1A Essay 3 (Essay Worth 200 Points): Can a Genius Redirect His Passions Toward Moral and Professional Excellence?
Due as an upload on May 11.
The Assignment:
From Jeff Henderson’s memoir Cooked and the movie Groundhog Day, compare the purgatory (pain and suffering as a form of spiritual cleansing and growth) and redemption in Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors.
In this comparison, you are analyzing the following similarities between Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors:
- Both are beset by the false promise that hedonism and pleasure bring happiness, and this false promise chains them to a lower, more corrupt version of their being that slogs through a miserable existence even as they try to tell themselves the opposite.
- Both hit rock bottom from their failed hedonism and are tempted by the great philosophical force of nihilism, the belief that nothing matters, that there is no purpose or sense to life, and that despair is the only reasonable response to a world that is so absurdly lacking in meaning, harmony, and a moral order.
- Both undergo a reformation of the soul by developing, as Cal Newport calls it, a Craftsman Mindset, toiling at their craft, developing mastery over their craft bit by bit, and accomplishing a maturity of mind and soul that results in producing beautiful art--gourmet cuisine in the case of Jeff Henderson; piano music in the case of Phil Connors.
- Both find the transformation of their soul is accompanied by excruciating and prolonged suffering, a tribulation that could be described as Purgatory.
- Both find that their personality transformation bears fruit: They produce great art, they develop character, maturity, humility, and the capacity to love others; and they are unrecognizable from the wretched person they were at the beginning of their journey.
- Both bear witness to Viktor Frankl’s famous adage from Man’s Search for Meaning that the search for happiness will always fail and therefore the search for happiness must be abandoned; rather, we must search for a higher purpose and moral goodness, and only then will happiness become the natural byproduct of our purposeful, moral life.
Suggested Outline for Comparing Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors
- Paragraph 1, summarize the memoir Cooked by Jeff Henderson with a focus on Henderson’s character arc or personality transformation
- Paragraph 2, summarize the movie Groundhog Day with a focus on Phil Connors’ character arc or personality transformation
- Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
- Paragraphs 4-8, expound on the similarities in your body paragraphs
- Paragraph 9, your conclusion, restate your thesis in emotionally powerful language
- Works Cited page, have no fewer than 4 sources
Comparing the 4 Major Life Stages of Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson
Major Points of Comparison Regarding Phil Connors' and Jeff Henderson's Character Evolution. Both go through 4 Major Life Stages:
Stage 1: The Know-It-All Stage: pride and egotism make them feel invulnerable to life's slings and arrows. They think they have everything figured out, but they're lost and in denial.
Phil is a lonely wretch who offends women, friends, and co-workers alike. He is maladapted to society. He cannot cooperate, be polite, or see the decency in others. He is consumed by self-loathing for knowing deep down he is so weak and ill-adjusted, but rather than fact those facts, he erects a defensive wall to hide his pathologies. He sees himself as a star when he is trapped in a mediocre job. He's waiting for The Next Big Thing and until then he is seething with bitterness. Meanwhile, he puts up the facade of The Talent. He fools no one, especially the object of his love and adoration, Rita.
Jeff Henderson is a drug dealer spreading disease and mayhem through the community, yet he is so depraved in his greed that he consoles himself with the notion that he is "just a businessman" doing no harm. He thinks he is invulnerable, but his life is in greater and greater danger.
Stage 2: The Pleasure-Seeking or Hedonistic Phase: Both Phil and Jeff try to assuage their broken selves with pleasure, riches, and indulgences. But no amount of cake, pie, alcohol, carousing, jet-setting or car racing can erase their sense of anxiety and wretchedness from being "lost in the woods," traipsing down a false path that cuts them off from humanity.
Stage 3: The Nihilistic Stage: When both get exposed as frauds, charlatans, and criminally neglectful souls, rather than address their deficiencies and moral shortcomings, they succumb to self-pity, despair, and narcissistic victimization ("I've been unfairly castigated. Woe is me!"). They contemplate suicide. They dabble in nihilism, the grotesque belief that life has no meaning, and in essence become their own worst enemies.
Stage 4: The Personal Accountability Stage. Only when both confront the humility of their life finiteness and limitations and embark on building their character through hard work, charity, service to others, engaging in their personal Life Crucible, and finding beauty in the world through cooking, music, and love of mankind do they abandon their grotesque Inner Beast and become their Higher Angel.
Engaging the Crucible
Using the Crucible to Write a Comparison Essay About Groundhog Day and Cooked
How does this post help you with your essay?
I propose that narrowing your focus on Phil Connors’ and Jeff Henderson’s ability to engage with their personal crucible will give you a rigorous, sophisticated approach to your comparison essay.
In this post, therefore, I will break down the crucible, explain what it means, and explain how we, Phil Connors, and Jeff Henderson must learn to stop retreating from the Crucible and engage with it.
What is the Crucible?
The crucible is a life conflict you can’t get out of; it is your place on life’s chessboard, so to speak. You engage with the various conflicts contained within your personal crucible and develop adaptation skills, wisdom, and strength, or you retreat from your personal crucible by escaping into various addictive behaviors (smartphone, social media, YouTube videos, Tik Tok, etc.) and by retreating you become the weaker version of yourself, maladapted to life’s conflicts and challenges, subject to personal entropy, the disintegration of your higher self.
The crucible tests and purifies us. In this regard, the crucible could be called a form of purgatory.
Phil Connor’s personal crucible is having to live the same day over and over and suffer through experimentation the best reaction to his personal crucible. He tries hedonism (pleasure-seeking), self-pity, and suicidal despair, but all these responses to his crucible only lead to personal failure and entropy, thereby prolonging his place in Purgatory.
It is only when Phil Connors accepts his limitations inside his Crucible, the finiteness of life, the manner in which death forces us to choose a life of meaning, and his choice to humbly make his life a service to others that he develops the ability to love the woman of his life, Rita Hanson (played by Andie MacDowell).
Jeff Henderson’s personal crucible actually takes on two forms, his In-Prison Crucible and his Post-Prison Crucible. Each crucible has different characteristics. In many ways, as Henderson explains in his memoir, his Post-Prison Crucible is even more difficult to navigate than his previous one.
It is only when Jeff Henderson accepts accountability for his criminal actions and sees their effect on the community and rebuilds his life in such a way that he contributes to society that he emerges from his crucible as a moral and successful person.
In both cases, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson never escape their crucible because the point of both stories, one fiction and one nonfiction, is that the crucible is neverending; how we react to the ongoing crucible of our lives is the point.
Talking to Married Couples About the Crucible
Marriage is an example of a crucible because you are in a commitment that has built-in conflicts and if you want the marriage to last, you have to learn to engage in the crucible.
Anger and Kind Deeds
Because marriage is such a common crucible in life, I interviewed some couples for this post.
One couple told me that they get angry from time to time but try to mitigate their anger by doing kind deeds for one another.
One man told me that every morning for thirty years, he brings toast and coffee to his wife in bed. “Sometimes I want to throw the hot coffee in her face, but I give her the coffee with a smile,” he said. “And by being kind, my anger diminishes.”
His wife said, “Sometimes I’m so angry with him that when he gives my morning toast and coffee, I want to throw the hot coffee back in his face, but I accept the breakfast with a loving smile and this makes me feel better.”
Failure to Engage in the Crucible of a Marriage
Many years ago, I was the best man at a wedding, and I was helping the priest carry some of his things from his car to the church, he told me that his younger brother was going through a divorce. The priest said, “My brother and his wife never fought or argued; neither committed adultery, and neither were dishonest with their finances. They were basically good people, but over the years they did not grow together. For fifteen years, all they did was watch TV at night, and failing to grow together, their marriage disintegrated.”
Failure to Engage in the Crucible Leads to Entropy
The priest’s brother’s marriage disintegrated or went into a state of entropy because he did not engage with his life crucible, his marriage.
At the beginning of Groundhog Day, Phil Connors won’t acknowledge that his life is a crucible. He seeks escape through cynical egotism, sophomoric smart-assism, and selfishness. He is disintegrating while becoming more and more repellant to others.
For the first hundred pages of Jeff Henderson’s memoir Cooked, he won’t engage in his crucible, to use his brilliance and genius to bring good into the world. Rather, he retreats from his crucible and leads a life of hedonism, crime, and denial. Like Phil Connors, he is spiritually diseased by entropy.
How to Use the Crucible and Entropy in Your Essay
To refresh your memory, here is a suggested essay outline:
Suggested Outline for Comparing Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors
- Paragraph 1, summarize the memoir Cooked by Jeff Henderson with a focus on Henderson’s character arc or personality transformation
- Paragraph 2, summarize the movie Groundhog Day with a focus on Phil Connors’ character arc or personality transformation
- Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
- Paragraphs 4-8, expound on the similarities in your body paragraphs
- Paragraph 9, your conclusion, restate your thesis in emotionally powerful language
- Works Cited page, have no fewer than 4 sources
Paragraphs 4-8 are the key to success.
In those 4 paragraphs, you could break down the manner in which Connors and Henderson engage with their personal crucibles.
Review: What is the Crucible?
The Crucible is your personal life conflict, a place where opposing forces meet and you are forced to navigate and engage with those forces. The process is excruciating, but the alternative is to retreat and become a weakling disintegrating inside your self-imposed cocoon.
Many resist the Crucible, but we must accept it.
In Michael Faust’s article published in Philosophy Now, we see that we must accept we are in a Crucible, a Sisphyus journey, and, like Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, we must accept suffering to be liberated from it.
Phil Connors’ monotonous life isn’t his hell; he is his own hell because he is diseased by self-pity and misguided attempts to overcome his self-pity: nihilism and hedonism. In both nihilism and hedonism, the person succumbs to the adolescent fantasy that life has no consequences. Both Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson try to base their lives on this fantasy with self-destructive, deleterious consequences.
We have to learn to Engage the Crucible.
In 1981 as a college student, I had a job loading giant trailers at the UPS hub near the Oakland Airport. I was inundated with thousands of parcels coming at me on a conveyor belt nonstop and had to quickly build stable walls with the parcels, using larger parcels to create a solid foundation below and fill the gaps with smaller parcels. Any laxity on my part would result in me drowning in parcels. I had to be both quick and deft in my wall-building. Being inattentive was not an option because I would drown in chaos. Looking back, this wall-building job at UPS seems like an apt metaphor for the Myth of Sisyphus and how we must engage with life’s crucible. The idea that life has no consequences and that nothing matters is both juvenile and a denial of reality. The parcels keep coming at us.
Second Review: What is your Crucible?
Your Crucible is a severe test, trial, and conflict in which disparate ingredients and forces bang into each other and as a result of this excruciating conflict, something new arises, a strength of character, a new skill, a new life-adapting trait. An experienced parent helps a new parent because the experienced one has been through his or her Crucible.
Not Engaging in the Crucible Leads to Weakness and Failure
Think of the husband who returns home from a long day of work and drinks whiskey from a flask in his car, which is parked outside his home where his wife is dealing with crying babies. The father is afraid to enter the Crucible.
Think of the college student who’s texting and posting nonsense on social media when he should be writing his English 1A essay. He’s avoiding the Crucible and every avoidance leads to a further maladaptation.
The Crucible is Purgatory
Failure to engage with an authentic crucible bores us from the inside out till we become hollow husks, walking brain-dead corpses, the state of Phil Connors at the beginning of the movie, and the spiritual state of Jeff Henderson when he feels unfairly convicted at the beginning of his prison sentence.
Only when both men engage in the real crucible of where this life is in the present moment do they begin the rebuilding process, do they embrace the suffering of their personal purgatory, and undergo a radical transformation of self.
How Do We Engage with the Crucible?
(Or for the purpose of your essay, how do Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson begin to turn their lives around by engaging in their personal crucibles?)
- We have to humbly admit we are finite and not squander our life as if we have infinite time and resources.
- We have to accept that life has no consequences, that a life of hedonism and nihilism is a juvenile fantasy that doesn’t square with reality.
- We have to accept that life is suffering and conflict and that engaging with this conflict, entering the Crucible, is our only path. Retreat from conflict feeds our Self-Pitying Sloth and makes us weaker and more miserable.
- We have to see that engaging with the Crucible is our life meaning and makes transforms us into our Higher Angel.
- We have to see that engaging with the Crucible means engaging with other people. Yes, it’s true, as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said, “That hell is other people,” but living with no people is a greater hell.
- Engaging with the Crucible means accepting that life is suffering, but it also means that we understand that not engaging with the Crucible results in even greater suffering.
- Engaging with the Crucible means defining our own personal ones. Everyone’s crucible is different. But each crucible imposes its own set of limitations on us. Phil Connors from Groundhog Day and Jeff Henderson from Cooked have certain limitations based on where they live, what their skill level is, and what their past actions have done to their present situation. In other words, you have to define your personal crucible.
- Everyone is faced with a Crucible. You have a choice: To enter the Crucible or retreat from it. But either choice has consequences. For example, for the last decade or so, billions of people have been on social media, a platform that is an escape from the Crucible; as a result, we have become more dumb and maladapted as written about with great persuasion and insight in Jonathan Haidt’s essay “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”
Here are some excerpts from Haidt’s essay:
Isolated in our information silos, we are as a country becoming fragmented, living in separate realities and unable and unwilling to engage with one another:
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
Instead of engaging with people we disagree with to find common ground and to find reasons to cooperate, we treat The Other as an enemy in a life battle that represents a zero-sum game:
There is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales. We see this trend in biological evolution, in the series of “major transitions” through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships. We see it in cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) President Bill Clinton praised Nonzero’s optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future thanks to continued technological advance.
The glue that keeps society together is coming undone:
Historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow. But what is it that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States and India, or, for that matter, modern Britain and France?
Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009.
The neverending stream is false engagement and keeps us out of a real crucible:
Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.
Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.
By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.
Being a good actor honestly engaging with the crucible became replaced with dishonesty, gimmicks, and living to get clicks.
This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.
It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.
The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare. Many authors quote his comments in “Federalist No. 10” on the innate human proclivity toward “faction,” by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”
But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”
Engaging with the crucible of significant challenges was replaced by being mired in the fever swamp of the frivolous.
Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird for tweeting about getting his COVID vaccine?
No longer trusting anything or anyone, we engage in nihilism, whataboutism, and “my truth is as good as your truth” relativism.
It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust. An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side. The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).
Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. A working paper that offers the most comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
We’ve replaced authentic engagement with Twitter darts.
What changed in the 2010s? Let’s revisit that Twitter engineer’s metaphor of handing a loaded gun to a 4-year-old. A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.
Conclusion:
Social media has become a way of failing to engage in life’s real crucible and as a result many of us are in a state of individual and societal entropy.
Building Block #1 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connors Comparison
Write paragraphs 1 and 2 in which you summarize the Jeff Henderson memoir Cooked in Paragraph 1 and the movie Groundhog Day in Paragraph 2.
Building Block #2 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connor Comparison
Write Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys.
Commas are designed to help writers avoid confusing sentences and to clarify the logic of their sentences.
If you cook Jeff will clean the dishes. (Will you cook Jeff?)
While we were eating a rattlesnake approached us. (Were we eating a rattlesnake?)
Comma Rule 1: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) joining two independent clauses.
Rattlesnakes are high in protein, but I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich.
Rattlesnakes are dangerous, and the desert species are even more so.
We are a proud people, for our ancestors passed down these famous delicacies over a period of five thousand years.
The exception to rule 1 is when the two independent clauses are short:
The plane took off and we were on our way.
Comma Rule 2: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase.
When Jeff Henderson was in prison, he developed an appetite for reading.
In the nearby room, the TV is blaring full blast.
Tanning in the hot Hermosa Beach sun for over two hours, I realized I had better call it a day.
The exception is when the short adverb clause or phrase is short and doesn’t create the possibility of a misreading:
In no time we were at 2,800 feet.
Comma Rule 3: Use a comma between all items in a series.
Jeff Henderson found redemption through hard work, self-reinvention, and social altruism.
Finding his passion, mastering his craft, and giving back to the community were all part of Jeff Henderson’s self-reinvention.
Comma Rule 4: Use a comma between coordinate adjectives not joined with “and.” Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives.
The adjectives below are called coordinate because they modify the noun separately:
Jeff Henderson is a passionate, articulate, wise speaker.
The adjectives above are coordinate because they can be joined with “and.” Jeff Henderson is passionate and articulate and wise.
Adjectives that do not modify the noun separately are cumulative.
Three large gray shapes moved slowly toward us.
Chocolate fudge peanut butter swirl coconut cake is divine.
Comma Rule 5: Use commas to set off nonrestrictive (nonessential) elements.
Restrictive or essential information doesn’t have a comma:
For school the students need notebooks that are college-ruled.
Jeff’s cat that just had kittens became very aggressive.
Nonrestrictive:
For school the students need college-ruled notebooks, which are on sale at the bookstore.
Jeff Henderson’s mansion, which is located in Las Vegas, has a state-of-the-art kitchen.
My youngest sister, who plays left wing on the soccer team, now lives at The Sands, a beach house near Los Angeles.
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