A professor recently came to me for help with what he called an “issue of thinking.” 

Part of it was procrastination, which many people are wrestling with. I suggested framing the habit as an expression of inner conflict. If there is something you really want to do, but you’re not doing it, there is probably another part of you that’s resisting. So it’s a negotiation between two parties, except that they are both you.

They’re different parts of self, with needs that don’t seem to fit together—or not at the very same instant. The part that wants instant gratification, now and forever, is probably a lot younger than the part that’s more interested in getting valuable things done (like pursuing justice, or doing the laundry,), even if that means having to wait awhile for some of the other kinds of value (like ice cream, or a movie).

Like ordinary negotiations, these are best pursued with gentle firmness, a vigilant yet easygoing grace that is authoritative because it takes the long view of the situation, and sets appropriate priorities. In other words, find your most adult self in there somewhere; assume it (i.e. take it on, activate it, become it); and parent the rest of you into ceding control to this most-adult part-of-self.   

Your inner child doesn’t actually want to run the show, knowing he or she lacks the skills, the knowledge, and the fortitude to run an adult life (in the world of grownups, with taxes and jobs and the occasional blizzard). But in order to stand down and let you get busy, the kid needs to feel that his or her yearnings and appetites matter; that they will not be trampled, mocked, or ignored; and that enough love is present to soothe a small person through the fear, boredom, and sheer fussiness that delayed gratification usually involves.

But the professor was working on more than procrastination. In fact, that wasn’t the main thing. 

His problem had to do with determining what to work on—which was tricky because, he said, he’s “too detail-oriented.” He had plenty of ideas, but they all pointed in different directions. It wasn’t clear which, if any, was really worth developing into a paper he would be confident he could (and should) try to publish. So he found himself floundering, despite a real wish to be productive and enjoy his work. In the classroom, he felt something similar. He wanted to let himself be the kind of beneficially weird lecturer who, as a student, he had always wanted and rarely got: the kind who’s full of quotations and colorful embellishments that link the parts of the course together, and even connect it to adjacent disciplines. But he kept fretting about whether this would be acceptable.

In an academic department, as in a marriage or a family, it’s good to have people with diverse thinking styles. But there is an art to knowing the limits of what’s unusual about the way you do things. Of course, your difference from other people’s style and methods will be partly built-in and unconscious. And yet some of it should be, or become, a free choice that you can adjust to the needs of the moment. As a teacher you can allow yourself plenty of (semi-relevant, but educational) digressions in your lectures. But when there’s an exam coming up, it’s best to curtail those a bit, the better to support your students as they try to prepare.

If you’re brimming with lore and anecdotes and allusions, and you believe they’ll enrich the course, most students will find that style at least a little bothersome—even if they can also appreciate it a little, since it’s unusual and therefore refreshing. “He goes on tangents,” they will complain, forgetting that a tangent does touch the circle at some point, and that there is more than one way to conduct a good lecture. It’s not a military campaign or a corporate boardroom. 

A small minority of students will highly prize what you’re giving them, because they can’t get it anywhere else—assuming you’re the only faculty member in your Department who teaches that way. You’re teaching whatever the actual subject is, but you’re also modeling the figure of the lifelong learner, whose love of knowledge transcends the frame of professional credentialing and credit accumulation. Be yourself up there—especially if you’re the type of teacher who strives to impart wisdom and skills, not information alone.

On the writing side, I suggest jotting down the seeds of ideas that you can water later on. You may find they’ve already begun to germinate under the surface in the meantime. Map out a few of them without committing to the immediate development of any particular one (let alone all of them at once). Then take a step back. Get a coffee. Play with the books you’ve already read as fertilizer for the process, and the ones you’ve got waiting for you. 

Now see which of those ideas you find yourself wanting to explore first. Which do you feel like discussing with a close friend? Spell out to yourself, as you would over lunch, and see where it leads. If that first idea seems too minor, well, maybe stick with it anyway. Maybe it’s a good preliminary piece of work, a warmup before you take on something more ambitious. If it doesn’t seem likely to fit into the top scholarly journal in your field, is there a second-tier journal you respect, where it might fit better?

Your minor works do not define you as a writer of minor works only.

There’s a difference between (a) living up to your own high standards as to the quality of a project—which is necessary—and (b) executing only the most serious, far-reaching, and consequential projects—which is not necessary, and may be counterproductive. As a scholar, you are not only engaged in the project at hand, whatever it turns out to be. You are also building a body of work over a lifetime career. 

It can be helpful to call to mind a figure you respect, whose best work you deeply admire, and who also wrote quite a lot. Some scholars write a small number of books, but a large number of papers across the decades. How is that achieved? By taking oneself seriously, with an encouraging version of humility. Assume your own thinking will probably bear valuable fruit, if you allow yourself to try things out and see where they lead. As they say in finger-paintiing class, “Get in there and smear.”

 The point isn’t to produce as much as possible, but to become as free to produce as you can possibly become.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

People have an evolved need to be part of something – to belong to a family that belongs to a tribe. Anyone who doesn’t have that can become susceptible to whatever offers itself as a substitute, even if the eventual price of belonging is unclear at the outset, and turns out to be too high. We are a profoundly social species, and the more isolated somebody is, the greater their risk for getting absorbed into a company that has cult-like features—especially if these only become obvious after some time has passed, and ties have been formed.  

In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam showed that people in the USA used to be connected to large numbers of neighbors and peers, by all sorts of clubs and civic groups and religious institutions that were larger than the household, but smaller than the state—the Elks Club, the Knights of Columbus, Boy Scouts, B'nai B’rith, and so on—and that since the 1970’s, most of these have shrunk or even vanished. For my MFT internship (2012-2016), I trained in Gestalt therapy at a Los Angeles nonprofit called The Relational Center whose motto was and is: Isolation hurts. We help. See also Johann Hari’s excellent book on this issue, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions.  

Our drive to be part of something larger than ourselves is a core need that’s sometimes fulfilled in wholesome ways, even today. If we’re fortunate, it can arise where we earn our daily bread. Teamwork on the job, if it goes well, feels good and works effectively. It’s not necessary to spoil it with cynicism by deciding that it’s all a swindle, just because management planned it for the purpose of maximizing the owners’ profits and the shareholders’ return on their investment. Yes, management did set up a personnel structure, with its cooperative and competitive dynamics; and yes, they did so mainly with those financial motives. But it’s a wasteful mistake to use this fact to empty-out the value of a collaborative experience. Enjoying your job doesn’t make you the dupe of exploiters—unless your employer happens to be exploitative. So it’s pretty important to have some criteria for that category.  

If the company’s internal communications are laced with the rhetoric of family life, does it feel icky and bogus?  

Prioritize your physical and mental health, and take a close look at the effects of your current employment on those two factors.

Is it a permissive environment, where bad interpersonal behavior has no consequences? Or an over-policed one, where H.R. feels overzealous and unpredictable?  

Do rewards for extra hard (or extra good) work go to everybody, not just the suits in the suites?  

Are you stuck in your current role, or can the leadership be convinced that they could make better use of you in another one where you feel you’d add more value? If you contribute advice for improving processes, products, or practices, does that get rewarded or punished?  

Do you feel misled about important aspects of your role, or are they frank with you where it counts?  

Bonuses and raises are not the only genuine sort of rewards—there’s paid time off, broader choice of tasks and teammates, more control over your schedule and remote work, and so on. Be wary if you put in a heroic chunk of overwork, and they either ignore it, or pay you in symbolism, praise, and thanks, but nothing more.

Consider that the ideal job, the real peach on a high branch, gives you three things:

·      enough meaning

·      enough money

·      adequate work-life balance  (WLB) 

Awful jobs are missing all three, and are way too close to what sociologists have called “social death,” in which one’s humanity is under dire assault by some combination of abuse and neglect. The late Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a poignant bestseller called Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, about such jobs, and the vexing struggle for upward mobility. More recently, in Democracy Awakening, professor Heather Cox Richardson has taken account of the way access to opportunity waxes and wanes cyclically through the history of the United States.  

A good job can provide you with any two of these, but not all three—and if the one you need most is the one that’s missing, the job’s not so good. Sociologist David Graeber made a splash with his Jeremiad on corporate culture, Bullshit Jobs, which he defined thus: “…a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” Bullshit jobs pay plenty, and they don’t take over your whole week—but their lack of meaning takes on a creeping toxicity the longer you work there, because the company culture requires you to fake it. Even if the work is (relatively speaking) socially and environmentally harmless, you still come to feel you are selling your integrity because you have to bullshit other people, and yourself, that the work is not, in fact, the bullshit it really is. This is sometimes called “golden handcuffs.” 

If there’s work-life balance and meaning, but not much money, it may be possible to add a lucrative side-hustle without becoming exhausted. If there’s good money and real meaning, but you’re frazzled and sleepless, that strategy’s not available; you may need to negotiate more time away, or build an exit ramp.  

Aristotle wrote a book of ethics for his son, where he states: Happiness is not amusement, it is good activity. Ideally, work is a form of serious play that gives us a role in the community and compensation for our labor in that role. On your way to a vocation that really suits you, remember that the gatekeepers will be behind you one day; that the stepping-stones are temporary phases of your life with something to teach you, however unpleasant; and that you must steer your life in the direction where you want it to go.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel The Great Gatsby, a self-made millionaire aspires to win the heart of a woman he once loved. Daisy is married and unavailable, but Gatsby has idealized her for years. He knows that she appreciates the outward signs of wealth, fame, and power—things that confer status—so he reinvents himself as a wealthy tycoon, hoping this will impress her enough to make her value him. He benefits from this quest because it focuses his energies, motivates him, and brings him the clothes and cars and cash that sometimes make life fun and exciting. Gatsby makes his money by bootlegging liquor during Prohibition, when it was illegal and therefore risky and lucrative. Alcohol has destroyed myriad lives, but in moderation it has been part of the good life in many cultures for millennia; one could argue that Gatsby’s path to success was not so antisocial as to be self-discrediting—he is no Al Capone, and no Macbeth. But such success itself poses a problem: if it all works out, and Daisy is won over by glitz and bling, how will he know she really loves him? Gatsby is a man, not a Rolls Royce or a bank account.

The book ends in tragedy, when Gatsby is killed by another character. But had he lived, one possible outcome would’ve been a temporary affair between him and Daisy, followed by some kind of disillusion. Either she would reject him and stay with her boorish husband (Tom), or Gatsby would tire of her upon realizing that she loves his status, his money, his power, more than she is capable of loving him. Such disillusion would be agonizing, but it would do him a world of good. Disillusion is the way out of illusion, and some illusions can be extremely hard to escape because their logic has a seamless continuity that conceals the exits. Of course I want to live in a giant mansion; of course more money is always better, ad infinitum; of course a higher status will enhance my success at anything I could possibly undertake in life, including finding a mate. It is because these assumptions seem so obvious that their fundamental error is so hard to detect.

Freud taught that the purpose of psychoanalysis (it applies to mental health treatment in general) was to help people to love and to work. The idea that more-is-always-better has serious drawbacks on both sides. In work, it threatens what we call “work/life balance” and risks work addiction, in pursuit of ever-more earnings, far beyond our ability to enjoy them. In love, more-is-better can mean either of two troublesome things. It can mean I am stuck in a compulsive accumulation of temporary partners, building my “body count” without checking its effect on my wellbeing. Or it can mean I am doing what Gatsby did, pursuing just one partner, but using means that are accumulation-based: if I have more status than these competitors, then I’ll win the competition for her. What gets neglected here is the way my toys and my success can upstage the merely human, unique individual I actually am. I also may fail to notice how much my attention is diverted from my “Daisy” onto the men with whom I’m busy competing, jockeying for position, comparing the size of our houses (paging Dr. Freud), etc.

If such a disillusioned Gatsby can survive the disillusioning experience, he may win the real prize, one more valuable than the solid gold toilet, or the victory over his male rivals, or even Daisy herself. The real prize is a mature freedom: freedom from the endless compulsion to accumulate ever more status and wealth, and with it, freedom from the need to woo the kind of person who remains focused on that kind of stuff. Whoever escapes from the prison-house of status-seeking gets to love and be loved by people who are also free of it.

There are plenty of good reasons for a couple to want lots of money, or for a single person to want wealth in an eventual marriage. Raising kids, running a small business, keeping a theater afloat, endowing a community’s nonprofit, all these require plenty of cash and become impossible if there isn’t enough, and the list goes on and on. What’s not so good, is chasing wealth as a substitute for self-love, and hoping that the display of this wealth will attract somebody else who has the same confusion between wealth and love.

People who are unconsciously afraid of love might not be able to tolerate getting the love they really need, but do not want. So they collude with similar people to form relatively loveless couples, held together not by deep affection, acceptance, and desire, but by the glue of status, purchasing power, and the conspicuous display of resources. Real love is associated with eventual death, because if I fall in love with one unique, mortal, individual person, I will one day lose them and it will matter to me. If I marry someone I really love who really loves me, I move forward on what Kierkegaard called “the stages on life’s way,” and this means leaving youth behind and getting closer to the end. Focusing on status and trophies can instead create the illusion that I am outside of the arc of the life cycle, that my world is one of endless youthful playdates and context-free experience, often of a dissociative, thrill-seeking kind. Diverse pleasures have their place, and there’s nothing inherently bad about thrills. But it’s worth checking: am I doing this as a defense against something else? Might I be partying quite this much because I am avoiding something?

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

At the job interview, the people asking the questions are usually searching for a particular experience they want to have with an applicant in the interview itself. The one who can give them that experience usually gets the job. What they want is an interaction, but it’s also a display. They want to have a conversation in which their specific, actual questions really reach the new person (that’s the interaction part). The questions evoke answers presented with a calm exuberance that’s a pleasure to watch (that’s the display). In music, the Italian phrase con brio means “with spirit, with vigor.” This kind of animated, engaged demeanor arises when the applicant has both confidence and expertise—a combination that usually comes from work experience, so it tends to count as evidence of work experience. Resumes, too, are evidence of work experience, but not everyone who has done a job has also learned from it, internalized its procedures and its ethos, and achieved good feelings about their ability to do it well in the future. Those are what the people doing the hiring are looking for in the interview, and the best evidence for it are answers that match the interviewers’ questions; that are focused on the concrete content of the job’s actual entailments (rather than abstractions about what kind of job it is), but aren’t entirely limited to that; and that show some degree of enjoyment from the applicant that springs from the pleasure of being both interested in something and good at it.

Applicants for teaching jobs are often advised, wisely, to treat the interview like a lesson, and to teach the interviewers about the way the job works and how to do it well. But this advice can apply to many other kinds of work, too—not just jobs in education. The teaching frame of mind, the Teacher role, can take you out of your ego-driven worry about how you’re being perceived, because it helps you to focus on the material at hand and the communication process. Value judgments and the fear of embarrassment, imaginary comparisons of yourself to others, worry about rejection or failure—these should be crowded-out by the enjoyable business of sharing what you know. One of the best indicators of your likely success is that the interview was fun. If it wasn’t, you might not like the job itself, either, in which case you’ve “dodged a bullet” by not getting it. The capacity to enjoy the interview not only bespeaks a confidence that comes from competence, it also suggests you’ll enjoy the work itself, which is associated with better performance. A hiring is a contract between employer and employee, and the enjoyment of an interview is a good sign that both parties may well benefit. If you feel qualified, stay in touch with your desire for the job, with your knowledge of the field, and with the pleasure you take in excelling at this particular type of work. It will probably show.