nemorathwald (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nemorathwald) wrote2022-02-13 04:50 pm
nemorathwald) wrote2022-02-13 04:50 pm
My Dissatisfaction Practice
tldr: Maintaining dissatisfaction on the long-term is a skill. If you are constantly forced to pretend to want things, you risk acclimating, so you need to remain attuned to your real feelings. This essay considers whether I inappropriately discount the meaningfulness of things, or correctly identify meaningfulness only where it really exists. How to have serenity without complacency.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
- "Harlem", by Langston Hughes
The question readers need to ask themselves in the Nihilism section is not "am I a Nihilist", because it's a thing you do, not a thing you are. Instead the question is "in any given specific situation, does there exist meaningfulness which I am inappropriately discounting?" That's the most common way in which I try to apply what I learned from the book.
Nihilism is often defined by eternalists as denying the meaning of their pet eternalism. In day-to-day life, without reference to anything written in a philosophy department, the most common way for nihilism to come to mind is to disagree about meaning and be suspected of nihilism by others. So, in each such disagreement, I ask myself two questions:
Is this a situation where eternalists see straw-nihilists whenever someone denies whatever meaning the eternalists fixated?
Is this a situation where nihilists look at something that someone cares about, and dismiss it by fixating the nebulosity in it, without asking the antidote question "is there actually some pattern of meaningfulness here?"
Sometimes it could be both simultaneously.
"But Matt, non-conformists are never really non-conformist, because they conform to each other." Yes, if mainstream-vs-indie is a pattern, you just identified the nebulosity in it, granted. But the pattern is real too. Each time you make a life decision, it's mainstream if you maximize how many people in your society will understand your decision without you explaining it. If explaining your decisions is uncomfortable to you, you're a mainstream person.
My communities are very indie. A lot of participants in, let's say, polyamorous communities (having mentioned soly poly, let's stick with polyamory as an example) are still deeply socially-embedded with those in the monogamous mainstream-- particularly their families of origin. And so one of the main topics of discussion in polyamory groups is complaining about having the same conversation over and over with people in their life. "Have you reached this escalator milestone yet?" the mainstream asks the indie. "No? How about this other milestone, or this one, or that one?"
No one asks me those questions, because I've set up my life to almost never have to field those questions. A big part of how I did that, was rejecting more-or-less-all meaningfulness, in career, workplace friendships, spirituality, marriage, monogamy, family, pets, and parenting, among many other things. And now nobody expresses confusion any more, because either they get me, or they don't expect to understand.
I base most life choices on a criteria: "An association only has meaning to the degree that participants can walk away from it at any time without much in the way of consequences-- outside of losing the direct benefit of the association itself." If walking away means they would suffer severe consequences, that changes the meaning of the association-- the meaning of staying changes into "to avoid consequences."
I call it "landing the plane": you don't just grab a parachute and bail out to leave me holding the bag to honor the commitments we made together, but. But. You can land the plane and get off. External entanglements seem, to me, to act as a poison to meaningfulness.
Decide for yourself whether that's nihilizing. I'm open to feedback in the comments.
Employment is one of the world's biggest eternalisms, in my view. It is the place where I experience the most pain about this, because I've mostly escaped the other eternalisms and comfortably accepted the limits that placed on me. I've gotten enormous fulfillment from work I've done voluntarily, and by comparison, how I pay the bills has very little to do with my identity. That has come with a great deal of sacrifice. But, if I completely turn my back on having a career, that decision would destroy all my relationships through poverty, and I would end up homeless. That would be a bridge too far, even for me. And so employment is the last foothold of the mainstream in my life.
I describe employment as a hostage situation, marriage as a mexican standoff, and parenting as serving as an incubation husk from which my future enemy will emerge, like an Alien bursting from my chest cavity and complaining to its therapist that I never took an interest in it. Am I nihilizing? Am I fixating nebulosity? Before I read Chapman's work I never thought about it that way.
I'm careful when to burst out into one of my lectures about these topics. This life strategy places a lot of social limits on me, as I'm sure you can imagine. For example, I go through conversations with my chosen loved ones, pretending to care about things they are telling me about, that I have already told them I find meaningless. (Of course I say it's meaningless "for me", not "for them", Sartre Kierkegaard Camus argle bargle.) My lover's children. My friend's career ambitions. My ex-wife's Buddhism. My partner's marriage. My roommate's dogs. I tell them my policy: my policy is that I let it be established what I think about things, once. And then I don't belabor it further, unless they want to talk about my views again. To be in their lives, the price of admission which I accept that I must pay is to quietly listen to them talk about things I find boring or (occasionally) actively harmful, and I am agreeable and congenial about it. And of course, the price of admission they must pay to me, is that they never ask me "Have you reached this escalator milestone yet?"
If you know me, you're familiar with me embracing things very enthusiastically. I'm known for how much passion shines through when you talk to me, and that's the main way I see myself. The bigger picture is all the "NO". No kids, marriage, pets, church. All of this is, in my view, the "no" that allows space for my "yes" to be a big "yes".
One thing I feel very excited about is the topic of "How To Become Interested In Things You Are Not Interested In". For years, I have wanted to give that talk at Penguicon, a convention which is a ground zero for becoming interested in things. But I have never found adequate conclusions about it. Studying how to get out of nihilism into the complete stance seems like just the thing.
Stoicism: Stay at the bar and pretend to socialize with co-workers because *that's your job*.
Miserabilism: Stand up and walk out at precisely 5:30 because everything is bullshit.
Nihilism: Stand up and walk out at precisely 5:30 because everything is meaningless. Or stay because everything is meaningless.
Dissatisfaction practice: Stand up and walk out at precisely 5:30 because my podcast needs my attention, and I deem it to have meaningfulness.
Stoicism vs miserabilism might be a dimension of meaningness, similiar to reasonable respectability vs romanticized rebellion. (But of course, because dimensions of meaningness are a pattern, they are as nebulous as everything else.)
There is something on which I'm not in alignment with stoicism. The stoic philosopher Zeno used the thought experiment of a dog tied to a cart. Zeno said that the dog would be happier to relax and follow the cart, than to resist and suffer. After all, if the dog broke free and ran off, it would die of exposure and starvation. Personally, I have a lot of respect for pets who insist on running away and die in the wild.
Stoics might mistake this for something akin to miserabilism, but I draw a distinction between serenity and complacency. Complacency prevents disappointed feelings. I'd rather keep the disappointed feelings but get rid of disappointed expectations.
In order to improve my situation on the long term, it's necessary to remain dissatisfied. Long-term dissatisfaction is a skill. The problem is that we sometimes become the person who we are pretending to be. In the workplace, we are required to pretend for decades. In order to keep focused on what brings us joy and fulfillment on evenings and weekends, then we need to counter the process of acclimation, with something which is the opposite of a gratitude practice. Gratitude practice is great. I love gratitude practice! But I also don't want toxic positivity. Toward this end, I maintain a practice to try to keep myself uncomfortable on a regular basis, constantly searching for solutions which might not exist, even if it takes years, or decades, or never. Stoics would probably not approve of what I'm doing to myself, and ask me what on earth I think my dissatisfaction practice is good for.
It's important not to numb oneself to negative emotions, and stay attuned to one's feelings. The last thing I want would be to spend decades losing touch with what I actually want, and have a mid-life crisis. I have to ask certain questions: When should I feel unhappy or angry or humiliated? Sometimes it's right to feel those things. I don't just decide in advance which feelings I want to feel. That's what feelings are good for. When you are socialized to erase your own dissatisfactions and just conform to want the same things that everyone around you want, you are left mainly with two emotions: shame and social anxiety. At that point, the main issue is that you are not on your own side. When you are exploited, you'll respond in a way that makes you complicit. I have a good relationship with myself, and my partnership with myself comes, if not exactly first, then at least equal to my partnerships with others. My dissatisfaction practice is just as much a form of personal maintenance as gratitude practice is.
Sometimes the some of the things I'm dissatisfied with are unlikely to ever change, or if they do change, it won't be much. I understand the concept of having the serenity with which to accept the things that you cannot change, but I'm careful to define how to distinguish serenity from complacency. Serenity gets rid of destructive expectations. Complacency gets rid of negative feelings. But you need your negative feelings.
And so my approach to employment is to remind myself constantly to be unhappy. Will I someday support myself entirely with Kickstarters and my Patreon and Buymeacoffee and be happy with how I earn an income? Maybe. But even if I never do, I I will gradually get out of each frying pan into a less-hot frying pan. At no point will I tell myself it's not a frying pan in order to feel good. Instead of having a goal which is "feeling good", I want to have goals to feel good about, and I don't want to feel good about them until I achieve them. Even if I never achieve them.
The Creation Museum in Kentucky is a Christian museum of evolution denial, one of the pinnacles of contemporary eternalism. It displays pseudoscientific evidence for the creation of the earth in seven days, and against evolution, interspersed with displays containing arguments about societal breakdown due to turning away from biblical literalism. What struck me most was the first room after the lobby, which has a diorama of a paleontologist working in the dirt. The signage, video, and audio in this room explains the concept of presuppositions. Before entering the rest of the museum, here we are told that each museum guest has already made up their mind that evolution is real, or already made up their mind that the earth was created in six literal days. "The evolutionist in this diorama", the signage tell us, "interprets all the evidence he sees through the presupposition that God does not exist, so that he does not have to obey God."
That's a bad room with bad arguments which undermine the very possibility of due process in evaluating anything. Because of the residue of my resistance and fear toward those bad arguments, part of me reacts negatively to the list at the end of the page about 190 proof nihilism. The emotional goal underlying the presuppositions of some nihilists, as I understand it, is probably a resistance to complacency-- a resistance to presuppositions driven by emotional goals. A resistance, ironically, which undermines itself. One can never claim that somehow, 190 proof nihilism has not had its due process in being evaluated.
Did you like this blog post? Buy me a coffee.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
- "Harlem", by Langston Hughes
1. Eternalism vs Nihilism
For the last several months, David Chapman has been working on writing the nihilism section of the audiobook I have been narrating, Meaningness. He invented the verb "nihilizing" because in his thorough review of the literature, it turns out there is no coherent ideology or "ism". Nihilizing is not a philosophy; it's something you do when you discount the meaningfulness of patterns. In his framework, the word "eternalism" is the opposite tendency. To "eternalize" is to deny the nebulosity of things and imbue everything with far more pattern (more meaningfulness) than it actually has. Nihilism fixates nebulosity and denies pattern; eternalism fixates pattern and denies nebulosity. What he calls the complete stance does neither of those things.The question readers need to ask themselves in the Nihilism section is not "am I a Nihilist", because it's a thing you do, not a thing you are. Instead the question is "in any given specific situation, does there exist meaningfulness which I am inappropriately discounting?" That's the most common way in which I try to apply what I learned from the book.
Nihilism is often defined by eternalists as denying the meaning of their pet eternalism. In day-to-day life, without reference to anything written in a philosophy department, the most common way for nihilism to come to mind is to disagree about meaning and be suspected of nihilism by others. So, in each such disagreement, I ask myself two questions:
Is this a situation where eternalists see straw-nihilists whenever someone denies whatever meaning the eternalists fixated?
Is this a situation where nihilists look at something that someone cares about, and dismiss it by fixating the nebulosity in it, without asking the antidote question "is there actually some pattern of meaningfulness here?"
Sometimes it could be both simultaneously.
2. The Mainstream Escalator
The solo-polyamory blogger Aggie Sez invented the metaphor of the "relationship escalator", a series of milestones that are considered a metric of relationship success, but which solo-polyamorists (such as I) do not practice. To extend Aggie's metaphor, there are many escalators in different domains of life, such as career or spiritual practice. It's hard not to turn these milestones into fixed meanings, hence the automated staircase-- an escalator. While milestones do have their own patterns of meaningfulness, I deny their fixed meaningfulness, and I'm not on an escalator. Therefore, I appear nihilistic."But Matt, non-conformists are never really non-conformist, because they conform to each other." Yes, if mainstream-vs-indie is a pattern, you just identified the nebulosity in it, granted. But the pattern is real too. Each time you make a life decision, it's mainstream if you maximize how many people in your society will understand your decision without you explaining it. If explaining your decisions is uncomfortable to you, you're a mainstream person.
My communities are very indie. A lot of participants in, let's say, polyamorous communities (having mentioned soly poly, let's stick with polyamory as an example) are still deeply socially-embedded with those in the monogamous mainstream-- particularly their families of origin. And so one of the main topics of discussion in polyamory groups is complaining about having the same conversation over and over with people in their life. "Have you reached this escalator milestone yet?" the mainstream asks the indie. "No? How about this other milestone, or this one, or that one?"
No one asks me those questions, because I've set up my life to almost never have to field those questions. A big part of how I did that, was rejecting more-or-less-all meaningfulness, in career, workplace friendships, spirituality, marriage, monogamy, family, pets, and parenting, among many other things. And now nobody expresses confusion any more, because either they get me, or they don't expect to understand.
I base most life choices on a criteria: "An association only has meaning to the degree that participants can walk away from it at any time without much in the way of consequences-- outside of losing the direct benefit of the association itself." If walking away means they would suffer severe consequences, that changes the meaning of the association-- the meaning of staying changes into "to avoid consequences."
I call it "landing the plane": you don't just grab a parachute and bail out to leave me holding the bag to honor the commitments we made together, but. But. You can land the plane and get off. External entanglements seem, to me, to act as a poison to meaningfulness.
Decide for yourself whether that's nihilizing. I'm open to feedback in the comments.
Employment is one of the world's biggest eternalisms, in my view. It is the place where I experience the most pain about this, because I've mostly escaped the other eternalisms and comfortably accepted the limits that placed on me. I've gotten enormous fulfillment from work I've done voluntarily, and by comparison, how I pay the bills has very little to do with my identity. That has come with a great deal of sacrifice. But, if I completely turn my back on having a career, that decision would destroy all my relationships through poverty, and I would end up homeless. That would be a bridge too far, even for me. And so employment is the last foothold of the mainstream in my life.
I describe employment as a hostage situation, marriage as a mexican standoff, and parenting as serving as an incubation husk from which my future enemy will emerge, like an Alien bursting from my chest cavity and complaining to its therapist that I never took an interest in it. Am I nihilizing? Am I fixating nebulosity? Before I read Chapman's work I never thought about it that way.
I'm careful when to burst out into one of my lectures about these topics. This life strategy places a lot of social limits on me, as I'm sure you can imagine. For example, I go through conversations with my chosen loved ones, pretending to care about things they are telling me about, that I have already told them I find meaningless. (Of course I say it's meaningless "for me", not "for them", Sartre Kierkegaard Camus argle bargle.) My lover's children. My friend's career ambitions. My ex-wife's Buddhism. My partner's marriage. My roommate's dogs. I tell them my policy: my policy is that I let it be established what I think about things, once. And then I don't belabor it further, unless they want to talk about my views again. To be in their lives, the price of admission which I accept that I must pay is to quietly listen to them talk about things I find boring or (occasionally) actively harmful, and I am agreeable and congenial about it. And of course, the price of admission they must pay to me, is that they never ask me "Have you reached this escalator milestone yet?"
If you know me, you're familiar with me embracing things very enthusiastically. I'm known for how much passion shines through when you talk to me, and that's the main way I see myself. The bigger picture is all the "NO". No kids, marriage, pets, church. All of this is, in my view, the "no" that allows space for my "yes" to be a big "yes".
One thing I feel very excited about is the topic of "How To Become Interested In Things You Are Not Interested In". For years, I have wanted to give that talk at Penguicon, a convention which is a ground zero for becoming interested in things. But I have never found adequate conclusions about it. Studying how to get out of nihilism into the complete stance seems like just the thing.
3. Stoicism vs Miserabilism
I wrote this blog post last year, although I haven't posted it until now. I was driving home from a bullshit workplace team socializing activity at a bar, where I stood up and walked out at 5:30 on the dot, in front of everybody. In the car, I used speech-to-text to dictate this entire blog post, more or less. It's not just about eternalism vs nihilism, but also about stoicism vs miserabilism. Where nihilism denies all meaningfulness, miserabilism assigns meaningfulness to everything, but the meaning is that it's bad.Stoicism: Stay at the bar and pretend to socialize with co-workers because *that's your job*.
Miserabilism: Stand up and walk out at precisely 5:30 because everything is bullshit.
Nihilism: Stand up and walk out at precisely 5:30 because everything is meaningless. Or stay because everything is meaningless.
Dissatisfaction practice: Stand up and walk out at precisely 5:30 because my podcast needs my attention, and I deem it to have meaningfulness.
Stoicism vs miserabilism might be a dimension of meaningness, similiar to reasonable respectability vs romanticized rebellion. (But of course, because dimensions of meaningness are a pattern, they are as nebulous as everything else.)
There is something on which I'm not in alignment with stoicism. The stoic philosopher Zeno used the thought experiment of a dog tied to a cart. Zeno said that the dog would be happier to relax and follow the cart, than to resist and suffer. After all, if the dog broke free and ran off, it would die of exposure and starvation. Personally, I have a lot of respect for pets who insist on running away and die in the wild.
Stoics might mistake this for something akin to miserabilism, but I draw a distinction between serenity and complacency. Complacency prevents disappointed feelings. I'd rather keep the disappointed feelings but get rid of disappointed expectations.
In order to improve my situation on the long term, it's necessary to remain dissatisfied. Long-term dissatisfaction is a skill. The problem is that we sometimes become the person who we are pretending to be. In the workplace, we are required to pretend for decades. In order to keep focused on what brings us joy and fulfillment on evenings and weekends, then we need to counter the process of acclimation, with something which is the opposite of a gratitude practice. Gratitude practice is great. I love gratitude practice! But I also don't want toxic positivity. Toward this end, I maintain a practice to try to keep myself uncomfortable on a regular basis, constantly searching for solutions which might not exist, even if it takes years, or decades, or never. Stoics would probably not approve of what I'm doing to myself, and ask me what on earth I think my dissatisfaction practice is good for.
It's important not to numb oneself to negative emotions, and stay attuned to one's feelings. The last thing I want would be to spend decades losing touch with what I actually want, and have a mid-life crisis. I have to ask certain questions: When should I feel unhappy or angry or humiliated? Sometimes it's right to feel those things. I don't just decide in advance which feelings I want to feel. That's what feelings are good for. When you are socialized to erase your own dissatisfactions and just conform to want the same things that everyone around you want, you are left mainly with two emotions: shame and social anxiety. At that point, the main issue is that you are not on your own side. When you are exploited, you'll respond in a way that makes you complicit. I have a good relationship with myself, and my partnership with myself comes, if not exactly first, then at least equal to my partnerships with others. My dissatisfaction practice is just as much a form of personal maintenance as gratitude practice is.
4. Self-Pity/Resentment vs Dissatisfaction
We probably can all think of people whose self-pity and resentment are intractable and unhelpful. There's an emotional bad habit where you resist solutions to your problems in order to feel self-pity and nurse a grievance, because it feels better than resolving a grievance. Dissatisfaction practice is different from this, in that there's far more mindfulness to it, and it's combined with gratitude practice. Dissatisfaction practice is about constantly looking for solutions. If you're in a frying pan, sometimes the only way out is into the fire, because the fire surrounds the pan on all sides-- but beyond that is the range top. Or, in other situations, there are only frying pans and fires as far as the eye can see. It's okay for it to be out of the fire into another, cooler, frying pan. The person drowning in self-pity and resentment will just sit there and fry.Sometimes the some of the things I'm dissatisfied with are unlikely to ever change, or if they do change, it won't be much. I understand the concept of having the serenity with which to accept the things that you cannot change, but I'm careful to define how to distinguish serenity from complacency. Serenity gets rid of destructive expectations. Complacency gets rid of negative feelings. But you need your negative feelings.
And so my approach to employment is to remind myself constantly to be unhappy. Will I someday support myself entirely with Kickstarters and my Patreon and Buymeacoffee and be happy with how I earn an income? Maybe. But even if I never do, I I will gradually get out of each frying pan into a less-hot frying pan. At no point will I tell myself it's not a frying pan in order to feel good. Instead of having a goal which is "feeling good", I want to have goals to feel good about, and I don't want to feel good about them until I achieve them. Even if I never achieve them.
5. Pre-Defined Emotional Goals
What I have pointed out here is a problem inherent in evaluating based on a pre-defined emotional goal: you have to feel positive feelings and avoid feeling negative feelings. On this basis, someone in the grip of nihilism can object to the arguments David Chapman made on the 190 proof nihilism page in Meaningness, because they can seem, at first glance, to have a pre-defined emotional goal. What Chapman is pointing out in the Nihilism section is that the person experiencing hardcore nihilism is also pursuing a pre-defined emotional goal.The Creation Museum in Kentucky is a Christian museum of evolution denial, one of the pinnacles of contemporary eternalism. It displays pseudoscientific evidence for the creation of the earth in seven days, and against evolution, interspersed with displays containing arguments about societal breakdown due to turning away from biblical literalism. What struck me most was the first room after the lobby, which has a diorama of a paleontologist working in the dirt. The signage, video, and audio in this room explains the concept of presuppositions. Before entering the rest of the museum, here we are told that each museum guest has already made up their mind that evolution is real, or already made up their mind that the earth was created in six literal days. "The evolutionist in this diorama", the signage tell us, "interprets all the evidence he sees through the presupposition that God does not exist, so that he does not have to obey God."
That's a bad room with bad arguments which undermine the very possibility of due process in evaluating anything. Because of the residue of my resistance and fear toward those bad arguments, part of me reacts negatively to the list at the end of the page about 190 proof nihilism. The emotional goal underlying the presuppositions of some nihilists, as I understand it, is probably a resistance to complacency-- a resistance to presuppositions driven by emotional goals. A resistance, ironically, which undermines itself. One can never claim that somehow, 190 proof nihilism has not had its due process in being evaluated.
Did you like this blog post? Buy me a coffee.