Why is your newsletter called Retrograder?

A few years ago, I decided, with very little warning, that I was going to do a Master’s of Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh. This was not a particularly well-conceived plan, but at the time, it seemed like my best life option. I ended up staying for three weeks of classes, during which I realized I had no interest in starting a quest for a PhD or living on my third continent in as many years. I withdrew before the financial deadline and ran away with my tuition.

Starting the program was an impulsive decision. Withdrawing from the program was also an impulsive decision. I don’t regret either of them. In both cases, I did the best I could with the information and emotions available to me at the time. I look back fondly on the whole ordeal—it was a learning experience that enabled me to go on a bunch of castle runs. It was interesting to me, then, how shocked some of my friends were when I decided to leave.

“Why wouldn’t I leave?” I asked. “I figured out a better plan.”

“But why did you start the program in the first place if you weren’t sure about it?”

“Because you don’t know until you know. You know?”

“Not really?”

It got me thinking about how we make decisions—small, big, romantic, platonic, career, geographical. Some people, it seemed to me, had an innate predisposition toward action—an impatience, a curiosity, a dose of fuck around and find out. But it also struck me that some people are much more likely than others to revise their thinking either before or after they have acted. I, for example, am incredibly susceptible to a thoroughly mid argument. If someone tells me I’m about to eat the best pizza of my entire life, I will probably hop on the bandwagon because it seems fun. The best pizza ever! Absolutely! Other people are more considered. They are less prone to changing their minds. These people are less flexible and more fixed—less likely to be swayed by nonsense, but more likely to ignore good advice.

In this theory of decision-making, there are four quadrants:

• Action/Fixed: Eager to make big decisions, content in mindset

• Action/Flexible: Eager to make big decisions, eager to revise mindset

• Inaction/Flexible: Content to avoid big decisions, eager to revise mindset

• Inaction/Fixed: Content to avoid big decisions, content in mindset

These are the pros. This is the less flattering version:

I think I’m proactive (yay!) but also impulsive (boo). I made a joke to my brother last week about being impatient, and he said, “You? No! Never!” I found his sarcasm both hurtful and fair enough. But I also don’t feel any urgent desire to change because I think this is a reasonable strategy to figure out one’s life. Personally, I’m more likely to regret inaction than the wrong action.

Let’s play a game with our decision-makers. Four stick friends are in a room full of balloons, some blue, some red. Half of these balloons contain fire (ah!). The other half contain iced oat lattes (yay!). What do the stick friends do?

• Stubborn has a good feeling the fire will be in the red balloons because fire = red. Stubborn opens a blue balloon and gets a latte. Stubborn opens another blue balloon and gets burned by a ball of fire. Uh oh. But Stubborn is pretty sure that was a fluke, so Stubborn keeps going around to all the blue balloons until they collect two lattes and two fires.

• Impulsive runs to the nearest balloon, red, and finds a latte. Yay! Impulsive decides all red balloons must contain lattes. They run to the next red balloon, where they find fire. No! Impulsive revises: Maybe blue balloons are more likely to contain lattes. On and on Impulsive careens through the room, changing tack whenever things are going not so good. Impulsive collects a lot of data, a lot of lattes, and a lot of burns.

• Paralyzed watches Stubborn and Impulsive for a while, hesitating, before noticing that they both got a latte from a convenient nearby blue balloon. Paralyzed goes to that one. When the game ends, Paralyzed only got one latte but did not get burned by any plumes of fire.

• Inert thinks this is, frankly, a ridiculous game, and that an iced oat latte is not worth the risk of opening a balloon full of fire. Inert sits down.

I’m sure we could train ourselves to be more of one thing and less of another, but I also think I have always been impulsive/proactive—not because I am a big risk-taker (ask anyone I have cycled with), but because I love gathering data. I think of my own life as a story whose characters and themes I need to close-read. How else to understand if you are growing as a person and learning to make better choices? My earliest memory is of staring at a glass fireplace and thinking: If I reach out and touch this with my hand, it’s going to be hot. I also remember thinking: But I must find out how hot.

All of this brings us (stay with me) to the reasonable question: Why did you name your newsletter Retrograder? Retrograder, I realize, makes it sound like I have a deep knowledge of astrology (my actual knowledge is limited to Co-Star memes).

Astronomically/astrologically, a planet is in retrograde when it appears to be moving backward. But it hasn’t actually reversed orbit—it just appears that way from our limited vantage point on Earth. I spent a year fanatically calling everything retrograde. It was my favorite word. Y2K fashion; political backsliding; circular book trends. Most of all, though, I like “retrograde” as a way to describe the shapes of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. When you make a bad decision; when you head off in the wrong direction; when you waste time on an idea or a relationship or a career that doesn’t last—it’s easy to feel, in these instances, like your life has gone on hold. It’s easy to feel like your life has started moving backward.

This sense of motion guides so much of our decision-making. It’s easy to be afraid of not growing or of turning into a person you’ll regret becoming. I think about this whenever I revisit something I wrote two, five, ten years ago. I’m always surprised how bad it is. I’m always surprised how good it is. It feels like I should be more different than I am, but it also feels like I should be more the same. We want to view our life in teleological terms; a monotonic upward trajectory where everything serves the grand plot arc of our lives. So it’s incredibly uncomfortable to stand in the wreckage of a bad decision and think: “This was not how my life was supposed to go.”

But then the planet exits retrograde. The perceived backward motion stops, and you can see once more what was true all along—that we are always, in every non-decision, in every bad decision, whether we like it or not, moving forward.

Currently reading: I’m halfway through the audiobook of Tom Lake, which is narrated perfectly by Meryl Streep. I put off reading this for a while because I got the impression it was one of those vaguely cynical but ultimately rewarding books I would have to force myself through. Not that! Extremely warm and cozy (the first part, at least).

Non-urgent thought of the week: We refer to drinks like apple cider and beer as “crisp” but it would be, frankly, illegal to call a drink “crispy.”

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