Adam Sandler Was Right

“If you’re sad now, you might still feel sad there, okay?”

One of my favorite SNL sketches features Adam Sandler selling Italian vacations with the following disclaimer:

“If you’re sad now, you might still feel sad there, okay?”

It might be one of the most honest ads ever made. It is hilarious and deeply sad because it punctures the fantasy that a new setting will produce a new self.

A new relationship. A new job. A new achievement. All the things we pursue in the hope that we will finally feel different.

Often, the pursuit itself can become an escape. Because no matter where we end up, if we are not working through our own pain, we will still arrive as ourselves.

This is not to say that change cannot help. Some jobs, relationships, and places really do need to change. But external change cannot do the internal work for us.

I began to understand this nearly thirty years ago, when I started working in international humanitarian aid. Humanitarian work can offer a particularly respectable place to hide. Being surrounded by so much suffering can become a way not to face our own pain. There is always someone else’s crisis more urgent than our own lives.

That was part of why I was there. In so many ways, I was escaping. I needed to keep moving, from one country, crisis, and war to the next, because there was still so much within me that I had not faced.

The work was as real as the escape.

The most visceral way I know to explain this:

Imagine you have a terrible headache. You can deal with the headache. Or you can hit your hand with a hammer. As long as your hand hurts badly enough, you will stop noticing your head.

For a moment, it works.

The problem is that you have to keep swinging the hammer.

The moment you stop, the headache comes back.

That described long stretches of my life.

Achievement often became the hammer for me. That does not make achievement the problem. A purposeful life can ask a great deal from us, including significant sacrifices. But purpose has a rhythm that allow us to pause, recover, and change course when necessary. We have fuller access to ourselves and to the reality in front of us, rather than being driven by the ghosts we’re running from. Compulsion does not. It needs the next goal, the next title, the next crisis, because stopping brings us back into contact with whatever we are trying to escape from.

Capitalism is very good at converting compulsion into output. If work is how we escape ourselves, we make ourselves endlesly available for extraction. No one has to force us to keep working. Our boss is inside us. The next title, the next bonus, the next crisis all become fuel for the escape.

We swing that hammer for free.

Power gives our avoidance a staff, a budget, and a calendar.

The higher we rise, the fewer people can tell us what they see. Power does not eliminate the mirror, but it lets us fire the person holding it.

Once in charge, our private avoidance can organize everyone else’s work. We can expand our escape outward for everyone else to absorb. Our urgency becomes everyone’s urgency. We pass the hammer to everyone else, demanding they swing it with us.

External success can change our lives, but it cannot free us from ourselves.

When we finally stop, there we are, okay?

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