Sometimes I am a lake
That behaves as though I were a river
But now and then I can look at my arms and stare at them like foreign objects
And I can feel a pain that isn’t really there
And then if I’m lucky I may shed some tears
And this whole process is beautiful to me, if I could refrain from its simile
I will do my best
And sometimes I can stare at a guitar fretboard and notice the imperfections of the metal,
and sometimes I can feel the weight of my head, straining to tip forward into my lap wanting to rest.
It’s in these moments sudden fantasies strike me as possibilities I can rush toward like rapids.
I’d like to buy land and live on it alone in privacy
and lose my mind,
my friend Jordan lost his mind, diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Or maybe he found it, and that’s what drove him mad.
Either way, Im behaving like a river again.
Somedays, not all, this is what I see
Someone once told me, “Drew, you think too much.” Of course, we’ve all heard it many times, from Michelangelo Antonioni’s reflection on the actor, claiming the intelligent thinking actor is not the best actor, but the instinctive one, to the overly rationalistic articles such as this from the Economist. Spontaneity, instinct, those impulses rooted in an act, rather than in thought, are often more reliable than the thoughts we encounter in our daily lives, and perhaps more bearable. For many of us, these daily thoughts seem to take on a remarkably unhappy, and neurotic character, something which is not wholly recent or novel in the human experience, but is increasingly an object of our attention through mindfulness programs and mental health initiatives.
Brian Leiter, a professor of philosophy who specializes in Nietzsche wrote of Nietzsche’s point of view on the general experience with self regard, “Self-reverence — to revere and respect oneself as one might a god — is no small achievement, as the proliferation of “self-help” programs and pop psychology slogans like “I’m OK, you’re OK” would suggest. Self-loathing, self-doubt, and self-laceration are the norm among human beings; to possess a “fundamental certainty” about oneself is, Nietzsche thinks quite plausibly, a unique state of affairs.”
Such an experience is still a “unique state of affairs.” as Brian Leiter points out, the commercialization and permeation of self-care, self-help, and autodidactic new age spirituality into nearly every realm, is less an ode to our mental success since Nietzsche’s statement than a sign of our continuing struggle. Robert Pirsig wrote in a subtle passing sentiment in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that those who fanatically support a given issue or point of view are working from a deeper insecurity to convince themselves of its veracity, their fanaticism is an overcompensation stemming from a lack of faith in their own claims. I am no stranger to either the self-lacerating thoughts, nor the overcompensation. What follows is neither, rather, it is an honest, non declarative, and perhaps inconsistent appraisal of sadness.
I suggest, that in lieu of better material well-being than ever before in the developed world, we are still sad, still suffering, no matter how petty the reasons may be, we live in a depressed time, and the ever growing spiritual grift and optimism, though sincere it may be, is a sign, contrary to Steven Pinker’s assertions that we are better off today than ever before, that we are not.
On Being Sad
There is a sadness, not an unhappy kind, not an adolescent kind, but perhaps a trivial kind, which in brief moments I can cling to. It gives me something nothing else can – a sort of selfhood, a sort of dignity wrestled away from nothingness, a sort of valor, the valor of sadness.
There is a certain phenomenon, expedited by social media, in which we are growing increasingly immersed in self care grammar, veneers of spiritual awakening, Dionysian festivals (these can sometimes be evidence of sincere joy), and other introspective routines the existence of which points to a deep collective depression and borderline ego worship. It’s a depression that sinks in when one is deprived of the overall plot, the argument of a life, when the freedom to “become oneself” (that is, to perfect ones ego) becomes a universal mandate and whose dignity comes from self fulfillment, rather than the “being self” whose dignity originates in a healthy relationship with the community, or, in a spiritual sense, God. I am not here to say it shouldn’t be this way, or that the above phenomenon are not interesting, sincere, or helpful. The primary issue however, is when the above phenomenon position us against a sadness that is without a doubt really there, a feeling that might be more an antidote to depression than it’s cousin.
And yet I don’t find depression necessarily needs an antidote. Depression doesn’t belong to an individual as much as it belongs to a landscape, or a moment in time, and so a sincere intimacy with it is not other than an intimacy with the particular landscape or the particular time. Contrary to a radical empiricism, we are immersed in a time of radical self centered idealism, in which we believe the “self” must be realized, and indeed can be realized, and any such sadness or depression is a symptom of the unrealized self, and not the world in which it must relate. And of course the contemporary landscape is full of many unpleasant moments and environments, therefore many of our attempts at a self realization are in vain, our mindfulness in this sense leads us into sadness. And there are many signs, beyond Pew research, that sadness and suffering are at large, and of course have been since the beginning of time. But today the character of our sadness is unique, stemming from different distant causes, what can appear to be more trivial reasons when compared to the past in which there was much less material abundance.
Optimism
It was true when Nietzsche wrote that scientific optimism is a sign of suffering. It is true when Hannah Arendt wrote that scientific optimism is a sign of alienation. And our scientific optimism has never been stronger than it is today. And what are we suffering from and so alienated from that we would spend millions to stay alive for two more weeks, that we would spend billions to escape the planet, that we would spend so much time escaping the temporal and spacial layout of our lives with movies and television and video games?
Is it our “self” our “world” that we are alienated from? Or perhaps, it’s our suffering itself. As mentioned , new age spirituality, syncretism, self-care, and self-growth vocabulary whose goals are to minimize suffering on earth are increasingly common in the cultural milieu. And it’s best to combat suffering with these mental regimes no? But these sometimes shallow attempts to overcome suffering don’t but widen the gap between us and our suffering. There is more suffering where we lose sight of our suffering, where the gulf between us and our suffering grows, we are less familiar, and less equipped to handle it, and so we suffer more, but in a different sort of way, characteristic of the apathetic depression that grips many of us today. The gap, and not the suffering itself, becomes the issue. And we’ve done a lot more to widen that gap than self care routines, which are more symptoms of the gap than wideners of it.
We’ve primarily widened the gulf between us and our suffering by offloading it onto the developing world through supply chain and economic war games, centralizing it under bureaucratic tutelage, and most recently, where this commerce of self help and management theory comes in, covering it up with clever mental heuristics or temporary and possibly pseudo-expansions of consciousness. This is all what might be called alienated suffering, or suffering from the alienation from suffering, and it could drive us to seek out the acute suffering of others in mass media and in the world at large as we grow evermore uncomfortable with our own sadness. From news junkies to nihilists, at the same rate we consume self-care commerce, we are what Lauren Berlant called, “addicted to having our heart strings pulled.”
This type of alienated suffering is a modern phenomenon. If there truly is a hallmark of modernity, one that separates it from all other ages, it is the alienation of the mass human from those aspects of the world which support his existence, the suffering necessary to keep him alive. The production of food water and shelter don’t belong to the mass person. The productions of society have grown distant to the mass person, as communities have grown larger and more centralized, we’ve become more alienated from the decisions which influence them. And now, perhaps the final nail and most recent one in the coffin built of our alienation is our intelectual and public alienation. From the collapse of the public and private realm into the social, our intellect is seized for use in labor rather than for a life work, for the construction of a social personae rather than a public personhood. It’s this final nail which we see most recently. Disconnected now from even our intellectual right to suffer, spectacular forces would rather we submerge our intellect into self-care and self-growth regimes in order that we may stay competitive with rising digital productivity, more efficiently direct our energies, and find “happiness” and “comfortability” in its wake only so that said happiness may make us better at our job.
So I cling to my sadness no matter how trivial, because it’s a sadness which belonged to me before I was born, dating back centuries, to a time when I knew for sure that God existed, that my mules would labor and my chickens would die for me to live, that a tree would spend half my life growing to be cut down for a month of heat, that I could exercise some political agency beyond the minor cast of a vote, that I could labor without needing to reprogram my intellectual vacancies and subtle personality faults, when I could be close with my sadness rather than far away from it. Because however we look at it, this sadness is still there, hidden behind much more, but it’s still there.
And yet, perhaps there’s something else at work too, something more timeless. Returning to Michelangelo Antonioni who spoke of progress in one of his few televised interviews, or for a more neutral term, simply, change, “…for me the industrial world represents progress, one can’t really be against progress, in any case there’d be no point. There’s something inexorable about progress. Some suffer horribly, and some adapt. There are those who can’t adapt, so they just fall apart.” Perhaps I belong to a long list of those who can’t adapt, who are falling apart, in either case, I’ll choose the intimacy of my crumbling over the estrangement of a happy charade.
gregorykelsh 