Holiday Blues and the Future Authentic

This year let's stop dodging the past, and listen honestly to its warnings about the future.

Reader Reactions

My piece about my parents’ irregular marriage and what a labor-dividing card game taught me about gender inequality got a ton of feedback. Nothing brings out big feelings like marriage and domestic labor, it seems. You can read it here:

Let’s Reinvent Marriage

In many families it seems that the Fair Play system, in which household tasks are divvied up with the goal of earning each partner more free time, can create a path toward equity, as it did in mine. But as many pointed out to me, in some relationships it can uncork resentments so deep and painful that the game winds up being a catalyst for the end of the marriage. And in some cases the husbands simply won’t engage with the game at all, which not only tears the mask off deep, frightening biases, it reveals how little we sometimes know about the people with whom we choose to make a household. As many have pointed out, and I tried to, the game’s not a perfect fix for all this. But man does it have a lot to teach us about the big, invisible forces that need fixing. On to today’s essay…

The holidays, I realized this year, are a consistent trial of my mental health. I hope you aren’t afflicted by the depression and anxiety I so often feel, but your odds aren’t good: 3 in 5 Americans report that the holidays get them down. Because I consider my reaction so off-brand for the most Wonderful Time of the Year, I find the National Alliance on Mental Illness’s definition of “holiday blues” quite reassuring.

Temporary feelings of anxiety or depression during the holidays that can be associated with extra stress, unrealistic expectations or even memories that accompany the season.

For so many of us, it’s a collision of storms: booze, big expenses, comparing one’s fortunes to others, impossible hopes. That last bit is what really cuts at me. As someone who already viciously sweats the difference between ambition and reality, there’s something particularly challenging about a season that for so many people is ostensibly their favorite, and as the singing starts I’m kicking myself for not knowing the words.

Usually I fall into a thick, disorienting depression. But this year I managed to stay on my feet. I stopped drinking in 2016, which helps enormously — happy to explain all that sometime, if you’re interested — and this year I tried to observe real sleep discipline, which has always made or broken my ability to keep depression at bay. I also made a point of doing at least one big, fun outing every day, rather than just sitting around and looking at one another, as my Mom would say. In any event, I’m thinking of all of you who experienced what I’m describing, and I hope you take the same comfort I do from knowing that you’re the norm, not the exception.

It’s taken me three decades to develop the skills necessary to prepare for this sort of depression by honestly assessing the last time it afflicted me. For years, it kept circling back like a shark in the water, and yet I was taken by surprise each time it returned. Why is that? What makes it so difficult for me, or anyone, to acknowledge a tendency, a pattern, a vulnerability such that I can be ready for it?

Part of it, clearly, is that I don’t like this aspect of myself, and don’t wish to admit that it’s with me. Part of it is that I deeply hope to have miraculously left this dark characteristic behind. Part of it is that I’m afraid of admitting that depression is largely out of my control, and that I also don’t know just how deep and dangerous it can be.

But none of that changes the truth of the matter: periods of sadness have swallowed me throughout my adult life. A dark phase in college, quitting an otherwise ideal job at 24 and surfing for a year in San Francisco, crash-landing at my parents’ home after witnessing September 11th in New York. I spent my 20s desperately trying to avoid acknowledging my depressive nature (and unconsciously managing it) through intense exercise, endless socializing, and a fair amount of alcohol. It wasn’t until I saw a particularly blunt psychiatrist that the pattern was made clear to me. “You’ve had at least two major depressive episodes in your life,” he said without a trace of sympathy in our one session together, “and it’s a good bet you’ll have more.”

I’ve been thinking about that unblinking shrink as we all face a year — hell, a future — of intense uncertainty, and I find myself wanting to sic him on all the folks I see continuing to make confident predictions in what is clearly an unpredictable world.

Trevor Jackson does quite a number on the celebrated economist Martin Wolf in the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books, and the way he dismantles him takes me back to that psychiatrist’s office. Wolf wrote a seminal 2004 book, Why Globalization Works, that was given to grand pronouncements like “liberal democracy is the only political and economic system capable of generating sustained prosperity and political stability.” Now, Wolf’s latest book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, tries to square his prediction with the past 20 years of damage to both prosperity and stability in those same liberal democracies. And as Jackson points out, he can’t quite do it, and instead doubles down on the notion that capitalism and democracy are entwined, and can be made into a happy marriage, in spite of their irreconcilable differences. I imagine Wolf facing Jackson in a beige room, two easy chairs facing one another. You’ve been wrong about the future before, Jackson tells Wolf, and you’ll be wrong again.

This isn’t just Wolf’s tendency, or mine. As a species, we are terrible at predicting the future, because we misremember the past. And going into a new year, I want to start acknowledging this flaw in our character, because we cannot let it continue to ambush us.

First of all, it’s not our fault. It’s a hardwired tendency. As the psychologist Baruch Fischhoff first reported in his 1975 paper “Hindsight ≠ Foresight”, and as he and others found again and again over the years, a “creeping determinism” takes hold in people when asked about the past. He described it as “the tendency to perceive reported outcomes as having been relatively inevitable.”

Ask a group of experts in Chinese geopolitics whether Nixon’s visit to China was likely to have ended in success, and the majority of them will not only say the outcome was the most probable, they’ll estimate the likelihood was twice as likely as what those who didn’t know the outcome would guess. And beyond that, Fischhoff found, those experts tend to not only forget their own past predictions, they falsely remember being right.

This “hindsight bias” is a cousin of what Fischhoff’s mentor Daniel Kahneman described as the human brain’s habit of assuming that it knows everything it needs to. He shorthanded it in his 2011 book Thinking: Fast and Slow as WYSIATI. What you see is all there is. In a 2012 interview, Kahneman described the brain this way:

It tells the best stories that it can from the information available, even when the information is sparse or unreliable. And that makes stories that are based on very different qualities of evidence equally compelling. Our measure of how "good" a story is—how confident we are in its accuracy—is not an evaluation of the reliability of the evidence and its quality, it's a measure of the coherence of the story.

People are designed to tell the best story possible. So WYSIATI means that we use the information we have as if it is the only information. We don't spend much time saying, "Well, there is much we don't know." We make do with what we do know. And that concept is very central to the functioning of our mind.

I spent years on a documentary series about this concept, and all the ways it sets the stage for propaganda, modern marketing, and the ascendancy of outrageous misinformation. (Hacking Your Mind is available on Amazon, if you’d like to check it out.) But more and more, I’m seeing people who clearly have no idea that they’re misremembering the past make bold pronouncements about the future, and get away with it.

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, entrepreneurs whose success came from a deep and disciplined analysis of data and the efficiencies it suggested, are both selling the notion of a life beyond this planet, in spite of the fact that the data is screaming at them not to pursue it. Mars, our closest neighbor with a walkable surface, requires a yearlong journey through dark, dirty, dangerous space that will likely kill the first few crews who seek to cross it. Space stations large enough to house a trillion people, Bezos’s dream, would require the annihilation of our planet’s climate to build. And no one with dreams of space seems to have the honesty to point out that Proxima Centauri B, the nearest possibly habitable planet, is so far away it would require 2000 human generations to reach. (I eschewed the notion of going there in the introduction to my book The Loop. Still: take a spin around it on NASA’s site and imagine walking its vast continents, though. The visualization is very, very cool.)

Artificial-intelligence hawkers talk about somehow precoding our values into automated systems, so that they can serve our purposes without betraying our morals. But as a political scientist can tell you, no two people on earth have a fully shared sense of what those values should be, making it impossible to enjoy the grand efficiencies that AI makers promise without betraying someone’s values — maybe even yours.

And economists continue to insist that by every conventional measure the status quo is continuing to work just fine, even as we see deeper and deeper income inequality as part of a pattern that has continued over the last 30 years. If I had my way we’d include the Gini coefficient in any conversation about the state of the economy. It gauges income inequality on a scale from 0 (perfectly equal) to 1 (utterly unequal). It’s been stuck between 0.43 and 0.49 since 1992.

The political analyst William Schneider coined a very apt phrase for describing the way public figures talk about their regrets without actually taking responsibility for their mistakes. He called it speaking in the “past exonerative,” and it’s been used to describe empty language like “mistakes were made” or “I’m sorry if anyone was offended.” It’s part of our grand tradition of ignoring our own tendencies, of losing track of the pattern, of pretending that our foibles don’t come with us into politics, technology, or the holiday season.

I’m trying to update Schneider’s “past exonerative” with a new tense of my own: the Future Authentic. It’s a form of speech built for honest assessment. Speaking in the Future Authentic is to acknowledge that our society has been around for too brief a time to know whether the arc of history bends toward justice, as Martin Luther King, Jr, imagined, or away from it. It’s for honestly looking at whether the free market is likely to give us affordable housing, or whether we have to invent and enforce hard rules to make that possible. It’s for endorsing the life-improving possibilities of cutting-edge technology without being blind to the ways that profit motives pervert its deployment.

When I reached my 30s, I began rummaging around for other riffs on depression, ways that it can be interpreted as something other than an affliction. For instance, I dove into the work of the psychologist Joseph Forgas, who escaped the oppressive Communism and bleak professional prospects of his native Hungary and made a new life in Australia, where in spite of endless sun and fun he studied the adaptive benefits of negative feelings. (My kind of dude.) Specifically, he found that mild negativity correlates with improvements in everything from learning a new language to cognitive ability. But, as he told me by phone from Sydney, it has to be a mild, brief form of the stuff. “Not so intense that it requires concentration, and not so long that it’s overwhelming,” he told me. “Because when it doesn’t work you can tip into depression,” which he pointed out isn’t useful at all. Well shit, I remember thinking.

For me the lesson of this period was that my darkness is perfectly useful, but it can’t drive the car all the time, because it eventually steers me into a tree. So I have to take the wheel in a conscious, often uncomfortable way, and I do so by preparing, with the help of friends, therapists, and occasional antidepressants, for my inevitable battles with what Andrew Solomon called The Noonday Demon. And more and more I’m learning to speak about it in the Future Authentic. These days it’s going pretty well. For one thing, having seen the cycle repeat itself so many times, I’m able to see that life is long, and that what I see when I’m in the grip of depression is most certainly not all there is. I try to share this notion as often as I can, and when I speak in the Future Authentic it seems to find an audience. I was moved to post something about this to TikTok when I found myself in front of an apartment building that was the scene of fierce depression back when I lived in Seattle, and more than 700,000 people watched. I still get comments on it, years later.

@byjacobwardI’ve had enormous advantages in Iife, but a sunny disposition is not one of them. So believe me when I say: life is long and has so many wonderful surprises. Keep going. #depression #mentalhealth #keepgoing #health

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I have by no means managed to take the wheel entirely. The joke in my house is that when everyone around the breakfast tale recounts their dreams, mine are incredibly predictable, and incredibly stressful: detailed imaginary cityscapes in which I lose a child, miss a train, run from the police. My anxiety has been in charge of my dream life for decades, and this year I’m going to try to take up meditation and some positive-psychology techniques, see if I can rewire my unconscious for the occasional fun and relaxing nighttime scene, and break free of the endless spy movie that is my sleep. Regardless, I’m going to try to speak, and act, in the Future Authentic whenever I can. Fundamentally my resolution this year is to not be surprised by future developments that are clearly advertised in the past, and in my work as a journalist I hope to cover the future in the same way.

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Recommendations

A few things I’ve enjoyed enormously over the holiday…

Layers • Little Dragon, April + VISTA

I listen to Little Dragon like crazy. (If you don’t know, they’re a Swedish band of friends from Göteborg that carries Prince’s sound forward in a very compelling way. And the lead singer, Yukimi Nagano, is about to tour the US for a new solo effort, it’s worth catching her.) This one for some reason has me locked in, and also has me trying to learn the Purdie Shuffle on drums, which turns out to be surprisingly difficult. If you’d like to listen to what plays in my household, here’s a playlist I and my 11 year-old assembled as we were driving around.

The Terror (AMC) • Season 1

The first season is based on the Dan Simmons novel, which took the real-life 1845 disappearance of two British exploration vessels in the arctic and fictionalized what might have happened to them. Jared Harris has made a career playing overlooked experts trying to talk sense into their superiors, and in this case he spends several episodes with lips crushed together as he suffers the stubborn foolishness of Ciaran Hinds as his sunny commander. Then the polar bears turn up.

Matuse Wetsuits

I spent years in a crumbling old wetsuit wondering why I couldn’t bear the cold as long as anyone else in the water, and on a trip to Orange County in the fall I realized it was because the neoprene had lost so many of its air bubbles — that’s the insulation — it wasn’t keeping me warm against the Pacific. I asked around and visited the nondescript Matuse headquarters near San Clemente, where locals told me they sold returned wetsuits at half price. The incredibly patient CFO got up from his desk to help us find our size and let us use the restrooms to try them on, and since then I’ve bought two. They’re magically warm and easy to get on and off, and if you can find your size in the Vintage section, they really are half price. (I get nothing out of this, btw — I’m just a fan.)

Thanks for reading. Let’s find purpose and chase joy wherever we can in 2025. (That’s Future Authentic for “Happy New Year.”) See you later this week.