Lying to Yourself for Fun and Profit

On toxic reframing, and how to avoid learning from one's mistakes.

At university, I enrolled in a subject called Crime and Punishment, and I was four weeks into the semester before it finally dawned on me that we would not be studying Dostoyevsky’s great novel of that name. In retrospect, I ought to have read the course description. In many ways, I am too trusting of institutions. It turned out to be an entire semester studying criminology, and it was too late to change classes.

I think you might already suspect where this is going. You’re probably thinking that six-month course turned out to be a fundamental turning-point in my life, whereupon I realized my vocation, or some such. I’m aware of these expectations. People write smug little articles like that all the time, and I think they’re bad for people. They insinuate that errors are rarely errors, but always meaningful cornerstones in our lives.

James Joyce wrote something about mistakes being ‘portals of discovery’. I see it quoted from time to time; it’s a popular line among writers who lack any feeling for irony. They know audiences can be especially receptive to sentiments which appear on the surface profound whilst also, somehow, absolving someone from being wrong or narcissistic.

It’s called ‘reframing’, by the way. To reframe is to transform your understanding of a negative experience into something more positive or redemptive. When I found out what reframing actually was, I realized I’d been doing it ever since I was a small child. It seemed to come naturally.

But interestingly, some people don’t know how to reframe the events of their life at all. My friend Byron, who lives in a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, couldn’t reframe a situation to save his life. He’s plagued by a morbid lack of optimism, is Byron. When anything goes wrong, he gets all sullen and dejected, and then I tell him, ‘Hey, at least someone isn’t sneaking into your house anymore, and rearranging your furniture slightly, so that’s good’. And Byron nods, then gives a sudden start and says, ‘Wait, was that actually happening?’ and then I say, ‘Why do I even try to help you?’

Now I think of it, that isn’t a particularly solid example of reframing. But sometimes, a flawed example can incite a moment of recognition in a reader, and that can more illustrative than a perfect one because it forces a reader to think about why the particular example was such nonsense. And that, by the way — that last sentence — is a much better example of reframing. It was also complete nonsense and — this is my central argument — most reframing somewhat is. Nonsense, I mean.

Yes, there are basically three categories here. There are those who reframe, purposely and correctly, as a means to better interact with reality. Then, there are hapless individuals like Byron, who cannot seem to reframe their way out of a damp paper bag, which is frustrating, really, and also why I had to sometimes break into his house when he was out, and move his furniture around, slightly — you know, in a thoroughly therapeutic manner. But we do what we can for our friends, I suppose.

So, I will reframe some negative experiences into positive ones, and Byron will reframe none; he’ll just stare at the experience in bewilderment. But there is a third and somewhat more pernicious category of individual who reframes all their negative experiences into positive ones, and they can be a little bit of a problem, as I’m about to demonstrate.

Now, most of the negative experiences in our lives — not all, but most, as I said — arrive as a consequence of our own decision-making. And this is significant; how we choose to think about our decisions can have a cumulative effect, later on. Of course, it can be a bit of a challenge to notice when we are making a decision. Many important decisions are made while we’re absent-mindedly making toast or something.

And the other thing is that the scope of the decisions available to us, in any given moment, can be quite limited. This is the primary benefit of learning and cultivating knowledge. The more knowledge you have, the broader the range of decisions that are available to your conscious self. The more experience you have in a kitchen, the more meal options you have, for instance.

Nonetheless, not all of our decisions are going to pan out well for us. Some, we will later realize, were mistakes. So, what we’re supposed to do with mistakes is reflect upon them, draw insight from them, and then, hopefully, avoid making them in future.

Thinking about our mistakes should be uncomfortable. You’re supposed to feel like a fool. Like me, enrolling in a criminology class accidentally. In my defense, I’d already read Crime and Punishment, and expected an easy A because I knew who the murderer was. But everybody does something dumb occasionally, especially my friend Byron.

Few admit to making mistakes because, after all, this is a planet of monkeys fighting over which branch to sit upon. If you admit to making a silly mistake, the other monkeys might think less of you. They might even throw fruit or feces at you. Or conceivably, you might be kicked down to a lower branch by some other monkey who, if we’re being truthful, made precisely the same mistake you did, one time. He’s just not going to admit it.

And this, in a nutshell, is the human experience.

The cumulative effect of being a monkey, surrounded by monkeys, is that we each have diminished incentive to admit our mistakes openly to other monkeys, because we have learned, through bitter experience, to associate honesty about our mistakes with diminished social status. We connect our mistakes, then, with feelings of shame, which is uncomfortable, and you can see why so many people try to avoid it, these days. Some people are so averse to shame that they seem to refuse to feel it at all.

As uncomfortable as it is, I think there is a place for shame in our society. There are plenty of people wandering the earth today who clearly deserve to feel shame; lots and lots of shame, actually. Racists, for example, and bigots, and tacit supporters of genocide — those people should all feel shame. Also, men who for some reason wear Lycra bodysuits when riding bicycles.

But shame, being such an onerous and unpleasant experience, is a feeling that many strive to avoid, so what they do, instead, is reframe their mistakes and falsify them into much more redemptive narratives.

There needs to be a word for this. I can’t think of one off the top of my head, but I hope that, if anybody does one day, they won’t name it after me simply for being one of the earlier monkeys to notice the phenomenon. People did that to George Orwell; they describe surveillance states as Orwellian, tacitly implying the man would have approved of them when he very much didn’t. So if, somehow, this article leads to a broader understanding of the abuse of reframing, please don’t Orwell me.

Let’s just call it toxic reframing. We could just Orwell the situation, and term it ‘Byroning’ but I really do think ‘toxic reframing’ will work better. (Poor Byron. We can name something else after him — like, being thoroughly unproductive, or taking needless naps during the day, or something.)

Where was I? Mistakes. Yes, I had enrolled in a class called Crime and Punishment, one time, which turned out to be a mistake. But some will tell you it wasn’t a mistake at all, because it turned me into the person I am today. To which I would reply, ‘What is so bloody good about the person I am today that could possibly justify me having to endure a torturous class on criminology? I don’t remember any of it, except the professor’s morbid propensity to wear sweater vests through summer. No, don’t reframe it, it was all a nasty waste of time! Do not rob me of my suffering!’

And this is the problem, you see. Too many people are drawing their sense of the world from writers who are — for want of a better phrase — chronically online. We’re not supposed to reframe things this much. Consider the actual line, by James Joyce:

“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

It’s been far too long since I first read those words, but I’ll wager the sentiment was drenched in irony because — and you might need to take it on faith — that is precisely the sort of thing a good writer will say to his wife when she finds him lying on his back, drunk, on their own front doorstep. Don’t ask me how I came upon this insight. Sometimes, I just know things.

But again, when you read about reframing in places like Substack, you’ll be reading words that have been typed by someone who was probably wearing pajamas at the time. Not me; I don’t even own pajamas. I don’t respect pajamas. Men shouldn’t wear them. I consider pajamas a symptom of our civilization’s decline. And while I’m on the topic, a real man takes showers before going to bed and not in the morning. I know this is a class issue. Working class people like myself shower in the evening; middle class men shower in the morning and thus sleep in soiled sheets, which is neither sound nor hygienic, and I will fight people over this. And no, this is not a digression; this is proof that I am not the sort of man who would ever, under any circumstance, misunderstand the writings of James Joyce. Let us continue!

As I reflect upon my life, I recall many brawls, and much strife and conflict, starting with the dozens and dozens of school fistfights of my childhood, and eventuating into the low-level war I fought against management everywhere I worked. But don’t worry, we all had fun. My point, I suppose, is that I didn’t travel this far in life by lying to myself about my own mistakes.

Mistakes are inevitable. And not all of them are redemptive journeys for the soul. Some mistakes are just mistakes. They suck. They’re uncomfortable, but it is what it is. We are, at times, supposed to endure discomfort. But there is a popular alternative which is to never admit one has made a mistake at all. Just reframe it, retrospectively, and imbue the decision with a meaning that reflects well upon you. You see it all the time.

You might even be forgiven for thinking I am obliquely referencing the American government, here. I didn’t want to make this about geopolitics, but they’re twisting my arm, being so obvious about it, so I might as well go there.

The White House has reframed every single military defeat since Vietnam into some sort of inspiring victory. Recently, they concluded a two-decade-long war in Afghanistan in which they successfully replaced the Taliban with the Taliban. It always seems like the American people — even the military establishment — are being led around by the nose by successive administrations who don’t ever seem to know what they’re doing.

Back in 2003, Afghanistan was already referred to as the Graveyard of Empires. I lived in Washington DC, that year, and a lot of people I talked to thought the war was a bad idea. I knew it was a bad idea because a few years earlier, I’d watched a documentary about the Afghan fighters in the Soviet–Afghan War and I’d learned something which really shook me up. Did you know the Afghans liked to smoke hashish before going into battle?

Can you even imagine that? I wouldn’t smoke hashish before ordering pizza. You’d get it all wrong. Listen, one time back in the nineties, I was over at a friend’s house and ... well, long story short, I was too freaked out by absolutely everything to even eat the pizza we ordered. It ended up going cold and I was too discombobulated to figure out how to work the microwave. I spent the rest of the night hiding under a pool table.

But my point is, it took no special prescience to realize the Pentagon could not win a war against the Taliban, because there is, in fact, a level of crazy that nobody can win against. Similarly, if you see a naked man walk into Denny’s at lunchtime, it doesn’t matter how good you think you are at fighting, you’re not going to win that fight.

Anyway, the White House has kicked off yet another war, this time with Iran, and already it’s not going that well. The military objectives are changing from day to day. But despite all self-evident failures, the White House will assure you that it’s a perfect war. Regardless of the outcome, and no matter whether this is a conflict or a war or a special military operation, it will all end in a victory for the White House because the White House reframes all its defeats as victories. It doesn’t matter which political party is in office — that is just what they do.

I’m not actually making light of it. I find it upsetting. These wars are catastrophic and wasteful of lives and resources. If the people inside the White House had, over the past eighty years, decided to invest in infrastructure, at home and abroad … if they had just built hospitals and schools around the world, then the country wouldn’t have an enemy on the planet. I say that because there is already so much good will felt towards Americans, despite all these stupid, incessant wars. But successive administrations will continue to make the same mistakes, over and over, because again: if you constantly reframe all your defeats as victories, you don’t have to acknowledge mistakes, let alone think about them.

We see this all around the world today. People don’t like to think about mistakes, and they should, because mistakes are interesting, and overall very helpful to think about, especially if you don’t want to make them. If we lose a game of chess, we’re not supposed to reframe that defeat into some sort of transcendent victory. It’s supposed to sting. We’re supposed to feel it. We’re supposed to reflect upon our errors and then play a better game next time.

So, that’s what I have to say about this sort of so-called toxic reframing, which is an idea I have just now invented (I think). It’s a bit abstract, obviously, and you might be forgiven for wondering what I’m really getting at, here. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s this pajama thing. They’re stifling and uncomfortable, they look silly, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise. But mostly, this is about the showers. A man should always shower before climbing between the sheets because if you wait until the morning, you’ve just marinated for eight hours in the dried sweat you accumulated from the previous day — and nobody even talks about it.

One last thing, it’s possible that somebody else has somehow defined this whole issue — the one I’m calling toxic reframing — before me, so if that is the case, I think the best course of action for us is to pretend that was me who came up with it, and forge on, in complete denial. Because after all, I think that’s how it all works these days.

With chaste affection,

Kris St.Gabriel