Why Are Women Disappointed & Do We Ever Want to Be?
First presented in a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, New York City.

In the beautiful Victorian house where I lived while attending college in Montana, I often played and sang loudly miserable songs about disappointment in love, like songs from Joni Mitchell's popular album, "Blue."

Years later I learned—and this is new in civilization—that there was actually a hope in me, as there is in every person, to be disappointed. Aesthetic Realism explains with solid logic that there are two kinds of disappointment. Certainly, people have been honestly disappointed; have met tremendous injustice economically and personally. But there's also a determination in a person, which Aesthetic Realism makes clear, to see the world as a flop, as never coming through for you, so you can be disdainful and superior.

In his lecture, "Mind and Disappointment," Mr. Siegel describes that drive. "On the one hand," he says, people complain because they are disappointed:

On the other, to be disappointed is their triumph. If a person finds himself at the movies, he can be disappointed because he is not at home. If he's at home, he's disappointed because he's not at the movies. If he gets a telephone call, he's disappointed because his solitude is interrupted. If he doesn't get a phone call, he's disappointed because no one cares for him. And if he gets a phone call, and it happens to be a short one, he feels people are neglecting him and not talking long enough...Once you are looking for disappointment you can be a super-FBI.

I was one of those. Once, a friend pointed out on a very happy occasion at a restaurant, that I was looking to be disappointed with everything. I acted like a queen as I scornfully and casually mentioned that the food took too long to arrive; when it did, it wasn't what I expected; and then it was too hot in the place. Though this is ordinary, the determination in a woman day after day to find things to be disappointed about saps the life out of her, and also makes her mean.

The reason we want to be disappointed, I learned, is explained by this Aesthetic Realism principle: "There is a disposition in every person to think [we] will be for [ourselves] by making less of the outside world." This is contempt, and though having it makes you feel awful, you also have the pleasure of thinking other people are inept and you are the smartest thing going.

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