Why It Makes No Sense to Wallow in the Past
Canio, a clown, discovers shortly before he’s due to perform that his beautiful wife, whom he loves above all else, is betraying him with another man. He sits alone behind the circus tent, fighting back tears and trying to put on his stage makeup. Inside, the audience is eagerly waiting for him to appear. In a few minutes he’ll have to act the fool—after all, the show must go on—but first he launches into the gloriously tragic and beautiful aria “Vesti la giubba” (“Put on your costume”) as tears roll down his cheeks.
Thus ends the first act of Leoncavallo’s opera Pagliacci, premiered in 1892. “Vesti la giubba” is one of the most emotional arias ever composed, and all the greatest tenors in the world have wailed their way through it—Enrico Caruso, Plácido Domingo, José Carreras. Type “Pavarotti” and “Vesti la giubba” into YouTube. The music will break your heart, while Pavarotti, playing Canio the clown, wallows in self-pity.
The second (and final) act sees the customary stabbings, and all those involved die. Yet after the true climax of the opera, none of this seems particularly moving. Since its first performance, the image of the teary clown has been lodged in our cultural memory, long since finding its way into popular culture: in the Miracles’ song “The Tears of a Clown,” for instance, one of the most-purchased singles of the 1960s—with approximately one percent of the original aria’s musical complexity and half a percent of its emotional charge.
If you don’t get a little misty-eyed while listening to “Vesti la giubba,” then I can’t help you. Yet we know that Canio’s behavior is, in the long-term, counterproductive. Self-pity is one of the most useless responses to life’s trials. Self-pity doesn’t change anything. It does the opposite, in fact, because self-pity is an emotional whirlpool, a spiral that sucks you deeper down the longer you’re bobbing around in it. Trapped, people rapidly fall victim to paranoia. They feel as if a group of people, the whole of humanity or even the universe has turned against them. It’s a vicious circle for the person in question, but also for those around them, who at some point will understandably start to keep their distance. The moment I notice the first hints of self-pity in myself, I do my best to swim away from its dangerous pull, holding true to the adage “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
Charlie Munger tells the story of a friend who always carried with him a stack of printed cards. When he met someone who showed even a trace of self-pity, he would remove the top card with a theatrical gesture and hand it to the person. On the card was written: “Your story has touched my heart. Never have I heard of anyone with as many misfortunes as you.” A witty, refreshing, but also slightly callous way of confronting someone with their own self-pity. Yet Munger is right: self-pity is a disastrously wrong-headed pattern of thought.
Even more surprising, then, that self-pity has flourished over the past decades, particularly in the form of “facing up to” or “working through” things. There’s the social version of this, in which large groups of people feel themselves to be the victims of events that happened over centuries in the past. Whole university departments are dedicated to exposing the historical roots of this victimization and analyzing them down to the tiniest filament. All of it absolutely justified: even today, African Americans are still experiencing the effects of slavery and segregation, and colonialism still casts a long shadow across the African continent. The same goes for women, indigenous peoples, Jews, gay men and women, immigrants… of which exposition and analysis are understandable and justified.
Yet this way of thinking is unproductive, and even toxic. Moreover, how many centuries should you go back in order to “face up to” the past? One hundred, two hundred, five hundred years? Five hundred years ago, a million of your direct, blood-related ancestors were alive on Earth. Your grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents’ and so forth. Major branches of your family tree will inevitably have been brutally oppressed. You could face up to all of it, but what for? Accept the wrongs of the past and try to either manage or endure the hardships of the present. Collective self-pity is as unproductive as the individual kind.
A second form of “facing up to things” takes place in the private sphere. On the therapist’s couch, the patient digs around in his own childhood and comes up with all sorts of things he’d rather forget—but which can easily be made responsible for his current, probably sub-optimal situation. This is problematic in two respects. One: blaming other people, especially your parents, has an expiry date. If you’re still holding your parents liable for your problems at the age of forty, then one can argue that you’re so immature you practically deserve them.
Two: studies show that even undeniably awful childhood events (the death of a parent, divorce, neglect, sexual abuse) are minimally correlated with success or satisfaction in adult life. The former president of the American Psychological Association, Martin Seligman, analyzed hundreds of these studies and concluded that “It has turned out to be difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personality, and there is no evidence at all of large—to say nothing of determining—effects.” Far more decisive than our history are our genes—and their distribution is sheer chance. Sure, you could blame your genes for your situation and complain about the ovarian lottery (see Chapter 7), but what would that achieve?
Not getting bogged down in self-pity is a golden rule of mental health. Accept the fact that life isn’t perfect—yours or anyone else’s. As the Roman philosopher Seneca said, “Things will get thrown at you and things will hit you. Life’s no soft affair.” What point is there in “being unhappy, just because once you were unhappy”? If you can do something to mitigate the current problems in your life, then do it. If you can’t, then put up with the situation. Complaining is a waste of time, and self-pity is doubly counterproductive: first, you’re doing nothing to overcome your unhappiness; and two, you’re adding to your original unhappiness the further misery of being self-destructive. Or, to quote Charlie Munger’s “iron prescription”: “Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it is actually you who are ruining your life… Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life.”