There Are No Grown-ups

by Pamela Druckerman

  Tips on how to socialize were immediately useful. I heard a comedian say that when you’re stuck in a boring conversation with someone, “Ask them questions to which the answer is a number.” A businesswoman told me that she forbids three topics at her dinner parties: children, jobs and real estate. (I’m partial to rules that come in threes.)

  I also collected rules with no obvious utility. These made me feel prepared for an uncertain future—my own equivalent of a basement stocked with water and ammunition. I got excited when a producer explained on the radio that low-budget movies shouldn’t have many speaking parts, since you must pay actors more once they talk. (He said that’s why waitresses in low-budget restaurant scenes usually just stand silently with their notepads.)

  My litmus test for whether a rule deserved to be in my personal pantheon was whether it could work as a person’s last words. Could I imagine someone on his deathbed, surrounded by loved ones, saying, “You’re fluent in a language once you can explain to someone—in that language—how to tie his shoes”? (I can.)

  I also considered it fortuitous when someone repeated a rule that he had heard from someone else. A woman whose boyfriend had slept with her friend told me her therapist had a very reasonable explanation for this: “People sleep with people they know.” (These struck me as excellent last words, in a pinch.) Someone else repeated a rule passed down from a friend that I suspect might contain the formula for modern marriage: a woman must sleep with her husband every seven to ten days, or he goes a little nuts.

  I was partial to rules that contain numerical formulas, perhaps because they seemed scientific. “Cute is two-thirds,” a friend told me once, meaning that something is cute when it’s two-thirds its normal size. (This was his main takeaway from his brief marriage to a short, adorable woman.)

  When I started to travel abroad, I began collecting expressions, too.Foreign sayings had the advantage of being vetted in their own countries, but sounding fresh to me. As an exchange student in Japan, I learned that “even monkeys fall from trees.” (I’ve since found many occasions to say this in non-Japanese settings, though I often get quizzical looks.)

  I liked the explanatory power of the Italian phrase “The appetite comes with eating” and of the world-weary French expression “Only friends can disappoint.” When something comes too late, the Dutch say that it’s “like mustard after the meal.”

  I can’t always tell whether something is an established foreign expression or just something a foreigner happens to say. “Better the wrong place with the right people than the right place with the wrong people,” a Parisian tells me once. I later learn that this is just something her husband once muttered on a bus.

  It gradually occurred to me that I was gathering these bon mots not to learn about life, but to disguise my ignorance. It seemed a bridge too far when, in my twenties, I began repeating phrases that a Hollywood talent agent might say while smoking his after-lunch cigar, such as “Dress British, think Yiddish” (attributed to Lew Wasserman), or “Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a man who’s tired of fucking her.”

  My desire for life rules left me susceptible to superstitions. The hostess of a luncheon told me that if a slice of cake falls over while it’s being served, the recipient won’t get married for six years. Thereafter I stuck to desserts like brownies, with a low center of gravity. Years later, I realized what she was probably trying to tell me: if I wanted to find a husband, I should eat less cake.

  I was also susceptible to religion. What’s a religious practice, if not a collection of small rules for daily life? When I investigated Judaism in more depth in my twenties, I quickly realized I’d stumbled onto the mother lode of life rules. Observant Jews don’t just follow hundreds of commandments in the Old Testament, they also study centuries of rabbinic commentary on how to apply them in myriad situations.

  —What if a man falls off a roof and accidentally lands on—and has sex with—someone other than his wife?

  —What if you’ve purged your house of bread products to observe Passover, but moments before the holiday starts, a piece of bread flies through your kitchen window and lands in your vat of soup. Can you still eat the soup?

  I learn that there’s a prayer to say before you eat a doughnut, and another one to say before you bite into a peach. The blessing over a potato is different from the one for a potato chip, because the chip no longer resembles the original spud. (There’s a lively rabbinic debate about Pringles, since they still look quite potato-ish.)

  I loved all this minutiae. It was like communing with my ancestral OCD. No wonder I collected tips on low-budget films I’d probably never make. I descended from people who were obsessed with unlikely scenarios.

  I didn’t follow all the religious rules, but I kept adding more. If I believed that God didn’t want me to eat stone crabs, shouldn’t I also accept that he doesn’t want me to play tennis on Saturday afternoons? (More experienced practitioners knew where to draw the line. I dated an Orthodox man who followed every edict except the one banning nonmarital sex.)

  In the end I backed away from intense religious practice. I was self-conscious enough without fretting about which blessing to say over peanut butter (there are separate ones for chunky and smooth). But mostly it was that, for someone who was already drawn to rules, being semi-observant didn’t feel spiritual, it felt compulsive.

  I went back to seeking everyday solace in my assortment of secular principles. But the older I got, the flimsier these seemed. My random life rules weren’t making me feel more adult. They didn’t give me judgment, compassion or an understanding of other people. Surely being a grown-up didn’t just mean vacuuming up other people’s stray insights and beauty tips. It was time to forge some insights of my own.

  The Ten Commandments of the Forties

  Never wave at someone while wearing short sleeves.

  Do not buy the too-small jeans with the expectation that you will soon lose weight.

  Don’t suggest lunch with someone you don’t want to have lunch with. They will be far less disappointed than you think.

  When you go to meet someone who works in the fashion industry, do not wear your most “fashionable” outfit. Wear black.

  “Nice” isn’t a sufficient quality for friendship, but it’s a necessary one.

  If you’re wondering whether she’s the daughter or the girlfriend, she’s probably the girlfriend.

  If you’re wondering whether she’s the mother or the grandmother, she’s probably the mother (especially if she has twins).

  There are no grown-ups. Everyone is winging it; some just do it more confidently.

  Forgive your exes, even the awful ones. They were just winging it, too.

  It’s okay if you don’t like jazz.

  15

  how to be wise

  THINGS CHANGE IN YOUR FORTIES. I now laugh with genuine surprise at the punch lines of jokes I know I’ve heard before. At airports, I look at my gate number on the screen, then seconds later I’ve forgotten it. I recognize my children’s teachers by sight, but I couldn’t tell you their names. (In my defense, they’re French, and one of them keeps remarrying.)

  But something else changes in the forties, too. It might even compensate for those evaporating gate numbers. Lately, when I’m confronted with a new situation or problem, a sort of mental index card pops up in my brain. This card contains other, similar situations that I’ve encountered before and how they turned out. Based on this index card, I have a decent idea of what to do next.

  Let me be clear: I haven’t become an oracle. And my range is limited. I don’t have index cards for Chinese politics or nuclear proliferation. But faced with once-vexing situations in daily life, I often feel quite clear about how to handle myself. I spend less time paralyzed with doubt and regret and more time efficiently proceedi
ng with my life. Often, I’m not even tempted to ask Simon what he thinks.

  I’m glad to have this new card catalog in my head. And I’ve noticed that other people my age now seem to have them, too. What do all these index cards amount to? Are we finally becoming wise?

  * * *

  —

  People have pondered wisdom for millennia, but the first modern researcher who tried to study it was a New Yorker named Vivian Clayton.

  Clayton was born in Brooklyn in 1950. Her mother taught shorthand at a high school. Her father was a freelance fur designer. From an early age, Clayton was struck by how different her parents were from each other.

  “My mother was low on emotional intelligence, and her level of compassion was much lower than my father’s. She tended to make decisions impulsively, and sometimes they were very hurtful,” Clayton tells me on the phone, from her home in Northern California.

  Her father was far more even-keeled and would take time to reflect before making a decision. Sometimes he’d decide that the best move was not to do anything. He was very alert to how his choices would impact Clayton, and in general he seemed to understand how other people were likely to react and feel. “His strongest suit was compassion,” she recalls.

  Clayton’s father, Simon, wasn’t a financial success. When she once spent the day at work with him, they had lunch at his worktable, then he unrolled a sleeping pad and took a nap on the table, too. She was struck by the smallness of her father’s life. “That was the size of his space, that was it.”

  And yet he was content with his circumscribed world. For years he wrote a weekly column, “Simon Sez,” for a fur-trade newspaper, describing the foibles of life in the four square blocks that comprised Manhattan’s fur district.

  And Clayton noticed that, whereas her mother rarely got what she wanted by acting impulsively, and usually out of anger, her father’s approach often succeeded. “Over time he would come up with a decision, and it seemed to have benefited from the time he took to make it,” Clayton says.

  He also had an unusually precise understanding of himself. “He knew he was not an ambitious person. He knew what his flaws were. He sometimes would apologize for not being perfect.”

  Clayton was still trying to understand this elusive quality of her father’s when she wrote a paper about wisdom for an undergraduate psychology class. That paper led to a doctoral program in psychology, where she studied wisdom full-time. As far as she knew, she was the only person investigating this topic.

  That meant Clayton first had to define what wisdom is. Looking for common themes, she read sources ranging from the Bible, to ancient Roman playwrights, to Henry David Thoreau, to the speeches of John F. Kennedy. She asked law professors, lawyers and retired judges to describe wise people they knew.

  Beginning in 1978, Clayton published a series of groundbreaking papers positing that wisdom is a decision-making process in which someone analyzes knowledge using their intellect and emotions, and then reflects on it. She determined that wisdom is distinct from intelligence. Intelligence tells you how to do something. Wisdom, because it has moral and social dimensions, allows you to decide whether to do it or not.

  Clayton realized that, to be wise, you don’t need to be brilliant. You need an “adequate intellect” in order to understand all the factors involved in a decision. You also need to feel compassion, and to have that compassion “enter into the mixture, when you finally come up with a decision or judgment.” And since wise decisions require reflection, they’re usually made slowly.

  In other words, Clayton’s definition of wisdom sounded a lot like her father.

  On the strength of her research, Clayton was hired to teach at Columbia University in New York. It was a triumphant return to the city where her father had slept on his desk.

  Her research began to unleash interest in the study of wisdom. Journalists called her for interviews. Higher-ups at Columbia wanted to know when she would publish next. Colleagues and competitors showed up at her office to sniff out her progress. Could she measure people’s level of wisdom? Could she teach it?

  But wisdom was an elusive subject. Intelligence is “the ability to think logically, to conceptualize and abstract from reality,” Clayton wrote in a 1982 paper. Whereas wisdom includes “the ability to grasp human nature, which is paradoxical, contradictory, and subject to continual change.”

  At age thirty-one, Clayton made a decision that surprised everyone around her: she resigned from Columbia. Wisdom was overwhelming. She didn’t want to study it forever. And Clayton knew herself. She was slow and plodding, and didn’t respond well to external pressure. “I realized I was not by nature a true academician,” she told me. “And if I wanted to make anything of my life and make a living, I better get the hell out of there and get retrained and get to work.”

  * * *

  —

  After Vivian Clayton left the study of wisdom, many others picked up the baton. There was soon the “Berlin Wisdom Paradigm,” the “balance theory of wisdom” and the “Emergent Wisdom Model.” A psychologist at Yale launched a project to teach wisdom to middle schoolers.

  There were also many competing definitions. Some researchers defined wisdom in practical terms, as an expertise at solving common problems. Others defined it more esoterically as the pinnacle of personal growth, or as “a deep understanding of life and a desire to see the truth.” Still others considered wisdom to be an ideal that people should strive for, but that they’re unlikely to attain.

  While there was never a consensus definition of wisdom, eventually some common—or at least overlapping—descriptions emerged:

  Wise people can see the big picture. They’re able to look beyond the problem at hand to grasp the wider context and longer-term implications. They’re not swept up in the group mind.

  And yet they know that their own knowledge, judgment and perspective are limited. They’re humble. They realize that all decisions are made with imperfect information and will have imperfect outcomes.

  They know that life is ambiguous and complicated. They see nuance rather than absolutes. They know that most people and situations have both good and bad elements, and they’re adept at identifying what these are. The legendary Dutch soccer player Johan Cruyff pointed out that someone might seem like a bad player. But when you analyze his various qualities—his left foot, right foot, head shot, speed, etc.—you might see that he can do some things extremely well.

  They know that, in any situation, multiple outcomes are possible. Actions have unforeseen consequences. Even good solutions have hidden transition costs. When I show my husband a listing for a new apartment that’s bigger and cheaper than our current one, he refuses to even consider moving. He claims that the upheaval of moving, and of adjusting to a new place, could easily outweigh its benefits.

  Wise people know themselves. They’ve made a candid assessment of their own good and bad qualities. They have a decent understanding of their own family history, and of the historical era in which they live. When Angela Merkel was Germany’s chancellor-elect, she met British prime minister Tony Blair. Blair’s chief of staff recalls that “Without being starstruck, the soon-to-be chancellor plonked herself down in front of [Blair] and said disarmingly, ‘I have ten problems.’” She then listed them, starting with “lack of charisma.” Blair was impressed.

  But they’re not self-centered. They acknowledge other people’s points of view and accept that others have goals and values that differ from their own. Neurotics are unlikely to be wise, even if they’re very smart, because they’re preoccupied with themselves.

  They’re good at reading people. They have insight into how others think and how they’re liable to act in various situations. They grasp people’s motivations and emotional states, and they can predict how their own actions and decisions will impact others.

  This knowledge of other people isn’t just
academic. Someone who’s wise genuinely cares about other people and acts out of empathy, generosity and compassion. They favor conflict resolution, compromise, generosity and forgiveness, and they believe in charitable giving. When Nelson Mandela was president of South Africa, he would stand up every time the tea lady entered his office, and remain standing until she left. Mandela decided not to run for a second term so his newly democratic country could experience a peaceful transition. Wise people are driven not just by their own advancement, but also by a desire for the common good.

  They’re pragmatic and adaptable. They can manage life’s uncertainties. When reality contradicts their beliefs, they change their minds. “Wise people are able to accept reality as it is, with equanimity,” explains sociologist Monika Ardelt. They don’t aim for the unattainable. They can change. I once heard someone explain why Barack Obama was a wise politician: he only wanted what he could get.

  They have experience. This includes “rich factual knowledge and rich procedural knowledge,” the psychologists Paul Baltes and Jacqui Smith wrote. You can’t be wise yet ignorant. You need data points to feed your judgment. Wise people draw on this data to know which elements of a situation to focus on and which to overlook.

  They’re resilient. They learn from negative experiences and recover from setbacks. In the face of adversity, they maintain their emotional balance and sense of humor. They focus on the positive, without dwelling on past grievances. But they don’t go around irrationally convinced that they’re about to strike it rich.

  They know when not to act. In general, people have an “action bias”: when there’s a problem, they want to do something about it. Wise people know that sometimes the best option is to do nothing or to wait, even if people are clamoring for them to act. As chancellor, Angela Merkel once asked French president Nicolas Sarkozy to stop pressuring her to choose how to tackle a problem. She pointed out that in some cases, if you don’t make an immediate decision, the problem you’re trying to solve changes or disappears. “I’m someone who gives time to time; because I’ve seen, in slowness, there is a vast hope,” she said.