I am writing this week’s newsletter from a rented Airbnb in Atlanta. With all that has been going on in my life, I needed some time away so I can recalibrate and find my way again.
In her famous Ted talk, Anne Lammott said, “Almost anything will work again if you turn it off. Including you.”
Hope has been on my mind a lot lately. I write about hope often, more than other topics because it is the thing underneath everything, and I am not ashamed to admit, I need to strengthen myself in this area. I wanted to learn more about what it means to live with hope, so I did what any normal person does at 2 AM, I started researching the science of hope. I found this idea that I am about to share with you interesting, so now you’re stuck hearing about it.
Do you believe — not hope, not wish, believe — that the thing you’ve been waiting for is going to happen? If you had to think about it, keep reading.
If you immediately said yes, good for you but keep reading anyway.
I ask because I’ve noticed something. The people who believe it — whatever ‘it’ is for them — move through life differently than the ones who’ve stopped.
When it’s there, you can handle anything. When it’s gone, even small things feel impossible. You may think of a specific moment as “this is where I gave up”, but hope doesn’t disappear suddenly, it fades. “It’ll happen” turns into “maybe” turns into silence. When hope goes quiet, it takes your ability to see what’s right in front of you. Doors could be opening and you wouldn’t even notice, because you’ve already decided they’re all closed.
Giving Up
You know that friend who easily bounces back from everything? And that other friend who gets one piece of bad news and is done for the week? That’s learned behavior. I’ll explain more, but first, I want to tell you about a fascinating experiment involving dogs.
In 1967, a researcher named Martin Seligman worked with two groups of dogs. Group one got mild shocks that were annoying, but manageable. They figured out how to make it stop and moved on with their dog lives. Group two got random shocks with zero logic. Nothing they did made any difference. The shocks just came and came.
Then both groups were put in a totally new situation where escaping was laughably easy. Group one? Out in seconds. Group two? Lay down. Didn’t even try to escape. Didn’t look for the exit. It was right there and they just stayed.
They had learned to be helpless. Their brains had filed “trying” under “pointless” and closed the drawer.
How often do you do the same thing?
How many times have you said ‘sure, I’ll go’ to a date while already knowing it won’t lead anywhere, not because of him, but because you’ve stopped believing any of them will?
How many times have you had an idea and talked yourself out of it before you even started because “it probably won’t work anyway”?
How many things have you stopped letting yourself want because wanting hurts more than not having?
How many times have you stopped davening for something because you figured Hashem already heard you and the answer was no?
Nobody wakes up and decides give up. It’s when enough things don’t work out, and ‘why bother’ starts to sound like wisdom instead of defeat.
When hope slips away it is replaced by helplessness.
The good news is if helplessness can be learned, it can be unlearned. After Seligman discovered learned helplessness, he spent the rest of his career studying its opposite — learned optimism. Turns out resilience, that whole “I actually have some power here” feeling is a skill. Which means you can learn it or build it back, even if it’s been gone so long you forgot what it felt like.
So how do you build it? Glad you asked. (I was going to tell you either way, but it’s nice that you asked.)
The Three P’s
Seligman found that the difference between people who spiral after a setback and people who bounce back comes down to three mental habits. He called them the Three P’s.
Permanence. When something bad happens, do you think this will pass or this is my life now? A pessimist gets a rejection and thinks, “It’s always going to be like this.” An optimist gets the same rejection and thinks, “That was rough. But it’s not the whole story.” Now here’s the twist — when something good happens, they flip. The pessimist assumes the good thing is a fluke. A lucky break. Probably won’t happen again. The optimist sees it as a sign of more to come. Same events. Completely different inner narrative.
Pervasiveness. When something goes wrong in one area of your life, does it bleed into everything? A pessimist has a terrible date and suddenly her whole life is terrible — her job is pointless, her apartment is depressing, nothing is working. The optimist has the same terrible date and thinks, “Well, that was a disaster. But the rest of my life is actually pretty good.” She can keep a bad thing in its lane instead of letting it crash into every other lane on the highway. And with good things? The pessimist thinks a win is “just” that one area. The optimist sees it as part of a bigger picture.
Personalization. When something goes wrong, is it automatically all your fault? The pessimist takes everything personally. Date didn’t work? Something’s wrong with me. Project fell through? I’m not good enough. The optimist can look at the same situation and factor in context — timing, circumstances, the other person’s stuff — without letting herself off the hook entirely, but without burying herself either. And when something goes right? The pessimist says, “I got lucky.” The optimist says, “I earned that.” Imagine what that does to a person over time.
Three habits. Permanence, Pervasiveness, Personalization. And the most important word there is habits — because habits can be changed. You are not permanently wired to catastrophize. You just haven’t practiced being the other person yet.
Fifteen Minutes vs. Sixty Hours
Okay, I have another experiment involving animals but this time it’s about rats. Stay with me — it’s a good one.
1950s. Dr. Curt Richter puts rats in water and times how long they swim before giving up and drowning. Fifteen minutes. Every time.
Then he does it again but does one thing differently. Right before they hit that fifteen-minute mark, he scoops them out, dries them off, gives them a quick rest and then puts them back in the water.
Sixty. Hours.
That is how long they lasted this time.
Not sixty minutes. Sixty hours. Two hundred and forty times longer. Same experiment. Same water. The only difference was that somebody had pulled them out once. They’d felt what rescue feels like. And that single experience rewired their entire capacity to keep going. They had hope.
This isn’t just a cute story about rats — this is the key to everything we’ve been talking about. Those rats kept going because they had evidence of hope. And that changed everything about how they showed up.
We work the same way. When you’ve been in the shidduch system for years, or in a marriage that feels stuck, or in a life that looks fine but doesn’t feel like yours — your brain is collecting evidence. If the only thing you come up with is “I tried and it didn’t work,” you’re going to do exactly what those dogs did.
Lie down.
Stop trying.
File hope under “pointless.”
But remember what we learned from those dogs — the door was open the whole time, they just couldn’t see it anymore. The exit didn’t disappear. Their ability to believe in it did.
Whatever you’ve given up on, whatever door you’ve decided is closed, it might not be. You might just be too deep in the pattern to see it. You need to be intentional about evidence collection. Notice the times it did work. The moment something shifted when you didn’t see it coming. The time you were sure it was over and it wasn’t. We all have those moments, but we shrink them. We call them flukes; we call them luck. They weren’t. They were evidence. Stop dismissing them.
That’s what kept those rats swimming.
The question is: What evidence are you collecting?
If you’re someone who naturally sees the good stuff, keep doing that. But if you’re more like me and tend to let the good moments shrink while the hard ones take up all the space, I hope this gives you something to think about.
Writing it certainly did that for me.
Word of the Week: Ultracrepidarian
Say it three times fast. Or don’t — you might pull something.
An ultracrepidarian is someone who gives opinions on things they know absolutely nothing about.
Back in ancient Greece, (most English words come from Greek and Latin) there was a famous painter named Apelles. One day a shoemaker walked by one of his paintings and pointed out that he’d gotten the sandal wrong. Apelles looked, agreed, and fixed it. The shoemaker, thrilled with this newfound power, started critiquing the rest of the painting. At which point Apelles basically said, “Shoemaker, not above the sandal.” Meaning: you know shoes. Stick to shoes. The Latin version — sutor, ne ultra crepidam — eventually gave us this word that nobody can pronounce but everybody needs: ultracrepidarian
When Everyone’s an Expert on Your Life
If you’ve been single for more than fifteen minutes in a frum community, you’ve met an ultracrepidarian. You may not have known the word, but you know the experience.
It’s your aunt who’s been married since she was nineteen telling you that you’re “too picky.” It’s the woman in shul who heard you’re still dating and wants to know if you’ve “tried being more open.” It’s the well-meaning neighbor who knows exactly one detail about your life and has somehow built an entire theory around what you’re doing wrong.
And it’s not just about singles. It’s the mother who gets parenting advice from someone whose kids are two and four. It’s the woman going through something painful who has to smile through someone else’s confident analysis of why it’s happening and what she should do about it. It’s the person navigating a complicated situation getting input from someone who has never navigated anything more complicated than a carpool schedule.
These people are not trying to be hurtful. Most of them genuinely believe they’re helping. They heard something, they connected it to something else they once heard, and now they are experts.
And you’re standing there thinking, “You don’t know the first thing about my life.”
It’s exhausting. If you hear it enough, you start wondering if maybe they’re right. Maybe you are too picky. Maybe you should just settle. Maybe they see something you don’t. That’s what happens when enough shoemakers start critiquing the painting. You start to forget that they only know shoes.
And Then There is Us
We all do this. And I say this with love and self-inclusion.
Every one of us has been the shoemaker. We’ve heard half a story and formed a whole opinion. We’ve given advice on someone’s marriage when we have zero idea what happens behind their closed doors. We’ve told someone what they should do about their kid, their job, their health, their dating life — with total confidence and almost no information.
We do it because we care.
We do it because we want to help.
We do it because in a tight-knit community, other people’s lives feel close enough to touch.
But caring doesn’t make us qualified. And wanting to help doesn’t mean our help is helpful.
The Art of Staying in Your Sandal
So where does that leave us? Because we can’t just never speak. Community is built on people showing up for each other. Advice, when it’s good and when it’s earned, can genuinely change someone’s life.
It comes down to this: Did the person ask? If someone didn’t ask for your input, the default should be listening, not advising. And if you absolutely can’t help yourself, at least start with “do you want my thoughts on this?” and be okay with the answer being no. It doesn’t matter how much knowledge or experience you have, if you were not asked for your opinion – DO NOT GIVE IT!
Apelles didn’t kick the shoemaker out of the studio for noticing the sandal. The sandal feedback was legit. It was when the shoemaker kept going, past his knowledge, past his lane, past his sandal, that it became a problem.
Know your sandal. Stay in it. And when someone else wanders out of theirs and into your life with a confident opinion they haven’t earned, you now have a word for that.
You’re welcome.
