Playground logic

If I ever made it to square four, I didn’t stay there long. To my credit, I kept trying. (Image by Wokandapix)

As painful as it is to see kids dealing with academic challenges, it’s even more heartbreaking to bear witness to their social difficulties.

In a school setting, it’s very common to see kids who are unable to connect easily with peers begin to act out in unpleasant ways in order to attract negative attention as a substitute for the positive attention they crave.

When even that stops working (if it ever did), you might hear a sad and familiar line: “These kids are stupid! I don’t want to play with them anyway.”

Sadder still are the adults who hang onto these attitudes long after they should have learned to resolve them. This playground logic— “I will reject you before you reject me”—can show up unexpectedly when we’re faced with a dynamic that we’re not sure how to navigate.

Thus, so many of us find ourselves unable to attract the employees, clients, business partners, friends, colleagues, and romantic partners we want. Like the frustrated and confused kid, we decide ahead of time that we won’t be successful in finding what we’re looking for, so we either don’t try or we sabotage our own efforts.

I wasn’t the angry, acting-out kid—I was more of the clueless kid. But even so, I’ve demonstrated playground logic plenty of times.

In college, instead of joining in on fun things, I doubled down on being an outsider, spending my free time imagining how much better it would be somewhere else. It took spending my junior year away for me to finally appreciate what I had when I returned as a senior.

As a young adult participating in open mic nights, I often expended more energy judging other people’s performances than sharpening my own and building relationships with my fellow musicians.

And as a new entrepreneur, it was easier and more familiar to wallow in the resentment of overwork than to deal with the complexity of hiring employees.

There was no magic to resolving these issues and finding a more fulfilling life. Basically, what happened in each case was that the pain of living the way I was began to outweigh the risk of rejection and the fear of the unknown. I was motivated to change because changing became more attractive than staying the same.

I still encounter the old miserable playground logic when I dip my toe into social media and other online spaces. “Ugh, everyone on YouTube sounds the same! They’re all such phony a-holes. I don’t want to be part of this.” But painting “everyone” with such a broad brush is a sure sign that I’m the one being the phony a-hole, Holden Caulfielding myself into a solitary hypocrisy in which I’m the queen of a country nobody would want to live in.

The best way for me to get over these negative feelings has been to practice putting myself out there. Instead of believing that all of the other second graders are somehow aligned against me, united in their desire to exclude me from their game of tag, I can see them as individuals making their own choices. Instead of thinking I’m too cool to participate, I can join in the fun. I can try things, fail, and try again. I might actually do all right and not hate it. I might even make a friend.