The article deals with the psychology of lost causes.
And just to add to the merriment, we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Marcel Proust’s work.
How apropos.
Ah! is that a huge yawn, I just heard?
Now, there are some readers who will claim that it feels like an entire century does pass for them just making it through the first paragraph of the French author’s greatest accomplishment.
Swann’s Way is the first volume in the cycle-In Search of Lost Time or better known as Remembrance of Things Past.
I emailed The New York Times article titled, A Century of Proust, to a friend, recently.
You want me to read Proust at my advanced age, why I don’t even buy green bananas anymore, he retorted.
Proust’s suffering has no limits, especially if it is erotic in nature.
Rapture for some.
Pure agony for others.
After all, perception is everything. One of my favorite anecdotes about writing comes from the playwright Abe Burrows, who was having a discussion with other writers concerning comedy when he told them, Listen there are a lot of ways to look at King Lear, some people think it’s a play about a housing shortage.
Most of us know what it’s like to stay in a job or a relationship after it’s stopped being satisfying, or to take on a project that’s too big and be reluctant to admit it.
I present the following scenario.
Proust as a CEO.
Proust as The Chairman of the Board.
They are having their annual stockholders meeting.
The corporation must cut its losses.Now, we know our narrator of Remembrance of Things Past does not deal well with loss.
And apparently, this (financial) loss has been going on for some time.
Oy vey!
We know how badly our Marcel deals with the passage of time.
Walter Benjamin in a 1929 essay reveals that there is no individual suffering, and no social injustice, however, glaring, against which Proust would have protested with a candid No or an intrepid But Wait. Quite the opposite: we find him in a profound acceptance of the world, just as it is, even its saddest and most bestial manifestations.
I can see it now, Chairman Proust exercising his authority while sipping a cup of tea and proclaiming the meeting to be adjourned till next week and please ask the caterer to remember my favorite biscuits the next time.
Then to a person who does not know when to quit can be enormous. In Economics, it’s known as sunk cost fallacy, though the costs are more than financial and there are several powerful, largely unconscious psychological forces at work.
Isn’t suffering noble?
Gopnik fondly recalls; Swann whose tragedy in love does not diminish our admiration for his tact, his delicacy, his essential kindness, and his readiness to make himself look shallow in order to avoid betraying a friend.Sigh.
Whatever happened to CLASS?
There are several powerful, largely unconscious forces at work and we may throw good money after bad.
They are the years you spent training for a profession you hate. They are the thousands of dollars you spend on decorating your living room, only to find that you hate living in it. It just doesn’t make any sense.
An ugly living room’s an ugly living room no matter how much money you spent making it so.
And when it comes to love?
We waste time in dead-end relationships because we are unable to see any alternatives or we cannot admit our failures to friends and family but mostly to ourselves.
How could something that we felt was so right go so terribly wrong?
We have an overwhelming aversion to sunk costs.
And in time we let go and see the foolishness of our ways.
The morning comes and with it the truth that we have tried so hard to hide from.
Because his mind, anxious to admire the richness of invention that life shows, and incapable of facing a difficult problem for any length of time, such as deciding what was most wished for, came to the conclusion that the sufferings through which he had passed that evening, and the pleasures, as yet unsuspected, which were already germinating there—the exact balance between which was too difficult to establish—were linked by a sort of concatenation of necessity.
When we see our goals in terms of what we can gain, rather than what we might lose, we are more likely to see a doomed endeavor for what it is.
Once you’ve realized that you probably won’t succeed, or that you are unhappy with the results it shouldn’t matter how much time and effort you’ve already put into something.
I will let M ; have the final words on this subject.
To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type.
I think I am going to rearrange the furniture in my living room, the sofa really never belonged against that wall, anyway.
Talk to ya, later.
Heidi Grant Halvorson is the author of : Focus: Use different ways of seeing the world for success and influence.
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