The Connection Cure
Joe McGivney and the Jar
Five years ago, armed with an empty olive jar, some dirt, and a bunch of rocks and pebbles, I taught my students the only lesson that would ever really matter.
They wouldn’t know this then. And neither would I—until I remembered the lesson last April, when the only person I’d ever known to actually live by it had died.
The lesson takes just three minutes: open the olive jar and fill it with the big rocks. Ask the students if it’s full (They say ‘yes’). Then add the pebbles, close the jar, and shake until they fill the rocks’ empty-spaces-between. Ask the students if the jar is full (They say ‘yes’). Then repeat with dirt. Students, again, agree it’s full.
The kicker comes when you empty the jar—the rocks, the pebbles, and the dirt— and start over. This time, put the dirt in first. Ask the students if the jar is full (They say ‘no’). Then add the pebbles (Still ‘no’). By the time you try to add the rocks, there’s no room left in the jar.
Then, in your best soapbox tone, tell the students how the rocks represent the most important things in their lives: the people they care about. The pebbles represent things that matter, but less: work, hobbies, and passions. And the dirt is everything else: ‘likes’ and ‘views’ and the stock market and BravoTV all of the small stuff that sucks our attention, even when we know it doesn’t matter. “If you put the dirt in the jar first, there’s no room for the rocks,” you tell them, still soapboxing. “But if you’ve got the ‘rocks’ and lose everything else, your jar is still full.”
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Of course, the lifelong work of following the jar lesson is much harder than teaching it. It’s not that we don’t love our rocks, and we’re reminded just how much during breakups and birthdays and pandemics. But the day-to-day work of cherishing our rocks doesn’t come naturally, when most of our activities and attentions point us to dirt; ‘feeds’ and hacks and packed-calendars that instruct us to save the cash and the calories and the hours so that we have more freedom and more time, until something or someone shakes our jars and reminds us to ask: what are you saving it for, anyway?
Joe McGivney knew. And he spent his life—or at least each Tuesday—helping others find out.
Tuesday was the only day my household held any sort of ritual; Mom would make my brother and me spinach pie, and Dad would set off around rush hour on the ninety minute trek from Jersey to a church gymnasium in deep Brooklyn, where Joe, his best friend of sixty years, had organized for their greater crew of Bay Ridge-born Boomers to shoot some hoops. “Tuesday Night Hoop,” he called it.
For more than thirty years, Joe continued to gather his childhood best friends for that holy ritual, making them custom mustard yellow pinnies with ‘Tuesday Night Hoop’ inscribed on the front and their not-to-be-repeated nicknames on the back. Through births and bereavement, hurricanes and highway construction and 9/11, they met every Tuesday. They met when the Battery Tunnel starting charging ten bucks each way. They met when cancer and knee pains and back aches turned most of the players’ spritely cross-court sprints into sluggish shuffles. They met when the church landlord tried to evict them in pursuit of more lucrative renting opportunities, until Joe, with his gentle grace and kind, coke-bottle glasses eyes, persuaded otherwise. They met because if you didn’t show up to meet, Joe would whip out his meticulous Excel sheet and record your excuse, which had better be damn good, like “Walking Pneumonia” or “FIPM” (Fell Into Parking Meter).
Later I realized that Joe didn’t just do this on Tuesdays; he lived his whole life through the prism of his friends. Christmas was a chance to gather them for a spirited Kris Kringle exchange. The Tribeca Film Festival was a chance to invite sophisticated film analyses over less sophisticated Bud Lights. The pandemic was a chance to hold virtual poker nights, so raucous you could hear the Zoom roars two floors up. His post-retirement free-time was a chance to start an old-man band and book gigs at old-man bars, where more friends could gather.
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It turns out that living through the prism of friendship isn’t just more fun; it’s actually healthier. In 1938, when Harvard researchers designed an 80-year-study to explore what makes a long life, they found that the people who were healthiest at age 80 were the ones most satisfied in their relationships at age 50. People with strong social connections, according to the study, experienced less cognitive decline than those without them. Other research confirms this: the absence of strong social connections is linked with poor sleep, heart trouble, chronic stress, and even premature death.
The ancient Greeks knew this, too. When the philosopher Epicurus (341- 270 B.C) came down with a painful and fatal urinary infection, he turned to his most reliable medicine: his friends. Deep in Athens city center, in the friends’ garden-facing, jointly-owned home — a trend gaining steam some 2,400 years later, he spent his final days eating cheese and laughing liberally and asking life’s deep questions beside them, writing that physical pain is no match for the ‘cheerfulness of mind’ that comes from such activities.
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When Joe died last April, just nine months after his cancer diagnosis, Bay Ridge boomers everywhere wept, knowing that they’d forever feel the space in their jars. And when one thought it might be in the spirit of Joe to weep not in solitude, but together, they realized something: they didn’t have each other’s phone numbers. The calling, the congregating—that had been the job of Joe, whose own yellow pinnie nickname — the “Commissioner”— said it all.
At his funeral, when throngs of gray and no-haired men howled with laughter as they reminisced over the thousands of gatherings he’d arranged over the years, I wondered if Joe knew what being the Commissioner meant to them. To me.
I wondered if I could live it a bit more like Joe—through the prism of the people I cared most about. I wondered what my days would look like if I could dedicate the hours of them, proportionately, to the rocks in my jar. What would I be giving up? Would that sacrifice be worth it?
And then, when I walked up to his open casket and saw Joe’s gentle grin, I had my answer, for draped over his chemo-worn body was no tuxedo, no achievement medal, but the purest relic of a rare, rock-centric life: a mustard yellow pinnie, and a declaration of his legacy: “Tuesday Night Hoop.”
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This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful to have known a jar like Joe’s. And when I find myself habitually reciting the “I’m-too-busys” or “It’s-too-fars” or “I’ll-be-too-tired” in the wake of a chance to gather with loved ones, I’ll try to remember what fills my own jar.
The one thing on my to-do list
Recently I realized how I’ve turned everything into a to-do list.
Like Big Post-It had hoped, I’m prolific in the pen-and-paper ones: color-coded sticky notes strewn around my desk, with scribbles to renew my passport and purge my Google Drive and look up how NFTs actually work.
But most concerning are the “lists” I’ve projected everywhere else.
My texts— intentionally-unopened reminders to find time for drinks with Kat or lunch with Ryan.
My inbox—never-yet-read newsletters, hasty “dont-forget-to-X” messages from:me, to:me.
My web browser— dozens of dormant tabs for tofu recipes and tub cleaning hacks.
My iPhone notes— daily, time-stamped tasks that ritually, inevitably, get copy-and-pasted from one day to the next.
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Pretty much everyone, it seems, has a similarly endless to-do-list. It’s the creeping undertone of every “I’m running late” or “I have to leave early” text. It’s the mental Tetris game we play every Saturday—when we try to squeeze in three birthdays, two catch-up calls, a CrossFit class and a grocery haul during That One Magic Hour there’s no line at Trader Joe’s.
And still, pretty much everyone wishes they had a little bit more time for their to-do-ing. For me, I dream about having 2 free days, or even 2 hours, to tackle my to-do-lists, like weedwacker taking to an overgrown field. What will I do when I finish?, I wonder, conjuring images of reading by candlelight or idle walks along the water.
But then, when I look back on the rare instances when this has happened—when I’ve crossed off a sizable chunk of to-dos, I come to an uninspiring answer: I’d fill it with more stuff, of course.
Just as weeds grow back faster and fuller when you cut them, so do to-do-lists.
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Back in 1866, an economist named William Stanley Jevons drew attention to this paradox, after an engineer named James Watt invented a more fuel-efficient steam engine.
Because Watt’s engine used less coal than others, economists thought his invention (hack!) would help coal consumption go down.
But actually, that was the problem; because Watt’s steam engine was more efficient —it took trains and boats less coal to travel the same distance than it did with other engines— coal use became cheaper. And so, his engine created a market for more trains. More boats. More routes going to more places. So many, Jevons calculated, that Watt’s invention increased the world’s total coal consumption.
About a hundred years after Jevons, a psychologist named Cyril Northcote Parkinson made a similar observation. He’d been studying the expansion of the British government in the mid-twentieth century. Each year, he noticed, the government created new positions, and, then, more new positions (“subordinates”) for the old new positions to manage. But that wasn’t because Britain suddenly had more work to do (in fact, with their empire dwindling, they had less); instead, it had to do with our human impulse to create work for ourselves. So long as there is time—he said, in what’s now known as Parkinson’s Law—we will always find work to fill that time.
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During my particularly batty spells of to-do-ing— like hard boiling eggs by-the-dozen or painting my nails while I wait for the G train— I laugh, wondering what the cavemen would say if they could see this little Sissyphyian chase for more hours in the day; if they could witness the whole market we’ve created for time-saving and errand-slashing: One-hour-delivery and meal-prep boxes. Pomodoro timers and pen-and-paper planners. Frozen dinners and Task Rabbits.
Of course, you’d rightly point out, the cavemen can’t relate, because, besides eating Paleo and chilling in the cave, there wasn’t a whole lot for them to do. It’s a blessing, you’ll counter, to live in a world with abundant opportunity, with no time to be bored or sit still.
And you’d be right. We to-do because we there’s so much to do; because we’re curious and ambitious and want to be the most well-lived versions of ourselves.
But yet, I think, we also fixate on the ‘doing’ because it’s a lot easier than ‘not doing’. Because making and then tackling to-do-lists is our way of exercising control over a world that seems to lack it. To-do listing, maybe, is how we cope with societal violence, racism, climate change, government corruption-- forces the cavemen probably didn’t have to deal with; we may not be able to stop the decline of democracy, but at least we mailed those thank you notes.
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We now have a whole glossary of terms to describe the uneasiness of an unfinished to-do list: FOMO. Sunday scaries. “Fall anxiety,” as an article recently described of the mid-August blues we feel when we think of the trips not-taken, summer reads not-read, plans not-executed.
But we also have many millennia’s worth of literature and philosophy and science suggesting that this feeling—of wishing we’d done more— is kind of a scam in the grand scheme. How, instead, our truest joy comes not from a packed-calendar, but from the simple, focused moments within it.
When the frenetic temptations to to-do-list strikes, it helps to picture 90-year-old-me realizing this; how I’ll be OK with never understanding NFTs and not cleaning my potentially Tetanus-lined bathtub if it means more time on less; the pizza crawls and park picnics and ‘til-2am phone calls. The spontaneous stuff that could have never come out of a to-do list. The contents of what a “well-lived” life really is.
A friend recently told me over coffee, “Busy a decision,” and the opposite is also true: not being busy is a decision. Which is why, scribbled on Post-its and self-sent texts and emails, you’ll find just one item left on my to-do list: stop making them.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”
Once upon a 1999, under a big alphabet banner and boxy fluorescent lights, I stood before my first-grade classroom and did something adult-me would forever appreciate: I told a story.
As far as stories go, mine—about the day I got my dog, Brownie—was pretty standard for a six year-old, which is to say that it was almost comically unremarkable. But as teachers and parents and anyone who’s ever asked a six year-old about their day knows, that’s the whole point: the very essence of being a kid is being able to see the world for all its unremarkable-ness and find a story in it, still.
They also know this ability is tragically temporary, for if you ask adults to tell you a story about their day, they’ll give some vague descriptor, like “good” or “fun” or “tiring.” Though grown-ups have ten times more life experience than their six year-old selves did, they become increasingly convinced that none of it is ‘story-worthy.’
Science suggests that the kid in us —the one that seeks and tells stories—speaks to our truest human instincts. Yuval Noah Harari writes that the ability to “transmit information about things that do not exist” makes Homo sapiens unique. He explains how we evolved to tell stories, not only to entertain, but also to deal with its uncertainty. Look to the earliest civilizations, and where there are Big Questions—like what happens when we die? Or when we’re born? Or when we mate?— there are stories, forever codified in religions and customs and history books.
Earlier this month, while reporting for TIME, I learned that people are reviving their storytelling skills to cope with the uncertainty that COVID has made into a fixture of daily life. Daniel Weinshenker, licensed social worker and facilitator with nonprofit StoryCenter, explains how most of us are experiencing “the loss of the assumptive world”—grief over the big and small deaths of life-as-we-knew-it. And so, he says, to cope with our loss of lives and time and traditions, people tell stories to escape from it, to make sense of it, to get closure from it, and to find solace among others grieving from it, too.
Studies show that doing this helps our health, especially among those already sick; when compared with control groups, patients participating in group storytelling sessions saw lower cortisol and higher oxytocin; reduced social isolation, and less depression and anxiety.
But what studies can’t tell you, and something I’ve only recently realized myself, is the deeper way storytelling helps us: by inviting us to better remember our lives, and to live in a way that’s worth remembering. The late, great Joan Didion said it best: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” And I’d say the opposite is true, too: we live —or, at least, we should— to tell ourselves stories.
It occurred to me recently that I don’t remember much from 1999 except for the day I got Brownie, and the day I told a story about it. And I realized that if I want to start remembering more of my days, then I’d better start actively looking for the stories within them. To help, a friend taught me a trick: write down one, brief ‘story-worthy’ moment, every day. Coined by MOTH StorySLAM champion Matthew Dicks, this trick—dubbed ‘homework for life’— gives people not only a lifetime supply of stories, but also a lifetime demand for them.
These ‘story-worthy’ moments will probably be unremarkable, and that’s the whole point, for it’s a way to remember what your six year-old self never forgot: how the best way to cope with the fear and grief and boredom and nonsense of life is to look for small stories within it. And how, maybe, if we spend our days looking for those stories, we’ll start living to find them.
What makes a wonderful life?
“No man is a failure who has friends,” writes Clarence the Angel to George Bailey at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life. But when the classic debuted seventy-five years ago, that’s exactly what critics called the film’s director, Frank Capra: a failure.
For one, it was a financial failure—a box office flop sinking the studio a half million dollars, enough to kill it altogether. It was also a professional failure, straining Capra’s relationships with screenwriters. And perhaps the biggest failure was the messaging: a 1946 Times review criticized the film’s ‘sentimentality’, claiming that Capra’s “illusory” and “optimistic” view of life contrasted its “average realities.”
In other words, it suggested, humans were really not as generous or wonderful as the film depicted.
Call the reviewer a scrooge, but studies suggest most of us agree with the Times’ gloomy take; we may see the good in humanity when we’re high on Hallmark movies, but what about the other eleven months of the year? When not prompted by bell-ringing street Santas or Giving Tuesday emails or customary end-of year-cheer, are people actually generous?
I didn’t think so last April, when one of my editors asked me to follow-up on a story I'd written at the start of the pandemic. In March 2020, while most of us were couch-bound with Joe Exotic and sourdough loaf, armies of ordinary New Yorkers worked around the clock on Google docs and paper flyers and phone calls to make sure anyone who needed groceries could get them. The editor wondered what those groups were up to one year later.
I was sure I'd be let down. After all, how many times had I, in a moment of crisis, given a guilt-tinged $20 or put my name on a volunteer list, only to unsubscribe months later? These groups, I thought, would be no different.
But I was wrong. In New York City, the place most often chided for its cold anonymity, thousands of locals have spent the last twenty months turning once-temporary grocery deliveries to full-fledged safety nets—where tiny tots have diapers, older folks have company, and new New Yorkers have translators. The same streets that see F-bombs and fits of road rage also see community fridges and little libraries and a belief that everyone should have all they need to get by.
American history, I would learn, is ripe with these look-out-for-thy-neighbor projects, formally called mutual aid. Throughout the twentieth century, mutual aid looked like new immigrants, in the absence of credit history, lending money to one another, so they could have a more equal chance at starting businesses and buying property. It looked like the Black Panthers, in absence of government support, organizing free breakfasts so ten thousand kids could get healthy meals for free. When usual protections fail, people— in their ordinary George Bailey-like generosity —step in.
Still, it’s easy to believe in the myth of cynicism. And our anxiety-inducing newsfeeds, one-liner politicians, and outrage-obsessed culture tend to further breed this sort of confirmation bias; if you look for narcissism, pessimism, and all of the other ‘isms’ that make for a less-than-wonderful life, you’ll probably find them.
But the opposite is also true; that if you take stock of your year and of your own Bedford Falls, you’ll probably find kindness—moments of small but remarkable thoughtfulness: The random man who fixed your flat tire. The colleague who sent you congratulations cookies. The aunt who braved the always-backed-up BQE to drop candy on your doorstep when you had COVID. The friends who ruined their outfits to indulge your fantasy of an egg toss for adults. The baker who stayed after hours to hold your CitiBike while you tried, in vain, to hoist an engagement cake to its rack.
The greeting cards and text check-ins and ‘just-because’ treats.
The small talk of store-clerks and howls of marathon cheerleaders and passing masked strangers who smile with their cheeks.
We don’t need an Angel to confirm what we ritually realize this time of year—an insight that the ‘failure’ Frank Capra would see viewers appreciate long after his film first preached it:
The plans that never happened and to-do lists never completed and ambitions never realized matter little in the grand scheme of life. Instead, we realize, it’s the generosity we give and receive along the way that makes it truly wonderful.