will do it.

And yet, it doesn’t necessarily feel like that would be the case.

Every person I’ve ever met or read who has made it their business to travel the world and meet all kinds of people says that they discover the same thing over and over: people, fundamentally and overwhelmingly, are good. That matches my anecdotal experience as well. I’ve worked in media, government, nonprofits and agencies – lived in four major cities, and traveled widely. I’ve met thousands of people and found that the vast majority of them are not only good, but want to make a difference. They want to leave the world a little better than they found it. I genuinely feel morality all around me in everyday life.

How is it that the bystander effect is real, and yet so many of us feel a pull towards goodness?

Are we born with a moral compass?

Researchers turned to puppets to find out. In 2007, a landmark study came out showing that six- and ten-month olds preferred puppets that helped their friends achieve a goal (as depicted in a very simple puppet show) to those that made things worse. Researchers even looked at three-month olds and, using eye tracking as a proxy for preference, found the same thing. That might seem like a stretch, but other types of experiments have come to the same conclusions.

One study found that toddlers (~18 months) spontaneously helped adults, like by picking up something the adult dropped, even when it cost them. One famous video shows a toddler having the time of his life in a ball pit only to be interrupted when he sees a nearby adult drop a pen and struggle to retrieve it. Still, the toddler decides to help, even though it means breaking away from his fun activity, and even though he doesn’t get a reward. Toddlers, it seems, are altruists.

Over many experiments, compelling evidence seems to point towards babies being born with a preference for moral behavior, unincentivized and well before it could be socialized into them. How could that be?

There is no morality gene. But there are predispositions towards certain characteristics that might push you naturally towards more ethical behavior. Studies show that emotional empathy is partially – maybe even close to 50% – genetic. And there’s a neurological component too: seeing someone in distress activates the same neurological response as being in distress yourself (there is a name for when this connection fails to form for others – we call it psychopathy). So despite the absence of a morality gene, we arrive predisposed (some more than others, but still predisposed) to empathize with others. Exactly the kind of emotional habit that might lead you to feel the presence of a moral compass throughout your life.

We might think about it like this: we’re all born with a morality radius – a circle of people who we feel pulled to support, help and empathize with. Not everyone’s radius (ie predispositions) are the same, but we typically start with a wide one. The toddler isn’t particularly discriminating with her altruism.

So the question becomes – what happens as we get older? Does the radius expand or contract?

In short, we start targeting our empathy towards specific people – and away from others.

Babies may be born with some moral instincts, but they’re born with other things too. For example, they love punishment – some toddlers not only preferred the helpful puppets, but chose to whack the unhelpful ones over the head (if you’re a parent, perhaps this resonates).

But they also prefer people who look and talk like them and that can dictate who we direct our empathy towards as our own morality evolves. The toddler in the video helped the adult retrieve her pen without being asked, without considering who the beneficiary was (ie a parent or familiar person) and without a reward dangled in front of them. But by preschool, that starts to change – kids as young as 3-4 years olds start factoring in relationships and reciprocity, narrowing their generosity to those they subconsciously think deserve it. That’s why, in the hypothetical about whether or not you would jump in to save a stranger who was drowning, the ‘stranger’ piece is so important. Doing the right thing for someone we know is an entirely different proposition from doing the right thing for someone we don’t.

In other words, morality can evolve to protect your in-group. Which means that if you are, say, a political leader, and you define your in-group as your donors, your base supporters and your family, then you’re going to direct your empathy towards them, even if it’s at the expense of others. This is, arguably, the biological system at work. But societally, it can be pretty problematic. (And to be clear, biology isn’t the whole picture here – these people are still responsible for their own immorality.)

But that’s the thing with empathy. It can deepen your ties to those most like you, which, if taken too far, becomes a dangerous form of tribalism. Or it can open you up completely.

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The radius idea comes from Peter Singer’s moral expansiveness framework, which says that morality starts naturally with those closest to us. But over time, it expands – to different kinds of people, to strangers, to animals and other living things. In his view, it’s not that our morality has to narrow over time, it’s that it can and should accumulate.

So how do you expand your radius?

It’s not just about spending time with people who are different than you are, it’s about actively embodying their perspective to understand it as much as you can. It’s not necessarily about taking on someone’s pain as your own, it’s about learning to feel compassion for what they’re going through – something motivating enough to act on without draining your own reserves.

These might seem obvious, though they require practice and intention. But there’s a third way to expand your radius that I think is the most interesting. Awe produces what researchers call a ‘small self’ effect – in other words, it shrinks the ego and frees you up to focus your attention on others. In one study, participants who spent 1 minute staring up at eucalyptus trees then helped an experimenter who “accidentally” dropped a bunch of pens more than the participants who spent a minute looking up at a tall building. Weirdly specific, I know, but scientific nonetheless. Experiencing awe can open up your radius.

Which brings me back to my dad. He didn’t jump in to help that woman because he is uniquely heroic. He did it because through a lifetime of caring for patients, internalizing other people’s perspectives, showing compassion and experiencing some awe-some moments in between, he opened his radius of morality.

That’s how you become the bystander who defies the rule.

**Hello to the many new people getting this in your inbox. In the absolute deluge of content coming at you every second of the day, it’s not lost on me how remarkable it is that you’re choosing to read this. Thank you. Thoughts, ideas and reflections are always welcome.**

Exactly 11 years ago, my fiancé (now husband) and sister started planning a surprise 30th birthday dinner for me. I was so excited – 30 feels like the first big turn of a decade milestone (I can’t explain it, but 10 and 20 don’t hit the same way). All throughout the big day, I sizzled with anticipation, not knowing exactly what was coming but confident it would rise to the occasion, that occasion being: I made it through my 20s! When my sister suggested she and I go to dinner, my hopes rose even further (because let’s be real, my husband is an ok party planner, but with her involved I knew things would be next level).

That night I walked into the restaurant, ready to be feted by 20+ (maybe even 40+?) friends and family. So emotions clashed when I heard the inevitable “SURPRISE!” (I knew it!) only to realize that the number of voices in that crowd was, um, fewer than I’d hoped (This is….it….?). I looked around and a pit gathered in my stomach as I took in the table of people who had shown up. They included: 1/ my boss, 2/ my boss’s wife, 3/ my husband’s friend, and 4/ the one really close friend who showed up (shout out to Iain, who I will always appreciate for this) – plus the party planners, my sister and fiancé. Not exactly what I had in mind.

Let me start by saying that I know I’m lucky to have six people who were ready to celebrate me. But looking at that room, I saw five out of six people who had come at least partially out of obligation. And it crushed me. The table was covered with old, funny pictures and other Hanna / birthday paraphernalia, an incredibly thoughtful gesture which somehow made the whole thing even more awkward.

I knew that this wasn’t a reflection of the quality or quantity of friendships in my life. If you, like I, am a summer baby, you know that scheduling celebrations is always a beast (oh, the struggle of not getting to celebrate your birthday in school!). I knew that it was wildly immature to be – if I’m honest – devastated that this event wasn’t filled with more of my people. And yet it threw me off so badly that I got weird about my birthday for years.

Why are we so weird about our birthdays?

Birthdays, am I right?! How is it that we go from an unmatched level of excitement as kids to an annual existential crisis as adults? It’s such a simple concept – your life started on this day, let’s celebrate you! And yet I know more happy, healthy, fulfilled adults who are weird about their birthdays than not.

Why?

Let’s start with the obvious: getting older can feel negative because our culture tells us over and over again that it’s a negative thing. Research clearly shows that aging stereotypes are internalized early, operate unconsciously and feel relevant as we get older (ie we turn the stereotypes on ourselves). Which means that on birthdays – the one day you can’t deny that you’re aging – we can feel anxiety that is coded so deep as to be unconscious. That won’t change unless the larger narrative does.

And just in case you questioned whether the narrative matters, one study showed that people who held more negative age stereotypes in early adulthood were significantly more likely to experience a cardiovascular event in the following years, even after controlling for family history and other relevant factors. (As I’ve written about before, what you believe can determine your reality.)

New decades in particular can prompt a real self-audit, though research actually shows that this starts to happen during the year prior, like when you’re 29, 39 or 49. One study found that this group – the ‘nine-enders’ as they call them – are 48% more likely to register for their first marathon, and also more likely to show up on extramarital affairs websites (existential crises come in many forms). These authors theorize that the anticipation of a new decade can trigger a search for meaning because the birthday turns from a celebration into a deadline. Ugh.

That all helps explain the negativity and anxiety that so many people feel on their birthdays.

But another feeling might be dissonance. I can remember birthdays where I didn’t exactly feel anxious or upset, I just felt…off. That might be because the age I was turning didn’t match the age that I feel. This, it turns out, is incredibly common – in fact age dissonance seems to follow a predictable pattern. Before 25, people tend to feel older than they actually are; after 25 they tend to feel younger than they actually are. This is the difference between your “subjective age” and your actual age. 30-something adults can feel 10 years younger than they actually are. And midlife adults typically feel 19% younger than they actually are. So a 32-year-old feels 22, a 45-year-old feels 36, a 50-year-old feels closer to 40, and a 60-year-old feels 49. No wonder that weird feeling prevails.

So birthdays can become a confrontational moment, the day when you have to sit with the age you actually are, even if it’s years off from what you feel.

And finally, our brain is not great at predicting future emotions. We’re decent at knowing if an event is going to make us happy or sad, but we are usually off on the intensity of that feeling and how long it will last, especially when it comes to positive events. We tend to overestimate how much joy we’re going to get from a positive event like, say, a birthday, because we focus only on the exciting thing and not the context, circumstances and other factors that will be happening at the same time. This is called impact bias, and it’s why whenever I think about an upcoming vacation with my young kids, I focus exclusively on the “vacation” part and forget about the “young kids” part until we’re halfway through a two-hour walking tour of Mexico City and I remember that young kids hate walking tours. But I digress.

So to summarize – the birthday system is rigged against us:

• Culture embeds a negative perception of aging that’s almost impossible to ignore emotionally even if we know it’s nonsense intellectually

• The age we feel and the age we are don’t necessarily match, which can lead to feelings of dissonance, stress or anxiety

• The birthday expectations run so high that it can be neurologically impossible to meet them

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We’re set up to fail – and yet, we don’t have to.

After 30th-gate, I struggled to even get excited about my birthday, much less celebrate with friends, despite many sweet, well-intentioned ideas from my husband (who cannot relate to this story at all – damn him and his perpetually secure mindset).

The fever finally started to break on my 35th when, in the depths of COVID and 8.5 months pregnant, we couldn’t celebrate with anyone even if we’d wanted to. Instead, he created a fun survey about me and sent it to everyone I’ve ever known – then invited them to a 15 minute zoom where he charmingly revealed the results and asked everyone to sing. With absolutely nothing else to do – it was June 2020 – everyone participated, and as I listened to the asynchronous version of Happy Birthday coming from a bunch of tiny boxes on the screen, I could feel the gray birthday cloud finally starting to lift.

That wasn’t because there were so many people. It’s because COVID had the opposite effect of the impact bias – there was so much else going on in the world that I forgot to focus exclusively on the birthday. Which made me underestimate the joy that a 15 minute zoom would bring me.

Birthdays are not a referendum on your life. I know that, but the COVID birthday was the first time in awhile that I actually felt it. And it taught me something I used when I turned 40.

Ten years after that rough 30th birthday, I approached the day differently. I thought about what I actually wanted to do, and then I did it. For me, that meant a night dancing to my favorite 90s cover band with anyone who wanted to join me. I chose something I knew I’d have fun at even if no one came.

Which is why, in a few weeks, when I turn 41, I might just do that again.

This past winter, my 8 year old daughter started on a basketball team. None of the girls had played before – they didn’t even know the basic rules – but they’re all friends and they figured why not. Then they had their first game. It turns out that all of the other teams in the league have been together for at least a season if not more. They definitely knew the rules. And they knew how to play. That first game was, um, rough. The ref called a foul on one of our girls, but with no idea what a foul shot was, she dribbled up to the hoop and attempted a lay-up instead of shooting from the line. Another girl, who missed that the sides switch halfway through, made two shots at the wrong hoop (neither made it, but still not a good look). Us parents found ourselves frantically yelling the basics from the sidelines: “Shoot for that basket!” or “Keep dribbling!” The girls lost 24-1 (the one who attempted a lay-up on her first foul shot actually made her second).

After the game, my daughter was understandably frustrated. “24-1 is really, really bad…right?” she asked. And yeah, it is. But I could see the learning happening for these girls in real time. Plus, they were together, doing something healthy and fun. It made me think about how the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen (h/t Derek Thompson) talks about the difference between a goal and a purpose. “Our purpose is often to have fun, or to relax,” he says. “But the only way to get there is by hyper-focusing on a goal.”

Sometimes these things are aligned, but often they’re not. A foundational study on this topic looked at a group of children who loved to draw. Some kids were told they’d get a reward for drawing, some were surprised with a reward after drawing and a third sub-group got nothing. After awhile, that first group – the one that got the reward and were told about it – opted to draw less (by 50%). The others saw no change.

This is called the overjustification effect: when you add an external reward to an activity that someone already loves, they start to love it less.

It turns out it’s more important why you’re pursuing a goal than whether or not you actually achieve it. Pursuing a goal because of intrinsic motivation (you genuinely find the pursuit interesting and worthwhile regardless of the outcome) produces better outcomes and higher wellbeing than pursuing a goal because of extrinsic motivation (you’re chasing rewards, accolades or rankings, or you’re simply afraid of losing).

Adding a reward shifts how your brain frames the activity – until eventually it becomes about chasing the prize instead of about doing the thing you love. It’s why despite loving music, I quit piano several years after starting to play in competitions. It became about winning first prize (extrinsic) instead of about loving the music (intrinsic). Adding an external reward can actually sour the experience, especially of something that you love.

This phenomenon shows up in American youth sports pretty clearly. About 70% of kids quit organized sports by age 13 and one of the top reasons is lack of enjoyment. As one kid said, “[I would play sports again] if the atmosphere was less serious, more about friendship and having fun instead of competition. Maybe a small community team or a mixed group where everyone just enjoys the game.”

Other countries do it differently. Kids in Norway don’t have a competition component to their sports leagues. Before age 13, there are no playoffs or championships, no rankings – they don’t even keep score (similarly, kids don’t get grades in school until age 13). The emphasis, by design, is on participation, enjoyment, teamwork and personal development. That’s not to say Norway doesn’t value sports – clubs are often community-based and subsidized, which helps explain why 93% of Norway’s kids 13-18 participate in sports (versus 54% of U.S. kids 6-17). Norwegian kids are also encouraged to try multiple sports – no specializing, hiring private coaches, joining tiny tots travel teams…just ‘Joy of Sport for All’, Norway’s stated mission. Yet Norway produces excellent athletes, especially relative to their small size – and their record outpaces most other countries too.

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This thinking can be applied beyond just sports. Norway’s neighbor, Finland applies this no-competition thinking to schools. There are no standardized tests until your senior year of high school. No gifted and talented programs or students separated out by ability. In general, teachers don’t compare students to one another at all. The focus is equity – in resources, in curricula, in access to learning. And yet, despite their disdain for competition in schools, they tend to win a lot of the ‘which students are doing best in the world?’ analyses.

When the goal of a competition is to serve a larger purpose – unity, connection, learning – it’s valuable, and everyone wins no matter the outcome. When competition itself becomes the purpose, everyone loses.

It strikes me that at least here in the US, we’ve really honed in on the goals, but we’ve lost the purpose. We love to win, but only when there’s a loser. American Idol was the #1 show in America for 7 consecutive seasons. We’re told that if we’re not optimizing every minute of our lives, someone else will – and they’ll beat us. Our education system – especially at the university level – rewards a tiny group of winners (those who get admitted), while the majority get left behind. Even health has become competitive. Instead of just doing a spin class, we have to compete on the leaderboard.

This kind of thinking is so pervasive that it’s laced throughout our daily conversations. We talk about “beating out” other people for everything from concert tickets to jobs. We either “make it” or we “don’t make it” – we win or we don’t. We “lose” a job. We fight to “get ahead,” “climb the ladder” or “catch” someone “out of our league.”

You could argue that we’ve achieved the goals of building the best entertainment industry, biggest military, greatest innovation economy and best higher education system. But we’ve slowly lost sight of their purpose: to empower artists and bring joy, to promote world peace, to advance our technology for good and to create widespread access to knowledge so that people can build better lives for themselves.

But let’s go back to 3rd grade basketball. The season was a blowout – I’d love to say that 24-1 was an anomalous score for them, but truthfully it was pretty typical. I might even argue that in their rush to remember what exactly they’re supposed to be doing with this bouncy orange ball, they sometimes lost sight of the goal entirely. But every week they lost, but every week they had fun, became a stronger team and learned something new. And the girls all signed up for next season.

A couple of months ago, I was with a close friend when she said she really wanted to ask me something. “How do I become an optimist?” she asked, over coffee at the kitchen table. She said it casually, like that isn’t a massive question for so many of us in 2026. And I took a long sip of dark roast as I thought about how to respond.

Because as someone who has written a lot about optimism – how much of it is inherited, how to combat fear and whether or not hope works – I realized I’d never thought about how you actually become an optimist, especially when it feels like a mindset that you used to have and now have lost.

This is someone who has been through a lot in recent years and she explained that her experiences had shifted her worldview into a place of fear. Not every day, not even most of the time, but she described a nagging question that sometimes swirled in her head and sounded something like, ‘What if things just collapse?’ And it occurred to me that a shift like that probably isn’t all that uncommon. I was right – as of 2025, 24.5 million fewer Americans feel optimistic about their own futures than five years ago.

She and millions of others are wondering: How do I see a future that I’ve stopped being able to see?

In the end, I fumbled my response. I gave her a list of writers and journalists who I think frame the world with a sense of grounded optimism. Incrementally helpful, but not exactly an answer. And I’ve been thinking about the question ever since.

How do you become an optimist?

Naturally, people have studied this in myriad ways. Apparently a lot of things can induce small, temporary bursts of optimism, including CBT, mindfulness and self-compassion training (makes sense), but also lying on a bed of nails and sensory isolation (....?). And there are courses and workshops that have meaningfully made people more optimistic, even over the long term.

But if you don’t want to enroll in an optimism course or lie on a bed of nails, there is only one proven intervention that actually seems to work.

It’s called the Best Possible Self intervention and it goes like this: for 15 minutes per day, every day for two weeks, you write about the best possible life you can imagine. Across all of the big areas of your life – relationships, friendships, career, hobbies, family, health, etc. – you force yourself to write specifically: What would it look like to achieve all of my goals?

That’s it – that’s the entire intervention. And it works, even better than a gratitude practice. Imagining a better future seems to foster optimism more than reflecting on the good parts of the past.

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In my day job at ENSO, a strategy and creative agency, I help organizations solve their problems, launch their products, navigate their transitions, build coalitions and – on the best projects – truly serve the world. And no matter the challenge, the one thing we always do is build out future scenarios for how they might meet their goals. It’s not just about what they could say and do, it’s also about who they might engage with, and what their work could look like and feel like out in the world.

We call this practice Future Design, and we’ve found that it’s an incredibly good way to get people to think bigger about what’s possible for their organizations and for themselves. With this framework, I have seen a company go from just wanting to improve a listicle to changing the way that millions of people measure work wellbeing. I have seen leaders go from just hoping to avoid bad press at their conference to facilitating a historic climate deal among nations. I have seen an organization go from just trying to double their sales to becoming a leader in reducing carbon emissions from buildings.

Future Design works because we cannot be what we cannot see.

And if it doesn’t exist then we have to imagine it. That’s what ENSO does – and it usually unlocks a whole new set of possibilities for the organization. I think that’s what the Best Possible Self intervention does for the individual. It forces you to tangibly record what optimism borne out would look like. In doing so, you see what you want more clearly, and that changes the way you look towards the future.

But optimism, like all good things in life, is a practice. In one study, people were trained to look for a smiling face in a crowd of frowning faces (in other words, to look for the positive). The practice made people more optimistic, not just in the moment, but in how they expected their own futures to unfold. It wasn’t just a mood boost, it was a real, cognitive shift in how they thought about their future.

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I was thinking about all of this earlier this week when I spoke on a panel about my experience negotiating the release of my aunt and uncle, who were taken on October 7th and held hostages in Gaza for months (left turn, I know, but stay with me). The other panelists were David Levinson, whose father Robert Levinson was taken almost 20 years ago in Iran and has since died in captivity. He remains the longest held American hostage in U.S. history. And Diane Foley, whose son, the conflict journalist Jim Foley, was held hostage and ultimately killed in Syria in 2012.

The last question to all three of us was ‘Where do you see hope?’

and as the only person on the panel whose family members came home alive, I was so impressed to discover that I was not the only optimist. Because we all said the same thing. We said we saw hope in each other, in the people listening to our stories that night and in the groundswell of love and support that came at us when things were at our worst. They did what we couldn’t – they imagined a future where our people came home. And then, for Diane and David, they imagined a future where Robert’s and David’s deaths weren’t in vain. Where their legacy was in helping thousands of people all over the world stay safe, and dozens of families get support when the unthinkable happens.

I think this all points to the same underlying thing. Optimism isn’t a feeling or a mood or a personality trait. It comes as you build the capacity to imagine a future that’s good. And when you can’t do that, you let people do it for you, until the nagging question swirling in your head isn’t ‘What if things just collapsed?’ but rather ‘What if, in the end, it all went right?’

To say I grew up lucky is a massive understatement. Great parents who stayed (and remain) together. A close-knit community in Rochester, NY. Good friends, good teachers – the picture of stability. A grandparent death in my teenage years that was a long time coming, so it was incredibly sad but not life altering. Otherwise, no major illnesses. No sudden movements. And then, something happened.

Before I was born, my parents lived in half of a house on Buckingham Street – they called it Buckingham Palace, which was of course a joke, as this place screamed ‘we’re just starting out.’ They took it over from a nice couple – B and R – who offered to leave a big swivel chair that had seen better days. It would be hard to move and wasn’t worth the trouble, so they asked if my parents – who were living on early career healthcare salaries – would like to keep it. My parents said yes.

Eventually, they reupholstered the chair and it came with them two kids and two houses later, where it became a staple of my childhood. Don’t underestimate the power of spinny chairs to entertain young kids for hours at a time.

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When I started first grade, I was new to the school – french braid in my hair and looking for friends.

That’s when I met K, cool even at 6, and we bonded immediately. She was one of the first people I was brave enough to invite over for a playdate and when she arrived my Dad answered the door, excited to meet my new friend. Imagine his surprise when he saw her parents – B and R from his Buckingham Palace days. “Hi!” I said to K, as our parents caught up. “I have a great spinny chair to play on – come see it.”

K and I were best friends from that day on. She was hilariously funny and frustratingly enigmatic. She was a person you wanted to pay attention to. She had the ingredients to become a Queen Bee, but she was too cool for that. Instead, she was popular but without the social responsibilities of someone who reigns. She wasn’t necessarily feared or beloved – but everyone respected the hell out of her, even the kids in the grades above us. She had the attitude of someone who had lived beyond her age. She wore pajama bottoms to school with these colorful knit clogs and she looked great.

She wasn’t always generous with compliments but she really believed in her friends. “I can’t wait until you get out of here,” she told me once, lamenting our small town life (that we both actually loved). “You’re going to do such big things.”

We left for college to start our new lives – me in Durham, North Carolina and her 30 minutes away in Geneseo, NY. College didn’t quite click for either of us at first, and we clung to each other over that, which in some ways kept us from finding the paths that we should have been finding.

In the spring of sophomore year she didn’t feel great.

She went to the health center where they brushed her off a few times before taking her seriously. To be fair, she was tired and a little off, but nothing crazy. College was hard on your body – it could have been anything.

But in fact it was cancer and when the tests came back, everything changed. She started chemo immediately and I ran out to buy headscarves for when she inevitably lost her hair. She was 19 years old and living through some Chicken Soup for the Soul kind of nightmare – the part before the lessons are learned, the part that just sucks. One night, she called me from the hospital and we talked for an hour. One of our friends had offered to shave her head in solidarity and she joked that the only thing worse than having cancer would be having to look at our friend bald the whole time too. But she was struggling. “My bones hurt,” she said, and I wondered what that would feel like. It didn’t make sense to me, but I could hear a new kind of pain in her voice.

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The next morning I woke up to 36 missed calls and the news that she’d died. Ten days from diagnosis to death – a one in a million series of horrifically unlikely turns. When I got home for the funeral her mom handed me a package with my name on the return address. It was the headscarves that I’d bought not one week before. The package was unopened – it didn’t even make it to her before she passed.

This was not just a tragedy, it was an ambush.

The first zag in what had thus far been a life of comfortable zigs. It became my entire identity for too long afterwards, but I just couldn’t figure out how to define myself in any other way.

There is some interesting research that says most of us carry three unconscious but fundamental assumptions about the world. First, overall, the world is a good place and true misfortune is the exception and not the rule. This includes the assumption that people are generally decent and kind. Second, that the world is meaningful. In other words, there is meaning behind much of what happens to who, and why, and we can control a lot of what happens to us through our own behavior choices. And third, that the self is worthy, which means that if we are moral, decent people who make the “right” choices and engage in the “right” behaviors, we earn some invulnerability against the world. We assume the really bad things won’t happen to us, which is why we’re always taken by surprise when they do.

Of course not everyone lives off of all of these assumptions all of the time. And intellectually, we know that these are not hard truths. But if you think about it, you’ll probably realize that in fact you do live according to some version of these core assumptions, even if they’re held loosely sometimes.

So if all of our other beliefs rest upon some version of these, it creates a worldview that a trauma like a sudden death at 19 years old completely shatters.

Which really messes with your brain because what happened is completely incompatible with reality as you have grown to know it. Through this lens, my identity shift, and how I became all about this event, makes sense. The cognitive dissonance led to a type of obsession – my brain trying to fit this twist into the plot that I’d inadvertently pre-written.

In this frame, unhealthy coping mechanisms become more understandable. Blaming yourself allows some control over the story – if there’s no one to blame then it really was just random. But if you are to blame then there is logic, even if it’s retroactive and inaccurate. Denial isn’t about burying what’s there, it’s about pacing. Adjusting, or finding your way back to the original assumptions takes time and effort. Our brains can only absorb so much.

In my case, part of my struggle came from the blessing of an easy childhood.

Because it turns out that there are cumulative benefits to some adversity. Research shows that there is a Goldilocks level of adversity that helps when the big stuff hits. People with some prior, manageable adversity reported better mental health outcomes than both those who had faced lots of adversity and those who had faced none. This makes sense – a lot of adversity will wear you down and make you less capable of handling the next big wrench that gets thrown your way. But a blank adversity slate like I had carries its own vulnerability. The first bad thing hits the hardest because you have no practice, no infrastructure, no mental model showing you that the suffering will end. Mentally and physiologically, you are totally unprepared. In fact, sometimes bodies treat an unexpected trauma like an injury even when the trauma itself isn’t physical. That’s how much it hurts – the pain can manifest in all forms.

Too much is too much and too little leaves you unprepared. But a dash of periodic and manageable adversity is like a vaccine. It introduces your mind and your body to some suffering and, in exchange, you get some preparedness and some fighting tips for next time. To be clear, I think a charmed childhood and adolescence is the best you can ask for and I wouldn’t want anything different. But there’s a reason this particular cut runs so deep.

Another reason has an official name – the reminiscence bump is the proven phenomenon that shows we remember things that happened between ages 15-30 more vividly than memories from other eras. These aren’t called formative years for nothing – this is the reason that the songs, films, loves and tragedies of that chapter persist for us emotionally and it’s not just because they were novel. It’s also because our brain literally etches memories during this period more deeply into our consciousness than it does others. Biologically, we are in peak encoding mode. So naturally, they can become an outsized part of who we are and how we see ourselves, even years later.

K died 21 years ago this month.

And while her death is no longer the defining moment of my life, it is still a part of me. In the years immediately following her death, I practically introduced myself to people as ‘hi-my-name-is-Hanna-and-my-best-friend-just-died.’ My identity felt singular and one dimensional – best friend of person who died. These were not easy years for me or the people around me. Yet in thinking about writing this piece, I realized I hadn’t told this story in years.

When does a thing stop being the defining story and morph into a meaningful chapter?

Six years after she died, I moved from New York to Boston and without realizing it, I stopped leading with this. K’s death didn’t become any less formative but somewhere along the way, it shifted from being a thing about me to a thing I could offer others. Because now I had the space and empathy to see someone else’s grief more deeply. Now I understood friendship to be something different than I had before – both because I’d lost it, and because I’d watched my own friends rise to the challenge that was my grieving self in a way that changed my perspective on what I could eventually give.

There is no ‘getting over’ the first bad thing. But 21 years later, I can see what this experience gave to me, instead of just what it took away.

There is this band in Washington DC, where I live, that is a bit of an institution.

They play 90s covers and their versatility is truly impressive – they’ll open with Pearl Jam, go straight into Backstreet Boys and close with Alanis. They are called White Ford Bronco after OJ’s getaway car and for those of us of a certain age, they play the songs we know all the words to. They play the hits, and the hits you forgot were hits. These are the songs of TRL, Casey Kasem’s countdown and – if you’re from Rochester, NY – 98 PXY. They are the ones you don’t even realize you know all the words to until you hear them and then it’s like this dormant songbook that lives inside of you wakes up and reminds you that while you can’t remember what day it is, you know every single word to Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star.’

A few weeks ago, I went to my third show in the last year and I swear there is something about this experience that feels almost life-affirming in the joy that it seems to bring every person in the crowd. Virtually everyone is singing and dancing together, jumping up and down and behaving in the unabashed way that most 40-somethings have left behind years ago. There is no self-consciousness, no performative karaoke and no trying-to-look-cool while dancing. There is just pure, unadulterated and deeply collective fun. As one of my friends put it, “Screaming the lyrics to ‘Zombie’ on a Friday night while dancing is self care.” And it made me realize that our definition of self care pays too much attention to the ‘self’, without thinking through what truly gives ‘care.’

I always feel a specific kind of high coming out of these shows – both a rush and a release that goes beyond just the power of music or the power of nostalgia. What is it about this experience that feels almost medicinal in how it soothes, uplifts and fulfills all at the same time?

Collective Effervescence

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim called this kind of experience “collective effervescence,” which is essentially being together in an ecstatic, bubbly, overflowing state that comes from a specific kind of shared experience. Durkheim says it is when a community shares a thought and/or participates in a shared action – according to him, it’s central to religious rituals. White Ford Bronco may not be a religion for me but I understand what he means. The ‘shared’ part of the concert experience is deeply-rooted, almost intimate, because we are synced not just physically, or lyrically, but culturally too – fluent in the language and feelings of the 90s.

So it’s not surprising that scientist Dacher Keltner found that collective effervescence actually triggers feelings of awe and of unity. Music in particular is a unifying force – when people listen to music together, their brains actually start to synchronize. It’s not just physical unity, it’s mental and physiological unity as well. It’s why during that concert I felt close not just to the friends I came with, but to the strangers around me too.

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A lot has been written about the anti-social century and the loneliness epidemic. By now, we know that social isolation carries the same mortality risks as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. So yeah, it’s bad. But what’s interesting to me is that alongside that thread of thinking, another has emerged with a vengeance: wellness as a solo sport. Wellness – the legit stuff (meditation, walks in nature), and the bullshit (supplements, detoxes) has grown into a $2 trillion behemoth that tells you that in order to improve yourself, you need to be by yourself. For some reason, we treat wellness as an individual project, when we know that social connection is the key to wellbeing.

Why? I have some theories.

For one, the wellness industry has exploded in part thanks to its spokespeople – influencers. And influencers are solo actors. It’s hard to promote a product as a group; it’s easy to sit at home in front of your iphone and record yourself in your red light mask. Second, the individualistic approach reflects our longtime American values. We are a DIY, lift yourself by your bootstraps culture so it’s not surprising that we’ve doubled down on individual optimization over systemic change. Finally, it’s easy to imagine that in recent years, as the world has felt even more unstable and uncertain, we’re attracted to the one thing that we can actually control: ourselves. So $2 trillion later, we’re doing everything we can to do just that.

Keltner has spent decades studying emotion, awe and wellbeing and he has another critique of this industry. Wellness has focused not just individually but also remedially. Wellness often tells us to look in – reduce our stress, calm ourselves down. Keltner says that’s not enough. We also need to look out – to each other. And, he says, we need to ask ourselves, “What are the big things that I need to care about and relate to and orient my life toward?”

Wellness and social isolation aren’t separate problems to solve – the latter is driving down the former. But the wellness industry is selling us solutions to the exact problem it’s making worse.

Back to White Ford Bronco.

One of Keltner’s findings that I found surprising is that the most common source of awe is other people. We find awe when we see people show courage, compassion, strength and resilience – what Keltner calls moral beauty. But we also feel awe when we experience something visceral and shared, even if it’s a little silly, like a 90s cover band. That’s because awe almost makes you shed your individualism. That feeling that you are separate from the person next to you, who is separate from the person next to them…all of that dissolves. When you stand in a room with a bunch of 40-somethings, most of them strangers, wearing a choker and belting out the Counting Crows, it does something that no box breaths or mouth tape or yoga class can do – it ignites a real, tangible feeling of togetherness. And that’s not only life-affirming and joyous, it’s also a relief. I am not alone. I am part of a bigger structure. I am small in the best possible way.

*The Hannalyst is going on spring break next week – see you the week of April 20th

The best therapist I ever had is the one who told me I didn’t need to come back.

A couple of years ago, I was dealing with a wild family situation – as high stakes and stressful as it was public. I knew it was impacting me and I had all of the questions that an emotionally in touch / eldest daughter / psychologist’s kid would have swirling in my head. Am I processing this the way I should be? Am I headed for an emotional breakdown? Am I traumatized and how is that going to show up later? The reality was that I felt ok, all things considered. But I knew I wasn’t doing much introspection and I worried that was a problem. So I got in touch with a therapist, determined to pre-manage my own mental health (did I mention that I am an eldest daughter?).

Essentially I told him that I felt ok, but a bunch of hard stuff is happening, so I should reflect and talk about it and process it with a professional…right? He listened. Said he appreciated the call. But ultimately he told me that no, that wasn’t the answer, at least not right now.

I was shocked, not just because he turned down my business, but because the world has always told me that introspection and self-reflection are signs of maturity, of intelligence and of leadership.

I didn’t come to that assumption in a vacuum.

The 1970s, dubbed the “Me decade” by Tom Wolfe saw a major cultural shift from the self-sacrifice, collective struggle orientation of the World War II era to the self-fulfillment and self-realization aspirations that characterized the 70s. The rise of one-on-one therapy and self-help came naturally and spread quickly – and with it the idea of introspection as the primary tool for personal growth. Critics like Wolfe panned this new ‘culture of narcissism’, while others theorized that for the first time in many years, people had the money, the time and the mental space to dwell on themselves. Either way, Let’s talk about Me became a cultural theme.

But in recent years, that quintessentially American individualistic streak has curdled into something a bit more obsessive and a bit more destructive – the all-consuming quest to understand and then optimize yourself. The democratization of data has given us the illusion of self-control – wear a ring, and check your health stats every morning. The science of longevity might be nascent (at best), but the industrial complex around it is growing. The yen for self-perfection seems especially strong.

And honestly, this is all pretty understandable. We’re in year 18(ish) of regular, unprecedented chaos at home and around the world. Great recessions and global pandemics and avoidable wars and insane presidents would make anyone yearn for some real, solid control. But absent the ability to do much of anything about all that stuff, we naturally look to the only thing that is within our power: ourselves.

Right now, it’s painful to look out. So why not look in?

But, it turns out, there is a right way and there is a wrong way to do the inner work. David Brooks introduced me to this concept in his latest piece, but the organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich did a major research program that proved it. Going in, she assumed that people who spent time examining themselves would both understand themselves better and be able to use that knowledge to improve their lives overall. Which is exactly what I also believed until now.

Instead, something else emerged. “To my astonishment,” says Eurich, “our data told the exact opposite story. The people who scored high on self-reflection were more stressed, depressed and anxious, less satisfied with their jobs and relationships, more self-absorbed, and they felt less in control of their lives. What’s more, these negative consequences seemed to increase the more they reflected.” (emphasis mine)

So just to recap: the more people self-reflected, the worse off they were. (!!)

Hers isn’t the only work to show this truth. There’s one study of the partners of people who died from AIDS – those who were introspective about things like how they would deal with life without a partner experienced an initial morale boost, but were more depressed a year later. There’s another of 14,000 students showing introspection is associated with low wellbeing.

All of this, she says, reveals the giant myth about self-awareness. Intuitively, it seems like the more we examine ourselves, the better we’ll know ourselves. But in reality, those two things have no correlation at all.

Perhaps the craziest stat I’ve come across on this topic, also from Eurich, is that 95% of people believe they’re self-aware, but only 10-15% actually are. So it’s not that we’re not trying to know ourselves better, it’s that we’re failing at the task.

And it’s not to say that introspection is uniformly bad. It’s more that – like with so many other things – we’re doing it wrong. Because there is a big difference between gaining actual insight from reflection and just ruminating. Ruminating – commonly known as “overthinking,” “going over things again and again without actually learning something,” or “driving yourself, your friends, your family and/or your therapist absolutely crazy” is where we get into trouble. But reflecting and gaining insight from it? That’s where the resilience really builds.

So how do you gain insight from your own experiences?

The answer, according to Eurich and many of her peers, is in the questions you ask yourself. We like to ask ourselves why? Why did I respond to that situation in that way? Why am I like this? Why did I fail when I thought I would succeed? But then, as Eurich says, our brain misleads us. Confirmation bias, recency bias and other shortcuts take us to the quickest, most plausible answers to these questions – which often aren’t the right ones. So we fail to learn.

Instead, we should ask ourselves what questions. What kind of person am I? What were the factors that led to me failing instead of succeeding? Research shows that with why questions, we tend to focus on rationalizing and justifying existing beliefs. With what questions, we stay open to new information, even when it’s negative or conflicts with what we already believe.

It’s like when a former boss told me I’d never make it in that industry. I spent weeks asking myself why she was right, instead of asking what, specifically, about me, about her and about that situation made her say it.

The what frame gives us some distance from ourselves that allows for a broader perspective – and the ability to learn and adapt from our experiences, instead of just explaining them to ourselves in a loop.

All of this research caught me by surprise – I realized how congealed my assumptions were: introspection is good, and it will make life better. But now that I see the distinction between the good kind and the bad, it makes complete sense. We all know people who are laser focused on ‘doing the work’ yet remain perpetually unfulfilled. We’ve all seen people who relentlessly self-reflect, yet remain tortured or depressed, even if their reflections make for entertaining or even profound material (see: writers, comedians, artists).

That therapist wasn’t telling me not to ever look inward.

But he pointed out that the things I was already doing were serving me well. And that introspection isn’t always what’s needed. Down the road, he said, that might change. But when it does, it won’t be about whether or not to examine myself. It will be about what I should be looking for when I do.

Last weekend, my family of Duke Blue Devil alums (myself included) got last minute tickets to the Duke-UConn Sweet Sixteen game on Sunday night. I’d say we are a relatively normal clan, but March Madness hits us hard. For example, we’re the kind of people that will work checking the score into a rehearsal dinner speech at a family wedding. This actually happened on Friday night – one of my cousins got married last weekend and let’s just say basketball came up a lot during the festivities.

So when Duke ended up winning against St. John’s on Friday, we all – including the bride and groom – changed our travel plans to stay in DC and go to Sunday’s game (ok fine – we’re not that normal). Simultaneously exhausted from wedding events and exhilarated by the tournament, we arrived about 20 minutes into the game to find Duke with a comfortable 20-point lead. By halftime, that lead had shrunk but only by a little bit. Blue Devils nationwide were feeling good. (Haters nationwide were feeling annoyed.)

And then the second half began. I don’t know what UConn’s coach told the players in the locker room, but they emerged a different team. In this moment, they were the underdogs, and you could feel that specific flavor of determination fuel their game.

Meanwhile, watching Duke was like seeing this effect in reverse. The team that had come in dominant kept acting like they had a 20-point lead, even as it was shrinking minute by minute. They weren’t coasting exactly, but their mindset had visibly changed. In the first half, they were playing to win. In the second half, they were playing not to lose.

Two different mindsets

This got me wondering about the psychology behind these two approaches. According to psychologist E. Tory Higgins, who has done a lot of work in this space, there are two fundamentally different ways that people are motivated towards their goals:

1. Promotion-focused: This is when you’re trying to achieve an ideal. In the best case scenario, what would I like to happen? is the question you’re asking and then you’re working backwards from there. In this mode, you’re more likely to take risks and to think bigger. You’re more entrepreneurial, more open to opportunities and generally more eager. You feel happy and joyful when things go well, and dejected when they don’t.

2. Prevention-focused: This is when you’re trying to avoid a loss. It’s not about an ideal – it’s What can I do to stay safe and secure? Not surprisingly, this mode is risk averse, cautious and generally more closed. Here, you try to simplify options, as opposed to generating possibilities. You feel calm and secure when things go right, and anxious when they go wrong.

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One way to think about that game is that Duke came in with a promotion-focused mindset. Ideally, they’d win the game and that’s what they were working towards. But with a sizable lead at halftime, their mindset subconsciously changed. Now it was about not letting go of that lead above everything else. It became about avoiding the loss rather than winning the game. Which leads to fewer risky plays and more conservative thinking. Less persistence through difficulty; more focus on protecting what was theirs (in this case, 20 additional points).

UConn on the other hand reconnected with their ideal – to win the game and move forward in the tournament. They took big bets, including the near half-court shot that launched them into the lead with one second left on the clock. And it paid off.

The same people, the same teams, but different ways of looking at the game. Which isn’t about failure or laziness on Duke’s part, or genius on UConn’s – instead, it was two natural psychological responses to a changing situation.*

We have become culturally prevention-focused

Nobody decided to play not to lose. It just happened, gradually, as the lead felt like something to protect rather than something to build on. I keep thinking about how that feels a little bit like what’s happened to us. Somewhere along the way, we as a culture shifted.

I’ve often wondered if the past handful of tumultuous years are what put us into this prevention-focused mode. But now I wonder if what happened first is that we got comfortable with our lead. For decades, America has been the ideal in so many ways – definitely not perfect, but a place where a lot of different kinds of people could build a genuinely good life. That was a pretty comfortable place to be. You might say we had a 20+ point lead. But as things got harder and more complicated, both at home and in the world, we lost sight of the ideal, and started focusing on protecting our old way of life. Even when it became clear that those systems weren’t serving us anymore.

These days, we’re playing not to lose.

We are working to avoid a climate catastrophe, to pull democracy back from the brink, to prevent AI from taking all our jobs or destroying the human race. We are anxiously hanging on to jobs that don’t fulfill us instead of taking the leap towards something that could be better. We get excited when politicians who aren’t criminals or narcissists get elected, instead of demanding the kinds of leaders we really need and deserve. I remember getting genuinely excited when Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her retirement from Congress and criticized Trump over the Epstein files. The bar is way too low. We are frantically trying to prevent loss at the expense of remembering the ideal.

And that’s a big problem because as psychologist Martin Seligman has shown, the skills of becoming happy turn out to be almost entirely different from the skills of not being sad, not being anxious, or not being angry. Getting to baseline is not enough. That’s simply surviving. To really grow and really succeed, we have to be able to thrive – to experience joy and fulfillment and true positive energy. We have to believe in the ideal. Because that’s when we’ll work to achieve it, instead of just functioning to avoid the worst.

Anthropic did a recent global study showing that in the emerging economies world, there is more excitement than fear about AI, while in the developed world there is more fear than excitement. And while there are justifications for both emotions, this is also emblematic of the problem. The underdogs look at big changes and see opportunities for what’s possible. We look at big changes and see threats to our current way of life. And all of that ignores the fact that we have a lot of agency over what happens to us. But we have to get to work.

We need some new, clear ideals.

We need a vision for the future that we can collectively work towards. We need leaders who see its possibility and can show us the way. There are glimmers of what that might look like. The abundance movement starts with a vision where everyone has an affordable place to live. AlphaFold is using AI to work towards a solution for all disease. These ideas are just two of many, and they aren’t just about naming the ideal – they have strategies and innovations designed to actually achieve them. Our problems today require that level of ambition, whether we’re ready for it or not. We need to play to win.

Promotion-focused and prevention-focused mindset aren’t universally good or bad. An entrepreneur benefits from a promotion-focused approach. A surgeon needs a prevention-focused one to do her job well. But as a culture, we’ve leaned too far in the prevention-focused direction at the exact moment when we could really use some promotion-focused thinking.

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Fortunately, these are not fixed traits

People, as individuals and as a collective, can change the way they respond to a situation. At the risk of alienating my entire family, I’m going to say that it was inspiring to watch UConn come out of that locker room after halftime a different team. They had remembered their ideal, and watching them work towards it was a lesson in what a mindset shift can do. Their plays were strong, their passes were clean and their momentum was palpable.

But the truth is, in that moment they didn’t have as much to lose. And that’s the rub. A prevention-focused mindset feels not just safe, but responsible, especially when you have something to lose. A job that’s tolerable. A relationship that works some of the time. A life that’s pretty good, if not what you really want. A future that’s bearable, if not exactly bright. These might not be perfect, but they are real things you could lose. Which is why a promotion-focused mindset can feel risky, especially during the moments when it’s most needed.

I don’t think we’ve lost our ideals, but we’ve forgotten them.

And in the meantime, we have internalized protectionism as a value – we’ve been running the same plays, with the same assumptions, even as our lead keeps slipping. Unfortunately, there is no halftime pause for us. There’s no moment of reflection to remember our ideal, and remind ourselves what’s possible.

But relentless optimism — the thing that a promotion-focused mindset depends on – used to be the most American thing there was. The deep belief that the future can be genuinely better, not just less bad. A fundamental orientation toward what is possible, rather than what is at risk. That was the ideal. And somewhere along the way, we forgot how important it is.

Remembering it is the key – that’s how we play to win.

*Admittedly, I think the Boozer twins – with their collective 42 points – were doing their best to maintain a promotion-focused mindset the entire time.

Roughly 5-and-a-half years ago, I went to a tarot card reader named Dante. No judgement to the believers out there, but this is not my usual tactic for trying to guess what’s coming. Still, I’d read about this guy and given a reading to my sister as an expensive-but-entertaining gift. She was so impressed that she gifted one back to me.

Which is how I found myself sitting in a small office in a New York City walk-up, waiting for the man himself. Like Rihanna or Sting, Dante had no last name to speak of and, similarly, an attitude and (according to him) a reputation that didn’t require one. He demanded that you bring a scribe because “you can’t record this and you’re going to want to remember every word”. So my sister sat with me, wedged in the corner, legal pad in hand, ready to take notes on my future.

I laughed nervously and, because I couldn’t help myself, made a joke about my own skepticism. Dante was not amused, but rather than get offended, he simply did not seem to care at all. Instead, he looked at me with just a tinge of pity, like I had no idea what was coming – and this was before he started flipping over the cards.

I have always assumed that many psychics, fortune tellers, tarot readers and the like have a habit of making their customers feel good by the end of the reading. This, I figured, is just smart business. But Dante was loyal to the cards. And the cards weren’t great.

The first thing he told me was that I was pregnant with a boy – news to me and I was very skeptical (to my knowledge, I wasn’t even pregnant). But I should have enjoyed that piece of news when I got it because it was pretty much the only good one he gave me.

One by one he flipped over the cards and while he didn’t look anguished (he’s a professional, after all), he definitely looked worried. “Ultimately,” he said in a not particularly comforting tone, “you’ll be ok. But the next few years are going to be challenging to say the least.” Details were vague but the overall prognosis was clear: prepare yourself because some things are coming.

Afterwards, I was honestly kindof pissed.

“What am I supposed to do with that?” I asked my sister. She offered me all the notes she’d taken, but I didn’t want them. I felt annoyed that my future didn’t look brighter (at least to Dante), anxious that he might be right and embarrassed that I had any anxiety (this stuff is BS, right? RIGHT?!).

And then I started spiraling thinking: how do I prepare for the worst? Or even just the bad? Is it helpful to know that it’s coming? Do I wish I had more details or fewer?

One reason this reading spiked some anxiety is that, for my brain, it was the worst of all worlds. Research shows that knowing something is coming – even if it’s bad – is less stressful than not knowing. And this makes sense – as one of the authors says, “When applying for a job, you’ll probably feel more relaxed if you think it’s a long shot or if you’re confident that it’s in the bag.” It’s the uncertainty that gets us. And it’s why I felt stressed at what I heard, even though I didn’t really believe in the credibility of tarot card readings in the first place.

The reality is we’re all walking around with some version of Dante’s reading all the time – life brings trauma and adversity, that’s just a fact. We know it’s coming, but we usually don’t know what, when or how. My discomfort and anxiety was less about suddenly believing in tarot cards and more about tangibly facing that subconscious reality I knew was true all along. We’re all living with uncertainty – and the knowledge that it’s possible the worst (but also the best) is yet to come.

The question is: What do we do with that?

For years, conventional wisdom said that resilience in the face of serious adversity or traumatic events was rare. Maybe you get there, but it takes time, interventions, therapy, treatments. But what if that’s not always the case? What if it’s not even the norm?

What if we’re more resilient than we think?

That’s what Columbia psychologist George Bonnano says. He and his colleagues did a meta-analysis of 54 studies looking at individuals’ responses in the wake of some really tough stuff, like injury, bereavement, natural disaster, and combat experience. He found that 65% of people showed a trajectory of few or no symptoms of psychopathology related to the event. In other words, instead of becoming traumatized, the majority responded with resilience.

So if resilience – for many of us – is the default setting, what does preparation actually get us?

I think it comes in the definition of preparation. One way to “prepare” is to brace for something bad. Run through scenarios so we’ve covered every contingency we can think of. But this is both mentally taxing, and pretty unhelpful. Especially for the anxious among us, the vast majority of bad scenarios we imagine never come to fruition. So we’re not so much prepared as we are exhausted.

But another way is to build the infrastructure that you’ll need when the hard stuff comes. It’s to spend your energy building a resilient life – maintaining optimism (not just that the future will be better, but that you have agency to help make that happen), reducing ambiguity where you can and cultivating a strong support system.

Because the other thing that Bonnano’s research showed is that it’s very, very hard to tell who is going to fall into the 65% who show resilience in the face of trauma – and who isn’t. You don’t really know how you’re going to react when sh*t hits the fan until it happens. But building that infrastructure makes it more likely you’ll fall into that resilient majority when it does. And for those who don’t — the work of healing, whether that’s therapy or medication or time or all three, is just as real and just as valid a path through.

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Directionally, Dante wasn’t wrong about what was coming.

In a series of freak medical incidents, my husband and I collectively endured 12 surgeries in two years. Later, my family found itself in the middle of an unimaginable personal – and geopolitical – crisis. Also, there was a global pandemic.

And yet in hindsight I can see that in each of these cases:

It happened, I navigated through it, it eventually passed, I survived.

You cannot prepare for the worst.

You can be the kind of person who finds your way through it and comes out the other side. But doing that won’t be the result of a tarot card reading – it’ll be because of what you’ve built for yourself, over time.

It also helps to remember that ‘the worst’ is only ever part of the story. That period for me was incredibly hard (understatement). But it wasn’t all bad.

About 8.5 months after my reading with Dante, I gave birth to a baby boy.