These small acts of defiance were, in the grand scheme of things, relatively minor. But they were psychologically powerful because the subversives saw the rebellions as evidence that they were still in control of their own lives. The subversives walked, on average, about twice as much as other nursing home residents. They ate about a third more. They were better at complying with doctors’ orders, taking their medications, visiting the gym, and maintaining relationships with family and friends. These residents had arrived at the nursing homes with just as many health problems as their peers, but once inside, they lived longer, reported higher levels of happiness, and were far more active and intellectually engaged.
“It’s the difference between making decisions that prove to yourself that you’re still in charge of your life, versus falling into a mindset where you’re just waiting to die,” said Rosalie Kane, a gerontologist at the University of Minnesota. “It doesn’t really matter if you eat cake or not. But if you refuse to eat their cake, you’re demonstrating to yourself that you’re still in charge.” The subversives thrived because they knew how to take control, the same way that Quintanilla’s troop learned to subversively cross a pit during the Crucible by deciding, on their own, how to interpret the rules.
The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are decisions that do two things: They convince us we’re in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning. Choosing to climb a mountain can become an articulation of love for a daughter. Deciding to stage a nursing home insurrection can become proof that you’re still alive. An internal locus of control emerges when we develop a mental habit of transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority over our lives.
Quintanilla finished boot camp in 2010 and served in the Corps for three years. He then left. He was finally ready, he felt, for real life. He got another job, but the lack of camaraderie among his colleagues was disappointing. No one seemed motivated to excel. So in 2015, he reenlisted. “I missed that constant reminder that I can do anything,” he told me. “I missed people pushing me to choose a better me.”
V.
Viola Philippe, the wife of the onetime auto parts tycoon of Louisiana, was something of an expert on motivation herself before she and Robert flew to South America. She had been born with albinism—her body did not produce the enzyme tyrosinase, critical in the production of melanin—and as a result, her skin, hair, and eyes contained no pigment, and her eyesight was poor. She was legally blind, and could read only by putting her face very close to a page and using a magnifying glass. “You have never met a more determined person, though,” her daughter, Roxann, told me. “She could do anything.”
When Viola was a girl, the school district had tried to put her into remedial classes despite the fact that it was her eyes, not her brain, that had problems. But she refused to leave the classroom where her friends sat. She stayed in that room until administrators relented. After she graduated, she went to Louisiana State University and told the school she expected them to provide someone to read textbooks to her aloud. The school complied. During her sophomore year, she met Robert, who soon dropped out to start washing and greasing cars for a local Ford dealer. He encouraged her to quit school, as well. She politely declined and got her degree. They were married in December 1950, four months after she graduated.
They had six children in rapid succession, and while Robert built his empire, Viola ran the household. There were morning meetings and charts showing what each child had to accomplish each day. There were Friday night check-ins, during which everyone laid out their goals for the coming week. “They were like two peas in a pod, both totally driven,” said Roxann. “Mom refused to let her disabilities stop her. I think that’s why it was so hard for her when Dad changed.”
When Robert’s apathy took hold, Viola initially focused her energy on caring for him. She hired nurses to help him exercise, and worked with his brother to form a committee to oversee and then sell off Robert’s companies. After a while, however, she ran out of things to do. She had married a bon vivant, a man so full of life that it was hard to go to the grocery store because he constantly stopped to chat with everyone. Now Robert sat in a chair in front of the television all day. Viola was miserable. “He didn’t speak to me,” she told a courtroom when the family sued for insurance money they felt owed because of Robert’s neurological injuries. “He wasn’t—it didn’t seem like he was interested in anything I did. You know, I would fix his meals and I was more or less a caretaker. I guess you would call me a caretaker.”
For a few years, she felt sorry for herself. Then she became angry. Then busy. If Robert wasn’t going to show any motivation to reclaim his life, then she would force him to get moving again. She would make him engage. She began by asking him ceaseless questions. When she made lunch, she would pepper him with choices. Sandwich or soup? Lettuce or tomato? Ham or turkey? What about mayonnaise? Ice water or juice? She didn’t really mean anything by it at first. She was just frustrated and wanted to make him speak.
But then, after a few months of harassing him, Viola found that whenever Robert was pressured into making decisions, he seemed to come out of his shell a little bit. He would banter with her for a few moments, or tell her about a program he had been watching. One night, after she had forced him to make a dozen choices about what he was going to eat and which table they should sit at and what music to listen to, he began talking at length, reminding her of a funny story from after they had gotten married, when they had locked themselves out of the house in a rainstorm. He told the story in an offhand way, and chuckled as he recalled trying to jimmy a window. It was the first time Viola had heard him laugh in years. For a few minutes, it was like the old Robert was back. Then he faced the TV and went silent again.
Viola continued her campaign, and over time, more and more of the old Robert emerged. Viola congratulated, cajoled, and rewarded him whenever he seemed, for a moment, like his former self. When he went back to Dr. Strub, the neurologist in New Orleans, for his annual checkup seven years after the trip to South America, the doctor could see the difference. “He was saying hello to the nurses, and asking them about their kids,” Dr. Strub said. “He would initiate conversations with me, ask about my hobbies. He had opinions on the route they should drive to get home. It was stuff you wouldn’t have noticed with anyone else, but with him, it was like someone was turning on the lights again.”
As neurologists have studied how motivation functions within our brains, they’ve become increasingly convinced that people like Robert don’t lose their drive because they’ve lost the capacity for self-motivation. Rather, their apathy is due to an emotional dysfunction. One of the things Habib, the French researcher, noticed about all the people he studied was that they shared an odd emotional detachment. One apathetic woman told him she had hardly reacted when her father died. A man said he hadn’t felt the urge to hug his wife or children since the passivity had taken hold. When Habib asked patients if they felt sad about how much their lives had changed, they all said no. They didn’t feel anything.
Neurologists have suggested that this emotional numbness is why some people feel no motivation. Among Habib’s patients, the injuries in their striata prevented them from feeling the sense of reward that comes from taking control. Their motivation went dormant because they had forgotten how good it feels to make a choice. In other situations, it’s that people have never learned what it feels like to be self-determined, because they have grown up in a neighborhood that seems to offer so few choices or they have forgotten the rewards of autonomy since they’ve moved into a nursing home.