Why being admired is overrated

Why being admired is overrated We are driving to cello lessons in Madison. Maybe you realize that just last week I wrote about about driving to cello lessons in Madison. Maybe my drives to Madison will be like Monets cathedrals: Ill just keep popping them out, each written from a different angle, and you will learn to see the nuances of our family interactions in different lights. In todays story we are late. I was going to shave my legs before we left because Ive never been great at shaving. I always tell myself Ill get them waxed next week and then I dont. But I just read how we perceive women to be good looking if they look like they spend a lot of time caring about their looks. So I thought I might spend some time caring. Seeking admiration is a mental disorder. My husband and my son are in the car, waiting. I felt bad. I could have kept them waiting for one leg, but not two. It would be too inconsiderate and I worry my son  will spend adult life telling a  therapist I was a narcissist. Is it narcissistic to think my kid will be consumed with recovering from my narcissism? People with Aspergers and people with narcissism look very similar because both seem overly concerned with themselves. The difference is that people with narcissism have a deep need for admiration and people with Aspergers dont need other peoples approval. I go to the car with my hairy legs as soon as I notice they are waiting. My son tells me my clothes dont match and my husband tells me I have toilet paper stuck to my skirt. I do not fix either. My husband, who is not the official driver of our family, is driving. Heres why: We flew to  Montana for my nephews bar mitzvah. And when  we got back to the Madison airport, my husband could not  find our car. A few years ago I lost our car at OHare, and my husband said, If I lost my car in a parking lot, Id go straight to the emergency room to have an MRI. Because there would have to be something really wrong. I made a note to myself to make an MRI joke later. In the meantime, I called security and asked them to look up our license plate.  My husband came  back two hours later. I pretty much wanted to kill him. But it turned out he wanted to kill me more: I didnt make payments on the BMW  for four months and the bank repossessed it. Oh, I said, processing the news. Then I looked up at him to see how angry he was and said, Thats surprising that they knew where the car was. I guess it has a chip in it or something. He said, How are we getting home? He asked because I am in charge of all things non-farm. Which includes getting back to the farm. Its not that I forgot to pay. Its more like I forgot how important it is to pay. Or I forgot how much I was forgetting to pay. Or something like that. I mean, I always know in the back of my head that I need to make the monthly payment. But its like how I always know in the back of my head that I need to cut out sugar and carbs. The other car we have (yes, I am supposed to make payments on two cars) is a Honda Fit. My husband picked it out and when I told him that the cello doesnt fit and no one but him wants to drive stick shift, he told me it is his midlife crisis car and he never does impractical things and he wants to get the car. As long as we were both in agreement that the car is impractical, I got on board. Empathy wastes energy. So now the midlife crisis car is our primary car and Carla, the driver, cant  drive it. Fortunately, its not that inconvenient for my husband to drive it today because we have to go to the repossession place to get our stuff out of the BMW and hes the only one who can do it because his name is on the car because when we bought the car he had amazing credit. That seems so long ago. I have messed up his credit because I have inconsistent cash flow from my business. And sometimes Im not just missing payments I said Id make, but Im also borrowing money from his farm account. I have empathy for how he is way outside his financial comfort zone with me. But empathy doesnt lead to action. In fact, empathy has been shown to actually undermine righteous  action, which maybe means I have an oversized amount of empathy for him. But since  empathy is really overrated,  maybe I should preserve my energy for something more virtuous. Shame marks  an immature  stage of  personal development. We drive to Madison and  I am answering email, and my son is listening to Haydn in C, and my husband is stressing about people seeing him  cleaning out a car thats been repossessed. No one cares, I tell him. Its okay. Well get a different car. Its fine. He says its a shame thing. He says, Not everyone can be like you and Donald Trump. What? What are you talking about? I have to peer around the top of the cello in the front seat to be able to see his face to check if hes joking. You and Donald Trump are the only two people I know who have no sense of shame. I tell him thats interesting because Putin is having trouble keeping his government together and the Economist reports that Alexei Navalny, a popular blogger,  is the most  viable opposition leader.  I tell my husband: Im thinking maybe bloggers and world leaders have the same traits. He drives. Emails. Haydn. Emails. Haydn. Emails. Haydn. Then we are at the car repossession place and theres our BMW, parked between two cars that look like they are not worth the time it took to repossess them. My husband wants to make sure we dont bring sticky, gunky kid junk into his midlife crisis car. As he  checks every little compartment, I rescue Monet and Modernism from under the seat. But I am distracted by a stash of disposable razors in the glove compartment. I put  my foot on the seat because its not our seat anymore, and I start shaving. The sun  shines  at a perfect angle to see all the hairs I might otherwise miss. He asks if I have to do that now and I say yes. If I did it  in your car  I would make your car dirty, I tell him. I shave. He searches. Hes looking for stuff we might not want to forget, but  I like the idea of forgetting most of it. The payments are $1100 a month. Im sick of them. Im happy to be rid of the car. I just wish it hadnt happened at the airport. Thats the difference between shame and guilt: shame is thinking I am bad for having my car repossessed. Guilt is taking responsibility for not having a car to drive home from the airport. Admiring  people makes you feel  good. But envy  makes you take action. We are unscrewing the license plate. My husband wants to keep it as a souvenir of the time we hit rock bottom. I dont tell him this is totally not as bottom as my rock bottom. My son stays in the car the whole time. He sees Im giddy that we wont have BMW payments so he thinks nothing bad has happened. It reminds me of when he was a toddler learning  to walk and  hed inadvertently gain speed and then start running and then trip and fall and if we didnt make a big deal about it, he wouldnt realize he should be crying. Cassie calls me to get feedback on her investor pitch. I tell her I cant talk because our car was repossessed and we have to clean it out. She talks anyway. She says she is in money trouble right now too. She says most small business owners are women selling to women and women dont do nearly as much in the summer because they have kids at home. So basically, unless youre selling pool passes, summer is not a good time for cash flow. Then, because she hates when I dont realize that she is full of brilliant insight, she sends me this link abut how Etsy sales plummet in summertime. She also sends me an article that says America is full of high-earning poor people, and people who are Internet famous have no money, and suddenly I feel very on-trend. I wish I were a good role model. The Harvard Business Review  published research that shows striving to be role models holds women back  because women focus on that so much more than men do, and it distracts from career advancement.  So the car repossession must be catapulting my career to the top. So its  not healthy to want to be admired. You could cultivate envy because envy, more than admiration, inspires action. But I think, instead, we should strive to admire. Psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, in his book, The Righteous Mind,  considers admiration something like gratitude with a moral component. Its the emotion we feel when someone does something good or skillfulit helps us feel transcendent ourselves. Admiration elevates life. But being admired ourselves has nothing to do with that experience. My husband is so stressed about our financial doom that he arrives at the cello lesson early and says hes taking a walk. Thats what he does when hes stressed, he walks. He is working really hard to adjust to life with me: financial windfalls and financial black  holes, bad credit and me constantly chasing my next idea for a business. And I admire that. Which is an emotion that makes me feel calm and secure. And thats how I deal with the slow cash flow of summertime months.