Hey guys,

Thanks for your feedback on last week’s newsletter! Pressure is on to make today’s as good… I had positive feedback on the length as well so, sticking with it for now. If you disagree, lmk. Here goes.

This week I'm reading: Malcolm Gladwell’s second book Blink: The power of thinking without thinking (2005)

Yes, I know. We’re only five newsletters in, and I am already reading another Malcolm Gladwell book. I did warn you (back here for the new subs, welcome guys). Really, I’m just using his book to talk about the work of psychologists Drs. John and Julie Gottman. It’s fascinating stuff. You may have heard of these guys are they are from all accounts THE authority on marriage stability and divorce prediction. John Gottman has written / co-written more than 40 books on the topic (!!). And they are married. Cute. (Confession… pretty sure I first came across their work on a goop podcast… I guess it’s better to get this out in the open now so if you need to unsubscribe based on what I’m about to say then do what you have to do. Gwyneth Paltrow, big fan.)

I digress… after analysing a couple in a conflict discussion for an hour, Gottman can predict with 95% accuracy whether the couple will still be married in fifteen years. And if he only has 15 minutes of their conversation to work with? He gets it right 90% of the time.

How does he do it? Well. Read on and I will tell you.

Actually, Gladwell will tell you:

“[Gottman] can find out much of what he needs to know just by focussing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.

“You would think that criticism would be the worst,” Gottman says, “because criticism is a global condemnation of a person’s character. Yet contempt is qualitatively different from criticism. With criticism I might say to my wife ‘You never listen, you are really selfish and insensitive.’ Well, she’s going to respond defensively to that. That’s not very good for our problem solving and interaction. But if I speak from a superior plane, that’s far more damaging, and contempt is any statement made from a higher level. A lot of the time it’s an insult: 'You are a bitch. You’re scum.’ It’s trying to put that person on a lower plane than you. It’s hierarchical.””

Side note… MS Word has underlined the word bitch and alerted me that my reader (you guys) may find this language offensive… apologies for that. Back to Gladwell on Gottman:

“Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or wife gets [!!] in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system. “Contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community. The big gender difference with negative emotions is that women are more critical, and men are more likely to stonewall. We find that women start talking about a problem, the men get irritated and turn away, and the women get more critical, and it becomes a circle. But there isn’t any gender difference when it comes to contempt. Not at all.””

If you think this sounds like finger in the air BS, the man studied maths at MIT. Of those 40 books I mentioned, one is a five-hundred page treatise called The Mathematics of Divorce. The analysis is done in a systematic way. Couples are filmed talking, and a number corresponding to an emotion (anger, whining, sadness, neutral etc.) is assigned to EVERY SECOND of the interaction for each person. So, a 15-minute conflict discussion is translated into a row of 1,800 numbers (2 people x 15 min x 60 seconds). This is input into an equation alongside data that comes in from electrodes and sensors, i.e., if someone’s heart is pounding or they are sweating or moving around a lot. The equation output is whether the couple will still be married in 15 years.

The idea here that links back to the central theme of is the book Blink is, Gottman is so skilled at divorce prediction he doesn’t need to run the whole algorithm to make an accurate prediction. “He says he can be in a restaurant and eavesdrop on the couple one table over and get a pretty good sense of whether they need to start thinking about hiring lawyers and dividing up custody of the kids”. He does this by picking up on the key indicator, contempt. (Which by the way includes eye rolling… something I should probably stop asap if I want to one day have a marriage that lasts. Eep.)

As always with Gladwell and these types of non-fiction books, this is one case study / anecdote of many used to support the central theme. The theme in Blink is “those moments when we ‘know’ something without knowing why”, and “how a snap judgement can be far more effective than a cautious decision”. Again, Penguin should really be paying me for this, but here’s a snippet of the blurb which will probably make you want to read the book “an art expert sees a ten-million-dollar sculpture and instantly spots it’s a fake. A marriage analyst knows within minutes whether a couple will stay together. A fire-fighter suddenly senses he has to get out of a blazing building…”.

By the way if the “snap judgement” or “knowing without knowing why” made you think of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow… same. Let’s discuss that book in a future newsletter...

P.S. Why would you even want to know if you’re headed for divorce? Are you meant to abandon the relationship as soon as you get the results, or do you go off to an eye-rollers anonymous class for rehab before giving things another crack? Jokes aside… thoughts with all who are currently experiencing or have been affected by the heartbreak of divorce. There's something on heartbreak at the end of this newsletter…

This week I'm asking: Do you have a job or a career? Or none of the above…

Is the work you do just a job or is it more than that? Does the money that keeps your lights on come from somewhere else (a partner, parent, inheritance, the government, your younger self who worked hard and invested wisely, or that Nigerian prince on Facebook who wasn’t lying about the lost fortune)? Do you not have to earn an income through work so you don’t? Or do you have a job or run a business or work your capital (day trade, buy property, manage a portfolio) because you get something else out it (structure, purpose, fulfilment, dopamine, friends)? Or because you want to accumulate more wealth / spend more than what's required for basic survival? Or do you live in a cave without lights?

Do you have a true passion or calling in life? Do you practise your passion outside your job (maybe through volunteer work / a creative pursuit / a hobby / taking care of children / family / the home / the garden??) and your job is to make ends meet, but if you received a windfall, you’d quit in a second to pursue your passion full time? Or is there something else that’s holding you back from being who you want to be and living the life you want to live? Lack of confidence? Fear of failure? Fear of judgement? Fear of letting someone down?

Is your career also your calling in life? You have a vocation, and you’re paid to do your life’s work. OR is your career supposed to be your calling (“I come from a long line of horse surgeons”) but actually it’s making you miserable and you’re wondering if you’re wandering further and further down a path you don’t want to be on but you don’t know if it’s too late to change direction (sunk cost fallacy – it’s never too late).

Hobby. Job. Career. Vocation.

Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love lady) popped up on my TikTok (that algorithm. Knows me so well) talking about the differences between the four. You can watch here. I loved the framework, especially for the very talented people in my life who are bursting to share their gifts with the world but feel like they’re meant to be invested in their day job like “everyone else”. (The bills need to be paid as a practical issue yes, but a job doesn’t have to be a career.) And for me! Who is figuring all this stuff out in real time (thanks to you guys, for allowing my musings to land in your inbox each week).

Last week you said: here are some other climate contradictions

My reportedly "best newsletter yet" on Bill Gates, hypocrisy & radical lesbian feminists here if you missed it)

“I sometimes wonder if a particular idea captures the ‘Zeitgeist’ of sustainability and longer-term consequences are ignored e.g.:

• We all love wind turbines, using nature to create electricity. Each turbine uses 200 tonnes of aluminium, and the turbines wear out/become structurally unsafe after about 20 years. Mining bauxite for aluminium is a filthy industry and wind turbines can’t be recycled
• Solar panels can’t be recycled. The photoelectric cells wear out after about 20 years and the panels go to landfill
• We will use more cooper wire in the next decade than in the history of the world to date, mainly due to wiring cities for electric cars. Many of the world’s largest copper mines are in third world countries and surrounding villages report rates of cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and reduction in longevity that are 3 or 4 times higher than other parts of the country. Arguably countries like Norway who pride themselves on the high rates of electric vehicle ownership have simply outsourced the environmental problem to countries where copper and rare earth minerals are mined and processed.” – Prof C.M.

This week I'm grateful for: the School of Life on Heartbreak

Here is a beautiful passage from the book Heartbreak by the School of Life (yes, we’ve had Gladwell twice and now we’re having Alain de Botton twice… the School of Life is another thing I’m obsessed with so expect lots more where this came from…)

“Our lover has wounded us deeply. Our suffering is comparable to being robbed or physically assaulted. In a way, this hurts more than someone stealing our phone or bicycle. [DB: having had my phone, bicycle and heart stolen (or broken) all in one year, can confirm the broken heart was the most painful…] However, in those cases, there are big societal mechanisms for addressing our suffering: there are insurance companies, police forces, courts and ultimately prisons designed to restore justice…if we have a toothache or a broken leg (which can be comparable to heartbreak in terms of anguish), we are met by a society that has evolved sophisticated ways of dealing with the problem and built enormous institutions to offer us skilled help.

The point isn’t that we should be able to go to a lawyer or a doctor with our complaint; we don’t want our ex-partner to be locked up or to undergo some emergency surgery. But we can, in a utopian spirit, imagine a society that has devoted itself with equal ambition – and over many decades – to addressing the intense, common problems of wounded souls.

…It has always been hard for us to imagine large societal responses to private problems – just as in the 17th century it was hard to image the existence of a reliable fire brigade. Relationship endings are standard hazards of existence. And perhaps at some point in the future, people heading off to their broken-heart specialists will look back on us with pity because – when our relationships failed – there were not so many places to turn for wisdom, consolation, and guidance.”

Yay for the utopian spirit… may I bring it to every newsletter and may all of you beautiful realists and sceptics tell me what I’m missing.

xx Delia

This newsletter is best served shared! Feel free to forward me to someone who might find these ideas intereting...

Forwarded this and want to sign up to the weekly newsletter? Click here​