James' World 2

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Dear How to Do It,

My husband and I are high school sweethearts and have been together for over 15 years but we are at a serious impasse. Over the years, the last five to seven, he has expressed his desires for more/different sexual experiences. We agreed that he could have a “side piece” as long as certain boundaries were kept. I don’t know if I’ve ever been fully comfortable with this but I don’t want to leave him so I’ve been trying out of love. Every time he finds someone he may be interested in and I get wind of, I LOSE MY MIND. He gets upset because he says we have talked about it and I have agreed and keep changing my mind. I understand that is not fair to him but I have no idea how to proceed. Neither of us wants a divorce but I have no idea how to keep the peace. I get upset and distant and in turn, he feels super guilty and doesn’t end up going through with going to see these girls. He’s fed up and we’re going through a rough patch. Any advice?

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Staras/iStock/Getty Images Plus.

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Have you ever decided not to go for that job promotion because you believe you’re not qualified enough? Or avoided asking a neighbor for help because you feel you’d be a nuisance? Or taken your failure to get what you wanted as confirmation that, yes, your hunch that it was never going to work out was obviously correct? Yep, me too. Pessimistic beliefs like these are common, and they hold you back more than you realize. Perhaps it’s never occurred to you that it’s possible to change these attitudes, let alone how you might go about it. Perhaps you wouldn’t even want to change them even if you could – after all, who wants to be that person who is arrogant enough to think they’re definitely in with a shot for that promotion despite being underqualified, or who doesn’t think twice about making demands on their neighbors, or who approaches their goals with an unwavering confidence in their likelihood of success?

Philosophy and coaching are a perfect – and underexplored – partnership. Doing philosophy involves identifying and challenging hidden assumptions, using analogies to reveal double standards, and exposing dodgy reasoning: all things that are helpful to coaching clients who are burdened with beliefs that get in the way of their success, who are compassionate to everyone but themselves, and who overlook their own errors in reasoning because they are too busy criticizing themselves. Often, too, the thoughts of philosophers – including René Descartes and the other thinkers that I’m going to mention here – find fresh application in providing a helpful new perspective on the difficulties that many of us face every day.

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Rising, Falling, Clinging, Flying (equilibrium) (detail, 1934) by Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel

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Common signs of a sociopath

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America’s children are not doing great. In August, the New York Times published “The Inner Pandemic,” a multipart project on adolescent mental health, which has reached crisis levels. In addition to higher rates of anxiety and depression, suicides have been increasing since 2007, passing homicide as the second-leading cause of death for those ages 10 to 24.

Because the youth mental-health crisis has been concurrent with certain developments in consumer electronics and internet advertising, commentators have found a convenient scapegoat in technology. In her 2017 book iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood — and What That Means for the Rest of Us, marketing consultant Jean Twenge blamed the iPhone and social media for a host of social problems in the post-millennial cohort.

But the technology thesis hasn’t performed well under critical examination, as the Times package notes. What possible reason could there be for American young people to be particularly unhappy in the 2020s? It’s hard to see the forest for all the low-hanging fruit: There’s the pandemic that has trapped kids inside with their families, a recipe for unhappiness all around if ever there was one; the rise of right-wing political extremism and rapid advance of various hate groups; and global warming, the imminent end of the world as we know it.

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Photo: Sara Messinger

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When I was seven years old, my father started sleeping on the sofa with a rifle.

We lived in a small Oregon town with a population of only a few thousand. Nestled on a gravel-lined, dead-end street, my childhood home was an idyllic setting to raise a family. To the east, a snow-capped Mt. Hood jutted from the tree-lined horizon. To the west, acres of cow pastures rolled into the distant hills. Everyone on our tiny street knew everyone else, and everyone knew our next-door neighbors hated us. 

Lined up in neat rows along our backyard was a young orchard: spindly trees still too weak to bear fruit, propped up by wooden stakes and thick twine. Looping through the branches and woven between the trees was a series of tripwires adorned with silver Christmas bells. My father told me he put them up to keep the deer from eating our apples. That also explained the rifle, I thought. My dad wanted to protect us.

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Illustrations by Anson Chan

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