Stairwell Thinker

How to Evolve from a Cynical Bastard into an Arrogant Asshole

Okay, this one probably won’t be especially funny, but I’m going to tell it anyway. If nothing else, it might add a bit of nuance to the picture you’ve formed of me while reading these essays.

Kate, my editor, asked me an interesting question today. If I’m capable of writing romantic novels, fairy tales, poems, and literary style parodies, why do I seem completely unconcerned with the fact that most of my relatives, friends, and business associates consider me, at best, a cynical bastard and, at slightly less best, an arrogant asshole? (Not to mention the book vultures who keep showing up in my inbox. They’d probably have no problem launching me into outer space without so much as a sip of oxygen.)

I don’t think Kate meant it as an insult. Mostly because people in my immediate circle rarely get annoyed enough with me to say what they really think to my face. Behind my back? That’s a different matter entirely. But if I can’t hear it, it doesn’t bother me.

The question only sounds difficult. The truth is, I know exactly why.

I’m a stairwell thinker, which means that once I’ve left a situation, I can explain it to myself with astonishing intelligence—even when I behaved like a complete idiot in it. So I’ve spent quite a lot of time analyzing the process that eventually turned me into the cynical asshole I am today. Or rather, how did Kate put it?

Let’s start here: I absolutely hated being a child. I couldn’t wait to grow up. The world of children is cruel, and worse than that, its cruelty is completely pointless. Like Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter. She isn’t awful because she has a grand ideological vision. She’s awful because being awful makes her happy.

And kids today have it even worse than we did. They’re buried under an avalanche of information: images, sounds, colors, trends, influencers, memes, fashions, and whatever toy or gadget everyone suddenly decides is essential this week. Pokémon, Labubu, phones that apparently need replacing every six months. And if their parents can’t afford those things, a target appears on their forehead almost immediately.

Their coping skills are practically nonexistent because there’s nobody they can really talk to. Their peers can’t help them, and the Wonderful Adults generally have no idea what they’re talking about. In barely a generation, not only have teenagers’ problems changed—the language they use to describe them has changed as well.

And yes, bullying can reach anyone. Preferably online. Preferably anonymously. If you’re skinny, they’ll attack you for that. If you’re overweight, they’ll attack you for that. The reason doesn’t matter. The cruelty does. Oh, the young are supposedly just expressing society’s frustrations? Fine. Then let them take up embroidery instead of driving other kids into anxiety, depression, and occasionally suicide. As a journalist, I’ve unfortunately seen examples of that firsthand.

I know this is taking us far away from where we started, and I also know nobody came here hoping to watch yet another intellectual attempt to save the world. But there it is. Sorry.

When I was growing up, things were a little simpler. The country where I spent my childhood was fairly poor, which was both good and bad. It’s true that a pair of Adidas sneakers, Levi’s jeans, or even a can of Coca-Cola could instantly make you a celebrity among your classmates. But if you didn’t have those things, you weren’t automatically exiled to society’s garbage heap.

To help you understand the situation: for decades, bananas were only available around Christmas. At six years old, I came up with what I considered a perfectly logical explanation. Bananas grew on the other side of the Earth, where it was summer during our winter. You can imagine my shock when I visited the decadent West a few years later and discovered grocery stores full of bananas in March. An entire worldview collapsed before my eyes.

Unfortunately, that social system didn’t eliminate children’s natural attraction to pointless cruelty. There was always a reason to single someone out and slowly drive them toward a nervous breakdown. Nobody was safe. You could be the most popular kid in school, but when your turn came, the others would tear you apart just as enthusiastically as anyone else. Which might sound like a definition of democracy. It isn’t. It’s a definition of stupidity.

In my case, I committed two unforgivable sins. I wore glasses. And my parents got divorced. The first was considered a sign of weakness. The second was practically a form of social deviance. So whenever someone mocked the kid whose father had left, they were essentially laying another brick in the glorious tower of actually existing socialism.

My coping strategy was simple. I became the class clown: it seemed safer to entertain people than to become their entertainment. Since I was relatively well-read for my age, that approach gradually evolved into sarcastic little comments that made everyone laugh. And eventually those comments became part of my personality.

They stayed there, especially after I realized that many of the values I was trying to preserve or represent mattered only to me. The process became so extreme that even when I was a senior executive, I never had a secretary. My reasoning was simple: by the time I explained what I wanted, I could have done it myself. And probably done it better. Because it mattered to me. To them, it was just work.

Before you conclude that I built a cynical monster out of childhood wounds, let me tell you something that explains why this attitude was occasionally useful. The first time my mother saw me on television, she didn’t comment on the topic of the program. She didn’t ask how it went. She didn’t even mention that I seemed comfortable in front of the camera. She simply asked: “So they actually pay you for this?” At the time, I was already the editor-in-chief of the television channel that aired the program. That was the entire conversation. I think you understand what I mean.

Years ago, I spoke with an author who wrote young adult novels. He was on his sixth book or so and doing quite well: book launches, signings, publisher support, the whole package. He told me he still couldn’t think of himself as a writer. Why? Because when his first book came out, he proudly told his best friend about it. Her response was: “Uh-huh. Great.” That was it.

I think we’ve successfully uncovered the origin story of my cynicism. From there, becoming an arrogant asshole is surprisingly easy—and I’ll even share the method so you won’t have to figure it out for yourself.

The easiest way to evolve from a cynical bastard into an arrogant asshole is to look around and realize that everything you spent years learning, practicing, and mastering appears to everyone else as a free service. If you’re a seamstress, your work is “just a few stitches.” If you’re a cameraman, it’s “just a few shots.” If you’re a circus performer, you’re “just hanging from a rope.” I’d be willing to bet you can replace those examples with something from your own profession.

For years, I ran the newsroom of an online newspaper. That was also when I met my wonderful wife, Martha, and more than one person asked her how she managed to tolerate me. She never understood the question. Her answer was always the same: “He’s completely normal at home.”

Our newsroom was part of a larger corporate group, and it took me months to train the other companies out of the habit of trying to dump every video project they could imagine onto my team—preferably for free. We were there to produce news coverage. Not weddings. Not family celebrations. Not graduation ceremonies. And certainly not documentaries about someone’s child losing a baby tooth. The more requests arrived, the shorter and firmer my refusals became. Funny how that pattern keeps resurfacing these days when I answer book vultures with three-word emails after a particularly exhausting day. They get offended every single time.

Things stayed quiet for a while. Then one day a new employee joined one of the companies, and the chair beneath him was barely warm before he called me to discuss the exciting video projects he had already planned for my team. I essentially yelled him straight back to his mother. Martha was sitting beside me on the couch. She listened to the entire conversation without saying a word, and when I finally hung up, she looked at me and said: “Now I understand.”

See? It really is that simple. According to the surviving witnesses, I was actually a very sweet child. Although I’ve noticed that the older I get, the more social awareness I occasionally develop regarding the parts of the world that happen to affect me personally.

But I always regret it afterward...