I’d go to a party: heads I’d have fun and feel connected, tails I’d feel even more lonely and get too drunk. I’d go to the gym: heads I’d break a personal best, tails I’d pass out during a lift. I’d go on dates: heads I’d enter a strange world of obsession, tails I’d feel more passion for the bar’s interior design than for the guy sitting across from me. So much of life seemed like flipping coins. Each day required complete submission to the odd laws of probability.
Naturally, I decided I would simply learn these laws. I got degrees in probability and statistics. Naturally, my understanding of math did little for my understanding of life.
I would approach life’s problems by trying to understand the laws governing them. If I could do that, I could engineer its coin-flip events. I could make its outcomes more favorable. Landing heads, whatever that happened to be, would make me happy. I wanted to maximize the probability of landing heads.
So I would ask for guest lists at the parties I attended. I would sum my knowledge about each person to arrive at the probability I would enjoy the party and that the party would enjoy me. I compared this estimate to the probability I would enjoy just staying home and reading a book instead (for this, I had a very precise estimate. It was high). I would make whatever decision had the lowest probability of disappointment.
At the the gym, I would research supplements and fascia and what stretching actually does (I’m not sure anyone is sure). I’d read anatomy textbooks and sets of online flashcards made by physical therapy students. If I learned enough, maybe I could re-engineer my own body. My designs got further than creatine and foam rolling, but thankfully not as far as anabolics.
As for love, I wanted to fall in it. Naturally, I studied the subject. I’d sit in bars and restaurants alone and study the couples. I’d download pdfs for libraries worth of books on close relationships. I acquired almost as much academic knowledge of love as the leading researchers in the field (there isn’t much of one. For some reason, the academic discipline of psychology doesn’t find this aspect of the human experience worthy of much investigation.) I pored over blueprints for what healthy relationships might feel like. I had to study my way into emotion. I had to think my way into feeling.
Things did get better. The engineering worked. Probabilities of heads went up. I went on fewer dates where I felt nothing. I lifted heavier. I had more fun at parties.
But always, eventually, I’d go to a party and I’d meet someone new and I’d ask how they knew the host and what they were most excited for on their next vacation, but these answers wouldn’t add up to a person. They would barely sum to an outline of a person. On these dismal evenings, it felt like the only thing I could calculate was distance. And so I’d sip my drink and I’d nod and I’d slide the lead beads on my abacus and I’d tally my lonelinesses.
And always, eventually, there would be a day where my muscles would fail halfway through a set of presses. Always, eventually, there would be a date with a carefully vetted man who fails to ask me a single question about myself. More alarmingly, this man also does not ask a single question about the world, or about himself. I leave hollowed and disappointed. Tails kept coming up, despite my efforts.
I took every one of these disappointments as a sign of personal failure. Each one reflected my imperfect knowledge of the world, of other people, of myself. Disappointment reflected only my inadequate study and imperfect designs. Disappointment reflected avoidable failure.
I thought of life as an engineering problem. The goal was to construct the best coin flip, the best life, possible. The goal was minimize the probability of disappointment. The goal was to chance tails as infrequently as possible. This becomes a very cold and sad game.
When tails did show up, when failure and disappointment rudely landed? I had to either work harder or care less. At first I chose the former. I worked until I frayed like worn parts in a faulty machine. Eventually my parts failed entirely. My only option then was to care less. I’d care less in order to risk less disappointment. So I cared less about school, less about parties, less about myself, less about other people, less about everything worth caring about. I cared about nothing. I cared for nothing. One cheeky doctor called this “depression.”
Depression was generous enough to offer me a lot of time, but the catch was that this newfound time could be spent only one way: listlessly in my bedroom. In this room I had not much to do except ruminate on all of the disappointments in my life. And boy did depression and I love to ruminate. Most of all, we loved to ruminate on the vexingly still-tailed coins that had landed us here. These ruminations on failure and disappointment went on for many months.
But one morning sunlight fell from my bedroom window onto my desk and glanced off the side of a mug full of mold in an unusual way. My ruminations were knocked from their familiar ruts. Instead, I wondered what might have happened if I had succeeded in my designs of avoiding disappointment and failure? What if lifts held no surprise or challenge; if parties held no mystery or intrigue; if love held no unknowable otherness? It seemed hard to care about these neutered things at all. Without the chance of disappointment, these seemed like different games entirely.
As a child I was taught that disappointment was caused by failure. And I was taught that if I failed, I was to learn from my mistakes, so that they would never happen again.
I now understand this is impossible. I got older and I failed and failed and tried to learn. Disappointment and failure seemed unavoidable. I fell in love and failed out of love. My GPA fell like the weights I failed to lift. Like my parents taught me, I tried to learn from my mistakes. I learned that I can learn from failure, sure. But I can never learn so much about it that I can eliminate the possibility of it.
Mostly, though, I came to understand that disappointment is born from caring, not from failure. To be disappointed is not to have failed.
Playing at a life with no chance of disappointment or failure is not playing at much all. At best, it’s playing at an artificial little game constructed inside one’s own head.
I no longer care much about those. I want to play at the real one. I want to lose at the real one.
So I sidle up to the poker table. I tell all of this to the dealer. He smiles and says Lucky you.
I’m reminded of what Ron Funches said about getting divorced... “I successfully graduated from my first marriage”.
What helps me when I get anxious and ruminate-y about all the mistakes I’ve made is forgiving myself. I take a deep breath and say “I forgive you” and try to change the topic in my own mind. It’s not a silver bullet, and it’s not like I just do it once and then I’m cured. I have to do this a lot. But I do find that it lifts a little of the weight of shame and grief, helps me stand up a little straighter, and out me in a more compassionate and kinder frame of mind.
Thank you for sharing this essay; I recognized a lot of myself in it.
"Playing at a life with no chance of disappointment or failure is not playing at much all. At best, it’s playing at an artificial little game constructed inside one’s own head.
I no longer care much about those. I want to play at the real one. I want to lose at the real one."
This one feels like it was unearthed straight from the heart <3.