I have a weird relationship with onion soup. More specifically, with onion soup bowls.
I spent a summer washing dishes at a fine dining restaurant during my high school years in Indiana. It was kind of a miserable job, but obviously there are many worse positions. Dishwasher is probably the lowest role in the kitchen, it is clearly the dirtiest, and is far away from paying customers. Although it is characterized as a “low skill,” the overall role does takes skill, and the processing speed between newbies and experienced dish monkeys is enormous. The dishwasher is responsible for turning chaos into order, quickly and efficiently. In addition to prepping dishes for the Hobart industrial dishwasher, you have to sort the clean dishes/glasses/flatware and return them to their stations. Good dishwashers have a process orientation, getting behind (“in the weeds”) is a bad place to be, but since the crush (peak activity) is always a challenge, you are always flirting with disaster.
In the US, onion soup generally comes with a thick layer of cheese thrown on top and then char broiled before serving. Burned cheese on soup crocks is impossible for industrial dishwashers to remove — so you have to hand prep / scrape that crap off — but that slows down the overall process. If you waste enough time on one or two onion soup nightmares, you can quickly find yourself backed up, heading into the weeds. So when I would get a particularly evil amount of encrusted cheese on a bowl, I used to ‘accidentally’ drop it into the trash — the ends justifying the means — and press on, keeping my head above water. Decades later, sometimes I feel both guilty and naughty when I order onion soup — but I sympathetically try to scrape off the worst bits of cheese before my bowl is cleared, aware of the potential misery I have just created.
Dishwashing is very low status — one is literally “clean up” — I tended to lock up because all the higher status employees would leave long before my work was done, and I smelled pretty funky when I was finished. I wouldn’t say I was miserable, but it definitely gave me the ambition to aim for higher status / more enjoyable jobs — this was the primary narrative I held, that this would be the ‘worst’ job I ever had, and I’d work hard to get jobs where value-added intelligence was the determining factor, rather than the willingness to take on dirty physical jobs.
The following summer I was ‘promoted’ to prep cook, where most of the tasks were almost fun, except outliers like shelling and deveining large numbers of frozen shrimp. Since the dishwashers toiled nearby, we would chat during down time — and I felt the improvement in role more acutely (but I never revealed my dark secret about the onion bowls). With the move, I had progressed from ‘usually miserable’ and low paid to “sometimes miserable” and slightly better paid (and definitely cleaner) — thereby partly validating my coping narrative of onwards and upwards.
The Parameters of Recoverable Misery
Not all misery is created equal, of course. Mostly what I aim to address here runs from temporary unexpected misery to finite medium term miserableness, which share the characteristic of recoverability – no permanent physical or mental damage (PTSD for example), other than perhaps one’s sense of pride or self-worth.
One micro example of ‘misery’ are those “bored” moments when one has nothing to do — waiting for someone, or something to happen — nowadays the common antidote is to pull out a smartphone and scroll through social media or TikTok/YouTube, rather than sit quietly with one’s thoughts, or observe the surroundings. I continue to find it funny that we require constant stimulation in our daily / working lives, and yet often desire nothing more than to veg out on vacation? Since it’s the winter travel season, sudden flight cancellations or long delays are other common examples of miseries which can benefit from reframing.
The outer bound of my scope is a frequent one: a job (or a boss) which is less than inspiring, where a variety of factors contribute to one’s sense of misery. I’m of the strong view that many of the jobs we do early in our career are both miserable and formative, but much depends on the narrative adopted.
Later on, certain life changes, like losing a job, breakups and divorces, can be fertile areas for both misery and reframing narratives.
Long term non-recoverable misery, like acute emphysema, or the many kinds of abuse – is beyond my scope. That said, Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, one of my most frequently recommended (short) books, would probably suggest that recovery from even some of the deepest miseries can be possible, with the appropriate mindset (and a little good fortune). I’ve sometimes thought about coping mechanisms for solitary confinement (as a POW, for instance) — to me it seems like recasting the narrative as a meditation retreat could be useful — what better way to best your captors but by attaining nirvana via their punishment?
But rather than try to coach people out of concentration or POW camps, I’ll focus on what I believe are more tractable situations, especially since there has been a narrative trend that younger generations are turning into complete snowflakes, with little tolerance for outcomes they don’t desire.
I can think of three parameters, but am not ruling out others:
There’s a visible end point — it’s not a permanent situation
It primarily affects only yourself
No permanent damage (physical or mental)
Early miseries: an example
Although my childhood was quite a happy one, I did spend one year in New Jersey at a public school when I was fairly constantly bullied — largely by some ‘white trash’ brothers, but also by a Neanderthal who fancied himself the school’s Tony Soprano — both sides had no affection for the kids of academics like me. My reaction to the brothers was to steer as clear as possible, and sit right behind the bus driver on our way to school — Tony’s MO was the surprise attack, which was much more difficult to defend — but contributed to a high level of threat awareness bordering on paranoia. At the time I was too young to understand the idea of reframing — I was too busy figuring out a way to survive, so any day where I avoided the thugs was a positive one. Looking back at that time now, it doesn’t seem like a big deal — I knew it was going to end (I was only there for one year) and other than me, it didn’t really affect anyone else.
Reframing methods
Rather than wallowing in a mire of immediate misery, most reframing methods are some variation of a new narrative, that require a bit of a third person perspective, rather than a first person “poor me” narrative. For the most part, this is an exercise of telling the present story from a future perspective. Some examples (I’m sure there are many more):
ESCAPE: “I was in this miserable situation, but I managed to reverse it by doing (X), channeling my inner MacGyver.” There is always an appetite for the unlikely reversal story, lemonade from lemons.
ANTI-FRAGILITY: “The situation was unfortunate but I’m a survivor and it didn’t bother me like most people; my anti-fragility was tested (again) and I passed.” In this sense you want to detail exactly how bad it was (flying cockroaches! slime!) – which would have devastated lesser souls. In the vein of Nietzche: ‘what does not kill me makes me stronger’
DEVELOPMENT: “I used this negative experience to redouble my positive efforts to progress to a new stage (so I would never be in that situation again)”
ANALOGY: “People I admire all have endured these episodes, usually in far worse situations, and some have bounced back even stronger.” Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize, an Oscar, a Primetime Emmy, and a Grammy after ‘losing’ the controversial 2000 US Presidential election. In the arts: the Count of Monte Cristo, The Shawshank Redemption, etc. are fine sources of inspiration, as is Lisbeth Salander.
RELIGIOUS: From the Christian parable of Job, to Buddhism, where desire and ignorance are the fundamental sources of various kinds of suffering, organized religions have a wide range of perspectives which address temporal misery.
GAMIFICATION: “Let me turn this into a kind of game.” Focus on micro-miseries and count them, guess how many you will endure. Develop a point system when there are a variety of unequal miseries. Award yourself points for avoiding / enduring / escaping.
PRE-POSITIONING: many miseries are more or less predictable — flight delays and natural disasters, for instance — having a combination of equipment (MacGuyver’s Swiss army knife, duct tape, and other useful items) as well as various skills can enable Houdini-like escapes if one is thoughtful enough to prepare in advance. While living in earthquake-prone Tokyo, I got used to having bug-out bags ready — hopefully I’ll never use one, but if I need to, they will lessen my misery. Even for jobs we like, it’s not a bad idea to passively maintain a set of options in case one’s tenure unexpectedly ends. This strategy is not recommended for romantic relationships, however, because it can become misery-additive.
LEARNING: periods of extended miserableness can be quite diverting, by paying close attention to the behavior and characteristics of the people, protocols, and ecosystem. In fact, the greater the detail you can recall, the more likely it becomes useful in the future. Truly understanding the mindset of very different people is a highly useful skill. One of my former (not direct) bosses annoyed me so much that I made extensive notes on his quirks – with the happy plan that one day I will create a truly dislikable character using him as a template as my revenge.
MICRO-AGGRESSIONS: like my onion soup bowl fatalities, sometimes you can create coping mechanisms which aren’t really damaging, but give you a little pleasure in active rebellion. Spitting in your boss’ coffee is another (not-recommended) example.
USE A COACH: at a higher level, talking through one’s current miseries with someone with a broader perspective can bring any of these reframing strategies into play. The process of explaining it to someone with a range of experience can often catalyze the formation of a new more positive and hopeful narrative.
Overall, the ability to reframe and deal with unfortunate circumstances can be characterized by the quality of resilience. The opposite of that, in my view, is whining — and we all know people whose first reaction to anything not going their way is to whine, which automatically implies a certain narcissistic narrative, and more importantly, slightly defeatist.
There is a spectrum, of course, of appropriate responses — not all misfortunes should be dealt with passively, there are plenty of egregious ills for which a strong complaint or arrest warrant is entirely appropriate. But whining is not that — whining is a mindset where the blanket first line of defense is a good passive aggressive whine. It is a sad sign of a pre-Copernican view of the universe, where everything revolves around the self, and expectations for outcomes are unreasonably high.
There is more I might say about the whining mindset but in the spirit of keeping things positive I will just express my opinion that life is too short to be surrounded by whiners. I have yet to find an antidote for this lamentable condition, although I have a tentative hypothesis for what brings about this phenomenon.
Career-related misery
My first full-time job, working as a semi-bilingual grunt for the International Sales group of a non-competitive floppy disk drive manufacturer in Tokyo, was a means to an end — I wanted to be in Japan to pursue a relationship with the woman who would happily become my wife (and later, even more happily, my ex-wife). Now that I think back on those days, it was kind of a perfect miserable first job — since I didn’t provide much value myself, I did lots of (appropriately) low level tasks, many of which became quite formative for my later career.
Of all the jobs I’ve ever had, it was the only one where I watched the clock — I took the train like the other drones, arriving slightly before 9, and left at the socially acceptable time befitting my lowly rank. It was a quintessentially traditional Japanese office, with rows of desks arranged by seniority, with a telephone and heavily used ashtray at the intersection of every four desks. My colleagues smoked incessantly — smoking was the boredom antidote of that period — when I left that job after two years I happily trashed my suits.
I think about those days almost fondly now – although it was repetitive and uninspiring, I learned a lot about the way traditional Japanese companies worked, and experienced many of those unique dynamics in a visceral way, from the unquestioned seniority structure, to the sad treatment of most female employees, and the consensus driven dynamics of decision making (which also materially affects their risk tolerance). We did classic ‘radio taiso’ (calisthenics) every morning, after which someone read out the silly company creed (I was petrified the days when I had to do it), and we all gamed the company’s system as much as we could (maximizing overtime, for instance).
Nearly everyone will have periods of career misery. I have written indirectly about some of my deeper troughs (even while at my favorite employer) in the “Yoda” note, the first of many notes on coaching. Jobs early in one’s career are often kind of miserable, reflecting one’s lower value-add – which drives the hunger to climb to higher levels.
Turning those periods into launch pads for future endeavors with narratives can be both engaging, and can positively affect your attitude towards that temporary misery. Allowing that period to endure too long, however, is a common mistake. There should be some rule about the “declining marginal utility of miserable experiences” but I have yet to see it formally stated.
Unproductive theoretical narratives
Perhaps the first step is to try to avoid unproductive cul-de-sacs – ‘what if’ narratives which largely assign a disproportionate amount of blame to adverse events, and underestimate human adaptability. For example: “if I hadn’t gotten fired, I would have been far more successful” or “If I’d only gone to Harvard” – are unhelpful for a variety of reasons:
it’s difficult to precisely know how the future would have turned out, and therefore fixating on a single theoretical negative narrative is dangerous
These narratives often don’t factor in the non-linear hunger / ambition / revenge / effort changes which are catalyzed because of a negative experience
Empirically, there are a lot of experiences which later prove to have silver linings because of appropriate adaptive responses
Sometimes the counter-narrative includes a “poor me” limiting assumption, which changes our kinetic ability and vision to figure out how to bounce back, thereby becoming a partially self-fulfilling prophecy
In terms of agency, there may have been little that you could have done to avoid the unfortunate situation at the time, but one does have agency in the ability to deal with it ex-post.
Final words
I guess my overall point is that the narrative of an adverse situation is pliable, but resignation to a specific helpless narrative is often self-fulfilling and therefore unhelpful or counterproductive.
The first step is really just internalizing the idea that we are largely responsible for our own narratives, for both the miseries and the successes, and that we don’t need to accept the default, whatever that is. Like the process of memory, where believing you can remember something is a primary determinant of recall, the confidence of recasting a narrative is the first bit of necessary momentum.
As one exercises the process of recasting narratives, and uses various methods to tell the story from a later period, the better the outcomes and the more frequent the reversals, ingraining a pattern of behavior, and momentum towards resilience.
In parting, some words from a book I just finished rereading (and which was partly the catalyst for this entry):
”Use the power of positive thinking. Give yourself five minutes to consider how you can turn a miserable situation to your benefit and that little light bulb is going to click on.”
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance