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.

Some people struggle with a compulsive need to save money. Even when their income is more than adequate, they feel as if any expense on present desires would be reckless. They see their peers fail to save for the future, and it redoubles their resolve. Some of them aspire to an early retirement, socking away their earnings in pursuit of a specific number that means “safety,” or “success,” or “freedom”—forgetting that retirement (especially an early one) tends to cause a crisis of meaning, when the intrinsic rewards of working are suddenly subtracted from life.

Of course, there’s much to be said for financial prudence, but what I’m talking about is the extreme version, where the saver begins to suffer from money anxiety, far beyond what the real circumstances impose. This can take the form of missing out on too many things, but it can also involve a partner’s distress—not just because the person won’t buy gifts or take vacations, but because they inflict too much criticism about the other person’s spending habits. In a relationship, constant penny-pinching can build resentment. And if one partner always takes the role of money saver, the other will have a hard time avoiding being cast in the role of money spender. When the saver talks as if spending and wasting were the same thing, the spender will be at risk for shame and guilt. Those are bad for the relationship.

The proverbial phrase “penny-wise and pound-foolish” is useful here (a Britishism, where a pound is worth a hundred pennies). But suppose the miser is prudent on both levels, saving money in matters both large and small. There is still a sense in which the phrase applies, because most expenses are less important than the emotional well-being of yourself and those closest to you—especially if you have a partner, and even more so if you have children. If you’re managing money well enough that your income covers your expenses and permits you to save or invest some of each paycheck, it might be penny-wise, but pound-foolish, to refuse to take your partner out on a date. That’s because the relationship is worth pounds, not mere pennies, and paying for shared pleasant experiences in the present is a form of investment in the relationship’s future.

Not only that, but the present is, strictly speaking, all we have. Aside from the fact that we might somehow die tomorrow, the present is the living flame of experience, where we are, and its claim on our resources inheres in the truism that this, too—not just the future we’re so worried about—is life itself.

Suppose you are struggling with excessive frugality, to the point where your partner feels nagged and demeaned by your bids for total financial control. You find yourself commenting on their every purchase, even though you realize the pain and anger this tends to cause. How can you stop yourself from saying this kind of stuff?

Well, here’s an exercise that may help. Imagine yourself one year in the future. You’ve now made about a hundred more remarks concerning your partner’s spending habits, their specific purchases, and their ideas about money, remarks that sprang from your anxiety and impulsivity. You rationalized your behavior by focusing exclusively on the fact that the money you were trying to save is, ultimately, for the both of you (for your family, whether it’s just the couple, or more). But now, one year on, you can plainly see how much accumulated suffering this has caused, how much distance it has put between you and the other(s) whom you love. You wish you had a time machine—you see where I’m going with this—to undo the piteous waste of closeness and harmony that you squandered in all that worrying. Well, here you are, back in the present, with those twelve months still stretching out ahead, unspoiled by any thoughtless utterance or grim withholding. How will you use this second chance?

Of course major purchases and big-ticket decisions will still require some discussion, some ambivalence, and some math. But in the small matters that crop up so frequently—stuff that costs less than 1 or 2 percent of a paycheck—you have a richesse of opportunities to let go, stay quiet, and smile on the process. For example, suppose your partner has just a brief moment free (between work and school, or childcare and eldercare, or housework and rehearsal, etc.) to grab a few necessities, and buys them at a big box store, instead of the 99 cent shop you’re sure is much cheaper. They could have spent $7 less and gotten the same stuff. Well, that $7 is not going “out the window.” It’s being invested in the relationship. You make the investment by giving up this one little nugget of control, and prizing the other person’s effort over your own vision of perfect prudence. As you watch yourself respond (rather than react), choose gratitude for the labor they did running errands, not anxiety about the price tag. Getting the job done should count for more than doing it perfectly.

When was the last time you took your beloved out to dinner? Can you afford to? If so, remember that this moment, too, is life. The present counts at least as much as the future will. And though you must save some for tomorrow, you should also spend some for today, lest it be remembered as a time of anxious austerity that could have been better, but wasn’t. Live your life, not your fears.

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.

We think of motivation as something driven by discipline. Often it is just that, a pressurized pushing and shoving from behind, away from the possible bad consequences of our inaction. As someone like Jordan Peterson is happy to remind us, discipline guards against the perils of what some people call laziness. But discipline is not the only form of motivation.

Rather than being pushed from behind, away from the failure we dread, we can be drawn forward from in front, led onward by curiosity, fascination, and a desire to explore the world. I do not believe in laziness. I think what we call laziness is actually internal conflict, a pattern in someone’s functioning, not a trait of his or her nature. If together we can bring the conflict into focus, you can position yourself to make more free, informed choices about what it is you actually want to do with your opportunities. “All you have to do,” as Gandalf said to Bilbo Baggins in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, “is decide what to do with the time that is given to you.”

I had a teacher years ago—a brilliant, soulful teacher of Ancient Greek, the late Jack Collins—whose maxim was “To row is human; to sail, divine.” Of course it was a play on the old proverb “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” What he meant was that there’s a place for discipline, and it’s often necessary, especially near the beginning of a project. But after discipline has done its work, after it’s gotten us launched, rowing our boat away from land, pushing on the oars, there comes a time when discipline is no longer needed, and the serious joy of the work takes its place. When you row a boat, there’s a 1:1 correspondence between the effort you invest, and the result you get. Shove on the oars this much, and the boat lurches forward so much as a result. But when we sail, we hoist the canvass, and thereafter the job is just to maintain the right relationship to the wind—a mighty force, for whose creative power we are not responsible. The wind is a free-flowing, abundant aspect of the environment, and the sailor(s) work is to keep the sail so oriented that the ship can move in the desired direction under the wind’s wild, natural power. Rowing is no longer necessary. One unit of effort can now yield much more than one unit of progress.

Reading books, or writing them, works the same way. At first, you’re counting how many pages you’ve read since you sat down; how many minutes you’ve been reading; what chapter you’re up to; and so on. But then you get successfully caught by the unfolding story, and you forget about all that counting and measuring. You read on because you want to know what happens next; because you care about the main character; because the story is carrying you along. Of course it isn’t only our intellectual tasks that work this way. So do a great many more of our human endeavors…

Therapy is sometimes a form of rowing out, away from the familiar shores of our trouble, and toward the open world, where there are currents and breezes that we can harness for our purposes if we can find the right balance of humility, self-knowledge, and ambition. To row is human; to sail, divine.

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.