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A note to the reader

I wrote this book because of a gap I kept finding and could not close.

We are told, reasonably enough, to look at things more closely: at what frightens us, at what we are angry about, at what we expect from other people and what we owe them. There is good sense in that, and better evidence behind some of it than you might expect.

What I kept running into was something else. You can find out a great deal about one of these situations and still not know what the understanding is for.

The nine chapters that follow begin with ordinary situations and try to examine them without deciding in advance what they are supposed to prove. Where evidence can help, I have used it, and said how far it reaches. Where an attractive explanation fails, I have tried not to keep it merely because it would make for a better ending. Where I could not settle something, I have said so.

This is not an argument against thinking, effort, courage, discipline, care, or trying to make a life better. Nor is uncertainty being offered here as a wiser answer to everything.

What I hope to do is narrower: to take a few ordinary questions seriously enough not to promise more from the answers than the answers can bear.

We can see where that leaves us.

Chapter One

The Four Days

There is a kind of dread that is embarrassing to admit to, because the thing being dreaded sounds so small when you say it out loud.

Something is coming up this week. A conversation, probably. It might be a phone call, or a message you have to answer, or a meeting where you will finally have to say the thing you have decided to say. Nobody is going to be hurt. Described to another person it would take about nine words and sound like nothing much.

And it has been sitting on you for four days.

You have rehearsed it. Not once: you have run it several times, trying out different openings, and at some point you began supplying the other person's replies, which is how you discovered that in two of the versions it goes badly. You have noticed yourself checking whether it might be postponed. When something did get moved, the relief lasted about forty seconds before it curdled, because now the thing is further away and still coming, and you have more days of this rather than fewer. You are aware, while all of this is going on, that you are being ridiculous. The awareness does not help. It runs alongside everything else, commenting.

What makes this genuinely confusing, rather than merely tiresome, is that you have evidence about yourself that points the other way. You hold down work that other people depend on. You make decisions with consequences and you do not need to be talked through them. There are things you deal with routinely that would have frightened you at twenty and now barely register, and if someone asked you to list them you would struggle, because they have become invisible in the way that competence does. None of that is in question. It is simply not available. It sits in another part of your life entirely and declines to come when called.

So the two facts lie next to each other and refuse to resolve. You can carry the responsibilities. You cannot send the email. And because they will not resolve, a third thing starts up underneath them, which is the part nobody mentions: a suspicion that the first fact is somehow the less reliable of the two. That the competence is circumstantial. That if people could see how much of your week this is taking, they would revise their view, and the revision would be the accurate one.

Almost everyone has some version of this and hardly anyone says it out loud, because saying it requires explaining why a small thing is large, and the explanation always makes it sound smaller than it feels.