What does not kill me makes me stronger (maybe)
Redemption vs. Contamination Stories
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” In his book Antifragile, Nassim Taleb argues that this statement is true within a range. For example, our muscles get stronger from working out with heavy weights. When we push our muscles the fibers that make them up experience microtears. As we recover from a workout, our body heals the microtears and makes the muscles stronger. This validates Nietzsche’s statement. But, Taleb says, if you go too far, you can tear a muscle or tendon and do permanent damage. It is possible to injure yourself while working out and you become permanently weaker. Look at how many professional athletes have career-ending injuries while playing their sports. So Taleb’s point is Nietzche’s statement is true, within a range. There is a healthy amount of stress, from which we grow, but beyond that stress can cause permanent harm.
Nietzsche was born in a time before we understood cellular biology. Since he wrote his statement as an aphorism and not a fully developed essay, we can only guess to what degree he was talking about responses to physical harms vs. social/psychological/emotional events. By the time you can reflect on it, you will have certainly had setbacks, disappointments, and losses in life that you would have to have responded and adapted to. Some of those might be physical, but a great many of them are going to be in the social/psychological/emotional spheres. It’s possible that they are both.
If you haven’t listened to it, I had the honor of interviewing David Krempels, the founder of the Krempels Brain Injury Center. While on his honeymoon, David and his new wife were struck by a semi truck on I-95. David’s new wife was killed, and he was severely injured, including a major brain injury. It took a couple of years for the courts to resolve the case, during which time he sometimes didn’t have enough money to buy food, but he eventually received a large settlement. With some of the money, he created the Krempels Center so that people who had experienced similar losses would have a place to go and have a community to support them. Today David has a lot of life satisfaction, not just because of the settlement, but because of how he chose to respond to his loss. David took this devastating life event and used it to create a community and to lift up other people who had experienced similar losses. David, and people like him, demonstrate a high level of generativity. As I wrote in last week’s newsletter, generativity is caring about the next generation and about the well-being of others. It turns out that having a high level of generativity is protective when bad things happen to you.
I came across the idea of stories of redemption and contamination in Emily Esfahani Smith’s fabulous book, The Power of Meaning. A story of redemption is like David’s. Something bad happens to you, and through that crucible, you come out the other side somehow transformed and in some way better. David endured a terrible accident, lost his first wife, lost his career, and was temporarily financially ruined. But David has impacted hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, through the Krempels Center, and it is likely his efforts will continue on and help future generations. If you asked him if he would choose not to have suffered a traumatic brain injury (as well as other devastating physical injuries), I’m pretty sure he would say, “What do you think?” Implying, in case it isn’t clear, of course he wouldn’t choose to have had the brain injury. I’ve had the privilege of getting to know David over the last few years as I have served on the board of the Krempels Center, so I can even hear the mild sarcasm he would use as he would say it. But, and this is the important part of redemption stories, given what has happened, given the loss, David has a deep sense of meaning from his life. I know this because I’ve heard him talk about it. The Krempels Center is his legacy. It would not have existed if he hadn’t suffered. A redemption story, or redemption sequence, is a way of interpreting the bad thing that has happened and what you do with your life after. David’s story is a redemption story. Typical of a redemption story is the realization that somehow a terrible thing has happened but it has made us stronger. We are able to find happiness through our response to the bad thing, usually because it made us more empathetic, and made us care about others more. People who tell redemption stories tend to experience higher levels of purpose, self-acceptance, and life satisfaction.
A contamination story is essentially the opposite of a redemption story. A bad thing happens, and then we develop a narrative that everything that follows goes to shit. We point at the bad thing, and we can trace how it was the beginning of an avalanche of badness in our life. People who tell contamination stories tend to experience higher levels of depression, and lower levels of life satisfaction.
According to the psychology literature (e.g., McAdams, et al., 2001), generativity mediates whether your response will be a redemption story or a contamination story. Remember, generativity measures how much you are oriented on the well-being of others, particularly future generations. Before his accident, David had been a builder. He had his own business building homes, and was doing well financially. After his accident, he could no longer work in his chosen field. When he received his settlement, he had a choice about what to do with his life. He could have chosen to be self-centered and used his money for himself. Instead he went looking for ways that he could help other people suffer a little less from the same circumstances he had experienced. He demonstrated a high level of generativity. Had he chosen to focus on himself, he probably would have become an angry, self-pitying person.
Our lives are stories. Our happiness depends mostly on the narratives we create about who we are, how we came to be here, and where we are trying to go. Stories and narratives are not facts, but we use facts selectively to create our life story. Which ones we choose to focus on, and how we string together the causality matters. Redemption or contamination is a choice. As David likes to say, “You’re not who you were, be who you are.” As I age and slowly lose the gifts of my youth, I am trying to lean into the gifts I do have, some of which come from age.
Two of the 3Cs of Meaning are Contribution and Connection, which are the fundamental elements of generativity. If something bad happens in our lives - and I should say, “when”, not “if” - we eventually want to be able to tell a redemption story, not a contamination story because redemption stories are adaptive and lead to happiness while contamination stories encourage a spiral of misery. Seeking to live a worthy life is seeking to live a happy life.