Farpotshket: Broken because you tried to fix it
Farpotshket (Yiddish)
This summer, I went on a night sky tour. A group of us sat in the dark, windy California desert while a retired astronomer pointed out celestial bodies in the night sky. He pointed to star clusters and showed us distant galaxies through a powerful telescope. He told us about a concept called averted vision: a way to see faint objects in the darkness. You know how sometimes you stare at a distant star and it seems to disappear? It’s only when you look away that you can see the star with any kind of clarity. Look too hard, and you lose sight of what’s in front of you. As I gazed up at these twinkling dots in the sky, I thought about how so many things in life seem to work this way.
On a Sunday evening, my husband and I sip cocktails in the backyard. We can’t help but notice the old, worn-out fence and the overgrown bamboo. “We should get some new patio furniture,” I say. We find a thousand other things wrong with our backyard. The lack of shade. The leaves that need to be raked. The spiders, my god, the spiders! Eventually, we get up to clean the lawn chairs or pull the weeds. We want to make the backyard nicer, more relaxing. And the closer we look for ways to fix this problem, the harder it is to see the reality of what’s in front of us: a space that is already nice, and an opportunity to relax right now. All we have to do? Sit down and stop pulling those damn weeds.
There’s a Yiddish word that reminds me of these Sunday nights: Farpotshket. It describes something that’s broken only because someone tried to fix it. The Yiddish Slang Dictionary explains:
“This word doesn't just describe something that is broken, but something that is broken specifically because someone else tried to fix it, making it worse. It is used most commonly today to describe software engineering projects.”
Ever tried to clean a small splash of tomato sauce on your shirt but ended up smearing it all over the place? That’s farpotshket in a nutshell. It’s when you attempt to buff out a tiny scratch on your car only to make it even more noticeable. Or when a small crease in your pants turns into setting the couch on fire. It’s when you touch up century-old painting, but you end up turning it into a potato. Broadly speaking, farpotshket describes what goes wrong when something becomes overcomplicated. It’s also a reminder that even if something doesn’t look perfect, making it needlessly complex can turn a minor imperfection into a messy problem. Like doing yard work on what’s supposed to be a relaxing Sunday night.
When we find ourselves in a state of farpotshket, our intense focus obscures our ability to truly see and appreciate the thing we're examining, as our attention becomes consumed by its flaws. The solution? A little averted vision. Sometimes the best way to get a clear view of what’s in front of us is to simply stop looking so hard.
From the archives
How to Be Better at Uncertainty: (The Cut): If you’ve ever taken a philosophy class, you’ve probably heard of the Socratic paradox: “The only thing I know is that I know nothing.” It advocates for the benefits of uncertainty, a point of view that happens to be backed by modern psychological science.
What’s new?
I read Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life. “It’s shocking to realise how readily we set aside even our greatest ambitions in life, merely to avoid easily tolerable levels of unpleasantness.”
I listened to this beautiful On Being conversation with Jane Goodall. “I believe part of being human is a questioning, a curiosity, a trying to find answers, but an understanding that there are some answers that, at least on this planet, this life, this life-form, we will not be able to answer.”
I enjoyed a poem: Sympathetic Magpies.
— Kristin