Just a quick post tonight--it is Saturday Evening, you know. All day today, I have been circling around an important truth. I'm not sure what it is. I guess, if I were sure, I would stop circling. I do have an idea what I want to reject, however, and that may be enough for tonight.
The idea I want to reject is this: the good things and the bad things are on the same scale. It's true about some things. In football, losing 10 yards on a play is the same kind of thing as gaining ten yards on a play. The negative side of the scale and the positive side are mirror images. But it's not true about other things. You can't go to a really bad job and make it a good job by removing the bad parts. Say you talk to the employees and they say there are three things they really dislike about the job, and your idea is that you will deal with those three things and everything will be good. You are very much surprised when you return to that workplace in a month and find everyone as unhappy as before and the top complaints are things you have never heard before. Why is that?
The other way to approach the situation is to find out what is good about it and make the good things a lot better. When the bad parts have been pushed to the periphery by the abundance of good things; when the job or the marriage or the class setting are producing good things in abundance, you will find two things about the negative parts. The first is that they don't matter very much any more. The second is that they have now become easy to fix.
Good experiences drive out bad. Or relativize them. Gresham's Law states that bad money drives good money out of the market. It does that because everyone keeps the undeniably genuine money and uses the possibly counterfeit money in purchases. But I think the good experiences are the ones we want to keep and the bad ones the ones we want to get rid of. And if that's not what we want, maybe we should look at just why that is.
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