The skeptic in Sam wanted to roll his eyes at the screen’s portrayal of the effortless Daniel. But hadn’t he encountered just this sort of person in college—like his freshman roommate, John? Raised in Wilmington and educated at St. Paul’s, John seemed to meet every new task with a knack. Sam vividly remembered the afternoon when John first tried his hand at lacrosse. Having watched some others playing on the quad, John picked up a stick and in a matter of minutes was cradling, throwing, and catching with the fluency of a varsity player—the way some young musicians can drop one instrument and pick up another without bothering to pause for instruction.
Sam was nothing like John. But our genes don’t merely express who we are. They contain all manner of talents from previous generations that we may not benefit from personally but that can be passed on to our progeny. So who was to say that he couldn’t father a son with the natural finesse of his old classmate?
As Sam was having this reassuring thought, the setting shifted from a university campus to Century Tower, where Daniel, already in his early thirties, dressed in a tailored suit, is walking down the hallway with a smile on his face and some folders under an arm. Passing a colleague of a similar age in similar attire, Daniel exchanges a high five. Then he pauses at a cubicle where another young man is transferring data from a document into a spreadsheet. When the young man looks up, Sam realizes with a touch of horror that it is the same actor who played Daniel in the first projection. The new Daniel dumps the folders on the old Daniel’s desk while making some smug remark about there being no rest for the weary.
“From the day that Daniel was born, everything came easy…”
Later that night (as Daniel One is presumably toiling away), Daniel Three is sitting in a fancy restaurant charming his waitress. A moment after she slips him her phone number, another attractive young woman arrives, gives Daniel a kiss, and sits. When Daniel reaches across the table to take her hand, on her finger we see the engagement ring that he has given her.
The scene shifts back to the office, where a paralegal emerges from the copy room while straightening her skirt, followed by a smiling Daniel, who is straightening his tie. When Daniel returns to his sizable office, he finds a superior waiting.
“Can I see you for a moment, Danno?”
Danno? thought Sam.
Danno is led into a conference room, where there are two other senior professionals, a man from HR, and a woman from Legal. He is invited to take a seat.
“It has been brought to our attention,” says the man from HR, “that this summer you may have been sleeping with one of the interns…”
“Two,” says the woman from Legal.
“Two of the interns.”
“As I remember,” Daniel replies with a wink, “we didn’t get much sleep.”
Cut to Daniel being led from his office by security with a cardboard box in his arms. As he passes between the cubicles, several of the analysts stand and applaud, including Daniel One.
The following montage is painfully easy for Sam to anticipate: Daniel having the engagement ring thrown in his face before his fiancée slams the door; Daniel applying for jobs he can’t get; Daniel ending his nights alone in a loft that seems glamorous but cold.
A year goes by, maybe two. Chastened, humbled, near defeat, Daniel is standing in a small office building reading the tenancy board until he finds the firm of McClintock & Co. Upstairs, he enters a waiting room with run-down furniture and an empty reception desk.
“Can I help you?” asks the sixty-year-old African American woman who emerges from an office.
“Yes,” says Daniel. “I’m interested in speaking with Mr. McClintock.”
“I’m Mr. McClintock,” the woman says sourly.
Daniel clears his throat.
“Excuse me, Ms. McClintock. I have almost a decade of experience in the field, and I was hoping you might have an opening…”
“The only opening we’ve got,” she says, pointing at the reception desk, “is the one right there.”
“I’ll take it,” says Daniel.
“All right, all right!” Sam called out. “I get it! Enough already!”
As Harry froze the projection and brought up the lights, HT turned to Sam in surprise.
“Don’t you want to see what happens next? It’s the best part!”
“Oh, I can just imagine,” said Sam. “At the foot of his wise new mentor, Daniel learns to be a better man.”
“Exactly,” said HT. “Terrific, right?”
“But why does he have to be such an asshole to become a good person?”
“It’s a classic second act, Sam. In the beginning—”
“Let me stop you right there, HT. What is it with all this classic second act business? We’re not talking about a Hollywood movie.”
“Of course we’re not talking about a Hollywood movie, Sam. We’re talking about your son’s life. But where do you think the three-act structure comes from? And why does it consistently speak to audiences? Because it’s an archetype. A universal pattern that recurs one generation after another. It’s not a coincidence that when the Sphinx poses her riddle to Oedipus, the answer is the three phases of man.”
“Oedipus! You do know that he slept with his mother and killed his father.”
“Okay,” said HT, putting up his hands. “Maybe not the best example. It goes without saying that our lives are intricate and multifaceted. But they also tend to have a larger arc that takes us from a position of youthful self-assurance through a period of setbacks, leading to a third phase in which, if we’re lucky, we’ve confronted our limitations and become deeper people ready to lead richer lives.”
“And because Daniel is someone for whom things came easy, he ends up being an asshole?”
“Not ‘ends up,’ Sam. He’s an asshole to begin with. But by the time he confronts the callousness of his own personality, he still has years—maybe half a century—in which to put his talents to more meaningful use. What a terrific third act! Are you kidding me? I would have happily been an asshole for thirty years in order to be wise for another fifty.”
Sam wasn’t sure where he should go with that admission. In the end, he just shook his head in exasperation. “I think your whole premise is crazy. Not all lives play out like that. It’s not like I’ve had to spend the last fifteen years drunk or philandering in order to prepare for my third act.”
HT, who was listening intently, opened his mouth as if to comment, then uncharacteristically kept his counsel.
“What?” asked Sam.
“Nothing.”
“Come on! What?”
HT shrugged. “You’re sort of mixing apples and oranges. That’s all.”
“Why?”
“Because for the last fifteen years, you’ve been in your third act.”
“Excuse me?”
“What can I tell you? We have your genetic makeup and your personality profile. We have your upbringing, your education, your career history, and we’ve mapped all that against our database of human outcomes. It seems very clear to us that your second act was back in college.”
“College!”
“Sometimes that’s when it happens, Sam. It’s like you told our interviewers. You had an idyllic childhood in a nice house in the suburbs and summers by the sea. But then your father quit his corporate engineering job, bought the copper mine, moved the family to Utah, and that’s when the troubles began. Wait. How did you describe him?” HT opened the green file and flipped quickly to somewhere in the middle. “No promise was ever quite kept; no bill ever quite paid; no dream ever quite realized.”
“I know what it says.”
Sensing from Sam’s tone that he had gone a step too far, HT resumed in a more sympathetic manner. “You went through an extraordinary series of experiences in your college years, Sam. While others were focused on getting drunk and getting laid, you were helping your father renegotiate with vendors, lay off employees, plead with banks, and navigate bankruptcy. And in so doing, you had to come to terms with the fact that the man you had idolized your whole life was not exactly whom you had imagined him to be. In the aftermath of that experience, you made a promise that you would never put your family in the same position. You achieved in school, advanced in a competitive field, steered clear of higher-risk opportunities, and ensured that when you had children, they would be raised on a foundation of financial stability. That this is your third act is nothing to be ashamed of, Sam. You should be incredibly proud of where you are.”