Although I came of age at a moment when politicians on both sides of the aisle were amenable to hearing each other’s ideas, we’re now at a juncture where each side seems more or less unpersuadable, unbudgeable, at least on the big stuff. The same goes for a substantial wedge of the public. We’re all rooted in our own media ecosystems, standing on different epistemological substrates, working with different understandings of what we think—know—is true.

The 2020 election was stolen; it wasn’t stolen. Immigrants are what make America great; immigrants are the problem. Inflation is going down; eggs cost too much. (They do cost too much, though for reasons that probably aren’t Joe Biden’s fault.) Abortion is an issue over which there really may be no compromise—this is life we’re arguing over. Life! What could be more fundamental than that?

I could go on.

And Democrats, just among themselves, are already arguing over why Tuesday night’s election turned out the way it did. How I loathe this part, all the gladiatorial intraparty bedlam: Racism was the main cause. Misogyny was the main cause. The intense estrangement and demoralization of the white working class, that’s what did them in—not only did they see their jobs slip away, but they were told that they were bad people when the words white supremacy entered the liberal lexicon, the mainstream media, and the vocabulary of many progressive politicians. All the talk about trans rights did them in—why do Democrats talk about gender-affirming care (and use that phrase) when parents have legitimate anxieties about their 18-year-olds who want top surgery? “Defund the police” did them in—don’t many people in dodgy or dangerous neighborhoods want cops? Elon Musk and Joe Rogan were the problem. The cultural conservatism of Hispanics was the problem. The failure to recognize illegal immigration and inflation and crime was the problem. Joe Biden’s mental decline was the problem; his not coming clean about it was the problem. The result was inevitable, because center-left parties are folding around the globe like beach chairs. Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

So the question becomes: How do we move forward without venom, without looking at strangers—and people within our own party—as potential enemies? As people who, if given their druthers, would undo the American project and destroy its values and make this country profoundly unsafe? (Which is something, by the way, that both sides believe.)

My answer would be something pretty basic, but at least achievable—a step the media can least try to take, that local leaders can partially achieve, but that we, as citizens, can most easily do ourselves: We can focus on our vulnerabilities. We can choose to talk about and pass bills to address and continually emphasize the human hardships that bind us together. We all experience grief. We all have disabled relatives in our family whom we worry about. We all need friendship and mourn the relationships that have faded away. We all get cancer or some other disease that makes us reckon with our own mortality. We get chronic illnesses; our bodies fail.

These five subjects are exactly what I’ve written about since joining The Atlantic in 2021. Suddenly, in my 50s, I found myself unconsciously drifting toward existential matters, because they started looming like smoke. What gives life meaning—this is what matters to me now. If not now, in life’s final innings, then when?

And we share so many other common struggles. Worries about our kids, if we have them. The trials of eldercare. The comforts of religion, if you’re religious, or the values and belief systems and structures that guide you, if you’re not. We all want love. We all want fulfillment. Married people all know how hard marriage is, if they’re in one, and divorced people know how hard divorce is, if they’re in the midst of that.

Most people instinctively lean into these topics.

Last year, I wrote about my intellectually disabled aunt, who had the catastrophic misfortune of being institutionalized in 1953, when she wasn’t yet 2. Along the way, I met a woman, Grace Feist, whose child had the same condition but the good fortune to be born 60-plus years later, and therefore led a far better life, a good life. The times had changed, sure, but her mother was a roaring outboard motor of determination when it came to supporting her girl, learning sign language and building what amounted to a Montessori school in her own home.

She was a devoted Christian who told me repeatedly how much she loved God; I think of the universe as a big-bang-size, multidimensional expanse of indifference. Yet I am psychotically attached to her. In fact, I fell instantly in love—she is warm and generous and funny and partial to silver flip-flops even when it’s 20 degrees out, because she’s used to the cold, having spent years freezing her ass off working security at an oil field in North Dakota, where she got to see the northern lights.

When we came around to discussing politics, she mentioned that she’d voted for Trump in 2020. I had not. But her reaction, almost immediately, was to tell me that she thought Republicans had lost their heads about masks—Was it that big a deal to wear one? Really?—and that she herself always wore one, because her youngest child had immunological issues. And I responded by telling her that I thought the Democratic policy positions on trans issues were excessive and ignored the legitimate concerns of parents, who didn’t want their adolescents making precipitous and irreversible decisions about their body when other factors could so often be at play. (To my fellow Democrats: Yes, there are kids who absolutely know they’re trans—I think of Jan Morris, who realized this at 3 or 4 while sitting under a piano—but I worry about the teenagers who suddenly come to this same conclusion when they hadn’t previously felt this way.)

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

Our impulse was to find consensus. Most people’s ideas about politics are pretty nuanced.

And that assumes they’re thinking about politics in the first place. Many people—27 percent, according to a 2023 Gallup poll—just don’t give that much of a shit. (And 41 percent follow national political news only “somewhat closely.”) It’s not part of their thinking in their everyday life. Grace and her husband, a lovely and quiet guy named Jerry, are far more preoccupied with other matters. I told them I’d just written a story about Steve Bannon, the one and only substantial feature I’ve written about planet Trump; neither had heard of the guy.

Grace and I were tied for life, in spite of our differences. Her child, my aunt, our love and  pained concern for them both—these were far deeper connections. And yes, I know:How hokey and Pollyannaish. Liberals will likely say: We have work to do. Trump is dangerous. We’re faltering on the precipice of catastrophe, if we haven’t already backwards-tumbled into the brink. And yes, I agree. We do have work to do; we should be terrified; we should be mourning the country that was. But more than half the nation doesn’t feel that way. And focusing on the shared things, the so-very-basic things, is the one thing within our control. They’re real. They matter. They’re the stuff of life.

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“If [X candidate I hate] wins this election, I will leave the country” is a sentiment we’ve heard from a few politically outspoken celebrities in recent presidential-election cycles. They never seem to follow through on the promise, though. That’s because it probably isn’t really a promise, but rather a defense against an emotion that humans truly hate: disappointment. They are soothing themselves with a strategy to neutralize anticipated feelings of impotence and frustration if the dreaded event comes to pass.

So if your preferred candidate lost on Tuesday night, you might be enduring that terrible emotion. Some people suffer from the malady so badly that they may be diagnosed with a condition popularly known as “post-election stress disorder.”

Even if all of this seems exaggerated, you probably do dread some source of disappointment in your life. Perhaps it involves your career, your education, or your romantic relationship. If so, you are very likely acting in a way that protects you from this deep and painful emotion; some research has found that disappointment can be associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. Understanding this phenomenon can help lower the fear of your own emotions, however, and help you make decisions leading to better outcomes. That may even help you avoid making a silly public promise to leave America.

[Read: What to watch if you need a distraction this week]

As two scholars described it recently in the Annual Review of Anthropology, disappointment is “the messy, friction-filled, and unsatisfying gap between lived experiences and expectations that have not come to pass.” The feeling is similar to regret, in that it involves a past event that didn’t turn out the way you had hoped. But whereas regret involves wishing you had done something differently, disappointment does not necessarily involve your decision-making agency. Because of this distinction, psychologists writing in the journal Cognition and Emotion find that regret more often leads to self-reproach, in contrast with the usual unhappiness associated with disappointment, which comes from a sense of powerlessness.

For example, you might vote for a candidate and regret it (that is, reproach yourself for doing so). But if the candidate for whom you voted loses, that can also give you a sense that you have no say over how you are governed—that’s where the powerlessness comes in.

The above research casts additional light on the psychological dimension of this difference between regret and disappointment. If a person disappoints you, that typically results in your feeling anger. But if an outcome is the disappointment, that is usually accompanied more by sadness.

Such findings tend to focus on what psychologists call “disconfirmed expectancies,” meaning a difference between what you think will or should happen and what actually happens. This involves the neuromodulator dopamine, which governs both rewards and the anticipation of rewards in our brains.

How this works: Imagine that at about 11 a.m., your stomach growls and you think about lunch. Your mind goes to a turkey sandwich you enjoyed last week from a local deli, which gives you a response from dopamine neurons to elicit anticipation and make you form a plan to go there at noon. If, when you arrive and get the sandwich, it is just what you expected, you get no additional dopamine response. But if the sandwich is even more delicious than you remembered, you will get an extra neurochemical spritz, which teaches you to come back again. But if the deli is closed, God forbid, your dopamine response will drop, making you feel mildly depressed—or, in a word, disappointed.

The mechanism no doubt evolved to teach us the most efficient way to accumulate rewards such as food and mates, and avoid wasting time and energy on fruitless activities. In ancient times, this reward system would keep you coming back again and again to a water hole where prey was easy to find. But if those animals caught on and stopped showing up, you would have a couple of disappointments and lose interest.

The most psychologically painful disappointments are those in which the hope of reward contrasts most sharply with the actual outcome. The closed deli involves a minor dopamine dip from which you’ll probably recover in minutes. But if, say, you truly expect your beloved to propose marriage and instead they skip town on you, the dopamine deficit will be a lot more severe and harder to endure—perhaps leading to a period of anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure that is characteristic of dysregulated dopamine levels and clinical depression.

Disappointment is especially severe for optimists: They predict outcomes that are above average, and much better than any negative occurrence. This means that they tend to have bigger “disconfirmed expectancies” than non-optimists. Writing in the journal Emotion in 2010, two psychologists studied how students felt before and after receiving exam results. They found that people with more optimistic expectations did not feel better than their peers beforehand, but did on average feel worse after learning their scores, because the optimists tended to be further from reality.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Schopenhauer’s advice on how to achieve great things]

Our lives are filled with uncertain outcomes, often involving the things we care about most deeply. To have any positive expectations means that disappointment is part of life. This has led some thinkers to conclude that the only answer is pessimism. The 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously made this case when he argued that “we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very much more painful.” One conclusion from that: Expect nothing good ever, or even expect the worst, and you will never be disappointed.

Then again, Schopenhauer was well known for being a miserable person, so that may not be the best strategy. Better, I believe, to maintain hope amid life’s uncertainties—but to distinguish hope from optimism. Many people use the terms almost interchangeably, but they are different. Optimism involves an element of prediction—as we just saw, expecting a good outcome in a way that may be borderline delusional. Hope involves a belief that even if a disappointing result to a situation occurs, you can do something to improve that outcome—in the words of one team of researchers on the subject, “having the will and finding the way.” Because of this, as I have written, hope is far superior to optimism where happiness is concerned.

Hope does not require that you make any prediction at all about what might happen. It simply asks that you believe that whatever happens, you will have the ability to make circumstances better and you can give some thought to what that action might be.

In an odd way, this is halfway what people are doing when they announce a plan to leave America if the wrong candidate wins the election. But the contemplated action—leaving home and going into exile—is foolish and extreme; much better would be to say, “If the bad guy wins, I will be disappointed, but regardless of the disappointment, I will work as much as I can to make things around me better.” The same is true for other letdowns in life. If you’re yearning for a big promotion, don’t predict whether you will or won’t get it. Just be honest with yourself that you hope for the reward, and think logically about what constructive action you can take if, in fact, you are passed over.

In addition, because disappointment is part of the useful neurobiological learning process that you’ve inherited for your evolutionary fitness, look for the valuable lessons of a setback. The psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that when we are disappointed, we can actually choose between bitterness and wisdom—the latter being “the comforter in all psychic suffering.”

The problem with the leave-the-country approach is that it succumbs to bitterness instead of looking to learn. The same goes for a disappointment such as a bad breakup. The bitter response is “I’ll never date again.” A wise response is to figure out how to avoid getting entangled in future with a person who shares your ex’s problematic traits (that jerk).

[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]

I wrote this column to soothe anyone who might be suffering from postelection disappointment, and to provide a better way to cope. But perhaps you aren’t disappointed: Maybe your candidate won, and you’re elated right now. That can also be an opportunity for wisdom—if you choose to take it.

Today you taste victory, but remember: Defeat is just around the corner, because that’s how life works. Reflect on this truth, and take the opportunity to show some grace to the neighbors and family members whose candidate lost and who are disappointed—because they’re feeling today the way you will surely feel tomorrow. Think of this as a chance to time travel, and bring a bit of kindness to comfort your future disappointed self.