Your job's fine. Your feelings ache. What gives?
Try deconstructing this one weird emotional fallacy
Ever heard of the pathetic fallacy? Maybe literary theory’s not your thing, but you’ve seen this fallacy in every Hallmark movie ever. It’s the assumption that there has to be a close fit between how a character is feeling and how the world is behaving.
Feeling good? It ought to be sunny outside. Feeling sad? It better be raining! (The guys on Flight of the Conchords have their usual fun with this misconception.)
Let’s take seven minutes to think about how a fallacy that makes for pretty good TV but a pretty bad approach to life and work.
First, let me share a pathetic-fallacy story from my life.
About six years ago, a close family member was diagnosed with cancer. Our little family had seen something of illness and death, but this, dear god, this felt claustrophobically close. We had always been a noisy, talkative, laughable bunch. But now, abruptly, we had a hard time talking to each other, much less talking to folks outside the house. We walked through our days carrying a thudding sadness.
But one day, when I’d gone to my professor job like usual, I met with some students to collaborate on a project. I remember we were working in a classroom with gorgeously tall windows, the sunshine pouring all over us. And, glory be, the work was going well. I felt on my game, the students were getting it, the project was happening. And then, I remember, in the middle of all that vocational satisfaction, feeling my soul come to a dead stop: Why is this work going so well when there’s cancer in the house?
And, secondly, a pathetic-fallacy story from someone else’s life.
The author Jonathan Malesic tells a burnout story from a time when his career was going very, very well. Everybody around him knew he was one of the lucky ones. He had a job he’d trained for and had always wanted. He had the respect of his coworkers and administrators. But although he was a professional success story, he carried a profound weariness.
Every morning before work, Malesic woke up and watched a YouTube video on an endless loop, a Peter Gabriel song, “Don’t Give up.” But Malesic wasn’t doing an eye-of-the-tiger motivation session. He was looping on a sad image the video portrayed, because, unlike everything in his professional life, this was how he felt. He had other coping mechanisms as well: “At night, I ate ice cream and drank malty, high-alcohol beer—often together, as a float. I gained thirty pounds.”
Malesic’s story is different from mine. He wasn’t enduring grief or fear. He was burning out. But the narrative illustrates the dangers of the pathetic fallacy. Your job can look great and be great, even while you are feeling far from great. If you don’t tend that gap well, the pathetic fallacy will overwhelm not just your private but your professional life as well.
How to deconstruct the pathetic fallacy in your life and work
What do you do when your job’s okay but your feelings aren’t? Well, first of all, don’t assume your job must suck. The always sensible Derek Thompson points out, on the basis of Gallup poll data, that Americans tend to like their jobs pretty well. The mismatch between working and feeling may simply indicate that existence is hard.
So, my first piece of advice is to simply to become watchful. Sit down and slow down enough to attend to the working/feeling gap. There, you may notice one of two things.
Your feelings are moving faster than your job. You might be at work, feeling full of rage or scarily anxiou. And you’re, like, dude, nothing is happening here! You feel like a Shih-tzu losing its ever-loving mind at the sight of the FedEx guy two houses down.
It may be the gap between how your job’s going and how you’re feeling comes with too much social-media scrolling. It may be that Thompson’s right to say that all those Instagram reels, all those hate-work TikToks, have created a “fake unhappiness trend.” It may be that you should just take your out your AirPods, put down your phone, and focus, dammit, on finishing that overdue month’s end report.
But it seems just as likely to me that the gap between your okay job and your not-okay feelings comes from being a person.
Your feelings are moving slower than your job. I remember hearing from a successful manager that she couldn’t figure out why she couldn’t keep up the pace her job required. She was making enough money; doing work she’d gone to school for. She was good at what she was paid to do. But she felt sluggish and sort of mystified:
It's very frustrating for me, but I don't feel like I can just be, like, “Oh well, I'm lazy. I need to work a little bit harder.” That's that's not the problem here. It's a much deeper problem… There are things that are happening with me personally. There are things that are happening with my own health and then and then there's a job that is working in a very turbulent industry.
It may be that you need to change jobs. It may be that, for the sake of mental and spiritual wellness, you need to transition to an industry that moves at a saner pace. (Have you read about those air traffic controllers coping with impossible professional circumstances by falling asleep on the job or coming to work drunk?)
But, again, it seems just as possible that the gap between your job and your feelings comes, not from having the wrong job, but from being the right kind of human.
How to learn from the gap that opens after the pathetic fallacy’s gone
I got the idea for this piece about the pathetic fallacy when I got a text this past Friday from a friend with good news that her company’s doing great. After a lot of hard work, and maybe some pretty good luck, she was seeing success.
But, my friend added, her thoughts were spinning on the suffering of a man she cares a great deal for. For years—ever since college, really—he’s been a brother and a musical collaborator. And now, severe illness had taken him to the brink.
Then, yesterday morning, I awoke to an Instagram post from my friend, reflecting on the passing of this gentle fellow. For my texting friend, it had been a weekend full of work and a weekend full of mortality. Learning to live there is a great deal of what it means to learn to be human.
The pathetic fallacy depends on the notion that your job is where you get your meaning. Deconstructing this fallacy means learning to live graciously in the gap between job satisfaction and all the feels.
The good news is that relinquishing the pathetic fallacy opens up a good space for re-thinking your life. Living watchfully in that gap can deconstruct other inadequate ideas besides the pathetic fallacy. For you, that deconstruction might mean rethinking what your job actually means in the world. Or it might mean rethinking your concepts of the world, of God, of your very self.