You know, when the celebration of your success is just flat. 

Emotionally flat, I mean.  Flat like a carbonated drink that has been opened and allowed to sit for a few days.  That kind of flat.

During this time of the year, I watch a lot of football.  As a rule, I don’t watch whole games.  I check in to see how things are going.  To my mind, it is like checking in every month or so on a TV soap opera to see if Josh is still going out with Sheila or whether he has refocused on his work and his family as he should.  Because I watch all that football, I see a lot of celebrating.  The people who are succeeding are entirely unabashed in letting you know that they have succeeded.  That now includes defensive linemen.  Who would have thought?

But what do you do if your successes—everyone agrees that you have succeeded—leave you feeling emotionally flat, as if there were nothing to celebrate?  It might very well be that you don’t value the task at which you have succeeded.

Does that seem odd?  What if you have a job that pays you a lot of money and which allows you to live a luxurious and much-admired lifestyle?  And you don’t think much of the job.  I recall a job description provided by Irving Goffman as “cooling the mark out.”  The people who run casinos don’t want the big losers to be angry when they leave, so they hire people to sit with them, have a drink with them, console them about their experience so that they are not angry when they leave.  What if you had that job and were really good at it and took no pleasure in your success?  Flat?

What if you are not one of the people who admires your “much-admired life-style?”  You do it. You have the things people admire, but they don’t reflect your own values.  Or maybe you don’t really know what your values are.

I’ve got an idea.  Is there anything in your life that makes you feel really good about yourself.  As I understand it, “who I am” is the residue of “what I do.”  When I do good things, I conclude that I am a good person.  If that is the way it works, would it be worthwhile to do things that matter to you; things that you, yourself, think are significant?

The two enemies of this celebration that come immediately to mind are relying on the standard life menu your setting provides and relying on the celebration by others.

I was struck by the instance of a distraught bride in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart.  She wasn’t as happy as she thought she ought to be and it brought her to the point of anguish.  She had run the mental checklist: right man, right family, right wedding service, and so on.  Check, check, and check.  Therefore, she ought to be ecstatically happy and she was not. Disaster!

It would have been outside the frame of the story Hochschild was telling, but I kept wondering whether this is something she really wanted or just something she was told that she wanted.  That’s the “standard life menu” I had in mind above.

The other is the celebration by others.  It is natural to feel that when others who ought to know, celebrate your success, then you have achieved something.  And, of course, this might be true if what you are trying to achieve is personally meaningful.  But what if it isn’t?  Then you are relying on the celebration by others to substitute for your own pride in your own achievement.  And when that happens, you don’t get the emotional lift you would get if you had achieved something that really mattered to you, personally.

I spent some years in grad school and even more years as a professor working on the question of what a good problem is.  The tool I used was a record of personal failures that followed a very explicit set of definitions and notations.  This practice enabled two things.  The first is a clear pattern of the elements of the “problem” which the notation involved.  The second is the clear recognition that the “problem” being considered was only one of several that could have been constructed.

The non-question question I often asked was: Is the water too high or is the bridge too low?  My students got tired of it, but I’ll bet they never forgot it.

If “problems,” which we often take in the form then are presented, are really just devices we invent, then we have the opportunity to invent better problems.  A “problem” in this setting (that is the last time I am going to put the word in quotations marks) is a set of elements that presuppose failure.  The elements are a) something you are trying to do, b) your best guess about why you are trying to do it, c) the fact—this is presupposed—that you failed in your attempt to do it, and d) your best guess about why you failed.

Most commonly, the discussions in class focused on the second and fourth elements.  The first had to do with motivation.  Why were you trying to do that?  The second had to do with the reason for failure.  Who or what stopped you from succeeding?

The goal of the exercise was, as I usually put it, “making better problems.”  What would happen if you took a month’s worth of these notations—I called them “journal entries”—and discovered that none of the things you were trying to do, really mattered to you.  All the entries are records of failures because that is what the format requires, but you have here a list of the things you tried to do.  This is worth considering by itself, without reference to whether you succeeded or not.  Why am I trying to do these things?  Is there anything on this list that I think would give me cause for celebration (if you are that kind of person) or for quiet satisfaction (if you are that kind of person).

You know you have celebrated by the effect it has on the next thing you do.  Your success at that put fuel in your tank or recharged your battery or restored the fizz to your carbonated drink.  It isn’t a feeling that makes you want to do that thing again, necessarily; it is a feeling that helps you do whatever is next with more focus and more agency.

Imagine that I have succeeded in making myself a part of a social group and I get no inner celebration from that success?  Need a different group?  Need a goal other than “making yourself a part?”  Need to have your successes recognized by people whose judgment you value?  New problems are available.

The issue here is “no inner celebration” despite recognized success.  If you hold constant the value of “inner celebration”—the kind of thing that re-fizzes your drink—then all the other elements can be swapped out.  I need to be a part of a different group.  I need to reconsider what I mean by “being a part.”  I need to seek the recognition of people whose judgment I admire and to be swayed, if necessary, by their understanding.  Every swap provides you with a new problem.

Imagine that I have taken on a series of tasks and that I do what is necessary to succeed at them and that from those successes, I get no “inner celebration.”  Agency can be assumed here in the task setting as it could not be in the belonging setting above.  I am acting so as to achieve a goal.  But what if it is not a goal that matters to me?  I need different tasks?  I need a different goal with reference to those tasks?  I need to have those “successes” validated or invalidated by people whose judgment I respect.  Every swap provides you with a new problem.

Again, we hold the “inner satisfaction” constant, the “celebration of my success” constant, and change anything else or everything else until I have a problem that matters to me and that I can find a way to achieve.  I know I have succeeded in a meaningful way when I see the effect it has on the next thing I try to do.

It doesn’t have to be an achievement anyone else understands.  I remember vividly a scene from the film The Long Walk Home, which is set in Montgomery, Alabama at the time of the bus boycott.  A black kid is set upon by racist thugs in a public park.  He is rescued shortly by a black chauffeur wielding a tire iron, but afterwards he expresses his pride in how many blows he absorbed before they made him fall down.

You can argue with the merits of his project, but you cannot argue with his pride in what he did.  And he is empowered, afterwards to do things that only his pride could have produced.  His family goes, after this beating in the park, to a church service in which the Christian songs are sung and the plans for the next protest are announced.  The family does not want to be there and they are not singing the hymns…until the kid starts singing them, using his bruised face and his battered lips to form the words of the song. Seeing him do that is too much for his family, who begin, following his example, to sing the songs with him.  Powerful!

What happened?  His “success” in the park—we are taking his definition of what counts as success—enables him to produce a second success as his implacable family finds itself moved to follow his example.

I want to ask about my own choices whether succeeding in the tasks I have chosen will have that kind of effect on my life.  Does my success in Task A generate the resources I need to succeed in Task B?  I have the option of noticing this or not; of understanding it or not; of acting on it or not.  

Accepting the fact that my successes do not move me is not one of the options I am willing to consider.  I really need a better problem.