On Bitterness

2025.12.28

CXXXII

[A Force of Nature; The Greatest Sufferer Award Goes To...; The Drink Was Poisoned, Not the Well; Rattlesnakes & Bears; A Bitter Life is a Life Only Partly Lived]

Thesis: Don't let experiences make you bitter.

[A Force of Nature]

I'm reading a phenomenal memoir called "Every Man for Himself and God Against All" from one of my favorite directors, Werner Herzog.

Herzog beautifully traces his life in a roundabout, non linear way. What is most shocking to me is how many terribly challenging experiences he’s had:

• Born in Germany in 1942; his cradle was covered in dust and rubble during an allied bombing raid

• Grew up severely impoverished in Bavaria; one loaf of bread per week for a family of three.

• Didn't meet his father until he was 4, and then, rarely saw him

• As a young boy, saw his friend get in a ski crash and carried him down the mountain unconscious

• Repeatedly dissuaded from his ambition to be a director (too young, inexperienced, go work for someone, getting laughed out of a studio at 15, etc)

The life of myself and my average reader is so far removed from this level of challenge that it is hard to comprehend. You'd think that most people who went through a childhood like that would get calcified into a bitter ball of hate.

Herzog did not become bitter. He reflects back on the memories with a steady hand and often a fondness. And, in spite of all of those challenges, he went on to do the impossible, again and again:

• Direct over 70 feature films

• Get a 320 Ton Steamboat over a mountain

• Publish over 10 books

• Act in a few movies

• Win the Venice Film Fest Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (less than 100 director / film maker recipients ever, including Kubrick, Charlie Chaplin, Spielberg, Scorsese, Lynch, Tim Burton, etc etc etc)

He did all of this as if it were inevitable, as if the challenges and “handicaps” weren’t even a consideration. To boot, all the rights to his movies are owned by a non profit foundation he started that supports up and coming film makers with awards & workshops.

Bitterness comes from being stuck on things that happened to you in the past. In sharp contrast, all of Herzog’s achievements speak to a present curiosity and vitality and forward momentum.

If someone with so many objective challenges can protect himself from turning away from the world in bitterness, why can’t we?

[The Greatest Sufferer Award Goes To...]

We all have suffered in our lives, and it’s kind of crazy to think that someone else hasn’t.

It’s also pretty unempathetic to assume that your suffering is greater than someone else’s. In reality, you have no idea what someone else went through.

By assuming your suffering is greater than anyone else’s and letting others know it, at best, you get some pity, but more likely, you come across as entitled and calloused and umempathetic. I wrote about the danger of romanticizing suffering in a post anchoring on the DMV to show that suffering is a matter of perspective; ironically, I had someone respond to the post, saying I could only write like that because I hadn’t suffered enough yet, unlike him!

On the other hand, you have a man like Herzog, who recounts both the negative and the positive with a steady hand, accepting that each is a part of his life. I see the objectively higher level of challenge in his life than mine, and marvel at the fact that not once does he say anything in the neighborhood of, “My life was the hardest life there was!”

There's no contest or prize for suffering, but there is one for overcoming and creating.

So yes, we all have a “reason” to be bitter, I'm sure, but that doesn't mean you should be.

[The Drink Was Poisoned, Not the Well]

I view bitterness as calcified fear.

This bad thing happens, and you’re afraid of it happening again. So, you create rules to protect yourself from it.

I don’t know if there is a single person breathing who has never experienced pain that was only possible by being vulnerable with a romantic partner.

If the pain is strong enough, the trap is that some people become bitter and think that all women or men are heartless and will hurt them if they get close again.

You’re afraid of being hurt and you let that fear calcify into a protective behavior change. Of course you won’t get hurt by a romantic partner if you internalize the view that it’s not worth it to open up to a romantic partner ever again!

But you also will never have a romantic partner ever again!

While bitterness is an effective protection from getting hurt again, it also severely limits your range of motion. If it dominates you entirely, you can fence yourself in from doing some of the things you’re most interested in! Don’t let one or even multiple painful experiences cut you off from the possibility of a good one for the rest of your life.

For instance, I would not be able to build BirdDog if I let the fear of painful things that happened in my last businesses dominate me.

When bad experiences calcify into an overly protective fear, your bitterness takes over and you start to cut yourself off from life itself. The painful thing that happened in the past becomes more important than the amazing things that could happen in the future.

[Rattlesnakes & Bears]

Fear is not inherently a bad thing. Fear helps us identify risks in our environment.

If you become afraid of everything, though, the greatest risk becomes your fear.

On a hike in Yosemite, I heard, for the first time in my life in the wild, a rattling of a snake's tail. Immediately, I received a shot of cortisol. We were on a relatively narrow (but also well traveled) mountain trail, and had to carefully pass the rattlesnake at as much distance as possible.

This was an appropriate response to risk. There was a real threat that I wasn’t used to and needed to safely navigate it. Once we passed it, I was more cautious than before, but eventually returned to relatively normal stress levels after the threat was passed.

On the other hand, on the first >7 day backpacking trip I went on, I became totally dominated by fear near the end. At that point, the fear isn’t at all useful.

My friend Bobby & I were in Olympic National Park; we were maybe 5 days into our trip and made it to this absolutely beautiful location, the Enchanted Valley.

When we got into the Valley proper, the walls were covered in countless waterfalls from the spring melting of the glaciers on the summits above. It was as if the mountains themselves were weeping uncontrollably at their own majesty.

There were also quite a few black bears in the floor of the valley with us. We saw one not 20 meters away from one of the 3 other campers at the site. They were yelling at it to go away, but it was ignoring them for the longest time before finally wandering off.

I had never been so close to a black bear, let alone a persistent one. I became terrified. Everything became a threat. I clutched my bear spray in the tent that night. It stormed. Would we be struck by lighting? Would the inside of our tent get wet? The next day, would we run out of food? Would the trails wash away?

When I finally did drift off to sleep, funnily enough, I woke up to my friend Bobby, who is notorious for sleep walking shenanigans, leaning over me. He was pantomiming driving our tent as if it were a car and saying, “Look, the water park is right over there,” pointing with his hand off towards some phantom location only he could see in his dream.

Now, I think that story is terrifically humorous, but at the time, the re awakening only served to make me more stressed and anxious. How would I even survive the next day without enough sleep?

Anxiety can help guide you and identify the most critical risks. But if everything is the most critical risk, nothing is.

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[A Bitter Life is a Life Only Partly Lived]

If you let each of the bad things that happen to you calcify into protective fears, you might find yourself walking through life wracked by anxiety, like I was walking through the most beautiful natural place I have ever seen.

Bad things will happen to you, and some of them will be very, very bad and hard to understand.

Those aren't the things that define, you, though, not if you don't let them. Yes, like Herzog’s poverty and fatherless upbringing are part of what made him who he is, they were each only part of the mosaic of experience.

If you focus more on the suffering and less on the overcoming, you'll fence yourself into a safe little square that you are convinced is surrounded by rattlesnakes. To hell with the world out there, I'm safe in here!

Rattlesnakes are part of life, but they’re not the only part.

A bitter life is a life only partly lived.

Yes, I'm sure some of the things that happened to you were terrible.

That doesn't stop you from living a life of so much beauty that they're just footnotes in comparison.

Live Deeply,