10 | THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
One day, a few years ago, I was rush-
ing from the pool dripping wet when a
man with a Russian accent stopped me
and said, “You must come to svim with
the team.”
I was in my early 50s — too old for
swim team, I thought. But the coach —
Igor was his name — persisted: “I see
you are good svimmer.”
Intrigued, and being a sucker for
flattery, I relented and joined his rag-
tag group of swimmers. Workouts
started at 5:30 in the morning, when
most sane people were tucked in bed.
It didn’t matter because no matter how
sleepy we were, we were guaranteed
to be wide-awake, if not euphoric,
when we finished. We enjoyed our
camaraderie and although we were all
at different swimming levels, we had
one thing in common: We wanted to
get better.
One day, a bunch of us were grous-
ing about how little progress we were
making in our swim times, how slow
we were.Ever the philosopher of the pool,
Igor smiled and said, “You are all
confused! Speed is not the goal; it is
the result of perfect beautiful tech-
nique.”
What really mattered to Igor was
excellence — the efficient stroke. Once
you mastered that, he argued, speed
would follow naturally. Speed was
simply the welcome side effect of
swimming well.
I’ve been thinking lately that there’s
a lesson here that goes beyond the
pool. We all wanted to swim faster and
the more hysterically we tried, the
more speed escaped us. The same goes
for happiness. Everyone wants to be
happy, yet the more directly we pursue
happiness, the more elusive it be-
comes.
We’ve all experienced this phenom-
enon. Think, for example, about your
coming vacation. You are excited about
going to the beach or mountains and
relaxing with lots of free time. How
happy you are going to be! Then you
start to plan out what you’ll do, what
you need to bring, what restaurants
you need a reservation for. Soon you’re
feeling a bit stressed out about your
future pleasure.
Research shows that thinking toomuch about how to be happy actually
backfires and undermines well-being.
This is in part because all that thinking
consumes a fair amount of time, and is
not itself enjoyable.
The researchers behind this study,
called “Vanishing Time in the Pursuit
of Happiness,” randomly assigned
subjects to one of two tasks: One group
was asked to write down 10 things that
could make them
become happier,
while the other
wrote 10 things that
demonstrated that
they were already
happy. The subjects
were then asked to
what extent they felt time was slipping
away and how happy they felt at that
moment. Those prompted to think
about how they could become happier
felt more pressed for time and signifi-
cantly less happy.
This jibes with the argument the
journalist Ruth Whippman makes in
her 2016 book “America the Anxious:
How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is
Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks.”
Trying too hard to be happy — down-
loading mindfulness apps, taking yoga
classes, reading self-help books —mostly just stresses us out, she writes.
So what should we do instead? Maybe
simply hang out with some friends,
doing something we like to do togeth-
er: “Study after study shows that good
social relationships are the strongest,
most consistent predictor there is of a
happy life.”
Which brings me back to swimming.
When I swim, I feel that I have all the
time in the world, in part because
much of what marks time — my every-
day life — vanishes the moment I step
in the water. And all the while I’m
there with my buddies, bound by mu-
tual exertion and joking about life.
Our technique has improved, thanks
to Igor. We have a smoother pull, never
dropping our elbows, and a steadier
flutter kick. Some days, I swim a little
faster than I did before. But even if I
don’t, I feel great.
In the end, happiness is a side effect
of living well — just like speed can be
the result of excellent swimming tech-
nique. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off
to the pool.Richard A. Friedman
Contributing WriterRICHARD A. FRIEDMANis a professor of
clinical psychiatry and the director of
the psychopharmacology clinic at the
Weill Cornell Medical College.A swimmer’s guide to happiness
ADALIS MARTINEZLesson No. 1:
It’s not about
how fast
you can go.The latest issue of New York magazine
features a long, bizarre, amazing story
by Kera Bolonik about a hapless Har-
vard Law professor, Bruce Hay, who
managed to get duped by two apparent
grifters, Maria-Pia Shuman and Mi-
scha Haider, one a lesbian and one a
transgender woman, into believing
that he had fathered a child with Shu-
man — a con that they allegedly ran on
multiple men at once.
From this paternity-trap beginning,
Hay found himself emotionally entan-
gled, ideologically bullied and effec-
tively extorted. At one point, Shuman
and Haider somehow tricked him into
letting them “house-nap” his Cam-
bridge home, until a court order
evicted them. Finally, as the grift ran
dry, Haider filed a sexual harassment
complaint against Hay that’s still being
adjudicated by Harvard.
When this story — far more byzan-
tine even than my summary —
dropped into the internet, the second-
most-interesting thing, after the wild
tale itself, was to watch how it was
read by people who lean right versus
people who lean left. The leftward-leaners were more likely to focus on
Hay as a uniquely gullible or lust-
addled individual, and to draw strictly
personal lessons from his disastrous
arc. (For instance, to quote the Atlan-
tic’s Adam Serwer, that “men need
meaningful and supportive friendships
with people they are not married to,
especially into middle age.”)
The rightward-leaners, on the other
hand, read the story politically, as a
vivid allegory for the relationship
between the old liberalism and the new
— between a well-meaning liberal
establishment that’s desperate to act
enlightened and a woke progressivism
that ruthlessly exploits the establish-
ment’s ideological subservience. (“Not
only did [Hay] trust Shuman,” Bolonik
writes, but “he felt it would have been
insulting for a heterosexual cisgender
man to question a professed lesbian as
to whether she’d had sex with other
men.”) In this reading the Hay-Shu-
man-Haider story is a real-life version
of a Michel Houellebecq novel, a tale of
liberal culture that wears reactionary
implications on its sleeve.
Since I am a right-leaner you can
easily imagine to which reading I was
instinctively inclined. But step back a
bit, and the contrasting responses to
this one bonkers story offer a way to
think about our political polarization,
which is shaped by a recurring version
of the Hay story’s reception.
By this I mean the heart of polariza-
tion is often not a disagreement about
the facts of a particular narrative, but
about whether that story is somehow
representative— or whether it’s justone tale among many in our teeming
society, and doesn’t stand for anything
larger than itself.
When conservatives talk about
liberal media bias, for instance, their
complaint isn’t necessarily that main-
stream outlets fail to report stories that
might confirm a conservative world-
view. Rather, it’s that they report on
them in ways that make them sound
dry and dull or just random and unrep-
resentative, without ever acknowledg-
ing their wider interest or significance.
Likewise, when liberals damn con-
servative megaphones for reporting
“alternative facts”
instead of real ones,
what they often
really mean is that
the right-wing media
reports on real facts
and real stories —
crimes committed by
illegal immigrants,
say, or the violent
edge to the Antifa protests — but then
overstates or misreads their signifi-
cance.
All this suggests that breaking out of
polarization, thinking for yourself
instead of as a partisan, is ultimately
more about imagination than informa-
tion, and not something achieved by
becoming better educated in the facts
of issue X or Y or Z. (Indeed, studies
suggest that the most factually in-
formed voters are also reliably the
mostpartisan.)
If I were trying to de-polarize some-
one, in the way that you de-program
members of cults or revolutionarycells, I might hand them a copy of their
favorite magazine or newspaper, and
ask them to construct a version in
which the exact same set of stories
were edited and headlined and pri-
oritized by an editor from the opposite
political persuasion. (I promise you my
own guest-editing stint at New York
would be fantastic.) Or to program an
opinion show for Rachel Maddow using
only stories that Chris Wallace and
Bret Baier report, or a show for Laura
Ingraham using only the stories that
lead MSNBC.
It’s not that full depolarization is
ever possible; basic moral and philo-
sophical commitments inevitably
divide us. But seeing our disagree-
ments through the lens of narrative
might get us closer to a crucial insight
— which is that in a big, diverse and
complicated society, multiple narra-
tives can all be true at once.
Maybe Bruce Hay’s strange odyssey
isn’t actually a heightened example of
what’s gone wrong with academic
liberalism or the sexual revolution as a
whole. But it could be such an exam-
ple, and the mistreatment of a particu-
lar migrant family at the border could
alsobe a heightened example of what’s
gone wrong with Trumpian conserva-
tism ... because choosing a side, as we
all tend to do, doesn’t have to mean
taking only that side’s narratives as
truth.
And nothing should temper partisan-
ship more than an awareness that
somewhere, on some issue, people with
whom you disagree are telling a story
that you really need to hear.The stories that divide us
How seeing
the other
side’s
narrative can
depolarize
your mind.Ross Douthat
opinion
Before President Trump picked Dan Coats to be the
director of national intelligence, Mr. Coats spent 24
years in Washington as a member of the House and the
Senate from Indiana, serving long stints on both the
Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed
Services Committee. He had also been ambassador to
Germany.
His predecessors included James Clapper, an Air
Force lieutenant general who previously headed two
other intelligence agencies, and Adm. Dennis Blair, who
commanded United States naval forces in the Pacific.
After an increasingly difficult tenure, Mr. Coats is
stepping down and Mr. Trump has chosen as his replace-
ment Representative John Ratcliffe of Texas.
The 2004 law creating the position of director of na-
tional intelligence says that whoever holds the post
must have “extensive national security expertise,” but
Mr. Ratcliffe has been a House member only since 2015
and joined the House Intelligence Committee just this
year. Before that he was a small-town mayor and a
United States attorney, apparently with little or no expe-
rience dealing with terrorism or national security issues.
He may have even falsely claimed to have prosecuted
terrorists.
One reason Mr. Coats’s tenure was so uncomfortable
was that, unlike many Trump appointees, he was more
likely to say what he believed to be true than what the
president wanted to hear.
Even some influential Republican senators are con-
cerned that Mr. Trump’s main reason for picking Mr.
Ratcliffe is his intense loyalty, and not his experience on
intelligence issues.
Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelli-
gence Committee, said he didn’t even know Mr. Ratcliffe.
“I talked to him on the phone last night,” Mr. Burr
said. “It’s the first contact I’ve ever had with him.”
That Mr. Ratcliffe’s record seems so undistinguished
by relevant experience and so filled with examples of
partisanship makes it all the more vital that the Senate
carefully vet him.
Days before Robert Mueller, the former special coun-
sel, testified last week that Russia had corrupted the
2016 presidential race and was once more “doing it as
we sit here,” Mr. Coats appointed an experienced official
to oversee election security intelligence across the gov-
ernment in a newly created senior position. A bit late in
the game, but it amounted to an act of courage in the
face of Mr. Trump’s adamant refusal to acknowledge the
problem and respond forcefully ahead of the 2020 elec-
tions.
Mr. Ratcliffe appears to have caught Mr. Trump’s eye
by being a dogged critic of the Russia investigation and
claiming that the F.B.I. harassed Mr. Trump. During Mr.
Mueller’s testimony, Mr. Ratcliffe accused Mr. Mueller of
violating American judicial norms by writing an incon-
clusive report about whether Mr. Trump committed a
crime by obstructing justice.
Just before Mr. Trump picked him for the intelligence
job, Mr. Ratcliffe was on the president’s favored source
of intelligence, Fox News, smearing the special counsel’s
report.
“Its conclusions weren’t from Robert Mueller, they
were written by what a lot of people believe was Hillary
Clinton’s de facto legal team, people that had supported
her, even represented some of her aides,” he said.
Mr. Coats has defended the nation’s intelligence agen-
cies in their unanimous finding that Russia interfered in
the 2016 election. He refused the president’s request to
get James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, to end his
investigation of Michael Flynn, the national security
adviser who has since pleaded guilty to lying about his
contacts with the Russian ambassador.
These were not the only ways Mr. Coats rubbed Mr.
Trump the wrong way. Time and again he delivered
truths at odds with Mr. Trump’s preferred version of
reality — saying that North Korea was unlikely to aban-
don its nuclear weapons, that Iran was abiding by the
nuclear deal, that the Islamic State continued to be a
threat in Syria.
The president made his position clear on Tuesday
when he said that “the intelligence agencies have run
amok” and that Mr. Ratcliffe would “rein it in.”
Mr. Coats wasn’t perfect. Some experts think he could
have done more to protect America’s 17 intelligence
agencies from politicization. But more often than not, he
stood by the professionals and their analysis.
One of the most important lessons from America’s
response to the attacks of 9/11 that led to the creation of
this post was that intelligence agencies need to work
freely and honestly, and not be swayed by political con-
siderations and the need to placate a president. An ad-
ministration that sought and got the message it wanted
from the intelligence apparatus is what helped lead to
the invasion of Iraq and the disasters that followed.
The Senate needs to be sure we don’t go down that
road again.If confirmed
as director
of national
intelligence,
would John
Ratcliffe be
more loyal to
the truth or to
the president?PARTISANSHIP WON’T KEEP THE U.S. SAFE
A.G. SULZBERGER,PublisherDEAN BAQUET,Executive Editor
JOSEPH KAHN,Managing Editor
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate EditorJAMES BENNET,Editorial Page Editor
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page EditorMARK THOMPSON,Chief Executive Officer
STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON,President, International
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA,Senior V.P., Global Advertising
CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing
HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P.,International Circulation
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