Fallacy Factory
Manufactured Misery Meets Martyrdom
TL;DR: Some people would rather be right about why they’re stuck than actually get unstuck. Misery worn as a badge, the open door they won’t walk through.
The horse is standing in the river. Cold current breaking around its knees, water close enough to drink without lowering its head much, and it has decided – with the calm of an animal that’s long been running on pure intuition – that there is nothing here worth drinking.
You know the proverb. Something something, “lead horse to the water,” something something, “yet it won’t drink.”
It leaves out the horses that walk all the way into the river and die of thirst anyway. On principle.
I’ve been watching one do it for years. Not a horse, obviously. A person, and the river is an ordinary one: a better job, a nicer place to live, the small daily proof that life could be less of a grind. None of it is locked away. The door has been open the whole time. And every year the door gets a little more bricked up, from the inside, until the brick is painted to look like a wall that was always there.
People stay in situations they resent for all kinds of decent reasons. That’s not what fascinates.
It’s the factory, tirelessly producing excuses – why not this, why not that – one brick at a time. The better job won’t last. The nicer place isn’t really us. The promotion would mean longer hours and you’d never see the kids, and anyway, have you noticed how the people who chase that stuff end up hollow, divorced, medicated, sad?
By the time the production line shuts down for the night it has manufactured a complete moral universe in which wanting more is the character flaw and staying put is the quiet dignity.
Sour grapes, except industrialized – and most of it inherited.
Más vale malo conocido que bueno por conocer: better the bad you know than the good you don’t. A lie you’d see through; a half-truth you can hide behind for a lifetime. The same machine, running on centuries of practice.
And the factory needs a steady stream of new recruits.
Show up with a bucket of water from somewhere better and you become the villain of the story – the striver, the sellout, the one who thinks he’s better than everyone. Your ambition goes in as raw material and comes back stamped sin.
Then again, wanting less isn’t the fallacy… plenty of people want the small life and mean it, and the world is probably better for them.
The fallacy is wanting more, then building the reason you can’t have it – brick by brick – so you never have to try. But you won’t shut up about it, either. Real contentment is quiet; the manufactured kind needs an audience – it has to announce, to someone still reaching, that the grapes were sour all along.
Underneath all of it is something simpler and perhaps worse: self-inflicted misery, a special kind of Stockholm Syndrome where you’re the hostage and the warden both. You built the cell, and the bars are supporting the structure – pull them out and the whole thing comes down.
The bigger life costs more than effort, of course – it costs becoming someone you’ve never been, a small death. The smaller one is at least yours, and you built it.
I used to think the horse was stupid. What if it’s loyal instead? Born drinking from one particular puddle, certain it’s the only honest water on earth and everything else a trick, a sales pitch, some richer animal’s idea of what a horse should want.
So it drinks its puddle and calls the taste dignity. And everyone arriving with news of the river gets a scoff disguised as neighing.
WEEE-Hee-Hee!
Then again, I run a smaller version of the machine (and I bet you do, too).
I bet on the idea that a life could run on curiosity instead of a salary, and the voice that whispers – don’t, it’s safer here, who do you think you are – still echoes every time I drift back toward the puddle.
My puddle is cleaner, I tell myself. Better lit.
But some mornings the river looks an awful lot like a trick to me too, and I notice how much I want to stay exactly where I am.
Related reading:
Why I’m Interviewing for a Job I Don’t Want – the puddle, up close.
