Magical Thinking Presentation #1
Essay 2: Magical Thinking and "Winter Dreams" (200 points and due April 4)
Analyzing the therapist and best-selling author Phil Stutz's notion of magical thinking, write a 1,200-word essay that analyzes the manner in which Dexter Green from the short story “Winter Dreams” squanders his existence by obsessing over his all-consuming chimera Judy Jones. Because this essay is an analysis and not an argument, there is no counterargument-rebuttal section.
Building Block #1 for Magical Thinking and "Winter Dreams" Due March 18
The Assignment for 25 Points: 2 Paragraphs
In your first paragraph, write a 200-word account of a time you sabotaged your life by succumbing to magical thinking. Your first sentence should be a definition of magical thinking followed by your personal account.
In your second paragraph, write a 200-word comparison between the features of your magical thinking and those of Dexter Green from the short story “Winter Dreams.”
If you can’t recognize magical thinking in your own life and the resulting self-sabotage and would prefer to use another person as an example, that is fine.
Building Block #2 for Magical Thinking and "Winter Dreams" Due March 24
Write your third paragraph, your thesis paragraph, which explains how magical thinking can provide an effective framework to analyze Dexter Green's demise.
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Suggested Outline
Paragraph 1: Your personal magical thinking paragraph should contain your personal story and your explanation of how the story defines magical thinking.
Paragraph 2: Compare your magical thinking trainwreck (misadventure) with Dexter’s.
Paragraph 3: Write a claim or thesis that explains how magical thinking was the cause of Dexter’s demise.
Paragraphs 4-7 are body paragraphs.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Your last page should be your Works Cited with 4 sources.
This Essay May Be “Too Painful” to Write
For this essay, you have to go down one of your magical thinking rabbit holes, describe it in unflinching detail, and integrate it with your analysis of Dexter Green.
Let’s face it. Writing about one of your magical thinking misadventures is going to be ugly. It’s supposed to be.
It will also be traumatic. Some of you will think this is too traumatic. If you’re traumatized by the assignment, that’s a good thing because confronting the trauma will make you stronger and immunize you from engaging in magical thinking foolishness in the future.
Going to college is about evolving into an adult. Magical thinking is about acting like a child. Therefore, a writing assignment that discourages magical thinking and encourages adult behavior is a moral imperative, especially in a critical thinking class.
Critical thinking is antithetical to magical thinking.
Exceptions?
What About Those of You Who Don’t Engage in Magical Thinking?
If you are not a magical thinker, or never were, then you can compare Phil Connors from the movie Groundhog Day to Dexter Green from “Winter Dreams.” Both are magical thinkers; however, Phil Connors escapes the private hell of his magical thinking. Dexter Green never does.
Phil Connors lives in purgatory where he repeats the same day over and over. He’s trapped in magical thinking that separates him from the nature of reality: self-pity, delusions of grandeur, nihilism, hedonism (pleasure-seeking), seeking validation of others, manipulating others to assert his will over them--all of these magical thinking behaviors fail him. He doesn’t escape purgatory until he learns how to build a work ethic, to connect to the community, and to learn how to love.
Magical Thinking Defined
Magical thinking is a series of false beliefs that we absorb from the culture and the fever swamp of our own imagination. Oftentimes, magical thinking is hoping good things will happen to us by basing our life expectations on premises that have no connection to reality. Our premises are based on wishful thinking or how we think our lives should be rather than how our lives really are.
Another word for magical thinking is wishcasting.
Best-selling author and therapist Phil Stutz says most of us are disconnected from reality because we have replaced realistic thinking with magical thinking.
Lacking humility, discipline, and wisdom, we engage in magical thinking when we believe we achieve happiness through “methods” that are purely based on fantasy and delusion and as a whole consist of a child’s fairytale.
People with humility, discipline, and wisdom tend to resist magical thinking. People with arrogance, laziness, and foolish ideas tend to be drawn to magical thinking like flies to honey.
Why should we understand the nature of magical thinking and resist it? Because magical thinking will make our lives collapse. In the words of Stutz, “It is impossible to function in the world if you reject it.”
In other words, you can't bend reality to your desires.
If you look at people who resist magical thinking, they tend to have deep connections to others, a high degree of success, and a strong work ethic.
If you look at people who are drawn to magical thinking, they tend to be isolated, resentful, low-achieving, and have an abysmal work ethic.
List of False Beliefs from Magical Thinking:
To repeat our definition from above, magical thinking is a series of false beliefs that we absorb from the culture and the fever swamp of our own imagination:
- Things in life should come easily; if not, then I am a victim of a world that is out to get me. My failings don’t come from inside of me. They come from living in an unfair world where I am the unlucky target.
- If I play my cards, meet the right people and fall into the right circumstances, I can avoid unpleasant experiences.
- I am entitled to live life as a series of pleasurable experiences without any serious pain or challenges. Therefore, immediate gratification is my goal. Where did I learn this? From popular culture, the Internet, the world of advertising, etc. That life is “Christmas every day” is something that has been ingrained in me since birth. My sense of entitlement is therefore unconscious and flows through my veins when I’m not even thinking about it.
- Falling in love with the right person can protect me from pain and offer me a world of constant and abundant pleasure. My failed relationships are never my fault. They failed because I haven’t yet “found the right one.”
- Failure to live in a fantasyland of constant pleasure where there is no pain is proof that something is wrong with me. Clearly, “I did something wrong. Perhaps if I buy Brand Y or Brand X, I can fix myself.”
- I do the same thing over and over and never get the desired result. Do I stop the thing that doesn’t work? No. I continue doing it with the hope that eventually things will go my way. Think of people who go back to an abusive partner over and over, or people who make failed New Year's resolutions over and over.
- I can’t be happy until evil is conquered forever. In fact, there will always be evil. You can't use evil as an excuse to stay in bed all day.
- If I’m willing to spend enough money, I can get a “quick fix” for whatever changes I need to make in my life.
- If I close my eyes to evil, it will go away or it won’t exist anymore. A variation of the evil fallacy is the betrayal fallacy: If I deny my partner is cheating on me, then no betrayal has occurred.
- I'm unhappy because I lack "good things" in my life. In fact, we should not look to external factors to support our happiness. Seeking pharmaceuticals, applause, pleasure, or wealth to feel better is a fool’s errand that will not render the results we seek. Stutz writes, “Believing that things outside you will make you happy is false hope. The Greeks considered it the ‘doubtful gift of the gods.’ In reality, there can be only two outcomes. Either the hoped-for thing does not happen, or it does and its effect quickly wears off. Either way, you are worse off than before because you have trained yourself to fixate on outer results.” Magical thinking diverts us from the real source of happiness. Learning to self-parent so that we can trust ourselves and navigate through the world in a state of confidence, moral authority, and self-agency. This moral character has nothing to do with external factors.
- The Comfort Fallacy: “Once I get my college degree, get my power job, find my true love, and settle into my dream house, then I chillax. Life will be eternal bliss without a hiccup.” Phil Stutz calls this fallacy pursuing a Moment Frozen in Time. These idealized images are not life; they are fantasies.
Areas of Our Lives Where Magical Thinking Raises Its Ugly Head
- Money
- Social Status and self-aggrandizement
- Oneupmanship
- Fitness and health
- Mortality
- College
- Career
- Love and romance
- Consumer purchases
- Addictive behavior
- Grief as a lifestyle
- Politics and owning my political enemies in a zero-sum world
Specific Examples of Magical Thinking
The Pretend College Student
A college student spends over three thousand dollars on a Macbook Pro thinking that the device will make him a better student when he ends up using the laptop as a nonstop entertainment device, becomes brain-dead, and drops out of college.
The Man with the Biggest Lexus Loses
An engineer with a Lexus GS notices his neighbor just bought a bigger, more luxurious Lexus LX. Seething with envy, the GS owner works long hours to get the superior Lexus RS so that he can “crush” his neighbor. Working obsessively for 80 hours a week, the aspiring RS buyer neglects his wife and ignores her pleas for valuable family time. At last, a year has passed and the GS owner buys his prized Lexus RS only to find that his wife is having an affair with the LX owner. His marriage is ruined, he is expelled from his own, and must live and sleep in his new Lexus RS.
The Short Man with an Inferiority Complex
One of my students was obsessed with being short. He was convinced that everyone had a low esteem of him due to his short stature. He wore elevator shoes, lifts, and even walked on his tiptoes. Eventually, his attempts to be taller destroyed his spine, he required surgery, and the surgery left him two inches shorter than when he started his machinations.
The Mother Who Protected Her Son from Mold
A mother has forced her family to move to five different houses because of perceived mold, which she is convinced is the root of her son’s problems. She goes to her son’s classrooms at school and monitors “the mold situation.” Her magical thinking is that she must protect her son from danger when in fact her “protection” is ruining his life evidenced by the fact that the boy is nervous and socially maladapted.
A Man Frozen in Time Dies from a Bee Sting
A perfectly sculpted man at the beach is playing Frisbee with two beautiful women when he steps on a bee. He cannot violate his perfect image by telling them that he is in pain. His foot swells and he soon dies of anaphylactic shock. His perfectly curated image is interrupted by death.
The Landlady Who Died in the Sun
An American father and son are walking the hot streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina, one summer afternoon when they come across a bazaar where goods are sold outdoors. There they see a 75-year-old greedy landlady who must show her superiority “over the riff-raff” by wearing her expensive full-body mink coat in the sweltering summer heat. Overcome by exhaustion, the landlady collapses. The father and son rush to her aid, the father kneels and attempts to rip the coat off of the landlady, but she spits in the father’s face and says, “Get away from me, mijo,” before giving up her last breath. Her belief that having better things than others made her a better person resulted in her death.
Distracted by Two Large TVs
A couple constantly fights over the TV to the point that a divorce is imminent. The wife wants soap operas. The husband wants ESPN. On the verge of losing all hope for their marriage, they see a therapist. Their therapist recommends that they get two TVs in the living room. The husband wears bluetooth speakers and watches ESPN while his wife sitting right next to him watches soap operas. They spend the rest of their lives without conflict or acrimony.
Phil Connors from Groundhog Day
Phil Connors lives in purgatory where he repeats the same day over and over. He’s trapped in magical thinking that separates him from the nature of reality: self-pity, delusions of grandeur, nihilism, hedonism (pleasure-seeking), seeking validation of others, manipulating others to assert his will over them--all of these magical thinking behaviors fail him. He doesn’t escape purgatory until he learns how to build a work ethic, to connect to the community, and to learn how to love.
What is the opposite of magical thinking?
Reality
Phil Stutz aims to reorient us to reality, which is comprised of the following:
- Life is pain and adversity. We can accept this fact and engage with adversity with strength and courage, or we can deny this fact and retreat into a posture of fear, self-pity, and trepidation.
- Life is uncertain. Good and bad events come to us in a random fashion. We should therefore not be lulled into a false comfort by good fortune knowing that our fortunes can change without warning.
- Worthwhile accomplishment requires long-term focus, hard work, and discipline, which means we must sacrifice immediate gratification for our long-term goals and far-ranging purpose.
- We are not special. We may be fixated on our magical thoughts, but life and the human race move forward, with or without us. Father Time will inevitably hunt us down. If we squander our time here on Earth, our meeting with Father Time will be one of fear and anguish.
- These aspects of reality are unchanging. No amount of money or wishcasting can change them.
We Resist Reality
In spite of these aspects of reality, Stutz explains that popular culture encourages us to disavow reality because popular or consumer culture is selling a fantasy. The media presents us with mythical happy people. They are physically beautiful and perfect; they are confident; their life narrative is certain; they are connected to love and companionship and the whole world loves them. They seem special and live outside the five aspects of reality Stutz describes.
Because they live outside of reality, they are more like demigods than human beings. These people may be actors, musicians, TV personalities, and influencers. Whoever they are, they exist on a plane of fantasy and therefore are chimeras.
We want to be like these demigods. We wear their clothes, drive their cars, consume their music and art, eat their organic food brands, take their special nutrition supplements; we do everything in our power to be like them, but we have been duped and have embarked upon a fool’s errand.
Stutz writes that this magical thinking of buying the same things as the demigods to be like them is so pervasive that we don’t even know we’re doing it. He writes, “We all feel a pressure to convince others that we are part of it. This holds true for the poor kid unsure if dinner is coming and the billionaire with six homes. When everyone acts as if a fantasy is real, it begins to seem real.”
Buying Chimeras to be Happy
For example, a lot of podcasters I listen to advertise AG1, Athletic Greens. There is this fantasy that if you take AG1, you will partake in the demigod-like magic of these influencers. These greens cost about $100 a month. There is no research to support the claims made by the manufacturer. Eating real vegetables is more affordable and more bioavailable than green powder supplements. Taking green powders can cause bloating and gas. However, people eagerly spend money on these green powders because they emulate the influencers who sell them.
Just as Dexter Green from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams” pursues Judy Jones as if she were a ticket to the dining hall of the gods, AG1 promises to give us entrance to the emporium of modern-day health, strength, and beauty. AG1 is the Judy Jones of health supplements.
Moments Frozen in Time Vs. Daily Events
Dexter Green is a sucker for the consumer fantasy of perfection. He doesn’t know how to become a full human being by living through life’s daily events. Rather, he is fixated on mythical representations of perfection. He is both hollow and superficial as he waits to be saved by a moment frozen in time.
This moment is embodied by Judy Jones, a myth he has created in his head. This moment does not exist. Meanwhile, life is passing him by.
To become a full human being, we have to renounce and let go of mythical representations of perfection by seeing them as both stupid and dangerous.
We have to move into a new direction. Stutz writes, “The first step is to realize that life is a process. Our culture leads us to forget this fact and makes the destructive suggestion that we can perfect life and then get it to stand still. The ideal world with the superior people is like a snapshot or a postcard. A moment frozen in time that never existed. But real life is a process, it has movement and depth. The realm of illusion is an image, dead and superficial. Still, these images are tempting. There is no mess in them.”
In contrast to those whose lives are squandered as they wait for frozen moments in time, fully-realized human beings live in the messy world, which consists of a flow of events, one after another, which push us forward. Moving forward is living. Being stuck in a frozen moment is death.
Regulating Our Mood With Magical Thinking
We should not look to pharmaceuticals, applause, pleasure, or wealth to feel better. Stutz writes, “Believing that things outside you will make you happy is false hope. The Greeks considered it the ‘doubtful gift of the gods.’ In reality, there can be only two outcomes. Either the hoped-for thing does not happen, or it does and its effect quickly wears off. Either way, you are worse off than before because you have trained yourself to fixate on outer results.” Stutz observes that we “can never be happy by the material world” because we are spiritual beings. As such, we need to have deep connections with others to be content.
Dexter Green is in pursuit of a dead image that he thinks is life. As a result, he will be stagnant as the world passes him by.
Centripetal Vs. Centrifugal Motion
“Winter Dreams” is not a story about a character growing into a more evolved being (centrifugal motion). It’s about fixation, intensification and stagnation (centripetal).
The more magical thinking Dexter invests in Judy Jones, the more difficult it is for him to let go--even though he is disintegrating and becoming more and more miserable.
“Winter Dreams” is a cautionary tale. It is warning us to give up hope in frozen moments of time--images of perfection.
Moreover, we need to give up hope in the idea of feeling good or pleasure-seeking as the answer to our miserable condition. Rather, we must see our addictive pursuits as part of the cause of our misery and depression.
Stutz writes, “Each time depression recurs, it is a reminder that you cannot rely on the outer world. This awareness is the first step in overcoming depression.”
Summary of “Winter Dreams”
Growing up in a working-class family, Dexter Green is obsessed with the shame of his humble origins and with magically transforming himself into an upper-class Alpha Male.
He studies the lifestyles of the rich, imitates their behavior, and absorbs their egotism and vanity.
His journey begins as a teenager working as a caddy on a golf course, where he rubs elbows with the rich and famous.
It is while working as a caddy that he sees Judy Jones upon which he projects all his fantasies about fame and happiness onto her. He becomes obsessed and fixated with the idea that “having” Judy Jones will make him happy. His life will be one of success, Alpha Male status, and nonstop pleasure and happiness.
In fact, Judy Jones lacks character, charm, wit, substance, and intelligence. She is a blank slate for whom Dexter has projected his most crazed fantasies. Because she is a phantom in Dexter’s imagination, she has power over him.
Over the decades as he becomes a wealthy businessman, Dexter pursues her relentlessly, sacrifices friendship and love to be with this woman of no character. She commits infidelity against him repeatedly, but because he has no dignity and pursues her the way a junkie pursues his drug of choice, he debases and humiliates himself in his pursuit of her.
Whereas the goal of life is to learn from our mistakes and grow up to become mature, seasoned adults, Dexter is a study in perpetual stagnation and immaturity. He is the picture of a man who squandered his entire existence on magical thinking.
Critiques of ChatGPT
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Example of a Personal Introduction Followed by a Thesis
Worst College Student Ever
Of course, I was the worst college student ever. Even though I got straight As in high school, my high school was dumbed down to the point that getting a 4.0 GPA was meaningless. One of my classes, for example, was called “Money Matters.” We learned how to balance a checkbook and plan a budget so that we were saving more than we were spending. At best, you’re looking at first-grade math, a workbook full of simple percentages and fractions. Busy work like this was proof that our school didn’t want to educate us so much as keep us contained all day in an institution so our parents could work enough to afford living in the suburbs and get a break from the headaches of parenting.
Another class was called “Popular Lit.” There were no lectures or tests. For the semester, you read any three books you wanted from the library and wrote three one-page book reports. You didn’t have to read the book. You could present chicken scratch on the book report form or make up some crazy dream you had. It didn’t matter. As long as you turned in the book report, you got an A. The teacher was a woman in her sixties who told us to do “quiet reading” while she sat at her desk reading magazines, paying her bills, and clipping her fingernails. She was ghoulishly pale, she had long, uncombed dyed black hair, overly dark lipstick, and puffy bags under her eyes. No matter the weather, she wore wool coats that smelled of old sweat and bodily decay. Had you not told me she was a teacher, I would have assumed she was a homeless person scavenging the school for discarded cafeteria food from the high school’s trash cans.
My classes were so dumb I felt like I was in continuation school for juvenile delinquents. Clearly, the teachers weren’t preparing us to become members of the professional class. They wanted us to learn to follow rules so we’d stay out of prison and be satisfied with a blue-collar job or some minimum-wage gig in the service industry. As I heard one teacher say out of the side of his mouth in the corridor to one of his colleagues: “We’re training them to become burger-flippers.”
Even though I had no preparation for higher education, I capitulated to my mother’s demand to attend college, but I knew I didn’t belong there. I knew I would be the worst college student ever.
I was a terrible student in part because I could not regardless of their achievements admire my professors. I envied them because they were so educated and appeared to have everything I didn’t. They had impressive credentials, world travels, including African safaris, to provide scintillating stories while lecturing; nice clothes, not store-bought but made by celebrity tailors; a well-curated persona enhanced by professional voice lessons; an impressive zip code that made them neighbors of politicians and socialites; membership to various tennis, bird-watching, and yoga clubs and intellectual committees; literacy in multiple languages, mastery of at least three musical instruments, and fluency in gourmet cooking. During lectures, they talked about how they prepared extravagant meals that required lemon zest, capers, and ice baths, and they beamed with pride as they rhapsodized over the pleasures of making homemade puttanesca. I had never met a group of people from one profession who were so in love with themselves.
My Ethics professor, who was also the Dean of Philosophy, had recently dumped his wife for his young secretary. He seemed rather oblivious to the rich irony of his life choices and rode his Porsche convertible over the faculty parking lot, apparently unaware of the way his toupee would flop off his bald head like a flying squirrel every time his Porsche caromed over a speed bump. A lack of self-awareness seemed to serve my Ethics professor rather well. I despised him.
My bitter envy for my professors was only matched by my spectacular ignorance. I was deemed so illiterate that the university was not content with demoting me from Freshman Composition class into the remedial class, more commonly referred to at the time as Bonehead English. To let me know my place in this world, the university made it clear that even Bonehead English was too advanced for a pariah like myself. I was quickly demoted from Bonehead and placed in the Pre-Bonehead class, a level held in such contempt that the classroom was in the Humanities Building basement next to the boiler room. Broad-shouldered maintenance men wearing denim overalls would frequently peek into the room and cackle at us for being at a level of remediation that was such an embarrassment as to be the equivalent of leprosy.
Being envious of my professors and feeling like a college outcast, I was in a constant state of depression and demoralization. This did not bode well as a predictor for my academic success. To add another nail to my coffin, I may have just been plain stupid. I was stupid to judge my professors for having everything I lacked. Had I been smart, I would have humbled myself before them and looked at them as role models so that someday with lots of hard work I would become just like them. I was also stupid for feeling insulted for being placed in the Pre-Bonehead English class. Had I been smart, I would have been grateful for the fact that the university had provided resources for hopeless cases like mine rather than expel me from the university altogether.
Clearly, I was on my way to becoming the worst college student ever.
My failings as a college student were rooted in part in my inability to find a major, and my indecision made me miserable. I took a criminal justice class, but the books were mired in lawyer-speak. As a result, the sentences were larded with provisos, caveats, and contingencies reflected in elongated sentences in which I had to wade through several dependent clauses before I reached the independent clause. These sentences were so tedious and convoluted that I felt I had to go through the obstacle course on American Gladiators before I got to the sentence’s main idea. This drove me into a state of madness.
Then I tried sociology and psychology, but the books were immersed in self-satisfied academic jargon in which self-evident observations were made to look sophisticated and authoritative by virtue of the indecipherable, pretentious and self-indulgent verbiage. Being forced to read these textbooks, I imagined brandishing a machete and slashing through a jungle thick with words like positivity, codependency, external validation, inner child, interconnectivity, facilitate, mindset, marginalization, multi-faceted, dichotomy, and contemporaneously. Hacking my way through this forest of phony language made me tighten my body with so much hostility that I feared I would suffer a self-induced inguinal hernia.
Then I gave history a crack. The sheer volume of facts, dates, and places seemed to have compelled the authors to write in a mundane, almost remedial prose style with no distinctive point of view. The result was that I was bored out of my mind.
Oceanography was mildly interesting; however, the oceanography professor seemed to have a pathological fixation on the words “denitrification,” “liminal zone,” and “viscosity” so that it reached the point that every time he repeated those words I would skyrocket off my seat like a lab rat receiving an electrical shock.
Accounting was even worse. On the first day, the professor bombarded us with algebraic equations, the Index Matrix, the Nullspace, and homogeneous linear systems. Within ten minutes, I made an exit for the door. The professor asked me my name.
“That won’t be necessary,” I said at the doorway. “You’ll never see me again.”
In my first year of college, I dropped accounting, criminal justice, and sociology. I also failed a remedial algebra class. In the late spring of my first year, the university sent me a letter explaining that I was officially on academic probation. I could not drop any more classes and I would need to improve my GPA. Otherwise, I would be expelled. This was the wake-up call I needed. No longer could I use my crappy high school education as an excuse for my failures. No longer could I complain that life wasn’t fair. No longer could I fail to see that my toxic, cynical, self-pitying attitude was the equivalent of shooting myself in the foot.
Once receiving the university’s expulsion warning--which was the necessary kick in my lazy ass--I turned my life around. My recovery was swift and relentless. My GPA spiked to close to 4.0 and the distance between me and that expulsion letter widened more and more. The university seemed impressed with my reformation. Shortly after hiring me in the Tutoring Center, they offered me teaching positions for freshman composition. The university that had once threatened to expel me had now hired me to teach. I was on my way to becoming the worst college professor ever.
The cause of my turnaround was my decision to replace magical thinking with reality: Feeling sorry for myself and making excuses for my failure was sending me to the Shame Dungeon. Developing a consistent work ethic was the only realistic way I could get out of my rabbit hole, and I was young enough to bounce back.
In contrast, Dexter Green from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s depressing short story “Winter Dreams” squanders his entire life on magical thinking. His fixation on Judy Jones reveals that he is a man who is blinded by a chimera of glamor, status, and Alpha Male fantasies that in the end sever him from meaningful connections with other people and eviscerate him spiritually. His failure to wake up from his magical thinking is a cautionary tale for us all. We can break down Dexter’s magical thinking into four main parts____________________, ______________________, ________________________, and ___________________________________.
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