Who Is Responsible For Happy?

Chuseok is upon us here in South Korea. The biggest holiday of the year when Koreans have the responsibility of subjecting themselves to nightmarish traffic jams to meet in agreed upon rural locations to tend ancestral graves, and practice many other traditional traditions. It's always seemed a bit ironic, at least to me, that the modern problem of traffic precedes the old, not to say antiquated Chuseok responsibilities. Like the charye or tea ceremony or the seongmyo or the cleaning of the grave sites and offering of food, wine and bows, two forms of ancestor worship lots of Koreans engage in. I bring this up for a couple of reasons. To give the reader an idea of what is happening now, and my future self when I feel nostalgic and look back on this blog, and because this post is going to be partially about "responsibility." 

It may not be in the way you think. I've written before about how I have no truck with the hyperpositive and I've written about how I loathe even more those con artists, life coaches and snake oil salespeople who seem to be multiplying almost as fast as their slick, well-oiled B.S. holes can regurgitate slogans like, "Your happiness is your responsibility." If I were vulnerable to their cereal box psychology, I suppose I could take "responsibility" for the massive irritant in my life that they represent and just force myself to ignore them and refuse to let them steal my joy. Problem is, constant positivity is a form of escape and I prefer to live in a world where I acknowledge the "metric" of reality, not depend on the "metric" of fantasy or make believe. I refuse to accept toxic positivity as a panacea for all life's ills. I feel more and more outnumbered in that life choice. Am I wrong?

I guess I'm seeing it a lot in the job market right now in which businesses are trying to slowly get back to work as people receive their Covid vaccines. Businesses never want to lose, and usually don't if they can pass the losses on to customers and/or workers. Customers post-Covid are going to have to do some very toxically positive self-placating to pay the prices we'll be charged to "help business recover from Covid." And workers are going to have to delude themselves into believing that shittier jobs than ever are acceptable for the same reason. I think people might be willing to accept these inevitable results of a pandemic in a capitalist world IF there weren't so many jackholes saying that emergency Covid relief benefits have made people lazy. "People have lost their work ethic." "There are plenty of jobs out there, people just won't take them." Despite a million articles like this one. 

Stories like the above represent, or at least they should, a wake-up call to the necessity, nay, the urgency to do something about one of the worst symptoms of capitalism whereby prices and profits skyrocket while wages stagnate. The only person upon whom this gradual slide into wage slavery can be perpetrated is one well trained in explaining it away with a smile. 

I guess this sort of thing wouldn't be able to rot my socks so efficiently if I weren't so well trained in recognizing the sophistry, rhetoric and bullshittery that is used when trying to foist this crap upon us, the general public. We are in an instant position of weakness because we all WANT to be happy, so we actually make it easier for people to convince us that we have the power to make ourselves happy. It's all just in the way we perceive our lots in life. The fact that my lot in life is better than many, but not nearly as good as it could or should be, is one reason I am here to tell you that this type of reasoning is only valid to a point. After that point it becomes the tin-eared, out of touch ramblings of the privileged. And with the availability of living wage jobs on the steady decrease due to inflation, the demise of labour unions, and globalization to name a few causes of the dilemma, it doesn't help much to tell a person who can't even pay the rent or put food on the table even though he/she is working two jobs that their unhappiness is not their fault, but it IS their responsibility. 

I read the book "The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck" by Mark Manson and in it he tells a lot of good stories and makes some great points. But oddly, after a chapter decrying the "well at least" people who always try to be happy with the least, saying that denying negative emotions leads to worse negativity and emotional dysfunction, he launches into the reverse Uncle Ben philosophy. Everybody knows the line from Spiderman when Uncle Ben says, "With great power comes great responsibility." Well, Manson decided to reverse that and write a chapter explaining how with great responsibility comes great power. We have the power to make our lives happy if we take responsibility for our sorrows essentially. This was in successive chapters for crying out loud!!!

He gives the infuriating example of a man who lost his son in a car accident and called him an asshole for expressing in a blog post that he might be responsible for the pain he felt at his son's death. I agree with the man who lost his son. Manson goes on in the book to describe that how the man reacted to his son's death was his own choice. Manson describes how he wanted to reply to this man and angrily tell him that his comment was missing the point and that just because he hadn't lost a son doesn't mean he hasn't felt pain. But he didn't. He writes proudly of how he just told the man he was sorry for his loss, then applied his OWN advice to his own situation and took responsibility for staying happy and not fighting with this man. Then fucked up his wise decision by writing the whole story in his book. I guess because he gave too much of a fuck? Not subtly or artistically either.

He should have stuck with his previous chapter's advice. Only one thing can heal a wound like that and that is time. We all have differing grief recovery schedules. But to try taking responsibility and forcing the grief out of yourself unnaturally, that's escapism and it could lead to emotional dysfunction. He talks about one of his relationships in the book too and as gag reflex inducing as that is, I actually related to that better since I've never lost a son either. 

He caught his girlfriend cheating and they broke up. He says he blamed her for a long time until he finally took responsibility for his sadness and got on with life and dating. I feel like maybe he didn't give time enough of the credit. I had a breakup that I moped about for a long time too. But it was when I was young and stupid. Before I learned of Aristotle, syllogisms and the art of mindfuckery. The saying goes that love is for the young. I think they should add "foolish" to that. I was young and foolish and I was in love. Fooled around and fell in love... as it were. What got me out of my funk after breaking up with my girlfriend was the realization that I was largely deluding myself! The ability to overlook warning signs or fault in a relationship can be what keeps successful relationships successful. But it was what made me realize that while in the relationship, I wasn't as happy as I was forcing myself to believe, just as I wasn't as miserable as I was conning myself into believing I was when it was over. What I learned with time was love was self-delusional and so was my blubbering over lost love. It was awesome while I thought I was in love, but it was also largely a complex mental construct of what I had learned from songs and movies I enjoyed while I was a kid. With that knowledge, or dare I say wisdom, it's unlikely to ever happen again. Love is for the young. 

In my "mourning" period you'd better believe I had people trying to sell the same garbage that I'm talking about here. Join our group, convert to our way of thinking, become a member of our church, open your mind to our philosophy, sign up for our cult, I'm sure the "responsibility" ploy was in there somewhere. But I wasn't buying. It would have just been trading self-delusion for being conned by someone else. A step down intellectually, I thought. No, by then I had developed a healthy skepticism. I had grown up.

ANOTHER unpopular opinion among the hyperpositive. I'm gonna be hit at the party tomorrow. I'm going out, which we're not supposed to do during Covid Chuseok, but there will probably only be a handful of folks there, all vaxed and we'll be outdoors. Hopefully none of my opinions espousing harsh reality will seem too buzz killing to the partiers who don't know me. I sometimes feel outnumbered. If only I could master the subtle art of not giving a fuck about that. It's probably easier than mastering the art of taking JOY in the sufferings of the world. It's such a hard thing to do! 

Some of you might be thinking right now that taking joy in suffering sounds an awful lot like taking responsibility for your suffering. It DOES too! But I think the difference is how. If you try to hide from your problems and pain, and fake like you're happy, it's that toxic positivity. I'm working on making my life a happy one that includes, and actually REQUIRES suffering. How can we know happiness without suffering? I have actually been known to subconsciously set myself up for suffering from time to time. Bad choices are the spice of life! Tomorrow might be the next...