Table Of Contents

1. 3-2-1: Starting the new year the right way, how to stay focused, and a lesson on long-term thinking

2. Waiting for the Weekend

3. It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart

4. 3-2-1: How friendship shapes you, improving along the way, and how to handle your doubts

5. 3-2-1: On friendship, the secret to focus, and how to cultivate a good life

6. I Gave Myself Three Months to Change My Personality

7. What Boredom Actually Means

8. References

3-2-1: Starting the new year the right way, how to stay focused, and a lesson on long-term thinking

3 IDEAS FROM ME

I.

As we start the new year, a reminder from Atomic Habits:

“New goals don’t deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome. For this reason, all of your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results.”

II.

“A simple filter for managing your time: You’re not focused enough unless you’re mourning some of the things you’re saying no to.”

III.

“Don’t worry about being the most interesting person in the room, just try to be the most interested person in the room.

- The interested person asks about others and leaves a good impression because people like talking about themselves.

- The interested person is genuinely curious about someone’s craft and learns a lot about how things work.

- The interested person engages with more people and—because opportunities come through people—is more likely to catch a lucky break.

In general, the interested person learns more and tends to be well-liked. And in the long run, it’s hard to keep down someone who is well-learned and well-liked.”

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I.

Entrepreneur and investor Matt Griswold offers an approach for life:

“Think in decades and act in days.”

Source: Twitter

II.

Roman philosopher Musonius Rufus on long-term thinking:

“If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures.”

Source: Lectures and Fragments, Fragment 51

1 QUESTION FOR YOU

Who are you trying to become this year? Which actions will reinforce that identity?

Until next week,

James Clear

Author of Atomic Habits and keynote speaker

p.s. The ultimate New Years resolution.

Waiting for the Weekend

See this story as it appeared in the pages of The Atlantic magazine.

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The word “weekend” started life as “week-end” but lost its hyphen somewhere along the way, ceasing to be merely the end of the week and acquiring, instead, an autonomous and sovereign existence. “Have a good weekend,” we say to one another—never “Have a good week.” Where once the week consisted of weekdays and Sunday, it now consists of weekdays and weekend. Ask most people to name the first day of the week and they will answer, Monday, of course; fifty years ago the answer would have been Sunday. Wall calendars still show Sunday as the first day of the week, and children are taught the days of the week starting with Sunday, but how long will these conventions last? Sunday, once the day of rest, has become merely one of two days of what is often strenuous activity. Although we continue to celebrate the traditional religious and civic holidays—holy days—these now account for only a small portion of our total nonworking days, and are overshadowed by the 104 days of secular weekends.

For most of us life assumes a different rhythm on the weekend; we sleep in, cut the grass, wash the car. We also go to the movies, especially during hot weather. We travel. And of course we exercise and play games. Some of these pastimes, like tennis, have an old history and a newfound popularity; others, like whitewater canoeing, windsurfing, and hang-gliding, are more recent. Most are distinguished from nineteenth-century recreations such as croquet and golf by their relative arduousness and even riskiness.

Although the weekend is a time for sports, for shopping, and for household chores, it is foremost a manifestation of the structure of our leisure. The chief Oxford English Dictionary definition of leisure is “time which one can spend as one pleases.” That is, “free” time. But in one of his popular columns in The Illustrated London News—a Saturday paper—G. K. Chesterton pointed out that leisure should not be confused with liberty. Contrary to most people’s expectations, the presence of the first by no means assures the availability of the second. This confusion arose, according to Chesterton, because the term “leisure” is used to describe three different things: “The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything. And the third (and perhaps most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing.” The first, he acknowledged, was the most common form of leisure, and the one that of late—he was writing in the early 1890s—had shown the greatest quantitative increase. The second—the liberty to fashion what one willed out of one’s leisure time—was more unusual and tended to be the province of artists and other creative individuals. It was the third, however, that was obviously his favorite, because it allowed idleness—in Chesterton’s view, the truest form of leisure.

Perhaps only someone as portly as Chesterton (Maisie Ward, his biographer, estimated that he weighed almost 300 pounds) could rhapsodize over idleness. More likely, inactivity attracted him because he was the least lazy of men; his bibliography lists more than a hundred published books—biographies, novels, essays, poetry, and short stories. He was also a magazine editor and a lecturer and broadcaster. Although he managed to cram all this into a relatively short life (he died at sixty-two), it was, as his physique would suggest, a life replete with material enjoyments, and surprisingly unhurried. Not a life of leisure, perhaps, but one carried out at a leisurely pace.

Chesterton’s observation that modern society provided many opportunities for leisure but made it “more and more easy to get some things and impossible to get others” continues to be true. Should you want to play tennis or golf, for example, courts and courses abound. Fancy a video? There are plenty of specialty stores, lending libraries, and mail-order clubs. Lepidopterists, however, will have a difficult time finding unfenced countryside in which to practice their avocation. If your pastime is laying bricks and you do not have a rural estate, as Winston Churchill had, you will not find a bricklaying franchise at your neighborhood mall. Better take up golf instead.

Chesterton argued that a man compelled by lack of choice—or by social pressure—to play golf when he would rather be attending to some solitary hobby was not so different from the slave who might have several hours of leisure while his overseer slept but had to be ready to work at a moment’s notice. Neither could be said to be the master of his leisure. Both had free time but not freedom. To press this parallel further, have we become enslaved by the weekend?

At first glance it is an odd question, for surely it is our work that enslaves us, not our free time. We call people who become obsessed by their jobs workaholics, but we don’t have a word for someone who is possessed by recreation. Maybe we should. I have many acquaintances for whom weekend activities seem more important than workaday existence, and who behave as if the week were merely an irritating interference in their real, extracurricular lives. I sometimes have the impression that to really know these weekend sailors, mountain climbers, and horsewomen, I would have to accompany them on their outings and excursions—see them in their natural habitat, so to speak. But would I see a different person, or merely the same one governed by different conventions of comportment, behavior, accoutrement, and dress?

I’m always charmed by old photographs of skiers which show groups of people in what appear to be street clothes, with uncomplicated pieces of bent wood strapped to sturdy walking boots. These men and women have a playful and unaffected air. Today every novice is caparisoned in skin-tight spandex, like an Olympic racer, and even cross-country skiing, a simple enough pastime, has been infected by a preoccupation with correct dress, authentic terminology, and up-to-date equipment. This reflects an attitude toward play which is different from what it was in the past. Most outdoor sports, once simply muddled through, are now undertaken with a high degree of seriousness. “Professional” used to be a word that distinguished someone who was paid for an activity from the sportsman; today the word has come to denote anyone with a high degree of proficiency; “professional-quality” equipment is available to—and desired by—all. Conversely, “amateur,” a wonderful word literally meaning “lover,” has been degraded to mean a rank beginner or anyone without a certain level of skill. “Just an amateur,” we say; it is not, as it once was, a compliment.

The lack of carelessness in our recreation, the sense of obligation to get things right, and the emphasis on protocol and decorum do represent an enslavement of a kind. People used to “play” tennis; now they “work” on their backhand. It is not hard to imagine what Chesterton would have thought of such dedication; this is just the sort of laborious pursuit of play that he so often derided. “If a thing is worth doing,” he once wrote, “it is worth doing badly.”

Chesterton held the traditional view that leisure was different from the type of recreation typically afforded by the modern weekend. His own leisure pastimes included an eclectic mix of the unfashionable and the bohemian—sketching, collecting weapons, and playing with the cardboard cutouts of his toy theater. Leisure was the opportunity for personal, even idiosyncratic, pursuits, not for ordered recreation; it was for private reverie rather than for public spectacles. If a sport was undertaken, it was for the love of playing—not of winning, nor even of playing well. Above all, free time was to remain that: free of the encumbrance of convention, free of the need for busyness, free for the “noble habit of doing nothing at all.” That hardly describes the modern weekend.

Work Versus Leisure

What is the meaning of the weekday-weekend cycle? Is it yet another symptom of the standardization and bureaucratization of everyday life that social critics such as Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul have warned about? Is the weekend merely the cunning marketing ploy of the materialist culture, a device to increase consumption? Is it a deceptive placebo to counteract the boredom and meaninglessness of the workplace?

Or is this the heralded Leisure Society? If so, it is hardly what was anticipated. The decades leading up to the 1930s saw a continuing reduction in the number of hours in the workweek, from just under sixty to just under fifty, and during the Great Depression even below thirty-five. There was every reason to think that this trend would continue and workdays would grow shorter and shorter. This, and widespread automation, would eventually lead to universal leisure. Not everyone agreed that this would be a good thing; there was much speculation about what people would do with their newfound freedom, and some psychologists worried that universal leisure would really mean universal boredom. Hardly, argued the optimists; it would provide the opportunity for self-improvement, adult education, and a blossoming of the creative arts. Others were less sanguine about the prospects for creative ease in a society that had effectively glorified labor.

Universal leisure did not come to pass, or at least it did not arrive in the expected form. For one thing, the workday appears to have stabilized at about eight hours. Automation has reduced jobs in certain industries, as was predicted, but overall employment has increased, not decreased, although not necessarily in high-paying jobs. Women have entered the work force, with the result that more, not fewer, people are working; since housework still needs to be done, it can be argued that in many families there is really less leisure than before. On the other hand, the development of the weekend has caused a redistribution of leisure time, which for many people has effectively shortened the length of the workweek. This redistribution, coupled with more disposable income, has made it possible to undertake recreation in a variety of unexpected ways—some creative, some not—and do so throughout the year instead of at annual intervals.

All these developments have called into question the traditional relationship between leisure and work, a relationship about which our culture has always been ambivalent. Generally speaking, there are two opposing schools of thought. On the one hand is the ideal—held by thinkers as disparate as Karl Marx and the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper—of a society increasingly emancipated from labor. This notion echoes the Aristotelian view that the goal of life is happiness, and that leisure, as distinguished from amusement and recreation, is the state necessary for its achievement. “It is commonly believed that happiness depends on leisure,” Aristotle wrote in his Ethics, “because we occupy ourselves so that we may have leisure, just as we make war in order that we may live at peace.” Or, to put it more succinctly, as did the title of Loverboy’s 1981 hit song, we are “Working for the Weekend.”

Opposed to this is the more modern (so-called Protestant) work ethic that values labor for its own sake, and sees its reduction—or, worse, its elimination—as an unthinkable degradation of human life. “There is no substitute for work except other serious work,” wrote Lewis Mumford, who considered that meaningful work was the highest form of human activity. According to this view, work should be its own reward, whether it is factory work, housework, or a workout. Leisure, equated with idleness, is suspect; leisure without toil, or disconnected from it, is altogether sinister. The weekend is not free time but break time—an intermission.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I want first to examine something that will shed light on the relation between work and leisure: how we came to adopt a rigorous division of our everyday lives into five days of work and two of play, and how the weekend became the chief temporal institution of the modern age. And how, in turn, this universally accepted structure has affected the course and nature of our leisure—whether it involves playing golf, laying bricks, or just daydreaming.

The Invention of the Week

Our chief occasion for leisure—the weekend—is the direct product of the mechanical practice of measuring time. Counting days in chunks of seven now comes so naturally that it’s easy to forget that this is an unusual way to mark the passage of time. Day spans the interval between the rising and the setting of the sun; the twenty-four-hour day is the duration between one dawn and the next. The month measures—or once did—the time required for the moon to wax, become full, and wane; and the year counts one full cycle of the seasons. What does the week measure? Nothing. At least, nothing visible. No natural phenomenon occurs every seven days—nothing happens to the sun, the moon, or the stars. The week is an artificial, man-made interval.

Generally speaking, our timekeeping is flexible, full of inconsistencies. The length of the day varies with the season; the duration of the month is irregular. Adjustments need to be made: every four years we add a day to February; every 400 years we add a day to the centurial year. The week, however, is exactly seven days long, now and forever. We say that there are fifty-two weeks in a year, but that is an approximation, since the week is not a subdivision of either the month or the year. The week mocks the calendar and marches relentlessly and unbroken across time, paying no attention to the seasons. The British scholar F. H. Colson, who in 1926 wrote a fascinating monograph on the subject, described the week as an “intruder.” It is an intruder that arrived relatively late. The week emerged as the final feature of what became the Western calendar sometime in the second or third century A.D., in ancient Rome. But it can be glimpsed in different guises—not always seven days long, and not always continuous—in many earlier civilizations.

Seven appeared as a magical number among the Babylonians, as early as the third millennium B.C., and played an important role in their calendar. There were seven heavenly bodies with apparent motion in the sky: the “erring” seven, the seven “wanderers”—that is, the seven planets of antiquity (including the sun and the moon). Whether they suggested the belief in the magic number or merely reinforced it is not clear. In any case, as astronomy—and astrology—spread from Babylonia to Greece, Egypt, and Rome, the seven heavenly bodies became identified with the great gods of the pantheon.

At the time that the planetary week became popular in Rome, there was already a seven-day week in place: the Judaic Sabbath observance. It is possible—although the idea is disputed by many scholars—that the Jews adopted this method of timekeeping during their exile in Babylonia in the sixth century B.C., and converted the septenary fascination into their Sabbath. The adoption of a continuous seven-day period independent of the lunar cycle was unusual, and exactly why the Jews evolved this mechanism is unclear. According to the Old Testament, the Sabbath was “their” day given to them—and them alone—by Jehovah. Unquestionably, its very singularity appealed to the exiled Jews as a way of differentiating themselves from the alien Babylonian Gentiles who surrounded them. In any case, that the Sabbath occurred on every seventh day, irrespective of the seasons, was a powerful idea, for it overrode all other existing calendars.

The origin of the planetary week is obscure as regards place and time. Dion Cassius, a Roman historian who lived in the third century, A.D., thought that the planetary week was conceived in Egypt, but modern scholars dispute this claim; more likely it was a Hellenistic practice that migrated to Rome. He also maintained that the planetary week was a relatively recent invention. There is some evidence, however, of a planetary week during the Augustan period, 200 years before, and it may have originated even earlier. What is certain is that by Dion’s era the habit of measuring time in cycles of seven days was already established in private life throughout the Roman Empire.

The week was many things to many people, sometimes many things to the same people. It was magical and practical both. A superstition at first, it survived as a social convention, much as shaking hands with the right hand has endured because there is a need for a gesture to represent friendly feelings to a stranger. The week was a short unit of time around which people could organize their lives, their work, and their leisure. At the same time, the week was a simple and memorable device for relating everyday activities to supernatural concerns, whether these involved observing a commandment from Jehovah, commemorating Christ’s resurrection, receiving the influence of a planetary deity, or, just to be safe, all three.

The roots of the week lie deep, too deep to understand fully. An air of mystery surrounds the week; perhaps that, too, is a part of its appeal. It is an observance that has been distilled over centuries of use, molded through common belief and ordinary usage. Above all, it is a popular practice that took hold without magisterial sanction. This, more than anything else, explains its durability. Less an intruder than an unofficial guest, the week was invited in through the kitchen door, and has become a friend of the family—a useful friend, for whatever else it did, the seven-day cycle provided a convenient structure for the repetitive rhythm of daily activities. It included not only a day for worship but also a day for baking bread, for washing, for cleaning house, for going to market—and for resting. Surely this over-and-over quality has always been one of the attractions of the week—and of the weekend. “Once a week” is one of the commonest measures of time. The planetary week is not a grand chronometer of celestial movements or a gauge of seasonal changes. It is something both simpler and more profound: a measure of ordinary, everyday life.

From Day Off to Days Off

The Oxford English Dictionary finds the earliest recorded use of the word “weekend” in an 1879 issue of Notes and Queries, an English magazine. “In Staffordshire, if a person leaves home at the end of his week’s work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance,” the magazine citation goes, “he is said to be spending his week-end at So-and-so.” This is obviously a definition, which suggests that the word had only recently come into use. It is also important to note that the “week’s work” is described as ending on the Saturday afternoon. It was precisely this early ending to the week that produced a holiday period of a day and a half—the first weekend. This innovation—and it was a uniquely British one—occurred in roughly the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

Throughout the eighteenth century the workweek ended on Saturday evening; Sunday was the weekly day off. The Reformation, and later Puritanism, had made Sunday the weekly holy day in an attempt to displace the saints’ days and religious festivals of Catholicism (the Catholic Sunday was merely one holy day among many). Although the taboo on work was more or less respected, the strictures of Sabbatarianism that prohibited merriment and levity on the Lord’s Day were rejected by most Englishmen, who saw the holiday as a chance to drink, gamble, and generally have a good time.

For most people Sunday was the only official weekly holiday, but this did not necessarily mean that the life of the average British worker was one of unremitting toil. Far from it. Work was always interrupted to commemorate the annual feasts of Christmas, New Year, and Whitsuntide (the week beginning with the seventh Sunday after Easter). These traditional holidays were universally observed, but the length of the breaks varied. Depending on local convention, work stopped for anywhere from a few days to two weeks. There were also communal holidays associated with special, occasional events such as prizefights, horse races, and other sporting competitions, and also fairs, circuses, and traveling menageries. When one of these attractions arrived in a village or town, regular work more or less stopped while people flocked to gape and marvel at the exotic animals, equestrian acrobats, and assorted human freaks and oddities.

The idea of spontaneously closing up shop or leaving the workbench for the pursuit of pleasure may strike the modern reader as irresponsible, but for the eighteenth-century worker the line between work and play was blurred. Many recreational activities were directly linked to the workplace, since trade guilds often organized their own outings and had their own singing and drinking clubs and their own preferred taverns.

Eighteenth-century workers had, as Hugh Cunningham puts it in Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, “a high preference for leisure, and for long periods of it.” This preference was hardly something new. What was new was the ability, in prosperous Georgian England, of so many people to indulge it. For the first time in centuries many workers earned more than survival wages. Now they had choices: they could buy goods or leisure. They could work more and earn more, or they could forgo the extra wages and enjoy more free time instead. Most chose the latter course. This was especially true for the highly paid skilled workers, who had the greatest degree of economic freedom, but even general laborers, who were employed at day rates, had a choice in the matter. Many of these worked intensively, sometimes for much more than the customary ten hours a day, and then quit to enjoy themselves until their money ran out.

It was not unusual for sporting events, fairs, and other celebrations to last several days. Since Sunday was always an official holiday, usually the days following were added on. This produced a regular custom of staying away from work on Monday, frequently doing so also on Tuesday, and then working long hours at the end of the week to catch up. Among some trades the Monday holiday achieved what amounted to an official status. Weavers and miners, for example, regularly took a holiday on the Monday after payday—which occurred weekly, on Friday or Saturday. This practice became so common that it was called “keeping Saint Monday.”

Saint Monday may have started as an individual preference for staying away from work—whether to relax, to recover from drunkenness, or both—but its popularity during the 1850s and 1860s was ensured by the enterprise of the leisure industry. During that period sporting events, such as horse races and cricket matches, often took place on Mondays, since their organizers knew that many working-class customers would be prepared to take the day off. And since many public events were prohibited on the Sabbath, Monday became the chief occasion for secular recreations. Attendance at botanical gardens and museums soared on Monday, which was also the day that ordinary people went to the theater and the dance hall, and the day that workingmen’s social clubs held their weekly meetings.

The energy of entrepreneurs, assisted by advertising, was an important influence not only on the diffusion and persistence of Saint Monday but also on leisure in general. Hence a curious and apparently contradictory situation: not so much the commercialization of leisure as the discovery of leisure thanks to commerce. This distinction is worth bearing in mind when one considers the complaint commonly made today that contemporary leisure is being “tainted” or “corrupted” by commercialism. Beginning in the eighteenth century, with magazines, coffeehouses, and music rooms, and continuing throughout the nineteenth, with professional sports and holiday travel, the modern idea of personal leisure emerged at the same time as the business of leisure. The first could not have happened without the second.

Saint Monday had many critics. Religious groups campaigned against the tradition, which they saw as linked to the drinking and dissipation that, in their eyes, dishonored the Sabbath. They were joined by middle-class social reformers and by proponents of rational recreation, who also had an interest in altering Sunday behavior. By the end of the century many shops and factories had begun closing on Saturday afternoons, leaving a half-holiday for household chores and social activities—an evening at the dance hall or the pub—and permitting Sunday to be used exclusively for prayer and sober recreations.

It’s unlikely that the Saturday half-holiday would have spread as rapidly as it did if it had not been for the support of the factory owners. Factory owners had little to gain from insisting on a six-day week of workdays of up to twelve hours if on some days so few workers showed up that the factory had to be shut down anyway. The proposal for a Saturday half-holiday offered a way out, and factory owners supported it in return for a commitment to regular attendance on the part of their employees. Half Saturdays and shorter workdays became the pattern followed by all later labor negotiations, and by legislation governing the length of the workday.

In the 1870s people began to speak of “week-ending” or “spending the week-end.” The country houses of the wealthy were generally located in the Home Counties, in the vicinity of London, and were now easily reached by train. It became fashionable to go to the country on Friday afternoon and return to the city on Monday, and these house parties became an important feature of upper-class social life. Weekend outings, often to the seashore, were also available to the lower classes, although their weekend was usually shorter, extending from Saturday afternoon until Sunday evening.

According to one contemporary observer, Thomas Wright, “That the Saturday half-holiday movement is one of the most practically beneficial that has ever been inaugurated with a view to the social improvement of ‘the masses,’ no one who is acquainted with its workings will for a moment doubt.” He approvingly described a variety of activities in which working people indulged on the Saturday half-holiday. The afternoon began with a leisurely midday meal at home, which was often followed by a weekly bath in the neighborhood bathhouse—an important institution at a time when few homes had running water, and one that was common in British and North American cities until well into the twentieth century. The rest of the daytime hours might be spent reading the paper, working around the house, attending a club, or strolling around town window-shopping. Saturday afternoon became a customary time for park concerts, soccer games, rowing, and bicycling—and, of course, drinking in the local pub, for despite the hopes of the reformers and Evangelicals, drinking was still the chief leisure pastime of the working classes, whether the holiday occurred on Saturday or on Monday.

Wright emphasized that the afternoon was usually brought to a close in time for tea at five o’clock, to leave plenty of time for the chief entertainment of the week. Saturday night was the time for an outing to the theater; most people brought their own food and drink into the cheap seats in the gallery. The music hall, an important influence on the spread of Saturday night’s popularity, began as an adjunct to taverns but emerged as an independent entity in the 1840s, and continued to be prominent in British entertainment for the next eighty years.

This was not the elite leisure of the aristocracy and landed gentry, for whom recreations such as shooting and fox hunting had become an all-consuming way of life. Nor was it the traditional mixture of leisure and work among ordinary people. No longer were work and play interchanged at will; no longer did they occur in the same milieu. There was now a special time for leisure, as well as a special place. Being neither play as work nor work as play, middle-class leisure, which eventually infiltrated and influenced all of society, involved something new: the strict demarcation of a temporal and a physical boundary between leisure and work. These boundaries—exemplified by the weekend—more than anything else characterize modern leisure.

It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

It is an insolent cliché, almost, to note that our culture lacks the proper script for ending friendships. We have no rituals to observe, no paperwork to do, no boilerplate dialogue to crib from.

Yet when Elisa Albert and Rebecca Wolff were in the final throes of their friendship, they managed, entirely by accident, to leave behind just such a script. The problem was that it read like an Edward Albee play—tart, unsparing, fluorescent with rage.

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I met Elisa one evening in 2008, after an old friend’s book reading. She was such mesmerizing company that I rushed out to buy her debut novel, The Book of Dahlia, which had been published a few months earlier. I was instantly struck by how unafraid of darkness and emotional chaos she was. The same articulate fury suffused After Birth, her follow-up; her next book, Human Blues (her “monster,” as she likes to say), comes out in July.

Rebecca is someone I knew only by reputation until recently. She’s the founding editor of the literary magazine Fence, a haven for genre-resistant writing and writers that’s now almost 25 years old. She’s also the author of a novel and four poetry collections, including Manderley, selected by the National Poetry Series; she has a fifth coming out in the fall.

The two women became close more than a decade ago, spotting in each other the same traits that dazzled outsiders: talent, charisma, saber-tooth smarts. To Rebecca, Elisa was “impossibly vibrant” in a way that only a 30-year-old can be to someone who is 41. To Elisa, Rebecca was a glamorous and reassuring role model, a woman who through some miracle of alchemy had successfully combined motherhood, marriage, and a creative life.

It would be hard to overstate how much that mattered to Elisa. She was a new mother, all alone in a new city, Albany, where her husband was a tenured professor. (Albany! How does one find friends in Albany?) Yet here was Rebecca—the center of a lush social network, a pollinating bee—showing up on campus at Fence’s office every day.

Read: Why making friends in midlife is so hard

The two entered an intense loop of contact. They took a class in New York City together. They sometimes joked about running away together. And, eventually, they decided to write a book together, a collection of their email and text correspondence about a topic with undeniably broad appeal: how to live in the world and be okay. They called this project The Wellness Letters.

I read the manuscript in one gulp. Their exchanges have real swing to them, a screwball quality with a punk twist. On page 1:

R: Anything you haven’t done?

E: Affair. Acid. Shrooms. Second child. Death. Ayahuasca.

R: “Bucket List.”

E: “Efforts at Wellness.”

R: I just started writing something called Trying to Stay Off My Meds …

E: U R A STRONG WOMAN.

But over time, resentments flicker into view. Deep fissures in their belief systems begin to show. They start writing past each other, not hearing each other at all. By the end, the two women have taken every difficult truth they’ve ever learned about the other and fashioned it into a club. The final paragraphs are a mess of blood and bone and gray guts.

In real time, Elisa and Rebecca enact on the page something that almost all of us have gone through: the painful dissolution of a friendship.

The specifics of their disagreements may be unique to them, but the broad outlines have the ring and shape of the familiar; The Wellness Letters are almost impossible to read without seeing the corpse of one of your own doomed friendships floating by.

Elisa complains about failures in reciprocity.

Rebecca implies that Elisa is being insensitive, too quick to judge others.

Elisa implies that Rebecca is being too self-involved, too needy.

Rebecca implies: Now you’re too quick to judge me.

Elisa ultimately suggests that Rebecca’s unhappiness is at least partly of her own unlovely making.

To which Rebecca more or less replies: Who on earth would choose to be this unhappy?

To which Elisa basically says: Well, should that be an excuse for being a myopic and inconsiderate friend?

E: The truth is that I am wary of you …

R: When you say that you are wary of me, it reminds me of something … oh yes, it’s when I told you that I was wary of you … wary of your clear pattern of forming mutually idolatrous relationships with women who you cast in a particular role in your life only to later castigate.

Their feelings were too hot to contain. What started as a deliberate, thoughtful meditation about wellness ended as an inadvertent chronicle of a friendship gone terribly awry.

The Wellness Letters, 18 months of electrifying correspondence, now sit mute on their laptops.

I first read The Wellness Letters in December 2019, with a different project in mind for them. The pandemic forced me to set it aside. But two years later, my mind kept returning to those letters, for reasons that at this point have also become a cliché: I was undergoing a Great Pandemic Friendship Reckoning, along with pretty much everyone else. All of those hours in isolation had amounted to one long spin of the centrifuge, separating the thickest friendships from the thinnest; the ambient threat of death and loss made me realize that if I wanted to renew or intensify my bonds with the people I loved most, the time was now, right now.

Want to explore more of the ideas and science behind well-being? Join Atlantic writers and other experts May 1–3 at The Atlantic’s In Pursuit of Happiness event. Learn more about in-person and virtual registration here.

But truth be told, I’d already been mulling this subject for quite some time. When you’re in middle age, which I am (mid-middle age, to be precise—I’m now 52), you start to realize how very much you need your friends. They’re the flora and fauna in a life that hasn’t had much diversity, because you’ve been so busy—so relentlessly, stupidly busy—with middle-age things: kids, house, spouse, or some modern-day version of Zorba’s full catastrophe. Then one day you look up and discover that the ambition monkey has fallen off your back; the children into whom you’ve pumped thousands of kilowatt-hours are no longer partial to your company; your partner may or may not still be by your side. And what, then, remains?

With any luck, your friends. According to Laura Carstensen, the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, I’ve aged out of the friendship-collecting business, which tends to peak in the tumbleweed stage of life, when you’re still young enough to spend Saturday evenings with random strangers and Sunday mornings nursing hangovers at brunch. Instead, I should be in the friendship-enjoying business, luxuriating in the relationships that survived as I put down roots.

And I am luxuriating in them. But those friendships are awfully hard-won. With midlife comes a number of significant upheavals and changes, ones that prove too much for many friendships to withstand. By middle age, some of the dearest people in your life have gently faded away.

You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics—even when you share the same politics. (Political obsessions are a big, underdiscussed friendship-ender in my view, and they seem to only deepen with age.) You lose friends to success, to failure, to flukish strokes of good or ill luck. (Envy, dear God—it’s the mother of all unspeakables in a friendship, the lulu of all shames.) These life changes and upheavals don’t just consume your friends’ time and attention. They often reveal unseemly characterological truths about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn’t imagined possible.

Those are brutal.

And I’ve still left out three of the most common and dramatic friendship disrupters: moving, divorce, and death. Though only the last is irremediable.

The unhappy truth of the matter is that it is normal for friendships to fade, even under the best of circumstances. The real aberration is keeping them. In 2009, the Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst published an attention-grabber of a study that basically showed we replace half of our social network over the course of seven years, a reality we both do and don’t intuit.

R: I’m worried once we wrap up our dialogue our friendship will be useless, therefore done.

E: Nope. We r deeply in dialogue for long run I think. Unless U want  to not b. Does our friendship feel useless?? …

R: No I want to be friends forever

E: Then we will b

Were friendships always so fragile? I suspect not. But we now live in an era of radical individual freedoms. All of us may begin at the same starting line as young adults, but as soon as the gun goes off, we’re all running in different directions; there’s little synchrony to our lives. We have kids at different rates (or not at all); we pair off at different rates (or not at all); we move for love, for work, for opportunity and adventure and more affordable real estate and healthier lifestyles and better weather.

From the November 2019 issue: Why you never see your friends anymore

Yet it’s precisely because of the atomized, customized nature of our lives that we rely on our friends so very much. We are recruiting them into the roles of people who once simply coexisted with us—parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, fellow parishioners, fellow union members, fellow Rotarians.

It’s not wholly natural, this business of making our own tribes. And it hardly seems conducive to human thriving. The percentage of Americans who say they don’t have a single close friend has quadrupled since 1990, according to the Survey Center on American Life.

One could argue that modern life conspires against friendship, even as it requires the bonds of friendship all the more.

When I was younger, my friends had as much a hand in authoring my personality as any other force in my life. They advised me on what to read, how to dress, where to eat. But these days, many are showing me how to think, how to live.

It gets trickier as you age, living. More bad things happen. Your parents, if you’re lucky enough to still have them, have lives so different from your own that you’re looking horizontally, to your own cohort, for cues. And you’re dreading the days when an older generation will no longer be there for you—when you’ll have to rely on another ecosystem altogether for support.

Yet for the past decade or so, I’ve had a tacit, mutual understanding with many of the people I love most, particularly fellow working parents: Look, life’s crazy, the office has loaded me up like a pack animal, we’ll catch up when we catch up, love you in the meantime. This happens to suit a rotten tendency of mine, which is to work rather than play. I could give you all sorts of therapized reasons for why I do this, but honestly, at my age, it’s embarrassing. There comes a point when you have to wake up in the morning and decide that it doesn’t matter how you got to whatever sorry cul-de-sac you’re circling; you just have to find a way out.

I think of Nora Ephron, whose death caught virtually all of her friends by surprise. Had they known, they all said afterward—had they only known that she was ill—they’d have savored the dinners they were having, and they certainly wouldn’t have taken for granted that more of them would stretch forever into the future. Her sudden disappearance from the world revealed the fragility of our bonds, and how presumptuous we all are, how careless, how naive.

Read: Nora Ephron’s rules for middle-age happiness

But shouldn’t this fragility always be top of mind? Surely the pandemic has taught us that?

I mean, how long can we all keep postponing dinner?

When I began writing this story, my friend Nina warned me: Do not make this an occasion to rake through your own history and beat yourself up over the state of your own friendships. Which is something that only a dear friend, armed with protective instincts and a Spidey sense about her friend’s self-lacerating tendencies, would say.

Fair enough. But it’s hard to write a story about friendship in midlife without thinking about the friends you’ve lost. “When friendship exists in the background, it’s unremarkable but generally uncomplicated,” wrote B. D. McClay, an essayist and critic, in Lapham’s Quarterly last spring. “But when friendship becomes the plot, then the only story to tell is about how the friendship ended.”

Friendship is the plot of this article. So naturally I’m going to write at least a little about those I’ve lost—and my regrets, the choices I’ve made, the time I have and have not invested.

On the positive side of the ledger: I am a loyal friend. I am an empathetic friend. I seldom, if ever, judge. Tell me you murdered your mother and I’ll say, Gee, you must have been really mad at her. I am quick to remind my friends of their virtues, telling them that they are beautiful, they are brilliant, they are superstars. I spend money on them. I often express my love.

On the negative side: I’m oversensitive to slights and minor humiliations, which means I’m wrongly inclined to see them as intentional rather than pedestrian acts of thoughtlessness, and I get easily overwhelmed, engulfed. I can almost never mentally justify answering a spontaneous phone call from a friend, and I have to force myself to phone and email them when I’m hard at work on a project. I’m that prone to monomania, and that consumed by my own tension.

What both of these traits have in common is that I seem to live my life as if I’m under siege. I’m guessing my amygdala is the size of a cantaloupe.

Most of my withered friendships can be chalked up to this terrible tendency of mine not to reach out. I have pals in Washington, D.C., where I started my professional life, whom I haven’t seen in years, and friends from college I haven’t seen since practically graduation—people I once adored, shared my life with, couldn’t have imagined living for two seconds without.

And yet I do. I have.

This is, mind you, how most friendships die, according to the social psychologist Beverley Fehr: not in pyrotechnics, but a quiet, gray dissolve. It’s not that anything happens to either of you; it’s just that things stop happening between you. And so you drift.

It’s the friendships with more deliberate endings that torment. At best, those dead friendships merely hurt; at worst, they feel like personal failures, each one amounting to a little divorce. It doesn’t matter that most were undone by the hidden trip wires of midlife I talked about earlier: marriage, parenthood, life’s random slings and arrows. By midlife, you’ve invested enough in your relationships that every loss stings.

Read: The Friendship Files

You feel bereft, for one thing. As if someone has wandered off with a piece of your history.

And you fear for your reputation. Friends are the custodians of your secrets, the eyewitnesses to your weaknesses. Every confession you’ve made—all those naked moments—can be weaponized.

There was the friend I lost to parenthood, utterly, though I was also a parent. Her child shortly consumed her world, and she had many child-rearing opinions. These changes alone I could have handled; what I couldn’t handle was her obvious disapproval of my own parenting style (hands-off) and my lack of sentimentality about motherhood itself (if you don’t have something nice to say about raising kids, pull up a chair and sit next to me).

There was no operatic breakup. She moved away; I made zero effort to stay in touch. But whenever I think of her, my stomach chirps with a kind of longing. She showed me how cognitive behavioral therapy worked before I even knew it was a thing, rightsizing my perspective each time I turned a wispy cirrus into a thunderhead. And her conversation was tops, weird and unpredictable.

I miss her. Or who she was. Who we were.

I lost a male friend once to parenthood too, though that situation was different. In this instance, I was not yet a mother. But he was a dad, and on account of this, he testily informed me one day, he now had higher moral obligations in this world than to our friendship or to my feelings, which he’d just seriously hurt (over something that in hindsight I’ll confess was pretty trivial). While I knew on some level that what he said was true, I couldn’t quite believe he was saying it out loud, this person with whom I’d spent so many idle, gleeful hours. I miss him a lot, and wonder to this day whether I should have just let the comment go.

Yet whenever I think of him, a fiery asterisk still appears next to his name.

Mahzad Hojjat, a social-psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, once told me that people may say that friendship betrayals aren’t as bad as romantic betrayals if they’re presented with hypothetical scenarios on a questionnaire. But that’s not how they experience friendship betrayals in real life. This doesn’t surprise me. I still have sense-memories of how sickened I was when this friend told me I’d been relegated to a lower league—my heart quickening, the blood thumping in my ears.

Then there was the friend who didn’t say anything hurtful to me per se; the problem was how little she said about herself at all. According to Hojjat, failures of reciprocity are a huge theme in broken friendships. That stands to reason—asymmetries of time and effort can continue for only so long before you feel like you’ve lost your dignity. (I myself have been criticized for neglect and laziness, and rightly. It’s shitty.) But there’s a subtler kind of asymmetry that I think is far more devastating, and that is a certain lopsidedness in self-disclosure. This friend and I would have long lunches, dinners, coffees, and I’d be frank, always, about my disappointments and travails. I consider this a form of currency between women: You trade confidences, small glass fragments of yourself.

But not with her. Her life was always fine, swell, just couldn’t be better, thanks. Talking with her was like playing strip poker with someone in a down parka.

Read: How friends become closer

I mentioned this problem to Hojjat. She ventured that perhaps women expect more of their female friends than men do of their male companions, given how intimate our friendships tend to be. In my small, unscientific personal sample of friends, that’s certainly true.

Which brings me to the subject of our Problem Friends. Most of us have them, though we may wish we could tweeze them from our lives. (I’ve had one for decades, and though on some level I’ll always love her, I resolved to be done with her during this pandemic—I’d grown weary of her volatility, her storms of anger.) Unfortunately, what the research says about these friends is depressing: It turns out that time in their company can be worse than time spent with people we actively dislike. That, at any rate, is what the psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad discovered in 2003, when she had the inspired idea to monitor her subjects’ blood pressure while in the presence of friends who generated conflicted feelings. It went up—even more than it did when her subjects were in the presence of people with whom they had “aversive” relationships. Didn’t matter if the conversation was pleasant or not.

You have to wonder whether our bodies have always known this on some level—and whether the pandemic, which for a long while turned every social interaction into a possible health risk, made all of our problem friends easier to give the slip. It’s not just that they’re potentially bad for you. They are bad for you. And—alas—always were.

A brief word here about the scholarship devoted to friendship: I know I’ve been citing it quite a bit, but the truth is, there’s surprisingly little of it, and even less that’s particularly good. A great deal is dime-store wisdom crowned in the laurels of peer review, dispatches from the Empire of the Obvious. (When I first wrote to Elisa about this topic, she replied with an implicit eye roll. “Lemme guess: Long term intimate relationships are good for u!”)

You have perhaps heard, for instance, of Holt-Lunstad’s 2010 meta-analysis showing that a robust social network is as beneficial to an individual’s health as giving up cigarettes. So yes: Relationships really are good for u.

Read: How friendships change in adulthood

But friendship, generally speaking, is the redheaded stepchild of the social sciences. Romantic relationships, marriage, family—that’s where the real grant money is. They’re a wormy mess of ties that bind, whether by blood, sex, or law, which makes them hotter topics in every sense—more seductive, more fraught.

But this lacuna in the literature is also a little odd, given that most Americans have more friends than they do spouses. And one wonders if, in the near future, this gap in quality scholarship may start to fill.

In a book published in the summer of 2020, Big Friendship, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, the hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, argued that some friendships are so important that we should consider assigning them the same priority we do our romantic partnerships. They certainly view their own friendship this way; when the two of them went through a rough patch, they went so far as to see a therapist together.

I mentioned this to Laura Carstensen. Her first reaction was one of utter bewilderment: “But … it’s the whole idea that friendships are voluntary that makes them positive.”

Practically everyone who studies friendship says this in some form or another: What makes friendship so fragile is also exactly what makes it so special. You have to continually opt in. That you choose it is what gives it its value.

But as American life reconfigures itself, we may find ourselves rethinking whether our spouses and children are the only ones who deserve our binding commitments. When Sow and Friedman went into counseling together in their 30s, Sow was unmarried, which hardly made her unusual. According to a 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center, nearly a quarter of American adults ages 30 to 49 are single—and single here doesn’t just mean unmarried; it means not dating anyone seriously. Neither woman had (or has) children, either, a fact that could of course change, but if it doesn’t, Sow and Friedman would scarcely be alone. Nearly 20 percent of American adults ages 55 to 64 have no children, and 44 percent of current nonparents ages 18 to 49 say they think it’s unlikely they ever will.

“I have been with family sociologists who think it’s crazy to think that friends could replace family when you realize you’re in real trouble,” Carstensen told me. “ Yeah, they say, they’ll bring you soup when you have the flu, but they’re unlikely to care for you when you have dementia. But we could reach a point where close friends do quit their jobs to care for you when you have dementia.”

Friendship is the rare kind of relationship that remains forever available to us as we age. It’s a bulwark against stasis, a potential source of creativity and renewal in lives that otherwise narrow with time.

“I’ve recently built a whole community of people half my age,” says Esther Perel, 63, the psychotherapist and host of the immensely popular podcast Where Should We Begin?, in which she conducts a one-off couples-therapy session with anonymous clients each episode. “It’s the most important shift in my life, friendship-wise. They’re at my dinner table. I have three friends having babies.” These intergenerational friendships, she told me, are one of the unexpected joys of middle age, giving her access to a new vocabulary, a new culture, a new set of mores—at just the moment when the culture seems to have passed her generation by.

When we spoke, Perel was also preparing for her very first couples-therapy session with two friends, suggesting that Sow and Friedman were onto something. “The pandemic has taught us the importance of mass mutual reliance,” Perel said. “Interdependence has to conquer the lonely, individualistic nature of Americans.” As a native of Belgium, Perel has always found this aspect of American life a little baffling, particularly when she was a new mother. “In my culture, you ask a friend to babysit,” she told me. “Here, first you try to hire someone; then you go and ‘impose.’ And I thought: This is warped. This has got to shift.”

Might it now? Finally?

Elisa and Rebecca nurtured each other as if they were family—and often in ways their own families did not. When they met, Elisa was a new mother, and her parents were 3,000 miles away. Rebecca became her proxy parent, coaching her through breastfeeding and keeping her company; she even smelled like Elisa’s mom. “I can’t describe the smell, but it’s YOU, and it’s HER; it’s no cosmetic,” Elisa later wrote in The Wellness Letters, adding,

and your birthdays are adjacent and you are very much like her in some deep, meaningful ways, it seems to me. There is no one I can talk to the way I can talk to her, and to you. Her intelligence is vast and curious and childlike and insatiable and transcendent, like yours.

When they met, Rebecca was still married. While Rebecca’s marriage was falling apart, it was Elisa who threw open her doors and gave Rebecca the run of her downstairs floor, providing a refuge where she could think, agonize, crash. “We were sort of in that thing where you’re like, ‘You’re my savior,’ ” Rebecca told me. “Like, you cling to each other, because you’ve found each other.”

So what, ultimately, undid these two spit sisters?

On one level, it appeared to be a significant difference in philosophy. Namely: how they each thought about depression.

Rebecca struggles with major depression. Elisa has had experiences with the black dog too, going through long spells of trying to bring it to heel. But she hates this word, depression, thinks it decanted of all meaning, and in her view, we have a choice about how to respond to it.

R: When I’m really depressed I feel, and therefore am, at a painful remove from “life” … Even as I was aware that I was doing it all the time, this thing called “being a human being” … it was not what I imagined living to feel like. And I have spent years essentially faking it, just reassuring myself that at least from the outside I look like I’m alive …

E: Jesus Christ, dude, first thought: you must chill. You must CHILL. This is not particularly empathetic, I’m sorry. I just want to get you down on the floor for a while. I want to get you breathing. I want to get you out of your head and into your hips, into your feet. I want to loosen you up. That is all.

To Elisa, women have been sold a false story about the origins of their misery. Everyone talks about brain chemistry. What about trauma? Screwy families? The birth-control pills she took from the time she was 15, the junk food she gorged on as a kid?

E: THE BODY, dude. All I care about is THE BODY. The mind is a fucking joke … Remind me to tell you about the time they prescribed me Zoloft in college after my brother died. Pills for grief! I am endlessly amused by this now.

But pills for grief—that is, in fact, exactly what Rebecca would argue she needed.

Around and around the two went. The way Elisa saw it, Rebecca was using her depression as an excuse for bad choices, bad behavior. What Rebecca read in Elisa’s emails was a reproach, a failure to grasp her pain. “If there’s no such thing as depression,” she wrote in The Wellness Letters, “what is this duck sitting on my head?”

It’s a painfully familiar dynamic in a friendship: One friend says, Get a grip already. And the other one says, I’m trying. Can’t you see I’m trying? Neither party relishes her role.

Eventually, Rebecca started taking medication. And once she did, she pulled away, vanishing for weeks. Elisa had no idea where she’d gone.

E: Well, our dialogue has turned into a monologue, but I am undaunted. Are you unmoved to write to me because your meds have worked so well that you’re now perfectly functional, to the extent that you need not go searching for ways to narrate/make sense of your internal landscape?

Weirdly, this explanation was not far off. When Rebecca eventually did reply, the exchange did not end well. Elisa accused her of never apologizing, including for this moment. She accused Rebecca of political grandstanding in their most recent correspondence, rather than talking about wellness. But Elisa also confessed that perhaps Rebecca happened to be catching her on a bad day—Elisa’s mother had just phoned, and that call had driven her into a rage.

This last point gave Rebecca an opening to share something she’d clearly been wanting to say for a long time: Elisa was forever comparing her to her mother. But Elisa was also forever complaining about her mother, saying that she hated her mother. Her mother was, variously, “sadistic,” “untrustworthy,” and “a monster.” So finally Rebecca said:

In all the ways you’ve spoken about your mother, I don’t recall you ever describing to me the actual things she’s done, what makes you feel so destroyed by her.

To which Elisa replied that this was exactly the manipulative, hurtful type of gaslighting in which her mother would indulge.

It was at this moment that I, the reader, finally realized: This wasn’t just a fight over differences in philosophy.

If our friends become our substitute families, they pay for the failures of our families of origin. Elisa’s was such a mess—a brother long dead, parents long divorced—that her unconscious efforts to re-create it were always going to be fraught. And on some level, both women knew this. Elisa said it outright. When she first wrote in The Wellness Letters that Rebecca smelled like her mother, Elisa mused:

What’s my point? Something about mothers and children, and the unmothered, and human frailty, and imprinting. Something about friendship, which can and should provide support and understanding and company and a different sort of imprinting.

A different sort of imprinting. That’s what many of us, consciously or not, look for in friendships, isn’t it? And in our marriages too, at least if you believe Freud? Improved versions of those who raised us?

“I have no answers about how to ensure only good relationships,” Elisa concluded in one email to Rebecca. “But I guess practice? Trial and error? Revision?”

That really is the question. How do you ensure them?

Back in the 1980s, the Oxford psychologists Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson wrote a seminal paper titled “The Rules of Friendship.” Its six takeaways are obvious, but what the hell, they’re worth restating: In the most stable friendships, people tend to stand up for each other in each other’s absence; trust and confide in each other; support each other emotionally; offer help if it’s required; try to make each other happy; and keep each other up-to-date on positive life developments.

Read: Arthur C. Brooks on how to make your friendships deeper

It’s that last one where I’m always falling down. Keeping up contact, ideally embodied contact, though even semi-embodied contact—by voice, over the phone—would probably suffice. Only when reading Elisa and Rebecca in atom-splitting meltdown did I realize just how crucial this habit is. The two women had become theoretical to each other, the sum only of their ideas; their friendship had migrated almost exclusively to the page. “The writing took the place of our real-life relationship,” Elisa told me. “I felt like the writing was the friendship.”

In this way, Elisa and Rebecca were creating the conditions of a pandemic before there even was one. Had anyone read The Wellness Letters in 2019, they could have served as a cautionary tale: Our COVID year of lost embodied contact was not good for friendship. According to a September survey by Pew, 38 percent of Americans now say they feel less close to friends they know well.

The problem is that when it comes to friendship, we are ritual-deficient, nearly devoid of rites that force us together. Emily Langan, a Wheaton College professor of communication, argues that we need them. Friendship anniversaries. Regular road trips. Sunday-night phone calls, annual gatherings at the same rental house, whatever it takes. “We’re not in the habit of elevating the practices of friendship,” she says. “But they should be similar to what we do for other relationships.”

When I consider the people I know with the greatest talent for friendship, I realize that they do just this. They make contact a priority. They jump in their cars. They appear at regular intervals in my inbox. One told me she clicks open her address book every now and then just to check which friends she hasn’t seen in a while—and then immediately makes a date to get together.

Laura Carstensen told me during our chat that good friends are for many people a key source of “unconditional positive regard,” a phrase I keep turning over and over in my mind. (Not hers, I should note—the term was popularized in the 1950s, to describe the ideal therapist-patient relationship. Carstensen had the good sense to repurpose it.) Her observation perfectly echoed something that Benjamin Taylor, the author of the lovely memoir Here We Are, said to me when I asked about his close friendship with Philip Roth. What, I wanted to know, made their relationship work? He thought for so long that I assumed the line had gone dead.

From the May 2020 issue: Benjamin Taylor on Philip Roth’s gift of empathy

“Philip made me feel that my best self was my real self,” he finally said. “I think that’s what happens when friendships succeed. The person is giving back to you the feelings you wish you could give to yourself. And seeing the person you wish to be in the world.”

I’m not the sampler-making sort. But if I were, I’d sew these words onto one.

Perhaps the best book about friendship I’ve read is The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis. That might be a strange thing to say, because the book is not, on its face, about friendship at all, but about the birth of behavioral economics. Yet at its heart is the story of an exceptionally complicated relationship between two giants of the field. Amos Tversky was a buffalo of charisma and confidence; Daniel Kahneman was a sparrow of anxiety and neuroticism. The early years of their collaboration, spent at Hebrew University in the late 1960s, were giddy and all-consuming, almost like love. But as their fame grew, a rivalry developed between them, with Tversky ultimately emerging as the better-known of the two men. He was the one who got invited to fancy conferences—without Kahneman. He was the one who got the MacArthur genius grant—not Kahneman. When Kahneman told Tversky that Harvard had asked him to join its faculty, Tversky blurted out, “It’s me they want.” (He was at Stanford at the time; Kahneman, the University of British Columbia.)

“I am very much in his shadow in a way that is not representative of our interaction,” Kahneman told the psychiatrist Miles Shore, who interviewed him and Tversky for a project on creative pairs. “It induces a certain strain. There is envy! It’s just disturbing. I hate the feeling of envy.”

Whenever I mentioned to people that I was working on a story about friendship in midlife, questions about envy invariably followed. It’s an irresistible subject, this thing that Socrates called “the ulcer of the soul.” Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, told me that many years ago, he taught a seminar at Yale about the seven deadly sins. “Envy,” he said dryly, “was the one sin students never boasted about.”

He’s right. With the exception of envy, all of the deadly sins can be pleasurable in some way. Rage can be righteous; lust can be thrilling; greed gets you all the good toys. But nothing feels good about envy, nor is there any clear way to slake it. You can work out anger with boxing gloves, sate your gluttony by feasting on a cake, boast your way through cocktail hour, or sleep your way through lunch. But envy—what are you to do with that?

Die of it, as the expression goes. No one ever says they’re dying of pride or sloth.

Yet social science has surprisingly little to say about envy in friendship. For that, you need to consult artists, writers, musicians. Gore Vidal complained, “Every time a friend succeeds, something inside me dies”; Morrissey sang “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful.” Envy is a ubiquitous theme in literature, spidering its way into characters as wide-ranging as Lenù and Lila, in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, and pretty much every malevolent neurotic ever conjured by Martin Amis (the apotheosis being Richard Tull, the failed novelist and minor critic of The Information, who smacks his son when his rival lands on the best-seller list).

In the spring 2021 issue of The Yale Review, Jean Garnett, an editor at Little, Brown, wrote a terrific essay about envy and identical twinship that feels just as applicable to friendship. My favorite line, bar none: “I can be a very generous sister—maternal, even—as long as I am winning.”

With those 15 words, she exposes an uncomfortable truth. Many of our relationships are predicated on subtle differences in power. Rebalance the scales, and it’s anyone’s guess if our fragile egos survive. Underneath envy, Garnett notes, is the secret wish to shift those weights back in our favor, which really means the shameful wish to destroy what others have. Or as Vidal also (more or less) said: “It is not enough to succeed; a friend must also fail.”

At this point, pretty much everyone I know has been kicked in the head in some way. We’ve all got our satchel of disappointments to lug around.

But I did feel envy fairly acutely when I was younger—especially when it came to my girlfriends’ appearances and self-confidence. One friend in particular filled me with dread every time I introduced her to a boyfriend. She’s a knockout, turns heads everywhere; she both totally knows this and doesn’t have a clue. I have vivid memories of wandering a museum with her one afternoon and watching men silently trail her, finding all dopey manner of excuses to chat her up.

My tendency in such situations is to turn my role into shtick—I’m the wisecracking Daria, the mordant brunette, the one whose qualities will age well.

I hated pretending I was above it all.

What made this situation survivable was that this friend was—and still is—forever telling me how great I look, even though it’s perfectly apparent in any given situation that she’s Prada and I’m the knockoff on the street vendor’s blanket. Whatever. She means it when she tells me I look great. I love her for saying it, and saying it repeatedly.

In recent years, I have had one friend I could have badly envied. He was my office spouse for almost two decades—the other half of a two-headed vaudeville act now a quarter century old. We bounced every story idea off each other, edited each other, took our book leaves at the same time. Then I got a new job and he went off to work on his second book, which he phoned to tell me one day had been selected by … Oprah.

“You’re kidding!” I said. “That’s fucking amazing.”

Which, of course, it was. This wasn’t a lie.

But in the cramped quarters of my ego, crudely bound together with bubble gum and Popsicle sticks, was it all that fucking amazing?

No. It wasn’t. I wanted, briefly, to die.

Here’s the thing: I don’t allow myself too many silly, Walter Mitty–like fantasies of glory. I’m a pessimist by nature, and anyway, fame has never been my endgame in life.

But I did kinda sorta secretly hope to one day be interviewed from Oprah Winfrey’s yoga nook.

That our friendship hummed along in spite of this bolt of fortune and success in his life had absolutely nothing to do with me and everything to do with him, for the simple reason that he continued to be his vulnerable self. (It turns out that lucky, successful people still have problems, just different ones.) It helped that he never lost sight of my own strengths, either, even if I felt inadequate for a while by comparison. One day, while he was busy crushing it, I glumly confessed that I was miserable in my new job. Then go be awesome somewhere else, he said, as if awesomeness were some essential property of mine, how you’d define me if I were a metal or a stone. I think I started to cry.

It helped, too, that my friend genuinely deserved to be on Oprah. (His name is Bob Kolker, by the way; his book is Hidden Valley Road, and everyone should read it, because it is truly a marvel.)

It’s the almost-ness of envy that kills, as Garnett points out in her essay—the fact that it could have or should have been us. She quotes Aristotle’s Rhetoric : “We envy those who are near us in time, place, age, or reputation … those whose possession of or success in a thing is a reproach to us: these are our neighbors and equals; for it is clear that it is our own fault we have missed the good thing in question.”

And I have no clue what I would have done if Bob hadn’t handled his success with humility and tact. If he’d become monstrously boastful—or, okay, even just a little bit complacent—I honestly think I wouldn’t have been able to cope. Adam Smith noted how essential this restraint is in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. If a suddenly successful person has any judgment, he wrote, that man will be highly attuned to his friends’ envy, “and instead of appearing to be elated with his good fortune, he endeavours, as much as he can, to smother his joy, and keep down that elevation of mind with which his new circumstances naturally inspire him.”

This is, ultimately, what Amos Tversky failed to do with Daniel Kahneman, according to The Undoing Project. Worse, in fact: Tversky refused to address the imbalance in their relationship, which never should have existed in the first place. Kahneman tried, at first, to be philosophical about it. “The spoils of academic success, such as they are—eventually one person gets all of it, or gets a lot of it,” he told Shore, the psychiatrist studying creative pairs. “That’s an unkindness built in. Tversky cannot control this, though I wonder whether he does as much to control it as he should.”

But Kahneman wasn’t wondering, obviously. This was an accusation masquerading as a suspicion. In hindsight, the decisive moment in their friendship—what marked the beginning of the end—came when the two were invited to deliver a couple of lectures at the University of Michigan. At that point, they were working at separate institutions and collaborating far less frequently; the theory they presented that day was one almost entirely of Kahneman’s devising. But the two men still jointly presented it, as was their custom.

After their presentation, Tversky’s old mentor approached them both and asked, with genuine awe, where all those ideas came from. It was the perfect opportunity for Tversky to credit Kahneman—to right the scales, to correct the balance, to pull his friend out from his shadow and briefly into the sun.

Yet Tversky didn’t. “Danny and I don’t talk about these things” was all he said, according to Lewis.

And with that, the reader realizes: Kahneman’s second-class status—in both his own imagination and the public’s—was probably essential to the way Tversky conceived of their partnership. At the very least, it was something Tversky seemed to feel zero need to correct.

Kahneman continued to collaborate with Tversky. But he also took pains to distance himself from this man, with whom he’d once shared a typewriter in a small office in Jerusalem. The ill feelings wouldn’t ease up until Tversky told Kahneman he was dying of cancer in 1996.

So now I’m back to thinking about Nora Ephron’s friends, mourning all those dinners they never had. It’s the dying that does it, always. I started here; I end here (we all end here). It is amazing how the death of someone you love exposes this lie you tell yourself, that there’ll always be time. You can go months or even years without speaking to a dear old friend and feel fine about it, blundering along, living your life. But discover that this same friend is dead, and it’s devastating, even though your day-to-day life hasn’t changed one iota. You’re rudely reminded that this is a capricious, disordered cosmos we live in, one that suddenly has a friend-size hole in it, the air now puckered where this person used to be.

Last spring, an old friend of my friend David died by suicide. David had had no clue his friend was suffering. When David had last seen this man, in September 2020, he’d seemed more or less fine. January 6 had wound him up more than David’s other friends—he’d fulminate volcanically about the insurrection over the phone, practically burying David under mounds of words—but David certainly never interpreted this irritating development as a sign of despair.

But David did notice one curious thing. Before the 2020 election, he had bet this friend $10,000 that Donald Trump would win. David isn’t rich, but he figured the move was the ultimate hedge—if he won, at least he got 10 grand, and if he lost, hey, great, no more Trump. On November 7, when it became official—no more Trump!—David kept waiting for a phone call. It never came. He tried provoking his friend, sending him a check for only $15.99, pointing out that they’d never agreed on a payment schedule.

His friend wrote back a sharp rebuke, saying the bet was serious.

David sent him a check for $10,000.

His friend wordlessly cashed it.

David was stunned. No gloating phone call? Not even a gleeful email, a crowing text? This was a guy who loved winning a good bet.

Nothing. A few months later, he was found dead in a hotel.

The suicide became a kind of reckoning for David, as it would for anyone. Because he’s a well-adjusted, positive sort of fellow, he put his grief to what seemed like constructive use: He wrote an old friend from high school, once his closest friend, the only one who knew exactly how weird their adolescence was. David was blunt with this friend, telling him in his email that a good friend of his had just died by suicide, and there was nothing he could do about it, but he could reach out to those who were still alive, those he’d lost track of, people like him. Would he like to catch up sometime? And reminisce?

David never heard back. Distraught, he contacted someone the two men had in common. It turns out his friend’s life hadn’t worked out the way he’d wanted it to. He didn’t have a partner or kids; his job wasn’t one he was proud of; he lived in a backwater town. Even though David had made it clear he just wanted to talk about the old days, this man, for whatever reason, couldn’t bring himself to pick up the phone.

At which point David was contending with two friendship deaths—one literal, the other metaphorical. “You know what I realized?” he said to me. “At this age, if your romantic life is settled”—and David’s is—“it’s your friends who break your heart. Because they’re who’s left.”

What do you do with friendships that were, and aren’t any longer?

By a certain age, you find the optimal perspective on them, ideally, just as you do with so many of life’s other disappointments. If the heartbreak of midlife is realizing what you’ve lost—that sad inventory of dusty shelves—then the revelation is discovering that you can, with effort, get on with it and start enjoying what you have.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson made a point of emphasizing this idea in his stages of psychosocial development. The last one, “integrity versus despair,” is all about “the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle and of the people who have become significant to it as something that had to be.”

An awfully tidy formulation, admittedly, and easier said than done. But worth striving for nonetheless.

Elisa recently wrote to me that what she misses about Rebecca is “the third thing that came from the two of us. the alchemy of our minds and hearts and (dare i say?) souls in conversation. what she brought out in me and what i brought out in her, and how those things don’t exist without our relationship.”

From the July/August 2014 issue: The power of creative pairs

And maybe this is what many creative partnerships look like—volatile, thrilling, supercharged. Some can’t withstand the intensity, and self-destruct. It’s what happened to Kahneman and Tversky. It’s famously what happens to many bands before they dissolve. It’s what happened to Elisa and Rebecca.

Elisa hopes to now make art of that third thing. To write about it. Rebecca remains close in her mind, if far away in real life.

Of course, as Elisa points out (with a hat-tip to Audre Lorde), all deep friendships generate something outside of themselves, some special and totally other third thing. Whether that thing can be sustained over time becomes the question.

The more hours you’ve put into this chaotic business of living, the more you crave a quieter, more nurturing third thing, I think. This needn’t mean dull. The friends I have now, who’ve come all this distance, who are part of my aging plan, include all kinds of joyous goofballs and originals. There’s loads of open country between enervation and intoxication. It’s just a matter of identifying where to pitch the tent. Finding that just-right patch of ground, you might even say, is half the trick to growing old.

This article appears in the March 2022 print edition with the headline “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

3-2-1: How friendship shapes you, improving along the way, and how to handle your doubts

3 IDEAS FROM ME

I.

“When you choose your friends today, you are choosing your habits tomorrow.”

II.

“It’s easier to optimize a modest start than to begin with a perfect start. Starting is the hard part, so start small and get in the mix. You’ll learn a lot and you’ll realize you don’t need to have it all figured out to begin.”

III.

“Don’t spend too much time around someone whose primary way of engaging with life is as a martyr. When suffering becomes your identity, you only see the hard parts of life.”

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I.

Author and poet Maya Angelou on finding your family:

“Family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile and who love you no matter what.”

Source: I found it on her Facebook page, but if you know the original source please share.

II.

Musician and entrepreneur Derek Sivers on how to handle doubts:

“If you’re in doubt about something that’s not in your life, try it. Things are so different in practice versus in theory. The only way to know is to experience it yourself. … Err on the side of yes. Try it. If it was a mistake, at least you’ll know first-hand, instead of always wondering.

If you’re in doubt about something that’s in your life already, get rid of it. Not just things, this goes for identities, habits, goals, relationships, technology, and anything else. Default to not having it, then see how you do without. … Err on the side of no. Get rid of it. Start with a clean slate. If it was a mistake, you’ll get it back with a renewed enthusiasm.”

Source: When in Doubt, Try the Difference

1 QUESTION FOR YOU

What are my favorite hours of the day and what adjustments can I make to ensure they are under my control?

Until next week,

James Clear

Author of Atomic Habits and keynote speaker

p.s. Teacher of the Year

3-2-1: On friendship, the secret to focus, and how to cultivate a good life

3 IDEAS FROM ME

I.

“The information you consume each day is the soil from which your future thoughts grow.”

II.

“Many of the best things in life grow along the way.

- Start hanging out with someone and love grows along the way.

- Start exercising and motivation grows along the way.

- Start writing and inspiration grows along the way.

Start now and let the feeling follow.”

III.

“Of all the ways you could be spending your precious time and attention, it is very unlikely that you are currently spending it in the optimal way. The only path I know for figuring out a better way to spend your life is to sit and think. You simply have to carve out some time to think carefully about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what you’re really trying to achieve. Nobody stumbles into a well lived life. It has to be cultivated. Reflection and review are critical.”

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I.

Steve Jobs explains the secret to focus:

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

Source: Worldwide Developers Conference 1997

II.

Writer C. Raymond Beran on friendship:

“What is a friend? I will tell you.

It is a person with whom you dare to be yourself. Your soul can be naked with him. He seems to ask of you to put on nothing, only to be what you are. He does not want you to be better, or worse. When you are with him, you feel as a prisoner feels who has been declared innocent. You do not have to be on your guard. You can say what you think, so long as it is genuinely you. He understands those contradictions in your nature that lead others to misjudge you.

With him you breathe freely. You can avow your little vanities and envies and hates and vicious sparks, your meannesses and absurdities and, in opening them up to him, they are lost, dissolved on the white ocean of his loyalty. He understands. You do not have to be careful. You can abuse him, neglect him, tolerate him. Best of all, you can keep still with him. It makes no matter. He likes you. He is like fire that purges to the bone. He understands. He understands. You can weep with him, sin with him, laugh with him, pray with him. Through it all—and underneath—he sees, knows and loves you.

A friend? What is a friend? Just one, I repeat, with whom you dare to be yourself.”

Source: The oldest source is an untitled book of poems for 1926, but Beran’s authorship is occasionally disputed. If anyone knows the original source, please share.

1 QUESTION FOR YOU

What worked well this year and is worth doubling down on in 2024?

Until next week,

James Clear

Author of Atomic Habits and keynote speaker

p.s. How my day begins…

I Gave Myself Three Months to Change My Personality

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

One morning last summer, I woke up and announced, to no one in particular: “I choose to be happy today!” Next I journaled about the things I was grateful for and tried to think more positively about my enemies and myself. When someone later criticized me on Twitter, I suppressed my rage and tried to sympathize with my hater. Then, to loosen up and expand my social skills, I headed to an improv class.

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I was midway through an experiment—sample size: 1—to see whether I could change my personality. Because these activities were supposed to make me happier, I approached them with the desperate hope of a supplicant kneeling at a shrine.

Psychologists say that personality is made up of five traits: extroversion, or how sociable you are; conscientiousness, or how self-disciplined and organized you are; agreeableness, or how warm and empathetic you are; openness, or how receptive you are to new ideas and activities; and neuroticism, or how depressed or anxious you are. People tend to be happier and healthier when they score higher on the first four traits and lower on neuroticism. I’m pretty open and conscientious, but I’m low on extroversion, middling on agreeableness, and off the charts on neuroticism.

Researching the science of personality, I learned that it was possible to deliberately mold these five traits, to an extent, by adopting certain behaviors. I began wondering whether the tactics of personality change could work on me.

I’ve never really liked my personality, and other people don’t like it either. In grad school, a partner and I were assigned to write fake obituaries for each other by interviewing our families and friends. The nicest thing my partner could shake out of my loved ones was that I “really enjoy grocery shopping.” Recently, a friend named me maid of honor in her wedding; on the website for the event, she described me as “strongly opinionated and fiercely persistent.” Not wrong, but not what I want on my tombstone. I’ve always been bad at parties because the topics I bring up are too depressing, such as everything that’s wrong with my life, and everything that’s wrong with the world, and the futility of doing anything about either.

Neurotic people, twitchy and suspicious, can often “detect things that less sensitive people simply don’t register,” writes the personality psychologist Brian Little in Who Are You, Really? “This is not conducive to relaxed and easy living.” Rather than being motivated by rewards, neurotic people tend to fear risks and punishments; we ruminate on negative events more than emotionally stable people do. Many, like me, spend a lot of money on therapy and brain medications.

And while there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert, we tend to underestimate how much we’d enjoy behaving like extroverts. People have the most friends they will ever have at age 25, and I am much older than that and never had very many friends to begin with. Besides, my editors wanted me to see if I could change my personality, and I’ll try anything once. (I’m open to experiences!) Maybe I, too, could become a friendly extrovert who doesn’t carry around emergency Xanax.

I gave myself three months.

The best-known expert on personality change is Brent Roberts, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Our interview in June felt, to me, a bit like visiting an evidence-based spiritual guru—he had a Zoom background of the red rocks of Sedona and the answers to all my big questions. Roberts has published dozens of studies showing that personality can change in many ways over time, challenging the notion that our traits are “set like plaster,” as the psychologist William James put it in 1887. But other psychologists still sometimes tell Roberts that they simply don’t believe it. There is a “deep-seated desire on the part of many people to think of personality as unchanging,” he told me. “It simplifies your world in a way that’s quite nice.” Because then you don’t have to take responsibility for what you’re like.

Don’t get too excited: Personality typically remains fairly stable throughout your life, especially in relation to other people. If you were the most outgoing of your friends in college, you will probably still be the bubbliest among them in your 30s. But our temperaments tend to shift naturally over the years. We change a bit during adolescence and a lot during our early 20s, and continue to evolve into late adulthood. Generally, people grow less neurotic and more agreeable and conscientious with age, a trend sometimes referred to as the “maturity principle.”

Longitudinal research suggests that careless, sullen teenagers can transform into gregarious seniors who are sticklers for the rules. One study of people born in Scotland in the mid-1930s—which admittedly had some methodological issues—found no correlation between participants’ conscientiousness at ages 14 and 77. A later study by Rodica Damian, a psychologist at the University of Houston, and her colleagues assessed the personalities of a group of American high-school students in 1960 and again 50 years later. They found that 98 percent of the participants had changed at least one personality trait.

Even our career interests are more stable than our personalities, though our jobs can also change us: In one study, people with stressful jobs became more introverted and neurotic within five years.

With a little work, you can nudge your personality in a more positive direction. Several studies have found that people can meaningfully change their personalities, sometimes within a few weeks, by behaving like the sort of person they want to be. Students who put more effort into their homework became more conscientious. In a 2017 meta-analysis of 207 studies, Roberts and others found that a month of therapy could reduce neuroticism by about half the amount it would typically decline over a person’s life. Even a change as minor as taking up puzzles can have an effect: One study found that senior citizens who played brain games and completed crossword and sudoku puzzles became more open to experiences. Though most personality-change studies have tracked people for only a few months or a year afterward, the changes seem to stick for at least that long.

When researchers ask, people typically say they want the success-oriented traits: to become more extroverted, more conscientious, and less neurotic. Roberts was surprised that I wanted to become more agreeable. Lots of people think they’re too agreeable, he told me. They feel they’ve become doormats.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Roberts whether there’s anything he would change about his own personality. He admitted that he’s not always very detail-oriented (a.k.a. conscientious). He also regretted the anxiety (a.k.a. neuroticism) he experienced early in his career. Grad school was a “disconcerting experience,” he said: The son of a Marine and an artist, he felt that his classmates were all “brilliant and smart” and understood the world of academia better than he did.

I was struck by how similar his story sounded to my own. My parents are from the Soviet Union and barely understand my career in journalism. I went to crappy public schools and a little-known college. I’ve notched every minor career achievement through night sweats and meticulous emails and aching computer shoulders. Neuroticism had kept my inner fire burning, but now it was suffocating me with its smoke.

To begin my transformation, I called Nathan Hudson, a psychology professor at Southern Methodist University who created a tool to help people alter their personality. For a 2019 paper, Hudson and three other psychologists devised a list of “challenges” for students who wanted to change their traits. For, say, increased extroversion, a challenge would be to “introduce yourself to someone new.” Those who completed the challenges experienced changes in their personality over the course of the 15-week study, Hudson found. “Faking it until you make it seems to be a viable strategy for personality change,” he told me.

But before I could tinker with my personality, I needed to find out exactly what that personality consisted of. So I logged on to a website Hudson had created and took a personality test, answering dozens of questions about whether I liked poetry and parties, whether I acted “wild and crazy,” whether I worked hard. “I radiate joy” got a “strongly disagree.” I disagreed that “we should be tough on crime” and that I “try not to think about the needy.” I had to agree, but not strongly, that “I believe that I am better than others.”

I scored in the 23rd percentile on extroversion—“very low,” especially when it came to being friendly or cheerful. Meanwhile, I scored “very high” on conscientiousness and openness and “average” on agreeableness, my high level of sympathy for other people making up for my low level of trust in them. Finally, I came to the source of half my breakups, 90 percent of my therapy appointments, and most of my problems in general: neuroticism. I’m in the 94th percentile—“extremely high.”

I prescribed myself the same challenges that Hudson had given his students. To become more extroverted, I would meet new people. To decrease neuroticism, I would meditate often and make gratitude lists. To increase agreeableness, the challenges included sending supportive texts and cards, thinking more positively about people who frustrate me, and, regrettably, hugging. In addition to completing Hudson’s challenges, I decided to sign up for improv in hopes of increasing my extroversion and reducing my social anxiety. To cut down on how pissed off I am in general, and because I’m an overachiever, I also signed up for an anger-management class.

Read: Can personality be changed?

Hudson’s findings on the mutability of personality seem to endorse the ancient Buddhist idea of “no-self”—no core “you.” To believe otherwise, the sutras say, is a source of suffering. Similarly, Brian Little writes that people can have “multiple authenticities”—that you can sincerely be a different person in different situations. He proposes that people have the ability to temporarily act out of character by adopting “free traits,” often in the service of an important personal or professional project. If a shy introvert longs to schmooze the bosses at the office holiday party, they can grab a canapé and make the rounds. The more you do this, Little says, the easier it gets.

Staring at my test results, I told myself, This will be fun! After all, I had changed my personality before. In high school, I was shy, studious, and, for a while, deeply religious. In college, I was fun-loving and boy-crazy. Now I’m a basically hermetic “pressure addict,” as one former editor put it. It was time for yet another me to make her debut.

Ideally, in the end I would be happy, relaxed, personable. The screams of angry sources, the failure of my boyfriend to do the tiniest fucking thing—they would be nothing to me. I would finally understand what my therapist means when she says I should “just observe my thoughts and let them pass without judgment.” I made a list of the challenges and attached them to my nightstand, because I’m very conscientious.

Immediately I encountered a problem: I don’t like improv. It’s basically a Quaker meeting in which a bunch of office workers sit quietly in a circle until someone jumps up, points toward a corner of the room, and says, “I think I found my kangaroo!” My vibe is less “yes, and” and more “well, actually.” When I told my boyfriend what I was up to, he said, “You doing improv is like Larry David doing ice hockey.”

I was also scared out of my mind. I hate looking silly, and that’s all improv is. The first night, we met in someone’s townhouse in Washington, D.C., in a room that was, for no discernible reason, decorated with dozens of elephant sculptures. Right after the instructor said, “Let’s get started,” I began hoping that someone would grab one and knock me unconscious.

That didn’t happen, so instead I played a game called Zip Zap Zop, which involved making lots of eye contact while tossing around an imaginary ball of energy, with a software engineer, two lawyers, and a guy who works on Capitol Hill. Then we pretended to be traveling salespeople peddling sulfuric acid. If someone had walked in on us, they would have thought we were insane. And yet I didn’t hate it. I decided I could think of being funny and spontaneous as a kind of intellectual challenge. Still, when I got home, I unwound by drinking one of those single-serving wines meant for petite female alcoholics.

A few days later, I logged in to my first Zoom anger-management class. Christian Jarrett, a neuroscientist and the author of Be Who You Want, writes that spending quality time with people who are dissimilar to you increases agreeableness. And the people in my anger-management class did seem pretty different from me. Among other things, I was the only person who wasn’t court-ordered to be there.

We took turns sharing how anger has affected our lives. I said it makes my relationship worse—less like a romantic partnership and more like a toxic workplace. Other people worried that their anger was hurting their family. One guy shared that he didn’t understand why we were talking about our feelings when kids in China and Russia were learning to make weapons, which I deemed an interesting point, because you’re not allowed to criticize others in anger management.

The sessions—I went to six—mostly involved reading worksheets together, which was tedious, but I did learn a few things. Anger is driven by expectations. If you think you’re going to be in an anger-inducing situation, one instructor said, try drinking a cold can of Coke, which may stimulate your vagus nerve and calm you down. A few weeks in, I had a rough day, my boyfriend gave me some stupid suggestions, and I yelled at him. Then he said I’m just like my dad, which made me yell more. When I shared this in anger management, the instructors said I should be clearer about what I need from him when I’m in a bad mood—which is listening, not advice.

All the while, I had been working on my neuroticism, which involved making a lot of gratitude lists. Sometimes it came naturally. As I drove around my little town one morning, I thought about how grateful I was for my boyfriend, and how lonely I had been before I met him, even in other relationships. Is this gratitude? I wondered. Am I doing it?

What is personality, anyway, and where does it come from?

Contrary to conventional wisdom about bossy firstborns and peacemaking middles, birth order doesn’t influence personality. Nor do our parents shape us like lumps of clay. If they did, siblings would have similar dispositions, when they often have no more in common than strangers chosen off the street. Our friends do influence us, though, so one way to become more extroverted is to befriend some extroverts. Your life circumstances also have an effect: Getting rich can make you less agreeable, but so can growing up poor with high levels of lead exposure.

A common estimate is that about 30 to 50 percent of the differences between two people’s personalities are attributable to their genes. But just because something is genetic doesn’t mean it’s permanent. Those genes interact with one another in ways that can change how they behave, says Kathryn Paige Harden, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Texas. They also interact with your environment in ways that can change how you behave. For example: Happy people smile more, so people react more positively to them, which makes them even more agreeable. Open-minded adventure seekers are more likely to go to college, where they grow even more open-minded.

Harden told me about an experiment in which mice that were genetically similar and reared in the same conditions were moved into a big cage where they could play with one another. Over time, these very similar mice developed dramatically different personalities. Some became fearful, others sociable and dominant. Living in Mouseville, the mice carved out their own ways of being, and people do that too. “We can think of personality as a learning process,” Harden said. “We learn to be people who interact with our social environments in a certain way.”

This more fluid understanding of personality is a departure from earlier theories. A 1914 best seller called The Eugenic Marriage (which is exactly as offensive as it sounds) argued that it is not possible to change a child’s personality “one particle after conception takes place.” In the 1920s, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung posited that the world consists of different “types” of people—thinkers and feelers, introverts and extroverts. (Even Jung cautioned, though, that “there is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.”) Jung’s rubric captured the attention of a mother-daughter duo, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, neither of whom had any formal scientific training. As Merve Emre describes in The Personality Brokers, the pair seized on Jung’s ideas to develop that staple of Career Day, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. But the test is virtually meaningless. Most people aren’t ENTJs or ISFPs; they fall between categories.

Over the years, poor parenting has been a popular scapegoat for bad personalities. Alfred Adler, a prominent turn-of-the-20th-century psychologist, blamed mothers, writing that “wherever the mother-child relationship is unsatisfactory, we usually find certain social defects in the children.” A few scholars attributed the rise of Nazism to strict German parenting that produced hateful people who worshipped power and authority. But maybe any nation could have embraced a Hitler: It turns out that the average personalities of different countries are fairly similar. Still, the belief that parents are to blame persists, so much so that Roberts closes the course he teaches at the University of Illinois by asking students to forgive their moms and dads for whatever personality traits they believe were instilled or inherited.

Not until the 1950s did researchers acknowledge people’s versatility—that we can reveal new faces and bury others. “Everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role,” the sociologist Robert Ezra Park wrote in 1950. “It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves.”

Around this time, a psychologist named George Kelly began prescribing specific “roles” for his patients to play. Awkward wallflowers might go socialize in nightclubs, for example. Kelly’s was a rhapsodic view of change; at one point he wrote that “all of us would be better off if we set out to be something other than what we are.” Judging by the reams of self-help literature published each year, this is one of the few philosophies all Americans can get behind.

About six weeks in, my adventures in extroversion were going better than I’d anticipated. Intent on talking to strangers at my friend’s wedding, I approached a group of women and told them the story of how my boyfriend and I had met—I moved into his former room in a group house—which they deemed the “story of the night.” On the winds of that success, I tried to talk to more strangers, but soon encountered the common wedding problem of Too Drunk to Talk to People Who Don’t Know Me.

For more advice on becoming an extrovert, I reached out to Jessica Pan, a writer in London and the author of the book Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come. Pan was an extreme introvert, someone who would walk into parties and immediately walk out again. At the start of the book, she resolved to become an extrovert. She ran up to strangers and asked them embarrassing questions. She did improv and stand-up comedy. She went to Budapest and made a friend. Folks, she networked.

The Atlantic

In the process, Pan “flung open the doors” to her life, she writes. “Having the ability to morph, to change, to try on free traits, to expand or contract at will, offers me an incredible feeling of freedom and a source of hope.” Pan told me that she didn’t quite become a hard-core extrovert, but that she would now describe herself as a “gregarious introvert.” She still craves alone time, but she’s more willing to talk to strangers and give speeches. “I will be anxious, but I can do it,” she said.

I asked her for advice on making new friends, and she told me something a “friendship mentor” once told her: “Make the first move, and make the second move, too.” That means you sometimes have to ask a friend target out twice in a row—a strategy I had thought was gauche.

I practiced by trying to befriend some female journalists I admired but had been too intimidated to get to know. I messaged someone who seemed cool based on her writing, and we arranged a casual beers thing. But on the night we were supposed to get together, her power went out, trapping her car in her garage.

Instead, I caught up with an old friend by phone, and we had one of those conversations you can have only with someone you’ve known for years, about how the people who are the worst remain the worst, and how all of your issues remain intractable, but good on you for sticking with it. By the end of our talk, I was high on agreeable feelings. “Love you, bye!” I said as I hung up.

“LOL,” she texted. “Did you mean to say ‘I love you’?”

Who was this new Olga?

For my gratitude journaling, I purchased a notebook whose cover said, “Gimme those bright sunshiney vibes.” I soon noticed, though, that my gratitude lists were repetitive odes to creature comforts and entertainment: Netflix, yoga, TikTok, leggings, wine. After I cut my finger cooking, I expressed gratitude for the dictation software that let me write without using my hands, but then my finger healed. “Very hard to come up with new things to say,” I wrote one day.

I find expressing gratitude unnatural, because Russians believe doing so will provoke the evil eye; our God doesn’t like too much bragging. The writer Gretchen Rubin hit a similar wall when keeping a gratitude journal for her book The Happiness Project. “It had started to feel forced and affected,” she wrote, making her annoyed rather than grateful.

I was also supposed to be meditating, but I couldn’t. On almost every page, my journal reads, “Meditating sucks!” I tried a guided meditation that involved breathing with a heavy book on my stomach—I chose Nabokov’s Letters to Véra—only to find that it’s really hard to breathe with a heavy book on your stomach.

I tweeted about my meditation failures, and Dan Harris, a former Good Morning America weekend anchor, replied: “The fact that you’re noticing the thoughts/obsessions is proof that you are doing it correctly!” I picked up Harris’s book 10% Happier, which chronicles his journey from a high-strung reporter who had a panic attack on air to a high-strung reporter who meditates a lot. At one point, he was meditating for two hours a day.

When I called Harris, he said that it’s normal for meditation to feel like “training your mind to not be a pack of wild squirrels all the time.” Very few people actually clear their minds when they’re meditating. The point is to focus on your breath for however long you can—even if it’s just a second—before you get distracted. Then do it over and over again. Occasionally, when Harris meditates, he still “rehearses some grand, expletive-filled speech I’m gonna deliver to someone who’s wronged me.” But now he can return to his breath more quickly, or just laugh off the obsessing.

Harris suggested that I try loving-kindness meditation, in which you beam affectionate thoughts toward yourself and others. This, he said, “sets off what I call a gooey upward spiral where, as your inner weather gets balmier, your relationships get better.” In his book, Harris describes meditating on his 2-year-old niece. As he thought about her “little feet” and “sweet face with her mischievous eyes,” he started crying uncontrollably.

What a pussy, I thought.

I downloaded Harris’s meditation app and pulled up a loving-kindness session by the meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg. She had me repeat calming phrases like “May you be safe” and “May you live with ease.” Then she asked me to envision myself surrounded by a circle of people who love me, radiating kindness toward me. I pictured my family, my boyfriend, my friends, my former professors, emitting beneficence from their bellies like Care Bears. “You’re good; you’re okay,” I imagined them saying. Before I knew what was happening, I had broken into sobs.

After two brutal years, people may be wondering if surviving a pandemic has at least improved their personality, making them kinder and less likely to sweat the small stuff. “Post-traumatic growth,” or the idea that stressful events can make us better people, is the subject of one particularly cheery branch of psychology. Some big events do seem to transform personality: People grow more conscientious when they start a job they like, and they become less neurotic when they enter a romantic relationship. But in general, it’s not the event that changes your personality; it’s the way you experience it. And the evidence that people grow as a result of difficulty is mixed. Studies of post-traumatic growth are tainted by the fact that people like to say they got something out of their trauma.

It’s a nice thing to believe about yourself—that, pummeled by misfortune, you’ve emerged stronger than ever. But these studies are mostly finding that people prefer to look on the bright side.

Read: The opposite of toxic positivity

In more rigorous studies, evidence of a transformative effect fades. Damian, the University of Houston psychologist, gave hundreds of students at the university a personality test a few months after Hurricane Harvey hit, in November 2017, and repeated the test a year later. The hurricane was devastating: Many students had to leave their homes; others lacked food, water, or medical care for weeks. Damian found that her participants hadn’t grown, and they hadn’t shriveled. Overall they stayed the same. Other research shows that difficult times prompt us to fall back on tried-and-true behaviors and traits, not experiment with new ones.

Growth is also a strange thing to ask of the traumatized. It’s like turning to a wounded person and demanding, “Well, why didn’t you grow, you lazy son of a bitch?” Roberts said. Just surviving should be enough.

It may be impossible to know how the pandemic will change us on average, because there is no “average.” Some people have struggled to keep their jobs while caring for children; some have lost their jobs; some have lost loved ones. Others have sat at home and ordered takeout. The pandemic probably hasn’t changed you if the pandemic itself hasn’t felt like that much of a change.

I blew off anger management one week to go see Kesha in concert. I justified it because the concert was a group activity, plus she makes me happy. The next time the class gathered, we talked about forgiveness, which Child Weapons Guy was not big on. He said that rather than forgive his enemies, he wanted to invite them onto a bridge and light the bridge on fire. I thought he should get credit for being honest—who hasn’t wanted to light all their enemies on fire?—but the anger-management instructors started to look a little angry themselves.

In the next session, Child Weapons Guy seemed contrite, saying he realized that he uses his anger to deal with life, which was a bigger breakthrough than anyone expected. I was also praised, for an unusually tranquil trip home to see my parents, which my instructors said was an example of good “expectation management.”

Meanwhile, my social life was slowly blooming. A Twitter acquaintance invited me and a few other strangers to a whiskey tasting, and I said yes even though I don’t like whiskey or strangers. At the bar, I made some normal-person small talk before having two sips of alcohol and wheeling the conversation around to my personal topic of interest: whether I should have a baby. The woman who organized the tasting, a self-proclaimed extrovert, said people are always grateful to her for getting everyone to socialize. At first, no one wants to come, but people are always happy they did.

I thought perhaps whiskey could be my “thing,” and, to tick off another challenge from Hudson’s list, decided to go to a whiskey bar on my own one night and talk to strangers. I bravely steered my Toyota to a sad little mixed-use development and pulled up a stool at the bar. I asked the bartender how long it had taken him to memorize all the whiskeys on the menu. “Two months,” he said, and turned back to peeling oranges. I asked the woman sitting next to me how she liked her appetizer. “It’s good!” she said. This is awful! I thought. I texted my boyfriend to come meet me.

The larger threat on my horizon was the improv showcase—a free performance for friends and family and whoever happened to jog past Picnic Grove No. 1 in Rock Creek Park. The night before, I kept jolting awake from intense, improv-themed nightmares. I spent the day grimly watching old Upright Citizens Brigade shows on YouTube. “I’m nervous on your behalf,” my boyfriend said when he saw me clutching a throw pillow like a life preserver.

From the January/February 2014 issue: Surviving anxiety

To describe an improv show is to unnecessarily punish the reader, but it went fairly well. Along with crushing anxiety, my brain courses with an immigrant kid’s overwhelming desire to do whatever people want in exchange for their approval. I improvised like they were giving out good SAT scores at the end. On the drive home, my boyfriend said, “Now that I’ve seen you do it, I don’t really know why I thought it’s something you wouldn’t do.”

I didn’t know either. I vaguely remembered past boyfriends telling me that I’m insecure, that I’m not funny. But why had I been trying to prove them right? Surviving improv made me feel like I could survive anything, as bratty as that must sound to all my ancestors who survived the siege of Leningrad.

Finally, the day came to retest my personality and see how much I’d changed. I thought I felt hints of a mild metamorphosis. I was meditating regularly, and had had several enjoyable get-togethers with people I wanted to befriend. And because I was writing them down, I had to admit that positive things did, in fact, happen to me.

But I wanted hard data. This time, the test told me that my extroversion had increased, going from the 23rd percentile to the 33rd. My neuroticism decreased from “extremely high” to merely “very high,” dropping to the 77th percentile. And my agreeableness score … well, it dropped, from “about average” to “low.”

I told Brian Little how I’d done. He said I likely did experience a “modest shift” in extroversion and neuroticism, but also that I might have simply triggered positive feedback loops. I got out more, so I enjoyed more things, so I went to more things, and so forth.

Why didn’t I become more agreeable, though? I had spent months dwelling on the goodness of people, devoted hours to anger management, and even sent an e-card to my mom. Little speculated that maybe by behaving so differently, I had heightened my internal sense that people aren’t to be trusted. Or I might have subconsciously bucked against all the syrupy gratitude time. That I had tried so hard and made negative progress—“I think it’s a bit of a hoot,” he said.

Perhaps it’s a relief that I’m not a completely new person. Little says that engaging in “free trait” behavior—acting outside your nature—for too long can be harmful, because you can start to feel like you are suppressing your true self. You end up feeling burned out or cynical.

The key may not be in swinging permanently to the other side of the personality scale, but in balancing between extremes, or in adjusting your personality depending on the situation. “The thing that makes a personality trait maladaptive is not being high or low on something; it’s more like rigidity across situations,” Harden, the behavioral geneticist, told me.

“So it’s okay to be a little bitchy in your heart, as long as you can turn it off?” I asked her.

“People who say they’re never bitchy in their heart are lying,” she said.

Susan Cain, the author of Quiet and the world’s most famous introvert, seems reluctant to endorse the idea that introverts should try to be more outgoing. Over the phone, she wondered why I wanted to be more extroverted in the first place. Society often urges people to conform to the qualities extolled in performance reviews—punctual, chipper, gregarious. But there are upsides to being introspective, skeptical, and even a little neurotic. She said it’s possible that I didn’t change my underlying introversion, that I just acquired new skills. She thought I could probably maintain this new personality, so long as I kept doing the tasks that got me here.

Hudson cautioned that personality scores can bounce around a bit from moment to moment; to be certain of my results, I ideally would have taken the test a number of times. Still, I felt sure that some change had taken place. A few weeks later, I wrote an article that made people on Twitter really mad. This happens to me once or twice a year, and I usually suffer a minor internal apocalypse. I fight the people on Twitter while crying, call my editor while crying, and Google How to become an actuary while crying. This time, I was stressed and angry, but I just waited it out.

This kind of modest improvement, I realized, is the goal of so much self-help material. Hours a day of meditation made Harris only 10 percent happier. My therapist is always suggesting ways for me to “go from a 10 to a nine on anxiety.” Some antidepressants make people feel only slightly less depressed, yet they take the drugs for years. Perhaps the real weakness of the “change your personality” proposition is that it implies incremental change isn’t real change. But being slightly different is still being different—the same you but with better armor.

The late psychologist Carl Rogers once wrote, “When I accept myself just as I am, then I can change,” and this is roughly where I’ve landed. Maybe I’m just an anxious little introvert who makes an effort to be less so. I can learn to meditate; I can talk to strangers; I can be the mouse who frolics through Mouseville, even if I never become the alpha. I learned to play the role of a calm, extroverted softy, and in doing so I got to know myself.

This article appears in the March 2022 print edition with the headline “My Personality Transplant.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What Boredom Actually Means

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

In 1933, the writer James Norman Hall had a bone to pick with the concise nature of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. It defined boredom as “being bored; ennui.” “To define [boredom] merely as ‘being bored,’ appallingly true though this may be, is only to aggravate the misery of the sufferer who, as a last desperate resource, has gone to the dictionary for enlightenment as to the nature of his complaint,” Hall wrote in The Atlantic.

Hall proceeds to explain that a dictionary can’t help those suffering from boredom; exercise can’t do much either, in his view (“I have climbed mountains, and boredom has climbed with me”). All a person can do, he argues, is hold on until the moment the boredom chooses to leave. But Atlantic writers in recent years have also pointed to the benefits of boredom—how it can slow us down, how it can motivate us. Today’s reading list takes a closer look at what we really mean when we say, “I’m bored.”

On Boredom

The Virtues of Boredom

By Julie Beck

What’s going on under the surface when people feel bored?

Kierkegaard’s Three Ways to Live More Fully

By Arthur C. Brooks

Take a cue from the Danish philosopher: Instead of seeking a new life, go deeper into the one you have.

Boredom Is Good for You

By Jude Stewart

The surprising benefits of stultification

Still Curious?

- Why boredom affects us so much: If being isolated at home is starting to feel like your own personal prison, it’s because tedium is also used as a severe form of carceral punishment, Saida Grundy wrote in 2020.

- The state of being bored: Read Hall’s full 1933 essay. “Boredom is a lesser malady of the soul, of yet undiscovered origin,” he writes.

Other Diversions

P.S.

I’ll leave you with Margaret Atwood’s poem “Bored”:

“I could hardly wait to get

the hell out of there to

anywhere else. Perhaps though

boredom is happier”

— Isabel

References

1. 3-2-1: Starting the new year the right way, how to stay focused, and a lesson on long-term thinking (jamesclear.com)

2. Waiting for the Weekend (www.theatlantic.com)

3. It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart (www.theatlantic.com)

4. 3-2-1: How friendship shapes you, improving along the way, and how to handle your doubts (jamesclear.com)

5. 3-2-1: On friendship, the secret to focus, and how to cultivate a good life (jamesclear.com)

6. I Gave Myself Three Months to Change My Personality (www.theatlantic.com)

7. What Boredom Actually Means (www.theatlantic.com)