Using the Crucible to Write a Comparison Essay About Groundhog Day and Cooked

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 to 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 a 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.

 

 

YouTube video: “Top 10 Reasons Why the Movie ‘Groundhog Day’ is Actually Set in Purgatory”

YouTube video: “Groundhog Day lasts HOW LONG for Bill Murray?”

YouTube video: “How Phil Connors Really Escaped Groundhog Day”

YouTube video: “Groundhog Day Movie Meaning”

Phil Connors must recover from his condition of anomie and solipsism.

Leah Schnelbach’s “Groundhog Day Succeeds by Breaking the Rules of Every Genre”

Excerpt (subtitles my own)

Death Challenges Phil’s Egotism

When he learns that the old man died, and is told by the nurse that “it was just his time,” he refuses to accept it and embarks on a new montage—this time trying to hold death off with money, food, warmth, anything he can think of, in a touching parody of the excess of the earlier diner scene, and his own parade of suicides.

Of course none of it works. Phil wants to control life itself, and become the god he claimed to be, but in the end, he’s left in an alley, holding Pops while he dies, and is left to stare into an empty sky, watching Pops’ last breath drift away.

In all of these scenes Pops never changes, never has any lines, no personality of his own, because he is Death. He is the reality of time, and finiteness, that Phil has to accept before he can return to life. It is only after the final death that we see Phil really shift in his attitude toward life, and even winter. Earlier he intones, “It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you the rest of your life,” but now he delivers a truly inspiring speech for Groundhog Day. “Standing here, among the people of Punxatawney, and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.”

Humility Causes Us to Reach Out to Others and Dissolve Our Solipsism

We see that Phil has changed by how he spends his day helping the people of Punxatawney. He can’t save Pops, but he can make his last day a little warmer. He can make sure the kid doesn’t break his neck falling out of the tree, that Buster the Groundhog Poo-bah lives to see February 3rd, and that a young Michael Shannon can attend Wrestlemania with his new bride. Winter itself is transformed, because he’s learned to look at it differently, and Phil has become a new person.

In the end, we have a romantic comedy that’s not about whether the boy gets the girl. We have a spiritual movie that never tells us why the hero gains his redemption. We have a vision of small-town America that makes us want to flee back to the loving arms of urban Pittsburgh. (OK, that might just be me…while I’ve come to love the people of Punxsutawney, I don’t think I could handle living there.) We have a time loops movie that doesn’t give us a single clue about its structure. And finally, we have a comedy that hinges on death, but remains so fucking wonderful that people are willing to suffer through multiple exposure to “I Got You Babe” to watch it every year.

***

Nihilism and Anomie Give Way to Caritas 

Tracey Moore’s “Everything I Learned About Life I Learned Through Groundhog Day”

Excerpts

A Consequence-Free Life Would Eventually Become Boring

When Phil first realizes he's living the same day over and over again, he takes advantage of it. He steals, he lies to get laid, he's lawless. And it gets boring! Eventually he realizes manipulating people to get exactly what you want all the time isn't that satisfying, and begins to help them instead.

People Make People Better

It isn't money or stuff or careers or fame or superiority that makes you a better person, it's giving yourself to something bigger or other than yourself — a person, a cause, an endeavor. Other people make you better! That's what people are for!

***

Solipsism Becomes a Form of Hell or Purgatory

Simon Gallagher’s “Film Theory: Groundhog Day is HELL And Ned Ryerson Is The Devil”

Excerpt:

There's been considerable talk about the idea that Phil is actually dead - having perished in the snowstorm that is then perpetually wrapped around Punxsutawney while his time-loop torment traps him. That's why he's unable to kill himself and why he's destined to live the same day over and over again: he's literally trapped in purgatory as his soul has been identified as not wholly bad but he cannot move on to Heaven until he proves his worthiness.

That school of thought basically suggests that all of the challenges that Phil overcomes by the end of the film are trials within purgatory that challenge him to make the most morally wholesome choices in the war for his soul. Either he's already fully dead at this point or he's dying, repeating his final day over and over in his head until he comes to the right resolution that helps him move on when he's ready to die properly.

But what if it's all a little darker than that? What if the Punxsutawney that Phil constructs in his mind isn't Purgatory but rather full-blooded, burn-your-briskets Hell?

Think about it: when we meet Phil, he's not a nice person. He's self-centred, arrogant, conceited and manipulative. He's not the kind of person who would be going to Heaven, in other words and it would take a SERIOUS attitude adjustment for him to even get to Purgatory. His morality is just that black and white and his idea of Hell is having to care about other people. To truly care, that is.

What worse a Hell could there be for someone so self-involved than being forced to help an entire town full of people? And worse than that, it's a Hell that promises him the ability to help and improve himself without ever letting him realise his moment of epiphany and move on. He can get kids WrestleMania tickets and fix people's backs, but he can't stop an old man from dying, no matter how hard he tries.

And on the surface, it might seem that that is because Phil initially uses the opportunity for self-improvement for the wrong reasons: he does it primarily to impress Rita in order to seduce her. Sure, there's probably an element of boredom that drives some of his behaviour (like learning to flick cards into a hat to expert level), but he's mostly focused on her as his goal until the very end when he is finally rewarded after a day of pure selflessness.

For most people, that would appear to be his defining arc and it's that that allows him to move on. But there might be something more to it. And to pick that apart, you have to consider two things: firstly, why Phil is trapped as he is in the first place and secondly what SPECIFICALLY gets him freed. It's simple enough to say that he's trapped because he's a bad person, but that wouldn't explain the supernatural element of it all and he's hardly the worst person in the world.

More likely is the suggestion that he's trapped in Punxsutawney as a punishment for something he does while he's there. Someone he interacts with who might have that sort of hellish power. How about the devil?

According to one theory that was originally posted on Reddit, he's there under the control of the devil, who we actually meet early on in Groundhog Day. You'd be forgiven for missing him too, because he doesn't come wearing red or bearing horns and a forked tail: instead he's a businessman in a suit selling life insurance.

That's right, Groundhog Day's Devil is, in fact, Ned Ryerson. Needle Nose Ned.

The theory suggests that Phil is trapped in Punxsutawney because he insults Ned and turns down his offer of a contract for life insurance. Or is that a contract for his soul? It's from the point of their first meeting that everything goes wrong for Phil. Literally, the first step he takes after their meeting is a "doozy" that sees him step into an icy puddle, and it's all downhill from there.

Curiously, Phil doesn't even recognise him, almost as if Ned doesn't actually know him and is operating under some pretence in order to get close to Phil. Almost like the Devil saw an opportunity to take a soul personally from someone he KNEW would be in Punxsutawney at that time and who he could probably have some fun with. Someone, mostly, who deserved to be tormented.

That would explain why it takes so long for Phil to "escape" Punxsutawney in the end. By the time he completes his "perfect day" there's no saying how many times he's tried to live purely selflessly (he does tell the kid who falls out of the tree he's saved him a LOT of times without a hint of gratitude), but you'd have to imagine it's a significant amount of time. There are lots of elements after all, but in the end only one matters.

It's not until Phil finally relents to Ned and signs away his soul to him that he's able to move on. That's the key to the ending, not saving anyone or any act of kindness. It's that transaction. Ned was always selling a contract that covered more than life insurance - he was bartering for Phil's soul, driving him to desperation through endless torment. That torment took two forms: first, making him miserable and then making him HAVE to be selfless - which was everything he hated up until his first meeting with Ned. By the end, he's lost sight of who he was and Ned/The Devil is able to absolutely fleece him out of extensive, unnecessary insurance.

Is this him selling his soul to the Devil for his freedom and everything he wants? After all, he wants to be loved by everyone, he wants to be famous, he wants to never suffer the torment of Punxsutawney ever again (which he achieves by learning to love it) and he gets the girl. Doesn't that all sound a little ideal?

So maybe the ending doesn't see Phil completely freed after all. Maybe him being freed from the loop is simply the end of his life as the Devil takes his soul and what we imagine is a happy ending is something far more profoundly sad. After all, just as George Bailey's "revelation" in It's A Wonderful Life isn't about escaping his hell, but rather embracing it, Phil's "happy ending" is simply to come to love everything that he hated and arguably abandoning everything that had made him successful. Doesn't that sound like Hell?

 

 

 

YouTube video: “Top 10 Reasons Why the Movie ‘Groundhog Day’ is Actually Set in Purgatory”

YouTube video: “Groundhog Day lasts HOW LONG for Bill Murray?”

YouTube video: “How Phil Connors Really Escaped Groundhog Day”

YouTube video: “Groundhog Day Movie Meaning”

• YouTube video: “Hidden Meaning of Groundhog Day”
• YouTube video: “Groundhog Day analysis: A Lesson in Happiness”
• YouTube video: “Groundhog Day--An Inescapable Premise”

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

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. The quest for hedonism does not create a hedonic response. On the contrary, it creates an anhedonic response or anhedonia. 
• 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 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 alway 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

Themes to Address in This Comparison

One. Living in the self or the ego leads to solipsism, a prison, and a form of hell where one’s delusions and self-destructive tendencies exist in a state of recalcitrance.

Two. The quest for hedonism puts people on the hedonic treadmill, a state of addiction, which leads to anhedonia, zombie-brain, and nihilism. 

Three. We have to toil in life, embrace a work ethic or Cal Newport’s Craftsman Mindset, not in the service of making money so much as in the service of finding meaning, connection, and belonging. 

Four. The search for happiness leads to unhappiness. Real happiness is the natural byproduct of a fulfilled and meaningful life. See Viktor Frankl, Oliver Burkeman (The Antidote, Four Thousand Weeks), and Scott Barry Kaufman (Transcend). 

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.

 

Arthur C. Brooks’ essay “Love People, Not Pleasure.”

"Love People, Not Pleasure" by Arthur C. Brooks

One. Happiness Fallacy:

That a life of power and money can afford you pleasures that will result in happiness. Brooks looks at the most powerful, wealthy people chronicled in history, and even they are miserable 99% of the time. 

Part of this misery is due to the "hedonic treadmill," the idea that we acclimate to pleasure so that whatever it is we're addicted to for a spike in endorphins, we become numb to it to the point that we crash and sink into a depression.

All pleasures start out with a spike in dopamine, which becomes addictive, but eventually we need more and more stimulation to experience pleasure and we inevitably burn out. 

Jeff Henderson becomes wealthier and wealthier and lives a more and more reckless lifestyle, accumulating cars, flying to Las Vegas with his posse, and his extravagant lifestyle attracts the attention from law enforcement, the feds. 

My wife's friend has a cousin who poses with her boyfriend for Instagram photographs, and she has hundreds of thousands of followers. This model can never get enough "likes" and followers. She's addicted to social media attention, she's a slave to posing with her boyfriend for attention, and she is progressively getting more and more miserable. But she can't see her misery. She is in denial.

Like the Instagram model, Jeff Henderson is operating under the fallacy that unbridled pleasure is the key to happiness, and in the process he fails to develop real connections with people. 

Two. The Unhappiness Fallacy:

Actually, we're dealing with two fallacies: That unhappiness is a bad thing and that unhappiness excludes happiness. 

Unhappiness is not bad. Unhappiness is normal. Life is full of evil and conflict, so a certain degree of unhappiness is a normal thing.

In fact, addressing evil and engaging with conflict gives life meaning, so we must not avoid unhappiness. Rather, we must struggle against the things that make us unhappy.

Also, unhappiness is a state of hard work that leads to positive outcome. Imagine the piano player who is unhappy playing tedious scales and arpeggios on the piano, but all in the service of improving on the piano.

In life, we are miserable if we don't progress and improve towards a meaningful goal, and this type of progress requires focus, isolation, sacrifice, and hard work, the kind that is not associated with happiness and pleasure. 

Every semester, I will have about two or three "star students" in a class. These are hard-working perfectionists who take so much pride in their work that if I were a CEO of a company I would hire those 3 students out of a class of 30. I said such to an employer who called me about a former student, and based on my testimony the student got the job. 

Such students are not enamored by short-term pleasure. Such students embrace sacrifice, hard work (not hanging out with their buddies at night so they can study), and see a certain amount of drudgery and unhappiness as essential to achieving their goals. 

The second fallacy is that unhappiness excludes happiness. Actually, according to Arthur C. Brooks, the most happy people can simultaneously experience unhappiness. 

As Brooks observes:

What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites. Images of the brain show that parts of the left cerebral cortex are more active than the right when we are experiencing happiness, while the right side becomes more active when we are unhappy.

As strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean that one can’t also be unhappier than average. One test for both happiness and unhappiness is the Positive Affectivity and Negative Affectivity Schedule test. I took the test myself. I found that, for happiness, I am at the top for people my age, sex, occupation and education group. But I get a pretty high score for unhappiness as well. I am a cheerful melancholic.

Three. Misguided Attempts at Happiness Backfire

We can look to all sorts of addicts to see how their addiction, an attempt to escape misery and find pleasure, backfires and results in misery. Of course, there is drug addiction, but there are many others: social media attention, Swiss timepieces, shoes, cars, getting ripped muscles, etc. But the drug eventually becomes the poison. As Brooks explains:

Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.

Four. Intrinsic Vs. Extrinsic Happiness

Intrinsic happiness refers to character building, the state of our soul, defined by the connections we make with others, creative pursuits, our contributions to society, and our ability to find meaning in suffering. 

Extrinsic happiness refers to the materialistic script society hands us: Go to college, get a job so you can make money to buy lots of stuff, show off your stuff to family and friends to win their approval, curate your "amazing existence" on Facebook, etc. Then die and have hundreds of people weep at your funeral. 

According to Brooks, intrinsic happiness is the way to go. He writes:

Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.

This is one of the cruelest ironies in life. I work in Washington, right in the middle of intensely public political battles. Bar none, the unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement — the pundits, the TV loudmouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images, but feel awful most of the time.

That’s the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either. Celebrities have described fame like being “an animal in a cage; a toy in a shop window; a Barbie doll; a public facade; a clay figure; or, that guy on TV,” according to research by the psychologist Donna Rockwell. Yet they can’t give it up.

That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”

And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.

Five. Jeff Henderson's memoir Cooked is largely about a man who transitions from an extrinsic quest for happiness to an intrinsic quest.

Henderson is miserable and suffering from soul rot during his obsession with finding extrinsic notions of happiness, but his soul finds redemption and he becomes a happier man when he helps the community and his family through an intrinsic search for happiness. 

Six. Extrinsic Happiness Is Born from Our Inner Reptile

Our Inner Reptile desires dominance and reproductive success by showing signs of power. Therefore, our instincts are to get as rich, famous, and powerful as we can. But Brooks observes that these unbridled instincts can backfire. 

As Brooks observes:

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.

But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”

But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.

More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.

We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”

Seven. Extrinsic Happiness Makes Us Users of People

Brooks writes:

This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:

Love things, use people.

Jeff Henderson up to about page 100 or so of his memoir, loves things and he uses people.

Eight. Most of us sleepwalk through life in our quest for pleasure

Brooks observes that our default setting is to seek pleasure and use people, and that most of us aren't even aware of this fact because we are "sleepwalking." As he writes:

This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:

Love people, use things.

Only because Jeff Henderson hit rock bottom and had his "butt handed to him on a stick" did he wake up from his sleepwalking ways and go on a heroic journey to find redemption for his soul. He learned to love people and use things.  

Jeff Henderson Must Overcome Hedonism, Nihilism and Self-Pity:

Why Bother to Try When Life Feels Like One Big Cruel Joke?

In 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson says there comes a time when we all feel like life is one big cruel joke. We reach the point where we say, like George Carlin, “This place is a freak show. Why even bother?”

Peterson uses Tolstoy as an example of a successful, privileged, wealthy person, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who came to that point at the peak of his powers.

Tolstoy looked at the world, and said, and I paraphrase, “I hate this place. Evil triumphs over good more than not. Stupid people rise to high positions in the bureaucracies and make our lives miserable. And no matter how great our achievements, all those successes will be cancelled by death, so what’s the point? Planet Earth is a joke, man.”

Nihilism

When you’ve reached this point in your life, you’ve arrived at the Door of Nihilism, the belief that nothing matters in this world because there is no meaning. Nihilism tells us there is nothing to live for.

There are 5 ways to respond to this crisis of Nihilism.

One. You can retreat into childlike ignorance and pretend that evil and stupidity don’t exist.

Two. You can pursue mindless pleasures and hope to erase the pain of existence through sheer oblivion.

Three. You can grit your teeth and bear the misery of life like a stoic.

Four. You can end your life and be gone from this miserable place.

Thankfully, there is a fifth response.

Five. You can clean your room.

I mean this literally and metaphorically.

Here’s an example:

I remember when I was ten, I went out to the front of he house where my dad was changing the oil on his 1967 Chrysler Newport. I said, “Dad, I’m not happy. I’m bored.”

My dad was a military man, and he always spoke in a loud voice. He said, “Of course you’re unhappy. Have you looked at your room lately? It looks like a pigsty. What are you, a professional slob? Go clean your room. You’ll feel better afterwards.”

I cleaned my room and told my father I felt a lot better.

“Of course you feel better,” he said. “Did you think being a professional slob was going to make you happy?”

Jordan Peterson is also talking about cleaning our room in the spiritual, moral, and psychological sense.

We clean our room in the moral sense in 3 ways.

Number One: Cleaning your room means you stop doing what you know is wrong.

You could be spending too much time on your screen.

You could be hanging out with losers unworthy of your friendship who are dragging you down.

You could spending your money in irresponsible ways.

You could be eating in irresponsible ways.

You could be disrespectful to the people you care about most.

You could be driving too aggressively, especially when there are children in the car.

You could be whining about your kids on social media when you should get off social media and do something about your kids.

You might not brush your teeth and your breath is so bad you could breath on an elephant and it would collapse and die from anaphylactic shock. Stop telling me how depressed you are, and brush your teeth.

Cleaning up these behaviors is like cleaning your room. It’s a good step toward feeling less miserable about your existence.

Number Two. Cleaning up your life means taking stock of your bad behaviors rather than blaming the world.

It’s easy to blame external forces for our misery when too often 95% of our misery results from our own self-destructive behavior. Scapegoats are convenient because they give us an excuse to let ourselves off the hook.

Number Three. Don’t expect all of life answers to be presented to you at once. Be comforted by one piece of helpful wisdom at a time.

I had a student from Taiwan who shared a story with the class about a story his father told him about a young man who refused to live his life until God gave him all the answers.

The idea of falling:

The rising-falling paradox can be explained by a close examination of human nature.

False rising: We are delusional so that our perception of "rising" may be a false perception. The narcissist always thinks he's rising when in fact he's falling.

The misguided "mountain climber" dates evil women to prove he's "number one." We could call this the drive for dominance.

False rising: We see what we want to see so there is a disparity between our self-image and who we really are. Again, this disparity evidences narcissism.

False rising: We become intoxicated or drugged by false ideas of success. Americans too often chase the mirage or chimera of fame and want their own "reality" TV show.

False rising: Success makes us feel invincible.We begin to believe in the lies of the sycophants.

False rising: When we feel invincible, we allow our behavior to become more and more reckless.

False rising: When we feel more invincible, we experience hubris, a form of arrogance that blinds us from our flaws.  

Fale rising could be based on arrogance and power giving us a false sense of invincibility while we become disconnected from others.

False rising could have a downside: being blind to portents of danger and obnoxious behavior as we become full of braggadocio. 

False rising could result in a disconnect from values and morals and even our true self.

False rising could result in inflated self-esteem, narcissism, and a loss of proportion in regards to what's important in the world.

False rising could be the misguided use of creativity and talent: used for the purposes of evil, concupiscence, greed, self-destruction when it should be used to blossom or to flourish.

False rising results in popularity and when we're popular we get surrounded by a popularity bubble in which sycophants praise us even when we don't deserve it so we think we're being smart and funny when we're not. 

False rising: The illusion of rising is often from misguided genius or talent in which we use our power for evil rather than good but willfully blind to this fact, we pat ourselves on the back for our evil deeds. 

Rising is also based on human nature and the nature of struggling, flourishing, and character-building.

Falling could be a good thing: a purging lesson in humility and fortitude. Sometimes the best that could happen to you is to have "your butt handed to you on a stick," to quote Marc Maron. For example, when I was 14, I picked a fight with an 18-year-old state wrestling champion, Sammy Choa, and I had "my butt handed to me on a stick," the best thing that ever happened to me because the experience taught me to keep my mouth shut.

Falling could be a test over what's really important in this world. 

Falling could be an opportunity to live and learn wisdom.

Falling could be the experience of rejection from others so that later we have empathy for those who are being rejected or scorned.

Falling could result in a struggle that develops our fortitude (strength to endure).

Falling makes us lose our "friends" and popularity so that we have to define ourselves in a new way, without the superficial definition we had when we gained our self-esteem from the approval of others.

Falling slaps our face and makes us see the truth, the truth that we have been denying. We often deny the truth about who we really are until we "hit rock bottom" and say to ourselves, "Whatever the hell it is I'm doing, it isn't working. I need a new plan."

To me, the topic demands a two-part essay. The first part is about false rising rooted in

self-delusion

denial

intoxication of false success 

The second half is about real rising rooted in

hitting a wall so that we finally see our self-destructive ways and take accountability for our actions

perdition, suffering and humility as part of the re-building process

developing empathy as we reinvent ourselves in a new, much wiser way.

Jeff Henderson Rejects Junk Values to Achieve Happiness (essay by Johann Hari)

Example of Signal Phrase, Introduction, and Transition to Thesis

In his brilliant essay "We know junk food makes us sick. Are 'junk values' making us depressed?," journalist Johann Hari observes that our greedy appetites for materialism fail to make us happy, but rather these extrinsic values for seductive objects such as fancy cars, watches, and designer clothes bloat us with us spiritual indigestion. He cogently writes: "Extrinsic values are KFC for the soul. Yet our culture constantly pushes us to live extrinsically." Hari's diagnosis of spiritual crapulence applies to the fall and eventual redemption of Jeff Henderson whose life as a premier crack dealer honed his appetite for extrinsic gratification made him hellbound, and his transformation into a seeker of intrinsic worth altered his trajectory toward heavenly atonement. 

Jeff Henderson's Fall Results in Too Much Denial 

Some Denial Is Necessary for Sanity, But Too Much Denial Leads to Insanity and Moral Dissolution 

We need a certain amount of denial to be sane. For example, we should not face the raw, bald reality of our most egregious personal defects and weaknesses.

Otherwise, we'll be bogged down in the paralysis of self-obsession and self-loathing and we would be worthless. Let's say we're not as kind as we'd like to be.

We can't go around muttering to ourselves, "I lack the milk of human kindness" over and over. Otherwise, we'll go insane.

Another example is ugly photographs of you. I'm talking about photographs that make you look so ugly you cringe and wince with disbelief.

Photographers say most of us are more photogenic on our left side.

THROW THOSE UGLY PHOTOS AWAY NOW! Before people put them on the internet.

If you walk around life with an image of yourself based on the ugliest photographs ever taken of you, you'll never leave the house; you'll never get a date; you'll die lonely.

Try to focus on the more flattering photographs of yourself.

Is this a form of delusion? Maybe. But it's a good delusion, one that preserves your sanity.

A personal example: I hate the sound of my voice when someone plays it back on a taperecorder.

Solution?

I DON'T LISTEN TO MY RECORDED VOICE.

Otherwise, I'll reel in self-disgust.

Take peanut butter as another example. It's full of cockroach parts, but we eat it without thinking about that disgusting fact. 

Or when we eat meat. Few of us contemplate the agony the animals suffered to become meat on our plate. 

Or cheap clothing. It's cheap because underage children are making it in third-world country at slave wages. Still enjoying your Gap T-shirt?

To a certain degree, self-delusions are necessary. Otherwise, we don't do much. We'll criticize every move we make.

Fly to a green summit on who to reduce the world's carbon footprint and the private jet you take is blowing carbons into the atmosphere. 

Another example is natural disasters. Even though an earthquake, a tsunami or some other disaster can destroy us in the blink of an eye, we have to live our lives as if we have a good shot of living a full, healthy life. Otherwise, we'll be paralyzed by fear.

So we all engage in some denial to some degree.

Taking Denial Too Far

But there is a point where denial no longer preserves our sanity, that denial goes too far and plummets us into the depths of illusion completely disconnected to reality.

We see people on American Idol who think they have the talent to be superstar singers.

Such is the fate of successful drug dealer Jeff Henderson who believes, one, he's invincible and, two, he isn't doing anything wrong: He's just a businessman.

 Use an example of denial for introduction.

Sometimes When We Think We're "Rising," We're Really in Denial

Examples of Denial

 

1. A woman sees gradual warning signs that her boyfriend is jealous and controlling, but she denies it and before she knows it, she is in the chapel about to give her vows, what will be for her a prison sentence of unbearable hell: physical beatings and psychological abuse.
2. A man is a major drug dealer but minimizes the harm of his actions by telling everyone he is not a drug user, a gang-banger, or a killer. He’s just a “business man.”
3. A man doesn't believe he has a snoring problem until his wife plays him a tape-recording of his sleep apnea.
4. A man cheats on his girlfriend, convinces her that he did not cheat and has a hard time “forgiving” his girlfriend for questioning his fidelity.
5. An El Camino student hangs out with college dropout buddies who never really grew up. Their lives center on “having a good time,” which is the usual fare of male bonding, bragging about their endless series of immature relationships, gossiping about their latest exploits, etc. This student can’t acknowledge that his “buddies” are emotional retards distracting him from his more important goals, such as succeeding in college. Even more disturbing, he fails to admit that his “buddies” are haters who want him to fail because crabs always pinch the top crab straddling the bucket and pull the crab back in before it can escape.

Two. The Causes of Denial

1. When you lie to yourself enough times, you begin to believe that your lie is a truth. This is the beginning of insanity.
2. When your whole life becomes a collection of lies that you’ve convinced yourself are truths, you are walking around Planet Earth with your head up your butt.
3. Denial is also brought upon by the gradual worsening of a situation. You acclimate to gradual developments so that you don’t see what is happening to you or your don’t want to see it. We can call this Suffering Acclimation. The pain is so gradual we can get used to it.
4. Acclimation allows you to adapt to an extreme situation so that is doesn’t seem extreme to you. Making $100,000 a month in easy money isn’t normal to us, but it was normal to Jeff Henderson during his drug dealing days. In other words, craziness becomes the “new normal.”
5. Denial is caused by the ego, which says, “These things can’t be happening because of me. I’m essentially a good person. I don’t deserve this.” Such is Jeff Henderson’s position during his initial arrest and imprisonment.
6. When the ego embraces denial to escape personal accountability, the result is nihilism, the death of morals and meaning. In other words, “you don’t give a damn about anything.” That’s nihilism. See page 110 in which Jeff Henderson says he doesn’t care about anything. He doesn’t want to get his life together. He just wants to lift weights and “kick it” with his homies. That’s nihilism.
7. When you're surrounded by sycophants, they tell you what you want to hear, not the truth, so you live in a bubble of denial.

Perdition and Redemption

Review: 

So far we’ve talked about Jeff Henderson’s Redemption Journey in terms of his Fall, which includes concupiscence, pursuing the good without a moral compass, and denial, the refusal to take accountability for one’s actions by relying on all sorts of rationalizations.

Redemption Reviewed

1. The Fall, misguided quest for goodness often resulting in the following:

concupiscence

we make rationalizations to justify our actions. We eventually believe our rationalizations and this is a form of insanity

denial or willed ignorance; we pretend that we don't know what we're doing.

moral dissolution, numbness

2. Denial of the Fall because of the some of the above reasons

3. Epiphany or revelation in which we realize our accountability for our Fall

4. Contrition: feeling badly for our misdeeds; this is part of perdition, suffering for our misdeeds.

5. reinvention: starting from zero (also part of our perdition) and building fortitude and hard work to create a new self. Reinvention is comprised of the following:

humility, starting at zero

fortitude

perseverance in the face of failure

discerning fruitful failure from futile failure

10,000 Hour Rule

6. Flourishing, blossoming at craft and personal life together

7. giving back, mentoring, other acts of atonement 

Today we will look at the second part of the Redemption Journey: Perdition, which means suffering punishment for one’s crimes or misdeeds. 

Reality sets in: crime and punishment or perdition

1.  Jeff Henderson gets arrested and realizes he won’t have access to women the way he used to. This is a shock to his psyche.

2.  He suffers another shock to his psyche. Once a powerful man who called the shots, he finds in prison that he is now powerless, beholden to guards like Big Bubba on page 79.

3.  In prison, he has time to think about his life in ways he didn't before. For example, he wanted to be like T whom he worshipped as a sort of god. Ironically, he doesn’t realize until he’s in prison that he had become BIGGER that T and that being SO BIG put him on the feds’ radar screen and that was his downfall. 81

4.  All Jeff’s life he’s been inculcated with the belief in the Homie or Gang Banger Code of Silence as if it were religious truth. But in prison, he discovers the No-Snitch Code has no real value because a homie will rat you out when it’s to his advantage. See page 151.

5.  Jeff thought he was invincible but discovers a painful fact: The Feds had been watching him, not for several months, but for several years. He was digging his own grave for a long, long time. 87

6.  Why me? Jeff is not a victim but he cries to Jesus and feels sorry for himself. In a state of perdition, he his helpless, beholden to the caprices of prison life.

7.  He realizes a painful fact: Prison may have saved his life. One of the Twins, his supplier, got killed shortly after Jeff’s imprisonment. 89

8.  Too late in the game, he discovers another painful fact: Anyone can get convicted who doesn’t get caught with drugs or money. 94

9.  His perdition takes on palpable pain when he is given legal accountability for his crimes: 19.5 years. See page 100.

10.     Only after he’s arrested does he discover another painful fact: There is no loyalty in the streets. It’s a myth. See page 152 after his homies steal all his stuff after he’s arrested. 

What is Jeff’s attitude at the beginning of his prison sentence? Contrast with his attitude at the end of it (centripetal vs. centrifugal development)

1.  Self-pity, victimization

2.  Nihilism 110

3.  Getting over, coast in life, do the minimum.

4.  Universe of One 113. On page 192, he says “in prison everything is about you.”

5.  No passion for marriage 114

6.  He fluctuates between complacency and despair.  

Future Goal and Redemption

We all have the drive for redemption; if this drive is frustrated, the drive does not remain dormant and neutral inside of us; to the contrary, this drive goes inward and poisons us.  

Changing Our Definition of Success 

When Jeff is able to redirect his energy from being a drug dealer to a chef, he finds redemption. All of us have a “life energy” that can be directed toward concupiscence, revenge, victimization or growth, maturity, and independence as is explained by Erich Fromm in this passage from Escape from Freedom: 

It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this, we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed toward destruction. In other words: the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness.   

Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies--either against others or against oneself--are nourished.  

In other words, Fromm is saying that we must flourish in a passion in order to direct our energy toward growth rather than re-direct that energy toward self-destruction such as concupiscent pursuits.  

It’s only in prison that Jeff is forced to being the journey to redemption. 

Redemption and Flourishing  

Flourishing is the opposite of concupiscence flourishing, from the Greek word eudaimonia: means to blossom, to become who we were meant to be.  

When Jeff Henderson becomes an illegal “business man” being followed by the feds, rationalizing his illegal activities, and living on easy money, he’s not the person he was meant to be. He is rather a grotesque variation. We see his misshapen character in prison when he becomes the enraged, nihilistic, disaffected victim.  

Only when he learns a passion and accepts his responsibilities as an adult, does he begin to flourish and he becomes happier than he was as a concupiscent drug dealer.  

Taking a Close Look at Fortitude: The strength and tenacity to push forward in the presence of ever surmounting obstacles. What are Jeff Henderson’s obstacles to starting over? 

1.  Jeff Henderson discovers that the world is full of “haters and dream crushers” (crabs in a bucket). These are the haters who don’t want people with good intentions to be afforded a clean, fresh start because they want everyone to share in their failure and misery. 

2.  Others don’t trust us. Nor do they forgive us for our past deeds. 

3.  Often we have an inability to forgive ourselves for our past deeds creates baggage 

4.  Often we lack confidence:  We fear that we may backslide into our old ways. 

5.  Often a past label like “convicted felon” creates a stigma that is extremely difficult to erase. We see the felon. We don’t see the husband trying to support his wife and two kids. 

6.  Jeff Henderson has to tone down his “stroll” and his muscles with baggy clothes to remove the hard gangsta look. See page 2 

7.  Jeff Henderson has to remain gracious and poised when he gets pooh-poohed by Caesar’s Palace, the very place that was happy to take his money when he was a dealer “back in the day.”  Now Caesar’s is playing all high and mighty.

Centrifugal Motion or JH's Transformation 

 1.  He sees he’s been blind and willfully ignorant about the consequences of his selling drugs. 115 

2.  He develops intellectual curiosity, reading eclectic material, various intellectual and religious doctrines. He doesn’t embrace one but rather picks and chooses as he sees fit. 124 

3.  He becomes engaged with others vs. being disaffected. 124 

4.  He finds a passion, cooking, that utilizes his talents. 

5.  He learns the humility of starting at the bottom and not getting things “easy” like when he was a dealer. 

6.  He learns a hard work ethic. It’s almost impossible to acclimate from easy money to hard work with low pay. But Jeff was always a hard worker. 

7.  Jeff found a mentor in Big Roy and later in Las Vegas a cook named Friendly. And then Robert at the Gadsby’s. 

8.  Jeff experiences contrition and regret on page 146: He is among the dregs of the world, exactly where he belongs, in the lowest rung of society: hell. 

9.  You must have a vision of a different life. See page 147. 

10.      He begins to take pride in his work. 147: Speed, taste, and presentation. 188 

11.   He undoes his wrong by talking to teens in Vegas. 165

Mastering the 6 Components of Signal Phrases

Sample List of Signal Phrases (active as of 2-29-20)

When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations. 

Successful College Students Master the 6 Components of Signal Phrases

Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases

One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."

Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material. 

Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.

Four. Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.

Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl. 

Six. Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument. 

Signal Phrases

Purpose to Make Smooth Transition

We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.

You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase. 

Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."

For students, signal phrases are an announcement to your professor that you've "elevated your game" to college-level writing by accessing the approved college writing toolbox. 

Nothing is going to make your essay more impressive to college professors than the correct use of signal phrases.

Purpose to Provide Context

Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material. 

Example:

As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."

Same Example with Different Context:

Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."

Different Example for Supporting Paragraph

Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."

Signal Phrase Comprised of Two Sentences

English instructor Jeff McMahon chronicles in his personal blog Obsession Matters that his opinion toward comedian and podcaster Nate Nadblock changed over a decade. As McMahon observes: "Since 2010, I had found a brilliant curmudgeonly podcaster Nate Nadblock a source of great comfort & entertainment, but recently his navel-gazing toxicity, lack of personal growth, and overall repetitiveness has made him off-putting. Alas, a 10-year podcast friendship has come to an end."

Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.

As a counterpoint to X, 

As a counterargument to my claim that X, 

Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .

Concurring with my assertion that X, 

Further supporting my contention that X, 

Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes: 

Purpose of Credentials:  Establishing Authority and Ethos

We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material. 

The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity." 

Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."

You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:

"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari. 

You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:

Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity." 

"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."

 

Varying placement and types of signal phrases helps you avoid monotony, makes you a more impressive writer, and gives you more ethos. 

Partial List of Signal Phrases

acknowledges  adds admits affirms agrees answers argues asserts claims comments concedes confirms contends counters counterattacks declares defines denies disputes echoes endorses estimates finds grants illustrates implies insists mentions notes observes predicts proposes reasons recognizes recommends refutes rejects reports responds reveals speculates states suggests surmises warns writes

Examples of a signal phrases:

We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”

The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."

Variation of the above:

The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."

Toolbox of Explaining Transitions

After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?

You explain what you just cited.

To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:

Writer X is essentially saying that 

In other words, X is arguing that

By using these statistics, X is making the point that 

X is trying to make the point that 

X makes the cogent observation that 

X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that 

X's main point is that

The essence of X's claim is that 

Here is a good college link for in-text citations.

Here is a good Purdue Owl link for in-text citations. 

Review Complete Package of Signal Phrases

One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."

Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material. 

Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.

Four. Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.

Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl. 

Six. Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.