Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

by Lulu Miller

Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century astronomer burned at the stake for believing Earth was not the center of the universe, as a hero. According to legend, before his execution Bruno quipped, “Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.”

Puritan that he is, David recommends the un-idling of hands. The “soul-ache… vanishes,” he writes, “with active out-of-door life and the consequent flow of good health.” He claims that salvation lies in the electricity of our bodies. “Happiness comes from doing, helping, working, loving, fighting, conquering,” he writes in a syllabus from around the same time, “from the exercise of functions; from self-activity.” Don’t overthink it, I think, is his point. Enjoy the journey. Savor the small things. The “luscious” taste of a peach, the “lavish” colors of tropical fish, the rush from exercise that allows one to experience “the stern joy which warriors feel.” Toward the end of the book, he quotes Thoreau—“There is no hope for you unless this bit of sod under your feet is the sweetest to you in this world—in any world”—and then he sends his readers off with a rousing chant of carpe diem. “Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the sunshine so bright, the shade so welcome, as right here, now, today.”

But as the twentieth century roared on, clinical psychologists began noticing odd things. Their healthier patients, the ones leading easier lives, bouncing back more quickly after setbacks, getting jobs, friends, lovers, all the gold rings on the carousel of life, seemed to carry the rosy mark of self-delusion.

And time and time again they found that, indeed, mentally healthy people rated themselves as more attractive than they were, more helpful, more intelligent, more in control of chance events (like rolling dice or picking winning lottery numbers) than they possibly could be. When they looked into their past, they remembered their successes with more ease than their failures. When they looked into their future, they voted themselves as more likely to succeed than their friends and classmates. Those people, on the other hand, with that oh-so-hailed virtue of accurate perception? Ding ding ding, you guessed it: clinically depressed. They struggled in their lives, found it harder to recoup after setbacks, often had more trouble in work and relationships.

As I read through this seemingly bottomless Mary Poppins bag of goodies that positive illusions could apparently bring—deeper sense of well-being, more success at work and in relationships, even better physical health—it dawned on me that perhaps my dad had steered me astray with his insistence on nose-to-the-ants humility. Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed on us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are.

It’s a hard lot being a human, these psychologists explain. You walk around with the knowledge that the world is fundamentally uncaring, that no matter how hard you work there is no promise of success, that you are competing against billions, that you are vulnerable to the elements, and that everything you ever love will eventually be destroyed. A little lie can take the edge off, can help you keep charging forward into the gauntlet of life, where you sometimes, accidentally, prevail.

And what cognitive glitch helps you achieve grit? Positive illusions. Other studies showed that if you had positive illusions, you were less likely to experience discouragement after setbacks. And while grit is a cocktail of many traits, one of its most important ones is just that: an ability to keep going after setbacks, to keep going in the face of no evidence that what you are striving for will ever work, or, as Duckworth puts it, “maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.”

real time. He’s a sort of Rumpelstiltskin of the Dis. Able to take any rejection, insult, or failure and magically transform it into a compliment. At one point in his memoir, he effortlessly transmutes a string of failures into a bouquet of compliments. In college, he lost the Botany Prize because, as he explains, his thinking was too expansive for standardized tests; he lost the Entomology Prize because he was too generous (he “stood back” to let a poorer student win the money);

“Every age gets the lunatics it deserves,” British historian Roy Porter once wrote.

But it’s not just the social toll. Inside the thick-walled bubble of self-delusion, the pain can slowly accumulate.

You’re setting yourself up for disappointment, was how Robins and Beer explained it: “short-term benefits but long-term costs.”

In other words, the lie catches up. The power of the rosy lens seems to have a limit. And when it runs out, the fact of your impotence will really sting. I think of these psychologists as the quiet, ragtag troop of Cheerleaders for Low Self-Worth. Their pom-poms are droopy. They whisper when they cheer. Be HUMBLE! Be BLUE! Who’s the best?? NOT YOU!

In other words, Baumeister and his colleague Brad J. Bushman discovered what depressed people had known all along. If you tell a person with low self-esteem “You suck,” they say “You’re right,” and roll back under the covers. It’s the esteem-bloated person, who has enough belief in himself to classify such an insult as untrue, who bothers striking back.

Baumeister and Bushman are quick to point out that not all high self-esteem is bad. They often find themselves needing to explain, palms in the air, that high self-esteem can be great! High self-esteem, they say, can make you freakishly peaceful (or “exceptionally nonaggressive,” as they put it), because you’re so comfortable with yourself that criticism does not threaten your self-worth. They believe it’s the very small subset of people with easily threatened high self-esteem that are the dangerous ones. “In plainer terms,” Baumeister and Bushman write, “it is not so much the people who regard themselves as superior beings who are the most dangerous but, rather, those who have a strong desire to regard themselves as superior beings.… People who are preoccupied with validating a grandiose self-image apparently find criticism highly upsetting and lash out against the source of it.”

“One of Jordan’s most double-edged talents,” writes Luther Spoehr, “was his ability to persuade himself that he was doing the right thing and then pursue his goal with seemingly boundless energy.… He prided himself on his tolerance and liberality… but… Jordan was not reluctant to use a cannon to swat a fly.”

The ruling that made this all possible, by the way, is still on the books. That’s right. The Supreme Court ruling has never been overturned. At our highest level, it is still written into law that if the government deems you “unfit,” officials have the authority to pull you from your home, stick a knife through your abdomen, and terminate your bloodline.

Over the period of 2006 to 2010, for example, nearly 150 women were illegally sterilized in California prisons, without the women’s consent and occasionally without their knowledge. And in the summer of 2017, a Tennessee judge named Sam Benningfield was found to be offering petty criminals reduced jail sentences in exchange for being sterilized.

“I just wish he had considered what Oliver Cromwell once said,” Luther Spoehr told me on the phone one June morning, as he tried to make sense of this man he had studied for so many years. “ ‘I beseech thee in the bowels of Christ, consider that thee might be mistaken.’ ”

But perhaps the most damning argument came from nature herself. Had David followed his own advice to look to nature for truth, he would have seen it. This dazzling, feathery, squawking, gurgling mound of counterevidence. Animals can outperform humans on nearly every measure supposedly associated with our superiority. There are crows that have better memories than us, chimps with better pattern-recognition skills, ants that rescue their wounded, and blood flukes with

higher rates of monogamy. When you actually examine the range of life on Earth, it takes a lot of acrobatics to sort it into a single hierarchy with humans at the top. We don’t have the biggest brain or the best memory. We’re not the fastest or the strongest or the most prolific. We’re not the only ones that mate for life, that show altruism, use tools, language. We don’t have the most copies of genes in circulation. We aren’t even the newest creation on the block.