Wasted Potential

After Thomas Aquinas

Articulus 1: Whether it is possible to be wasted potential

It appears it is possible to be wasted potential.

Obiectio 1: For your Introduction to Political Theory course, you write an article in the form of Summa Theologiae on political legitimacy. You meticulously deconstruct Lockean tacit consent and do a passable job of using Aquinas to argue something you do not believe. After two hours of cross-checking and Ctrl-F-ing, you construct a bibliography that you will forget to attach to your submission. Rookie mistake.

A month later, according to your TA, “You receive an A- rather than an A because, even though you have in-text citations, you do not include a full bibliography at the end (which references things like the editions you were working with).”¹ Therefore, the discrepancy between the paper’s potential grade and the grade the paper receives  suggests the existence of wasted potential.  A whole ten percent’s worth.

Obiectio 2: Moreover, the evening before you realize your citation slip-up, you give up on an internship application. According to Google Calendar and USA Jobs, you have been working on the application for a month.² According to the Word Document of your nearly-finished application, you have dedicated thirty pages and 51,653 characters to this endeavour.³ According to your Psyche, you would rather not know how much time you have spent writing thousands of words the Library of Congress will never read.⁴

The causal mechanisms behind wasted potential do not seem to matter. Rather, wasted potential is merely predicated on the expectation of a certain outcome. The temporal order is quite simple: act with the expectation of a certain result, receive feedback that reality contradicts this expectation, then feel disappointed.

Thus, wasted potential is born from the discrepancy between expectation and reality.

Obiectio 3: Thus far, we have discussed within-subject wasted potential. However, you can disappoint others in addition to yourself. Take the extended family. Your grandmother claims that, although she loves her sons and grandsons dearly, “she’d always wanted a little girl.”⁵

As previously stated, wasted potential is the residual of anticipated result minus observed outcome. In the hours after your birth, you, a newborn girl, wielded the maximum potential to meet your grandmother’s expectations. You, a tabula rasa in Lockean terms, available to be whatever amalgamation of dress-up and gender roles she desired.

The last time you entered your grandparents’ house, your grandmother wrapped you in a too-tight hug to remind you of everything she wants. “So, are there any handsome boys you’re interested in?”⁶ she whispered into your hair as your brothers unpacked the car.

You are seventeen, a means to an end between her bony arms and small frame. She will inquire again about a boyfriend more times than she asks about your college applications, civics class, and friends combined. You will disappoint her every time.

Obiectio 4: Little does your grandmother know, you spend the summer after your senior year typing “gay” into the Gallup⁷ search bar, reading critic reviews of the movie Troy, and thinking about all the different ways to destroy a copy of The Song of Achilles. You write about your best friend in ways that are supposed to be reserved for “handsome boys.” Instead of “girl meets boy,” the twenty-page draft reads more like, “two girls grow up together, girls do/say things that cannot be disclosed, girl cries, girl inflicts violence on her book, girl cries some more, girl loses touch with reality, girl does some origami and feels a little better.”⁸ Although the antithesis of your grandmother’s narrative, you would like to think this story has more depth than whatever she has written for you.

Not only is it possible to disappoint others in addition to yourself, but it is possible to do both at the same time. Efficient failure at its finest. You have chosen the wrong muse, and you cannot even write about her correctly.

Obiectio 5: You do more than flirt with Gallup’s search bar. You kiss a girl without the entire weight of your shame, and for the first time, you try to embrace the fact that you cannot make your family proud in every way.

You concoct chocolate pudding from Jell-O box mix in her living room, and walk miles around sports parks on Sunday afternoons. You outdrive a Fourth of July sunset to play I-Spy in the clouds until you become ants beneath the open sky. Braid rings out of blades of grass, wear her initials around your wrist. You name frog statues in front of public libraries, and learn to navigate her city’s five-way intersections without being too much of a liability. It feels good. Really good. So incomprehensibly, inexplicably good.

According to your Internal Monologue, you are not good enough for her.⁹ She never tells you this. In fact, she claims the opposite. She thinks you are kind and patient—maybe your humour is too dark, and it is weird, at first, that you send her pictures of cockroaches from your yard—but she tells you everything she appreciates about you. You do not know how to believe her.

You spiral into self-fulfilling prophecy in the backseat of her car. You want to touch her. She tells you she wants you to touch her, but you cannot. She must be lying. The moment your skin meets hers, she will realize you are not good enough for her. She will say she never liked you like that. You have read too much into a friendship again—even though you are not friends because you are dating, and you kissed her yesterday, and nothing bad happened. Still, as soon as your body meets hers, she will rattle off everything wrong with you. Once it starts, it will not stop.

She touches your arm, then lets you be. You utter an unsubstantial apology. In your anxious paralysis, she will drive you home and start to like you a little less.

Sed Contra: On your eighth birthday, you do something solely for yourself. You plunge your hands into the dirt and bury a time capsule meant to be unearthed in eight years. In between salmon and mint green construction paper covers, you record your love of cats, fear of needles, benign bibliographical information, and even a self-portrait with Picasso proportions on wide-ruled binder paper. You send three staples into the packet’s spine, wrap the book in plastic bags from Target, and bury it under the plum tree in your backyard.

You spend your 16th birthday in Zoom breakout rooms and your high school’s gym for colour guard practice before having an anxiety attack and calling it a night.

You never dig up the time capsule.

Responsio: The absurdity of “wasted potential” lies in its teleological argument—albeit a godless one. The so-called disparity between expectation and reality can only exist if you prescribe a purpose in the beginning. Presuppose a normative end and aim your future toward it. Stake your life on it, if you must: a time capsule is meant to be discovered, a girl ought to be the object of male affection, and you should finish any applications you start.

Ad 1: You admit you wasted your Political Theory paper’s potential by fumbling academic formalities. That’s entirely your fault. However, would you have remembered the bibliography on your next paper had you not wasted this paper’s potential? Presuming that wasted potential exists, is it such a bad thing after all?

Ad 2: The causal mechanisms behind wasted potential do, in fact, seem to matter.

Your application to the Library of Congress can be understood through Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory:

Realizing you couldn’t complete your application in time, you stopped. However, this behaviour is inconsistent with the attitude that this internship matters to you, evidenced by the time and effort you’ve invested in it. Corroborated by the emotional distress sparked by its perpetual incompleteness. Thus, you rationalize your choice by devaluing the internship. You change your attitude to justify your behaviour.¹⁰

Festinger’s explanation is acceptable, but Daryl Bem does better:

According to his self-perception theory, you discover your true attitudes toward American bank records and project management through your decision to stop your application. Unable to construct plausible reasons the internship would benefit your “career,” and unable to think of real reasons you wanted to undertake any of these projects—besides being unqualified for your top choice—you stop.¹¹

In the moment you become wasted potential, failure can tell you something about yourself. Wasted potential is not a waste.

Ad 3: When someone whispers into your hair to imply you’re wasted potential, cut your hair off. Take fortune into your own hands—twin-bladed, sharp-edged. Do it with fabric, or kitchen, or craft scissors if you must. Stare into the limp puddle of locks, its secrets open and bare. Contemplate your life through its death. Don’t think too hard.

If there’s nothing to hold the gravity of expectation, the disappointment will slip off your shoulders and fall to your feet. If your failure cannot weigh on you, it may as well not exist. Take the liberty to step on it if you wish.

Ad 4: Upon further inspection, the teleological argument of wasted potential is one with a generous serving of irony on the side. The so-called “normative end” isn’t normative at all. The ought isn’t universal. “Correctness” in storytelling depends on the teller.

Consider the story of “girls do/say things that cannot be disclosed.” Your interpretation of “correctness” can be summarized by a perfect balance between Weber’s “two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility.”¹² Your heart murmurs that honesty is the ultimate end of storytelling, but your conscience reiterates that you’re responsible for whatever you write toward those ends. You must be honest, but not too honest, and you must remain respectful while still revealing some part of the truth. Actualizing one will always come at the expense of the other, which means this delicate balancing act is so difficult you only share this story on a need-to-know basis. Some secrets are best untold in a zero-sum game.

While your version of “correctness” is a matted mess of moral gray tones, your best friend’s is more Hobbesian—clear-cut, cookie cutter. “[Woman] is forbidden to do that which is destructive of [her] life—” which you can respect until it’s your life or hers.¹³ To “seek peace and follow it” means that need-to-know storytelling is still too much.¹⁴ “Correctness” is absolute silence. Abdicate moral responsibility to play pretend that none of this ever happened. You can admit that it’s a soothing thought experiment—to extrapolate too far until you’re friends again, to tell all the alternative endings, to retreat from this harsh reality for just five seconds.

“Correctness” to your grandmother is a simpler silence. Keep quiet until you can correct yourself. Until it’s a boy who breaks your heart.

If these principles were all normative, one of them would surely win out. Then you would know how to measure your wasted potential empirically—how to wrap it in codes and run regression analysis—by the paragraphs left to type, the times you’ve told parts of this story when she told you not to, the years of silence, the disappointed smiles from relatives.

Without an objective measure, you can’t prove your wasted potential through quantification. Ten thousand words are only an arbitrary count, so you choose not to quantify at all.

Ad 5: According to your Call Log, it takes 108 days for you to prove the contamination hypothesis:

Subjects with low self-esteem anticipate rejection, so you derogate your partner when reminded that you’re wasted potential before she can hurt you.¹⁵

Unfortunately, she has no intention of hurting you, but everything reminds you that you’re wasted potential—including every interaction you have with her. You hurt yourself because you cannot get it in your head that this girl isn’t trying to hurt you.

Your protective strategy fails when she lets you explain the fragments of many stories instead of continuing your self-sabotage mission. This was not part of the plan, but neither was being wasted potential. So you tell her everything, brace for impact, and realize a funny thing:

Somebody needs to make the teleological argument for you to be wasted potential. Sure, you’ve learned to make the case yourself. Got really good at it—making claims supported by your thesis, analyzing all the evidence, anticipating counterarguments, refuting rebuttals—but without external reinforcement, the straw man begins to cave. So you pull at the loose hay to see where it leads. Start to unravel the persuasive body into shapeless form on the floor. A pile of straw that is just a straw and not a metaphor for failure or potential or a person.

She asks you what soup she should eat for lunch. You’ll pick up the straw later.

1. Introduction to Political Theory TA (2023). ↩︎
2. Google Calendar (2023). ↩︎
3. Microsoft Word (2023). ↩︎
4. Your psyche (2023). ↩︎
5. Your grandmother (2018). ↩︎
6. Ibid (2022). ↩︎
7.  A well-known public polling company in the United States. Not the movement of a horse. ↩︎
8. Perpetually unfinished draft of Five Ways to Destroy “The Song of Achilles” (2023). ↩︎
9. Your internal monologue (2023). ↩︎
10. Leon Festinger, Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 51. ↩︎
11. Daryl Bem, “Self-Perception: An Alternative Interpretation of Cognitive Dissonance Phenomena,” Psychological Review 74, no. 3 (1967): 183. ↩︎
12. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 190. ↩︎
13. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 165. ↩︎
14. Ibid. ↩︎
15. Your call log (2023); Social Psychology Professor, “Attachment Styles Lecture” (2023). ↩︎