60. Happy Endings

How to be a Person, The Newsletter for August 8th, 2025.

In Stephan Zweig’s Beware of Pity, the protagonist prays for a full recovery for his fiancé whose mysterious paraplegic prognosis looks hopeless. Every Formula 1 race I watch I hear the pundits and commentators bending over backwards to describe the bad boy of motorsport, Max Verstappen, as a really nice guy, a gentleman of the sport, which he is not. On his podcast Marc Maron asks celebrity guests if they’re still friends with past collaborators because he wants things to be nice, in of all places, Hollywood. We so want everyone to get along. We want a happy ending, something real life doesn’t often supply.

Unhappy endings are just too numerous, so we turn away, looking elsewhere for the good. We turn away from Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. We turn away from the two-year-old civil war in Sudan that has yielded three times the death toll as in Palestine. We never really looked at the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen where half the population (18 million people) rely on international aid to survive. We want a happy ending so badly we’ll subject ourselves and our children to the new Superman because we’ve had it with how awful the state of the world is.

My kids and I saw Superman in July in an old guy’s house in Kinmount, Ontario. There is a multiplex there called Highlands Cinemas and it’s been around since 1979. Keith Stata built five small theatres where audiences watch first-run movies. But first you have to get past the cats. 58 strays make up the cat zoo that surrounds the building. And then inside, on your way to watch a movie there’s Canada’s largest collection of film projectors.

But Keith is 78 now. Who will take over a cinema just outside of a village in the Kawarthas with a population of 300, plus cats? A happy ending sounds like a tall order.

No, we should expect the worst. Kierkegaard said we are subjective with ourselves and objective with others and emotional maturation requires we flip those two around. We should be forgiving of others while maintaining high standards for ourselves. Be not surprised when even the sweetest cream sours, for that is its nature.

Expectations are the path to disappointment. I tell my children I am here to disappoint them to prepare them for when they fly this coop. Every time they turn on the A/C in the back of my roomy crossover with plush leatherette seats I want them to remember to not get used to this. They won’t have it when they leave home. They’ll have to adjust. It’s hard out there especially with their skillsets. Their mother and I aren’t exactly raising future Fi-Bros.