Pride
The Fox and the Grapes
The fable
A hungry fox spied a cluster of ripe grapes hanging from a vine trained high along a branch. He leaped for them and missed. He backed up, ran, and leaped again — closer, but still short. Again and again he jumped, until his legs ached and the grapes hung exactly where they had always been. At last the fox turned away, nose in the air, and said to himself: "They were sour anyway. Who wants sour grapes?" And he trotted off, hungry still, but satisfied with his story.
The moral: We scorn what we cannot have.
The same moment, today
You put in an offer on a small row house on Sunday. You had run the numbers, and you could make it work. You pictured your bed in the back room. You pictured coffee on the tiny porch. On Tuesday your agent called and said there were twelve offers and you were fourth. You nodded and said you had expected that. By dinner you were telling your sister it was too close to the highway and the basement smelled damp. You slept fine, and by morning you almost believed you had never wanted it.
The fox jumps and misses, then says the grapes were sour. He does not know that. He is protecting his pride. We do the same after a loss. We tell ourselves the school was snobby, the ex was boring, or the sneakers were cheap. There is a clean gap of air between his highest paw and the lowest grape, and we try to cover it with a story.
The lesson
When you catch yourself talking down a thing you just missed, pause. Say out loud, I wanted it and did not get it.
Science has measured this
Brehm, 1956
In 1956 at the University of Minnesota, a psychologist named Jack Brehm invited women to a lab to look at home appliances. Toaster, coffee maker, iron, and so on. Each woman rated how much she wanted each one. Then she could take one home, but she had to choose between two items she had rated about the same. After she chose, Brehm asked her to rate them again. The numbers moved. The item she kept climbed the list, and the one she left behind dropped. The shift was biggest when the two had been close to begin with. Brehm said we change our preferences to make a loss or a hard choice feel better.
A small reminder, on the fridge or the laptop, that when your reach falls short, you do not need a story about sour fruit to feel okay.
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