Being Right Is Expensive

I said it last week. I said it the week before that.

I've said it every week since Trump took office the second time and started ruining the fucking world with the Heritage Foundation.

The world is fucked. Everything sucks. And our poor kids have a hopeless road ahead.

That's the one. Word for word.

I also wrote a book that tells you to put your complaint down.

I haven't put mine down.

And I'm not going to tell you it's wrong. I can make the case. Give me an hour.

You can be completely right and still be stuck.

That's the third framework in my book, and it's the one people fight me on, because their complaint is justified. Of course it is. Mine were too. (The chapter is about a woman who's been waiting decades for an apology, and a best friend I cut off for over ten years. Both stories stay in the book. All fourteen frameworks are here.)

Here's the thing. Nobody stays married to a complaint that's obviously bullshit. The ones that last are the ones where you're right.

I've been right about one person for years

Years ago I worked with someone who believed they were owed. Owed the training. Owed the opportunity. Owed the next thing before they'd done the current thing.

I'm not going to name them or tell you where. And I'm going to be nicer about it here than I am in my head.

In my head, I'm not nice.

I hate lazy motherfuckers.

I was right about that person. I'm STILL right about that person. We haven't worked together in a long time, and that sentence still shows up on its own.

As far as I know, they have no idea. I'm the only one still carrying it around.

So why keep it? I've been asking myself that since I wrote the chapter, and the honest answer isn't flattering. Every time I say that sentence, I get to be the one who works. The one who earned it. That feels good for about four seconds.

And yeah, I see it. My complaint is about somebody who thought they were owed. Guess what my complaint thinks I'm owed.

People will do it for nothing

And I'm not special. It gets uglier.

In 2020, Rahav Gabay, a psychologist at Tel Aviv University, and three colleagues went looking for people who feel like the wronged one all the time. They found four things that travel together: needing your suffering recognized, being sure you're the moral one, having less room for anyone else's pain, and replaying it. Over and over.

Then they put money on the table. In a game, the people who scored high were more likely to take the other player's winnings away... even though they didn't get to keep a cent of it. The researchers called it pure revenge.

Nothing to gain. They did it anyway.

The links in that study are modest (the full paper is here if you want to check me), so don't go diagnosing your sister with it. But I didn't need a lab to believe it. I just told you about mine.

They're not the one carrying it

Charlotte Witvliet, a psychologist at Hope College, had 71 people think about someone who'd really hurt them. Sometimes they rehearsed the grudge. Sometimes they imagined forgiving. She had them wired up the whole time.

When they rehearsed the grudge, heart rate went up. Blood pressure went up. They sweated more, and the muscle that pulls your face into a scowl got tighter.

Then she told them to stop, and their bodies kept going for a while.

That's a few minutes in a lab. She didn't find that a grudge will kill you, and I'm not going to pretend she did. But look at who was in that room. Just 71 people getting worked up over somebody who wasn't even in the building.

A grudge feels like something you're doing to them.

They're at lunch.

I was the someone

Let me back up. "The world is fucked" used to have a partner. A second sentence that ran right next to it.

Someone has to do something.

Read that again and find the person doing the work in it. Someone. Somebody with more money, more reach, an actual title. I could say that sentence every day for the rest of my life and never lift a finger.

So I quit saying "someone."

I can't fix the food supply. I can build a website. So I built That's Not Safe to Eat, which takes the recall notices the government publishes and puts them in plain English every morning, with where the stuff was sold. The morning I wrote this, it had 82 active notices on it. Salmonella in a pistachio butter. Listeria in a chicken salad sold in Oregon and Washington.

Then I built Build the Promise, which tracks 532 members of Congress and who's paying for them.

It's not much. I honestly don't know if either one changes anything. But it's something, and it's what I can do right now.

The complaint was true. It was also the only thing I was doing about it.

The world didn't get less fucked. I told you, I still say the first sentence. But one of my complaints has a to-do list now.

How to catch the one you're married to

You could recite it in your sleep

Same words. Same order. Same three examples. If it hasn't changed in years, nobody's working on it. Including you.

Somebody else has to move first

"Someone has to." "They need to." "Once he finally gets it." Find the person doing the work in your sentence. If it's never you, then you can't fix it. Handy, right?

You'd miss it

Nobody wants to check this one. Picture it gone. Just... gone. No fight, no winner. If the first thing you feel is a little lost... yeah. That scared me too.

Where to start

You don't have to forgive anybody. You don't have to call anyone or decide they were right. They probably weren't.

Just pick the one. You already know which one it is. You've probably said it out loud today.

Here's the exercise from the end of chapter 3, word for word.

My complaints kept me safe for a long time. If everybody's going to let you down, nobody gets close enough to do it. That worked great, right up until I wanted somebody close.

I was right the whole time. I just couldn't put it down.

So what's yours? How long have you been saying it? And who's the "someone" in it?

Write the paragraph. Put your own name where "someone" was.

Then go do one thing about it.