Telling You What to Feel

The last part of replying to @jadagul from here.

And this brings us to what I’m actually trying to accomplish when I get into these conversations. You write:

I believe that most people writing thousands of words about politics on tumblr dot com are actually deeply unhappy, and their attempt to change the political Discourse is reflective of a belief that things are not working and a compulsion to try to fix them.

I’m coming at this from a slightly different position: I am happy. But I have friends, and some of them are unhappy. (And in general I like most people, and we certainly agree that there are unhappy people out there somewhere). So my “project”, to be a bit grandiose about it, is to try to help other people be as happy as I am.

But there are (at least) two ways to become happier. One is to remove problems or external factors that are making you unhappy; one is to develop ways to be happier under the circumstances you face. (Compare: sometimes the best way to fix depression is to fix the problem that’s making you depressed; sometimes the best way is therapy and meds).

In this way I see us working on opposite ends of the problem–but also working in many ways at cross-purposes. I read you as very often arguing that the current system is deeply, maybe irredeemably fucked up. And that nearly the only possible response to it is to be unhappy and upset, and the reasonable response is to try to replace the system with something drastically different.

And I object to this two different ways. The boring one is that I think the current system is both pretty good and surprisingly good–in that it’s better than pretty much anything else we’ve had, and drastic changes are very likely to be very bad. So I’m deeply skeptical of all sorts of radicalism.

My relevant objection is that you’re telling people that being upset and unhappy is a reasonable and perhaps inevitable response to the world. And this is at cross purposes with my evangelical “go ahead and choose to be happy!” message. Things are actually pretty good, they’re getting better all the time, relax, enjoy your life. Don’t worry about what you “should” do.

And I realize–at least intellectually–that “just be happy” isn’t an instruction that most people can follow easily. (I had a bunchof interesting discussions about this a couple years back). But it’s still something people can move closer to.

A lot of my friends, and a lot of people I talk to on here, seem either to believe they “should” be unhappy–because they don’t deserve to be happy, or they haven’t earned it, or because other people are unhappy, or because unhappiness is the “rational” response to circumstances–or to have spent a lot of time feeling that way and to have spent a lot of time fighting off that implicit assumption.

I know you don’t actually believe that people should be unhappy. You want to make people happy. But the “everyone is alienated” narrative can be, and is, interpreted as arguign that anyone who thinks they’re happy are only fooling themselves. So if you think you’re happy, then stop.

The point of my blogging on these topics is to push back on that. Don’t worry. Be happy.

“What do I want people who read me to feel” is quite an intimidating question! I recommend most bloggers try to grapple with it at least once.

Fortunately this blog is largely not concerned with “what people feel” but rather telling the truth. I wish to practice kindness and compassion, but I can’t predict or control how people will respond to my words. I’m sure we’ve all had experiences where we really wanted someone to like us, or be comforted by us, or know how much we care about them, but no matter what words we used they would be interpreted in other ways and we would frustratingly end up even more alienated from them than we were to begin with. It’s easy to become obsessive about balancing the emotional reactions of all possible readers, which can lead to a deadlock where you shouldn’t say anything at all (or an explosion of your own repressed rage.)

I avoid that by just trying to tell the truth, and seeing what happens. 

If you are going to be angry, I can’t stop you nor do I feel any right to. But I would want you to be angry at the correct target. That fedora-wearing-youtuber or that purple-haired-twitter account is not the source of your misery, and I will mock the ideology that says they are.

Which may be why it seems I want people to be so angry at capitalism, or other systems that keep us enslaved. I don’t think that outrage is the necessary response, but if you are hurt and angry, then at least directing it against a system you can try to fix is more psychologically healthy than blaming a person or a group of people.

(I also spend time expressing understanding for suffering. As I said, I assume most of us are on tumblr because we’re very upset at the world. I do not think people lie about their emotions or fear - even your friend who misses her orange juice. I want to assure them that I really do understand and believe in their pain, I don’t think it’s “false” or “made up” or even, gasp, “performative.” I just think dealing with it requires an understanding of the true source of that pain. Hence the importance of understanding things like the Big Other, or ideology, or the futility of trying to control a chaotic world.)

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I’m not telling anyone to be happy.

If you were asking for my advice on “okay I want to be happy, how do I do that?” I might have some different suggestions.

• Embrace a nihilistic sense of responsibility. When you understand that you can’t control anything, especially the circumstances you find yourself in, that means you can no longer escape blame for your actions and thoughts (I’m only doing this because my job/friends/parents/the country wants me to, etc etc). They are fundamentally your choice and yours alone. This might sound scary but it’s actually incredibly freeing.

Our fundamental delusion today is not to believe in what is only a fiction, to take fictions too seriously. It’s, on the contrary, not to take fictions seriously enough. You think it’s just a game? It’s reality. It’s more real than it appears to you. For example, people who play video games, they adopt a screen persona of a sadist, rapist, whatever. The idea is, in reality I’m a weak person, so in order to supplement my real life weakness, I adopt the false image of a strong, sexually promiscuous person, and so on and so on. So this would be the naïve reading… But what if we read it in the opposite way? That this strong, brutal rapist, whatever, identity is my true self. In the sense that this is the psychic truth of myself and that in real life, because of social constraints and so on, I’m not able to enact it. So that, precisely because I think it’s only a game, it’s only a persona, a self-image I adopt in virtual space, I can be there much more truthful. I can enact there an identity which is much closer to my true self. 

Zizek

• If you care about other people and want them to value you, then work on that directly. Do not try to achieve things (fame, a good job, good looks) and then be valued for those. Find or build a trusted community where people do not abandon or denigrate each other based on changes in social status. Escape the rat race, as it were.
• Express yourself through art and create things that are great, in order to believe you are a great person. @raggedjackscarlet and @hotelconcierge talk about this approach a lot, and although I don’t agree with a lot of their Discourse, they do seem happier than typical ideologues.
• But mostly, just avoid the ideological traps that allow some Evil Other (Trumpistas, that judgy gossip at work, the people at church, videogame journalists.) to have control over your happiness.