Why Can’t You Just Deal with It?

Why can’t you just deal with it? It’s a question you can ask yourself in bed at night, or in the mirror the next morning. Procrastination is one thing: we’ve all put off writing thank-you notes or responding to e-mails and survived with our dignity intact. Not dealing with it is different. It’s what we experience when a lot is being asked of us and we’re not rising to the occasion. The issue isn’t procrastination—you’re trying!—but defeat. There’s a lot I’m not dealing with right now, which I won’t get into, so as not to freak myself out. But let’s imagine that a well-meaning hypothetical person—call him J—needs to make a difficult medical decision on behalf of an incapacitated older relative. Should the relative be subjected to an optional, arduous procedure that will be deeply unpleasant but possibly beneficial in the long term? Or should the not-inconsiderable risks of the procedure serve as justification for forgoing it? Having consulted with a number of doctors, J is stuck; there are many possible next steps, including seeking further opinions, or deciding definitively not to proceed. For now, the situation hangs in midair, undealt with, like a bomb that’s soon to land. “It’s a waste of time and energy to keep thinking about something that you make no progress on,” the to-do guru David Allen writes, in his productivity opus “Getting Things Done.” Accordingly, the best course of action is to find some small way of moving forward, no matter how incremental it may seem. Yet our most oppressive problems seem to resist this kind of measured, sensible approach. Right or wrong, we feel that something above and beyond is required. You can’t retake France from the Nazis by launching little operations here and there; you need D Day. You can’t untie a Gordian knot by tugging a little on random bits of string; you need to identify and yank on the most important loops in just the right sequence. According to some versions of the legend, Alexander the Great gave up on untying the knot and just cut through it with his sword. But, in real life, that’s rarely a viable plan; we have to keep poking and prodding our knottiest problems. When we find that we lack the fortitude to continue, we have no choice but to admit that we’re failing to deal. Emotions deepen the complexity. If that home office you need to transform into a nursery is where you work on your personal projects—your novel, your songs, your code—then the prospect of emptying it might make you not just wistful but afraid. Practical questions (should you throw out your old files, or scan them?) can take on existential weight (will parenthood mean the end of your personal life?). You can fall into a kind of affective spiral, in which you can’t deal with a problem because you feel bad, and you feel bad because you can’t deal. I sometimes break out of these loops by imagining my future self telling the story of how I persevered. “I was sad when I was doing it,” I’ll someday say, “but in the end it was fine.” A saving grace of emotional life is that feelings fade. What you build today will still exist a year from now, and what you feel won’t. Recently, like a typical forty-five-year-old man, I was in the gym, trying to best my personal record in the deadlift. Matt, a trainer I see every few weeks, had suggested that I put far more weight on the bar than usual, and when I tried to move it, it didn’t even budge. “Just keep working,” he said. “Use sustained effort. Keep going and it will lift.” I braced myself, gripped the bar, and pushed against the ground with my legs for two seconds, then three, then four, without result—until suddenly, as if by magic, the bar came off the ground, and the lift was complete. Ever since, I’ve thought of sustained effort as a particular way of dealing with a problem. I don’t know what was happening while I was trying to lift the bar but couldn’t; perhaps it took time to get through what’s sometimes called the “sticking point” of the lift, the position at which it’s most difficult. Many problems require long periods of sustained and seemingly fruitless effort. A painter may have to waste a lot of canvas before she starts making the paintings she wants; similarly, someone may have to hold a lot of repetitive conversations with medical specialists before he learns what he needs to know. Maybe, when we say that we’re not dealing with it, what we really mean is that we’re not used to failing for so long. Actually, we are dealing with it—but slowly. Is akrasia real? Does it make sense to say that you decided to do one thing but did another? Or have you simply decided to do the thing you actually did? The philosopher Donald Davidson argued that akrasia often results from the tension between our smaller-scale judgments and our “all things considered” conclusions. On a small scale, we might know that cake is bad for us and decide that we won’t eat anymore; on a larger scale, it’s the holidays, and your mother baked the cake, and you’ve had a hard December, and so, all things considered, a second slice sounds good. It’s not that your will is weak but that you’ve taken a wider view. A version of this dynamic may explain why we can’t deal with our biggest problems. Hamlet, famously, vows revenge on his uncle, Claudius, for the murder of his father—but then he dithers, delays, and generally goes crazy, only killing Claudius at the very end of Shakespeare’s longest play. Literary scholars have written essay after essay remarking on Hamlet’s delay, and he has been widely understood as a flawed person, too melancholy and intellectual to do what he’s decided to do. Yet, arguably, this is a bizarre view. Yes, in a narrow sense, Hamlet has concluded that he needs to kill his uncle—but in a broader, “all things considered” sense he’s reluctant to become a killer himself. This is an entirely sane way of behaving; it’s how we ourselves would hope to behave. It’s only within the confines of a revenge thriller that Hamlet’s actions seem odd. “Hamlet” holds two lessons for those of us who are struggling to deal. First, we might have good, or at least defensible, reasons for not getting a move on; if we can’t articulate them, that could be because we’re following a script that’s too constraining. (It’s fine to question the script—is that year-old report still necessary?) Second, it’s possible that, in order to deal, we need to change in ways we might appropriately resist. Dealing often requires toughness, even a kind of callousness. Years ago, I taught in a master’s program, and one of my students—a colonel in charge of thousands of soldiers—told me that, in his view, leaders weren’t much smarter than everyone else; instead, they were willing to make decisions under conditions that others found paralyzing and able to accept the consequences of those decisions, good or bad. So throw out those movie posters! Junk those files! Thrust your sword through that curtain! If it doesn’t work out, at least you made the call. Telling someone to “deal with it” like this only works when you don’t actually care whether they do so. But there’s another sense of dealing with things, which centers on a give-and-take. When we say that a salesman excels at dealing with customers, that a teacher is good at dealing with kids, or that a politician knows how to deal with her enemies, we mean that they adroitly handle the thorny peculiarities of other individuals. So maybe, when a problem needs to be dealt with, it’s almost as though it’s an individual, too. Ultimately, dealing with difficult things requires getting to know them. It can be hard to really wrap yourself around a quirky and recalcitrant problem; it’s a little like hugging in winter, when people wear big coats and seem to have a lot in their pockets. You often have to contort yourself into an awkward embrace. And embracing something briefly won’t help you really deal with it; you have to stay there, settling in. You need nuance, persistence, flexibility, firmness, attention to detail—almost a love of the problem. You’ll have to become old friends before you can say goodbye. ♦