They’re hiding in plain sight

The following is modified from an interview with Aaron James, the author of Assholes: A Theory and a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. His responses have been edited and condensed for clarity and context.

Jean-Francois Marmion: Let’s start with the basics. What, exactly, is an asshole?

Aaron James: An asshole is a man, or more rarely a woman, who accords himself special advantages in his social life and feels immune from reproach. He’s the guy who cuts in line at the post office, granting himself a privilege that’s normally reserved for pregnant women and emergencies. In the moment, he has no justification beyond feeling that he’s rich, handsome, or smarter than everyone else, so his time is more valuable than theirs. If you ask him to stand in line like everyone else, either he won’t listen, or he’ll tell you to get lost. …

A therapist’s advice for how to create some distance from other people’s problems — even when you’re stuck with them 24/7

As the coming pandemic winter forces us all to live even more fully at home, you may find yourself struggling more than ever to carve out your own emotional space. One person’s stress becomes contagious. An unending stream of other people broadcasting their inner monologues makes it impossible to spend time with your own thoughts. One person’s slacking off or shutting down pushes you to take over their responsibilities.

So, how do you hold onto the ability to act — and feel — like your own person?

As a therapist, I often help my clients think about how to become less responsible for other people’s thoughts and behaviors and more responsible for their own. And the more you can practice doing this now, the better shape you’ll be in for all that quarantine togetherness in the months to come. …

A professional poker player’s advice for optimizing outcomes

Most decisions are ultimately a guess. You can’t be certain that anything you do will lead to a specific outcome, and you can’t know the exact likelihood of any outcome at all. Part of becoming a better decision-maker is shifting your mindset about guessing.

I may be a professional poker player, but I approach decision-making the way an archer thinks about a target.

Archery isn’t all or nothing, where you get points only for hitting the bull’s-eye and everything else is a miss. …

There’s a stage in a bear’s annual cycle known as “walking hibernation.” At winters’ end, they emerge from their dens… a little off. They’re lethargic. They’re not eating much. They take a while to re-learn how to bear.

We’re all bears now. When I think of the looming pandemic winter, I imagine us all entering our own social hibernation, hunkered in our dens, the cold rendering most socially distant outdoor hangs newly impossible. And when we emerge into warmer weather, Elemental’s Dana Smith points out, we’re all going to be, well, a little off.

“Social skills are like any other kind of ability in that they require practice.” Smith writes in the latest edition of her newsletter, Inside Your Head. “And by this point in the pandemic, starved of normal, everyday social interactions — running into an acquaintance on the street, sharing an elevator with a co-worker, or making small talk with a barista — most of us are pretty rusty.” …

The pandemic and climate crises make working ourselves to the bone in service of our own ambition seem a little silly. Let’s change that.

Earlier in the summer, while picking up trash on a beach near where I live, I had a revelation: Engaging in this rather mundane activity was the most useful I had felt in a while. The idea was both unsettling and freeing at the same time.

We’ve all been spending more time lately on activities that feel immediately useful: cooking meals, moving our bodies, making and mending things, growing gardens, and — like me with the beach rubbish — serving as stewards of the places where we live.

But while the litter-picking was initially a way to fill my time during the long pandemic summer, it also got me thinking about the very notion of how I spend my time. In February, right before the world fell apart, I was diagnosed with burnout. I had been working too hard, and despite taking some time off, I didn’t have a strong sense of how I was going to avoid repeating the cycle again in the future. …

Many of us have whiled away the pandemic with deep dives into nostalgia, whether we’re self-soothing by lazing around like teenagers, or revisiting historical moments that seemed simpler (or at least, explicable). We all have our “comfort food” media of choice. For me, it’s been an era of lip-glossy costume dramas filmed in the 1990s (yes that’s two layers of history in one, it’s actually very complicated, but that’s another essay).

For writer Sarah Rosenthal, The Office has been her go-to…except that it’s not so funny anymore. …

Give yourself a microbreak

For many of us new at working from home, there’s a peripheral, palpable energy about our days that didn’t exist when we were going into an office pre-pandemic. For me, it starts right when I wake up, and it doesn’t end until my kids are in bed. It’s 14 hours of buzzzzz. It doesn’t feel draining exactly, but it complicates a workday that’s already complicated.

Forge’s resident time-management expert Laura Vanderkam recently wrote a popular story on how to feel calm despite that buzz. …

When times get tough, we look for hope. We hope that our hope will power us through the abyss. But a hopeful approach might not be the best strategy for soothing your nerves.

The therapist and Forge contributor Kathleen Smith suggests that instead of viewing hope as solution for anxiety or dread, we think of it as a byproduct of taking action.

“Engaging our frontal lobe, the part of the brain that defines goals and breaks them into manageable steps, can shift us out of anxiety and into a more thoughtful state of being,” Smith writes. “What once seemed like certain doom can start to look like a complex but manageable challenge.”