Life is a white-knuckle ride for us knucklehead genius humans, who can foresee the future like no other creature can, but so ambiguously that we can never tell whether we’re doing the right thing.

We humans depend upon affirmation. It’s a staple like air, water, food and sleep. We may not notice that we depend on it anymore than we notice our dependence on water until the pipes freeze and the water stops flowing.

Affirmation is a currency that flows much as money does. Like anything of value but in somewhat limited supply, affirmation is susceptible to economic analysis. There’s affirmation supply, demand, and negotiated affirmation transactions. There’s debts and surpluses and currency exchange rates between affirmation and other currencies. Indeed watching money-hoarders at work accumulating more billions than they can ever spend, we’re inclined to guess that the money is being translated into affirmation.

I’ll call it egonomics, but with two caveats. First, “ego” in some circles has come to mean a disease of the soul. I don’t buy that definition but rather think of it as the inescapable self-sustenance all creatures do, but we knucklehead geniuses do even more because with language we can sustain ourselves with stories of our worth, purposes, goals, and intentions. Other animals, lacking language can’t sing their own self-sustaining praises the way we do.

Second “egonomics” was coined and first used by my decision-theory hero Thomas Schelling to mean our inner negotiations between immediate and long-term desires (e.g. “why do I keep doing things for my future self? What has he ever done for me?” which I recently address in articles on “fuss-budgeting”). Egonomics is just too good a term to be limited to his definition, so I’m borrowing it here.

Egonomics is about markets for affirmation in a world where disaffirmations lurk behind every piece of discouraging news. Affirmation is evidence, real or imagined that we’re on track, doing the right thing, in a groove not a rut, going places not going in circles or going down the drain. Affirmations are the scaffolding that support as we build ourselves into the future. They’re the walls that make up much of our grooves’ sidewalls. Affirmation includes the love and appreciation, we experience but also the expectations we meet, confirming that what we do works.

An economic theory that says people only live for money doesn’t tell the whole story. Egonomics doesn’t either. Still, if you want a more encompassing theory of human behavior, don’t follow the money, follow the honey, the sweet affirmations we supply to and demand from each other. Here I’ll sketch out a little egonomics 101, as I see it.

Affirmation Supply:

Fungibility (functional equivalency): In economics, we assume that for most goods there’s more than one supplier. If you can’t get a McDonald’s burger, then you’ll have a Wendy’s burger. If you can’t get a hamburger, maybe a hot dog will do.  In other words we can generalize about functionally-equivalent kinds of goods, Wendy’s and McDonalds are to some extent functionally equivalent burgers; hot dogs and hamburgers are to some extent functionally equivalent main courses.

So too with affirmations—to some extent, the affirmation you get from one person can be had from another, and the affirmation you get in one domain can serve as well as affirmation in another domain.  You lose your partner? Maybe you rely more on your job to affirm you at least until you find another partner.

Currency exchange rates: A mutual admiration society is people supplying affirmation to, and demanding affirmation from each other. A trophy wife supplies affirmation to her wealthy husband in exchange for money. Jobs can be affirming and moneymaking both. Some jobs are more affirming than moneymaking. Ask an intern (“will work for occasional compliments”).

Virtual affirmation:  Affirmation is an intangible good, something in demand though not easily measured or quantified. It is, to some extent like credit, the ability to bank today on a promise of good things coming tomorrow, a promissory note, or accounts payable to you.  We can cook the books on our affirmation credit the way Enron did on its credit, experiencing affirmation from sources that don’t actively supply it. We can assume ourselves affirmed by a god that doesn’t exist, by a pet hamster that doesn’t care about us, by a spouse just going through the motions, by an employer who merely gives lip service to appreciating our work. We can overgeneralize affirmation. If we’re good at one thing, assuming we’re good at everything.

Affirmation Demand:

How much affirmation does a person seek?  That depends on several factors:

Marginal utility: A dollar means less to a rich than a poor person. Likewise, a fan letter means less to a popular than an unpopular person.

Affirmation efficiency: By temperament some people seem affirmation-frugal, able to make a little affirmation go a long way. Others need a lot of affirmation. Like hummingbirds, which have to find nectar every 15 minutes, these people are always worried about where their next affirmation is coming from. And it better be soon.

Chip on shoulder: Just as people who have been through hard economics times often become hoarders, so too do people who went through hard egonomic times, times when for example they either did something horribly wrong or were treated as though they did by chronically shaming parents, sibs, and peers. They seek more affirmation to compensate for the lack of it in their past.

Strategic gullibility: Some people are better at self-deception and are better at milking virtual affirmation. Maybe they’re “legends in their own minds,” so inherently proud of themselves that they can go without genuine affirmation for a long time. Or maybe they just have good imaginations, for example feeling as though the affirmation they provide their dog, god, favorite pop star, or favorite sports team is reciprocated in kind.

Conviction impairment: Affirmations round us up from doubt to confidence, from confusion about what to do, to conviction about what to do. If you’re surrounded by people who share your confidence and conviction, it’s often affirmation enough. In a pinch and out on a limb, even knowing one or two people you admire who share your convictions, their presence can be sufficiently affirming. We have role models but also goal models—people who model your goals thereby affirming them.

Societies used to be much more homogenous, tribes of people steeped in the same convictions. These days we often live in lifestyle melting pots, our neighbors often from entirely different tribes.  Offsetting this, we have newfound mobility, freedom of association, especially online where we can gather and consort with likeminded people living anywhere. Still, since roughly around the time of the Enlightenment, in the West at least, we’re exposed to more convictions at odds with ours, and therefore somewhat disaffirming. We may suffer more conviction impairment; less certainty that we’re on the right path and so may seek a little more affirmation.

The manner to which you are accustomed: We get used to the affirmation we reliably receive. If we have gotten a lot affirmation, we expect to continue to get a lot; affirmation in the manner to which we are accustomed. The Tao says, “success is as dangerous as failure,” in other words, the higher you rise, the farther you can fall. We see this frustration sometimes as people age, frustrated ex-beauties and ex-power brokers and broke ex-millionaires who can’t get used to losing the affirmation they had come to think was their birthright. And we see the opposite too, the poor, downtrodden and long-oppressed who seem to somehow get used to expecting very little affirmation.

Life stage: The supply of, and demand for affirmation changes over the course of our lives. The curve wouldn’t be easy to draw, nor would it be the same for each of us, in part because over time we seek affirmation from different sources: our parents, our friends, our boyfriends and girlfriends, our work colleagues and bosses; for some people, ultimately, our maker, anticipating meeting him at death.

When we’re young we don’t know what we’re good for. Your life package didn’t come with a packing slip, inventorying your gifts and gaps. You scrounge around like a scavenger, getting what affirmation you can where you can. To some extent what affirms you becomes your packing slip, your way of knowing what you’re good for and where you’ll most reliably get affirmed. This is why we worry for our beautiful daughters at risk of over-affirmation for beauty, that perishable gift, inattentive to cultivating other gifts and thereby other sources of affirmation.

In sum, egonomics is an interesting perspective on what gets us through the day, not just the macro-egonomics I’ve discussed here but the micro-egonomics of little subtle transactions, the strokes by which we paddle forward through the sometimes choppy seas of our lives.

I’ve just drafted a book called “Doubt: A Natural History; A User’s Guide,” much of it centered on the Serenity Prayer, a masterpiece of brief decision-making guidance, 26 words (Setting aside God) that corner us squarely with two of the three options we face in any frustrating situation. It would be nice if the prayer included the third option but it gets ungainly when it does:

Grant me the serenity to accept what I can’t change in a relationship, the courage to try to change what I can in a relationship, the prioritizing impatience to leave a relationship that I can neither change nor accept, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Three options:  In any frustrating situation we can take it serenely, try to change it courageously or leave it.  There are of course, many variations on how to do each of those, for example 50 ways to leave your lover, but ultimately those are the choices, take it, leave it, try to change it. Floodlighting them helps you gain the wisdom about which one to go with in any particular situation.

I do wonder about the serenity prayer’s ordering of the two options, serenity and courage.  Yes, I suppose at first we should serenely overlook whatever is frustrating. During the honeymoon period that’s relatively easy. And then, if we can’t simply overlook it then we should try to change it.

And if that doesn’t work, then what?

Maybe go back to serenity if you can. Lots of couples and couple’s counselors say that a relationship matures when both parties give up on trying to change each other, and with practice, get to where they regain a sobered acceptance of each other as is, that sustains them past the honeymoon period.  Partners just figure out how to tuck in their elbows and make it work.  So maybe the order is honeymoon serenity, courage and then back to sustainable post-honeymoon serenity.

Still, sometimes sustainable serenity just ain’t happening and instead couples enter a period of unpredictable and amplifying oscillation, strained efforts to achive the serenity to accept, whipsawing with ever-fiercer courage to try to change each other.

You pledge to just accept each other, but you can’t seem to hold to it, and then there’s some outburst, some escalated insistence on the other person changing.  Keep that up for long enough and you exhaust each other, and then prioritizing, you decide to call it quits, dropping your campaigns to accept or change each other, and just forgive and forget, letting go.  If you can.

Giving up on the relationship you’re really no longer in an appropriate position to influence your partner. You surrender your standing, a word we can borrow from the judicial system, meaning a stake in the outcome and therefore grounds for making your case. When the relationship ends, you no longer have skin in their game, and they no longer have to listen to you. They can say, “Look, give it a rest.  Don’t try to influence me any more. I’m not listening. Go do your thing; I’ll do mine.”

Relationships, therefore often end with a strong demarcation, as we go from throwing our full last-ditch weight behind arguments for the other person to change, to just letting them go do their thing elsewhere. We become most inconsistent, insistent and resistant before becoming least on all fronts. Sometimes relationships die with a whimper. But often conflicts are starkest before withdrawn.

At best we go suddenly and cleanly from saying:  “No really, you’re wrong dammit, stop doing what you’re doing!” to saying “It’s your life, not mine. Who am I to judge how you should live?”

But often that transition is much messier. Understandably, before we’ve ended it we take the escalated attacks quite personally, and attack each other for them:

• I would change if you weren’t so damned hard on me.
• I have to get this hard on you because you’re so damned stubborn.
• You not changing is further evidence of how closed-minded and selfish you are.
• You pushing me to change is further evidence of what a bully you are.
• You don’t want me to change. You just want to win fights.
• You not changing is evidence that you just want to win fights.
• The other day you said you accept me as I am, and now you’re pushing me again. You’re like bipolar or something, or at least completely inconsistent. I can’t take your word for anything.
• The other day you said you’d try to change and now you’re resisting again.  You’re like bipolar or something, or at least completely inconsistent. I can’t take your word for anything.

My point here is that while any of the conflict might be evidence about our flawed personal characters, it needn’t be.  The patterns of behavior that would make us escalate are explanation enough, even if neither of us are jerks, stubborn, bullies or other villifiable types. The escalation simply comes with three-way serenity prayer.

We crave the wisdom to know which of the three responses is appropriate precisely because they are inherently incompatible. If they weren’t incompatible we wouldn’t need the wisdom. We could hedge, accepting, trying to change and leaving all at the same time, which is impossible:

• Taking it means ignoring the problem because you’re invested in the relationship.
• Trying to change it means focusing on the problem because you’re invested in the relationship.

You can’t both ignore and focus on the same thing simultaneously. Those two responses are inherently incompatible.

• And leaving means neither ignoring or focusing on the problem but divesting yourself of the relationship.

You can’t both invest and divest in the same relationship simultaneously. Those two responses are inherently incompatible.

We can apply the three-way serenity prayer’s basic pattern to any kind of frustrating relationship or part thereof.  It applies to our relationships with our kids, parents, colleagues and friends. It applies to some portion of those relationships, for example deciding whether to keep arguing about politics with your friend, or to divest from that conversation but keep the friendship.

It applies to your relationship with parts of yourself too, for example when deciding whether to push yourself harder to lose weight or to drop that inner debate and love yourself for other parts of yourself.

It even applies to relationships that end by other means.  I’ve written elsewhere about the value of forgiving dead jerks, but not live ones.  The dead are dead. There’s nothing left to be gained in arguing that they should have been different. The relationship is complete. The dead were what they were, end of story. It makes no sense to say, “had he been different he would have been different.”

But live jerks are another story. They’ve got potential to change still, so no wonder we would campaign, often aggressively to try to get through to someone we think is a jerk, or at least doing jerky things.

One way or another, the third option exists. Relationships end. At some point we realize “they’re dead to me.”

Mostly we say that with residual spite, as in. “That jerk was a narcissist. He’s dead to me.”

Understanding the three-way serenity prayer and how it plays out in all relationship can make us less spiteful in the end, more wise even about when to give up on seeking more wisdom.  We become more agnostic and less regretful and/or angry about what went wrong, about whether we tried unconscionably hard to change them or not hard enough, about whether they were stubborn narcissists or just on a different path.

We can let go of wondering if they couldn’t, wouldn’t or shouldn’t have changed? We can switch from “I must know” to “who knows?”  We just know that for the effort we made, they didn’t change.

My daughter and I have a mantra we picked up from some childhood dinnertime blessing. The line is “bless the folk who come and go.” We say it often. It helps us deescalate out of whatever campaigns we engaged in when trying to make a relationship work when it wasn’t working.

That and an appreciation for the fundamental challenges we face in seeking and creating compatibility goes a long way toward gear switching into forgiveness.

I need to warn of a vocational and avocational hazard that threatens those who read and write here.  We psychology-oriented types specialize in seeking scientifically objective explanations for human behavior. We’re behavioral double-clickers, delving into the motivations that drive people.  By day the clinicians among us sit as neutrally as possible with clients encouraging them to probe a little deeper here or there exploring why they would do this or that. Why, really–not just the client’s rationalizations, but getting to the very bottom of it, the one true reason for what they do.

Though we try to probe neutrally, we can’t be neutral about what we probe.  We pick which this or that to probe, probing especially whatever we find aberrant, odd, wrong-headed, or inappropriate.

We don’t ask our clients “Now really, why did you choose to brush your teeth again last night?” because we think tooth-brushing is normal and healthy. We focus our psychological inquiry on the deviations from norms as we see them, whether we see the deviations correctly or not.

And that’s the hazard.  We tend to find abnormal whatever we don’t like, which means we’ll tend to probe what hurts, dissatisfies or disappoints us.  Yes we can say we are client centered enough to only probe what they find problematic, but we can’t and don’t take their word on it entirely, any more than we buy the first-response rationales they provide for why they do what they do. We in the supposedly neutral psychological profession have our moral standards, and they guide our analytical attention. Since like everyone else we tend to find amoral that which hurts offends or disappoints us, we can’t help but smuggle that bias into our supposedly “just-curious” analysis.

This hazard has been with us a long time.  For years people sought the real motivation for homosexuality..  Before psychology the clergy sought the real reasons why people deviate from religious laws, some of which we now look at as not deviations from normalcy at all. At its worst, such analysis becomes a witch hunt by other means.

The hazard spreads beyond the boundaries of psychology. Fox News is just curious about why liberals hate America so much. They’re just curious about why Global Warming scientists claim that there are real climate risks and are sure such devious behaviors are motivated by equally devious drives.

The vocational hazard spreads from the psychologist’s offices to their personal lives. As our coping strategy of first resort, we psychology-oriented folk will tend to probe for the true motives of anyone who hurts, offends or disappoints us. “I’m just curious why you would do that to me?” we’ll ask.

There’s a few problems with this as a coping strategy. First, it’s subjectivity masquerading as objectivity.  Psychologists posture as the neutral party, just curious, when there’s nothing strictly neutral about what they have chosen to analyze.

Second, there’s the word “just.”  Of all the four letter words I know, there’s none more prone to profane abuse.  “Just” means “Ignore all other possibilities,” so “Just curious” means “I have no skin in the game, no bias, all I am or could possibly be is curious.”

Third, the focus tends to be on negative reasons as though the just-curious question is “what bad motivation could make you do this objectively bad thing to me?” The analysis that such probing yields will often be framed by a “just” too, saying in so many words, “I have analyzed your possible motives. There’s just one and it’s not a good one.”

Speaking for myself (but I strongly suspect for everyone else too) I never do anything for just one reason, and the multiple reasons for my behaviors always include some motivations I’m proud of and motivations I’m ashamed of.  “You did that just for this reason” will tend therefore to be a very subjectively-motivated analysis. If you didn’t like what I did, you’ll say I did it just for a reason I’d be ashamed of.  If I like what I did, I say “No, I did it just for a reason I’d be proud of.” A conversation seeking the one true reason, when there are really many, will tend therefore to turn into an fool’s errand built for two.

Fourth, our vocational hazard coping strategy originates in the helping profession, so we’ll not just be framing our subjective criticism as objective, but as helpful objectivity. “Look I’m just trying to be helpful. When I tell you that your deviant behavior is motivated by one true and shameful motive I’m just trying to cure you.”

Here’s a simple thing to keep in mind if you want to protect against the hazard:  Being able to imagine a negative ulterior motivation for anything is a breeze.  It’s a breeze especially because there’s no behavior we could ever take that our egotistical inner-weasel couldn’t find a way to use for its own devices.  Things that hurt others, obviously could be ego driven. Things that help others could be motivated by egotistical pride.

That you can identify a shameful motivation that might be at play tells you nothing definitive about whether it is at play, or about whether the behavior itself is good or bad. Nor, does it hurting, offending or disappointing you.

At its worst, the vocational hazard becomes a way to neutralize and discredit any behavior we don’t like, simply by naming a negative motivation that could be at play. Do that with a Ph.D. after your name and you become a real Teflon-coated bully.

Don’t.

If you keep this in mind you’ll both be able to prevent the vocational hazard from becoming your coping strategy of first resort as it so often does, and on the receiving end, you’ll be better able to take with a grain of salt the “wise counsel” of the “helping professionals” who like so many have fallen for this coping strategy.

Check out this wonderful Nichols and May comedy sketch from the 1960’s that captures the problem exquisitely.

When we debate, our rhetoric escalates. Since we can only squeeze so much persuasion out of admitting that our opinions are subjective–saying, for example,  “but I really, really, really believe it,”–it’s natural that we gravitate toward postures of objectivity. We stop admitting that our opinion is a subjective interpretation and start acting like we’ve got the one infallibly true objective perspective.

Once one of us has done that, others, to stay competitive, are quick to follow suit and we end up in “infallibility contests,” dumb, dead-end debates in which the stakes become winner-takes-all; loser-pays-all competitions for who is right about everything and who is wrong about everything. In other words, we begin to sound like bickering pre-teens:  “You’re stupid.”  “No, you are.”

When the going gets tough, we seek the highest ground possible, and that highest ground is God-like omnipotence, the neutral view from nowhere, as though we have no skin in the game, no potential for interpretive bias. We stop saying, “I think that X is true,” and start saying, “X is true.”

We should counter this natural tendency. The more threatening your challenge or critique is, the more you should turn up the signals that it’s subjective.  Sometimes are argument opponents demand that we do, saying “well, that’s just your opinion.” So, of course is whatever they’re arguing.  You both should admit that it’s just your opinions and then duke it out, from the lower ground you both really occupy.

If you’ve read me before you know how much I think such absolutist pronouncements as “Don’t be judgmental” and “Don’t call people names,” stunt personal growth by blocking the better questions:  How to judge carefully and responsibly and how to generalize from a person’s behavior to decisions about the value of their overall approaches to life.

People who claim to embrace such absolutes never live by them.  They just get good at self-servingly overlooking the ways they judge and call names, and judging other people, calling them either aloud or under their breath “name-callers’ when they want them to shut up,

Still, lately I’ve found a way those absolutes resonate for me:

When judging, don’t pretend your judgment is objective.

When calling names, don’t pretend you’re doing something as simple as calling a spade a spade.

There’s a big difference between “You’re wrong” and “I think you’re wrong,” and between “You’re a fool” and “I think you’re a fool.”

We will think that some people are fools. That’s inevitable. But so too is it inevitably a thought, an interpretation we’re making.

We are all interpreters of reality.  Pretending that we aren’t is like a lawyer climbing surreptitiously onto the neutral judge’s bench and pronouncing final judgment in his own favor, as if to say “I’ve stepped out of my advocacy completely and from the neutral, bias-free position I now occupy I hereby declare that I’m right.”

Do that and you can bet your opponent will have do the same. You’ll both soon be scraping speciously for a neutral seat you can’t have. There are no neutral judges.

And this shouldn’t be confused with there being no right answers. In time some people do prove to be fools, and some opinions prove wrong.

We say “facts are facts” but without much care to distinguishing what kinds of things facts are.  For example, spades, for the most part are spades. But how about pessimists?  A pessimist is someone who you assess as less hopeful about the future than you are. The future isn’t here yet to weigh in on your intepretation of how it will go.  For all you know the future could go much worse even than your pessimist believes, which would make her an optimist, not in comparison to you but to the future, once it becomes the past and we can therefore talk more factually about it.

Most of our skin-in-the-game judgments are about how things will go in the future, which, alas, at present, is unavailable for comment. If you decide someone is a fool, you’re making a prediction based on past behavior that the things they do in the future won’t turn out well.  You’re entitled to your opinion. We’re all entitled to your opinion. We benefit from hearing it. But it remains an opinion, not a fact.

If there’s one thing to be hypersensitive to in your behavior and your opponent’s, it’s the subtle and insidious rhetoric of feigned objectivity.

An only life can take so long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never.

Philip Larkin

He who burns himself on hot milk blows on ice cream.

Turkish Proverb

You fell in a hellhole and for a time couldn’t climb out to save your life. A physical accident, a mid-life crisis, an enormous loss you weren’t prepared for–there you were just stuck, pulled up short by one of life’s cosmic wedgies. Nothing seemed to work to get you out of it.  And then something did.

Maybe it was a long time ago.  What a relief it’s in the past! And is it really?

Lately I’ve been interested in the milder, garden-variety, even healthy versions of the mental disabilities.  What if all the disorders have parallel orders?  Obsessive-compulsive order.  Post-traumatic stress order, or perhaps re-order.

My interest in milder versions was triggered in part by noticing how certain friends are actively insistent on staying happy and steering clear of discouraging words however wisely urged. One was in a terrible accident that laid her low for close to a year. Another talks of a time he almost committed suicide and the happy perfect, true revelations that he gained overcoming it.

The image came to me of a hellhole’s rim made of sand caving in, and my friends paddling against the sand’s downward currents, scrambling to get and stay as far from the rim as possible.

I thought about my own life, its hellholes and whether they’ve shaped my behavior decades later.  Yes they have.  Much of what I write here is inspired in large part by what I think I’ve learned getting out of those holes.

I’m also reminded of that cartoon cliché. Someone blindfolded gets walloped and anxiously grasps at thin air in every direction. What hit him?  Where is it? “I must get my hands on it, and when I find it, I’ll never let go.”

By midlife you meet a fair number of folks whose post-crisis calling is the promotion of some doctrine they think was their salvation. I know many people who became deeply religious, spiritual or philosophically firm-minded, committed with unyielding intensively to a whole worldview including lots of elements that to me seem extraneous to the salvation they claim they got from it.

I have a friend I visited when he was an editor at Yoga Journal where he received hundreds of review copies of new spiritual books.  I was writing one of my own at the time and scanning his shelves waiting for him to be ready for lunch, I thought, ‘yes this is what some of us do with our mid-life crisis. We write a book espousing the truth we declare we discovered, that maybe isn’t true, that maybe is just what we think was our salvation.

What exactly saved us? Was it the new friends, who happened to be fellow travelers on our new spiritual path?  The practical teachings? The simplicity of finding absolute rules to live by when we were otherwise floundering?  The surprisingly impractical cosmology about what some imagined higher power is rooting for or how the universe was created? What were the active and the inert ingredients in whatever medicine we claim cured us?

Many of the saved don’t dare analyze what got them out of the hellhole.  Tampering could weaken the cure exposing them again to that dreaded risk of sliding down the caving rim back into the hellhole.

We say we embrace but actually cling to the whole spiritual package, because if there’s one thing we know, we’re damn sure she’s not getting near that hellhole again.  The spiritual beliefs are our bulwark against sliding. We live in the fortress we’ve built out of these retaining walls. They’re load bearing. Don’t go tampering with a cinderblock here or there, or these walls make come tumbling down, and we’ll be lost again.

I’m saying many of us might have a low-grade version of post-traumatic reaction.  Being born again may not be just an Evangelical thing.

Some of us, me included have post-traumatic stress distorter, an intense distorting reaction to anything that seems the slightest like the rim of the hellhole we’re at pains to avoid.

But then some of us get beyond the distorting effects too.  We experience post-traumatic stress re-order. That hellhole taught us something useful, not an over-compensation, blowing on ice cream after being burnt by hot milk, but some useful subtle refinement of our wisdom, the kind of wisdom that makes us sadder but wiser.

Climbing out of a hellhole about 20 years ago, I noticed three basic options for how to do it.

1. Re-assertion:  Yes I fell in a hellhole, but through no fault of my own.  That jerk pushed me. I was a victim of circumstances, just some unlucky anomaly.  Nothing to learn here.  No need to reinterpret my reality. My existing interpretations will work fine from now on.

2. I once was lost but now I’m blind:  Yes my interpretations were wrong, but not my confidence in my ability to interpret. So I’m going to do a complete swap. My prior interpretations were dead wrong; their opposites dead right. I was a dupe but never again. I’ve got the right interpretations now, and am going to promote them with same blind zeal that I had for my prior interpretations.

3. A life-long commitment to shopping for better interpretations and studying interpretation itself:  Rather than hold to the old interpretations or flip them for exact-opposite new interpretations, recognize that interpretations matter, and that we really want good ones. And then become a student of what interpretations are and how we shop for them, including, but not limited to the ways that former hellholes influence our choice.

If you’ve read any of my other 450 articles you can tell that since my hellholes, I’ve been working to promote that third option.