📺️ Why toxic positivity is making us miserable
When I got cancer, people often told me that everything happens for a reason, and what they meant was that I will learn important lessons that will eventually enrich my life if it doesn’t kill me. But some things happen for no good reason. Sometimes in life we have to step up to the edge of the great mystery and in the face of mystery we can’t always say, we will know why.
If we don’t have a wider range than a toxic positivity, we threaten to stigmatize negative emotions and then eventually start to pathologize our own humanity.
📺️ Why Doing Nothing Feels Illegal Now
…the thing is you’re probably not that bad at focusing. It’s just that you’ve been psychologically waterboarded by notifications since approximately 2009…
Schopenhauer had this observation that human beings basically oscillate perpetually between desire and boredom. And that when we’re not frantically chasing something, we are miserable from the wanting.
But then when we actually finally get the thing, we’re almost immediately bored and then we start reaching for the next thing. And well, his conclusion was basically that most of human activity is just like an elaborate boredom avoidance process. Which you might see as a pretty dark perspective…but…have you been on the internet lately?
What Schopenhauer said tracks and I think about Hirayama in that context because he’s essentially doing the thing that Schopenhauer identified as the hardest thing. He stepped off the oscillation somehow and he didn’t do it because he got everything he wanted. He just stopped the chasing. And…I think the thing that makes his life look so strange to most people is his contentment…in spite of the toilet cleaning.
We don’t really have a framework for that anymore because in our culture, contentment reads as a sort of failure or delusion. And the gap, you know, the one that the algorithm depends on, contentment closes that gap. And a closed gap is bad for business.
So instead we pathologize it and we call it giving up, you know, lack of ambition and all that. And Hirayama doesn’t seem particularly impressed with any of that, which already makes him more psychologically stable than most of the internet in my opinion.