being too serious

Poststructural Pub
1

Is there a cure for being too serious or are some people just like that by nature?

It’s not that I can’t laugh or be light-hearted (well, mabey it is), it’s just that I don’t think too much in life is truly funny or should be taken lightly.

I know full well that I can come across as cold and heartless and dry and boring, both in real life and online, and 99% of me doesn’t care, but that other 1% (the part that still wants to marry amar) sometimes rears its head and fights the rest of me. When I think about laughing about something trivial like football, starving children and leprosy victims immediately pop into my head and tell me to put it into perspective, then it isn’t funny at all, it’s just horrible to laugh about that while everybody else is quite literally dying…

It’s like I’m aware of all the horror and pain in the whole universe and I can’t shut it out as easily as other people can. I don’t know how else to describe it. I consider myself an optimist, though, because I really do think the whole universe will get better.

2

Cran, I don’t know if there’s a cure.

But, that being said, I don’t see yours as a particularly unhealthy situation. Perhaps slightly stilting socially, but if that doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me.

But, then again, laughing improves your immune system, you know.

3

Hello Cran,

Thanks for the post card, showing the beautiful mountain dulcimers. Since I am old enough to be your grandpa, I have the right to give a little advice. Lighten up a little bit. Go to the Union Building on campus and watch what is going on. You are bound to see something hilarious in the first five minutes. So tell us what you think is so funny. Humor is a wonderful tonic that helps to deal with the realites of this troubled world.

4

Congratulations, I know it’s not unhealthy to think like that. I am mentally and spiritually the healthiest I have ever been in my life (but not physically) and surrounded by terrific, wonderful, bright people and circumstances, but I simply cannot forget that billions of other people, infants, women, and children, are dying of AIDS and hunger right now. Right this very second. There are times of day when I will be eating and think, “Dear God, I am so lucky to have this food. I know that most people would kill to eat this warm healthy food,” or I will be buying something trivial like bookmarks or a goldfish, and I feel like I should send that money to people who need it more. It’s not that I just feel like that, I physically know it in the deepest parts of my body and being.

It almost haunts me, and I almost feel guilty for being so blessed and I want to do more to help the whole world and it is gut-wrenching to me that people can laugh and carry on about things like football and movies, as if these people are not really starving, and these cows are not really being slaughtered, and these babies are not really being raped, and these children are not really dying like flies on a wall, and they are, they are. It’s as though the more privileged I have become in life (and I am very priviledged), the more accute my constant awareness of the world’s suffering people has become. I can’t talk about football when I know football costs millions of dollars and at this very second in time, right now, people the world over are STARVING TO DEATH because we spend money on football instead of feeding them. That is a choice we make. We choose to spend money on movies and cars and football instead of feeding people. How can we live with ourselves? I want to stand up and scream that question as loud as I can: How can we live with ourselves?

Doug, I might.

5

See, there’s a difference between finding something funny and taking it lightly. I don’t think there is too much in life that doesn’t contain at least a touch of humor. But I still take them very seriously.

6

Just allowing some awareness of a dilemma to percolate up can often be the seed of that dilemma’s resolution.

Everything you say is valid, and you may never find an explicit answer to this one. However, if your thoughts gravitate to it a bit from time to time, not as an urgent problem to be tackled, but just as a quiet, "I wonder … " you may find that things gradually shift inside in subtle ways. And you may find yourself laughing more, even if you can’t explain why.

Such quiet musings have tremendous power.

Best wishes,
Jerry

7

I fear I have paper-dry bones.

Thanks everybody. I am going to ponder and pray and meditate about everything you’ve said tonight.

8

The way I see it is this:

  1. there can be–and are–all the horrors in the world that haunt you, and you can feel them so keenly that you don’t feel like laughing at anything;

-or-

  1. there can be–and are–all the horrors in the world that haunt you, and you can feel them keenly, and you can also find all the ways possible to appreciate your blessings to the fullest, including laughing a lot. I believe that in most religious traditions the enjoyment of life is a form of worship.

Either way the world’s misery is present; your not laughing does not alleviate any of it. My guess–and I will admit that I have felt this way myself–is that you might feel you are letting it go, not doing your part, somehow, if you stand back from the misery enough to laugh. You aren’t though. You can keep it in your heart AND laugh.

Don’t mean to sound so preachy. I actually wanted this post to just be cool-ly logical:

X amount of misery in the world + humorless life = X amount of misery in the world

X amount of misery in the world + laughter-filled life = X amount of misery in the world

X amount of misery in the world + effort to alleviate some of it, whether laughing or not = Y amount of misery in the world (Y<X)

Therefore: why not laugh?

Ok you logicians out there–let me have it.

Best to you, Cran!

Carol

9

I don’t know the answer, but Carol seems pretty wise for someone so different from me, politically.

10

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If everybody had that attitude, how would we even know when misery had been eliminated?

I think a lot can be done to alleviate misery, although charity is only a band aid, and that it will require a drastic rethink of priorities in western countries. It will require serious wealth redistribution, a rethink of why we produce and distribute and how to do it with a view to human flourishing and not profit and a very serious rethinking of our belief in reproductive autonomy unless poverty stricken countries can be dragged up rather than rich and poor meeting somewhere in the middle. Put bluntly, relief in the absence of a policy designed to halt and reverse overpopulation is, globally speaking, useless.

We can do something about it but individually we can do very little. But worrying about it never helped anybody. The reasoning you talk about is a recipe for catatonia. Suppose you are working as hard as you can to alleviate suffering. Think of the countless billions you aren’t helping. Get obsessed about it. OK. How did that help?

11

Humor is our best friend. Temper is our worst enemy. Realism, plain common sense and an unspoiled view of life is what I have learned to cultivate. I have also learned to stop taking myself so seriously. The world doesn’t revolve around me, my wants, my likes. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. Everyone has freewill.

“Do what you can” is a powerful mantra. Railing against entertainment does nothing to feed the hungry. Nothing.

One person can make a difference. Sometimes it is a small difference, sometimes it can be more. I like to tell the story of a friend of mine. When I met her, she was in her 40s, a single mom, with only a high school education. My friend was interested in the environment. Some people in her position would do nothing, except complain, and b*tch, and tell other people what they should do or shouldn’t do.

My friend found out about the Mono Lake Foundation. A government agency was draining Mono Lake. One goverment official boasted, “no one can stop us, it will take a battery of lawyers and several lawsuits, and no firm is going to take that case without being paid.” The Mono Lake Foundation was started to raise money to pay those lawyers. The main fundraising event each year is a charity bike ride of over 450 miles through hills and mountains during one of the hottest weeks of the year. Despite not having ridden a bike since being a kid, and being over 40 years old, my friend decided that she was going to participate in that ride.

Some people would have called her crazy, unrealistic. However, the first year, she rode in a support van, ferrying gear and helping riders with mechanical problems, or cramps, or whatever. The next year she did the ride, and the next, and the next.

To cut to the chase, the Mono Lake Foundation “saved” Mono Lake. The battle took many years, thousands of volunteers and many more thousands of contributors, but the government agency is no longer allowed to deplete the water.

One person can make a difference. Walking the walk is infinitely better than talking the talk.

12

Cran, I have no idea how old you are, but you sound like every teenager in the world.

Mukade

13

Yes, this does tend to pass with middle age.

About the lepers. In India I got to know some lepers living
on the street. I finally I had to face the fact.
They were happy. Maybe it was the hashish.
We tend to have a cartoon in our heads about people
far away: ‘Lepers Living on the Streets of Bombay.’
But when you get to know them, you find people,
just people, who are happy and have leprosy.
Actually the cartoon romanticizes the reality–
we have a tendency to romanticize suffering.
That’s also part of the adolescent thing.

I knew one guy who would chase tourists around
Connaught Circle in New Delhi, waving what remained of his hands,
until they would give him money. ‘I am a leper!’ he would
cry, a fiendish grin on his face. I never have met anybody
more pleased with himself.

And then I went to Mother Theresa’s in Calcutta
and met the destitute and dying. They also were happy.
Indeed Calcutta is a happy place. A million people
sleep on the pavement each night. Great spirit.
The City of Joy.

And I’ve known people so terribly crippled they
could hardly talk or move. The brain damaged. And they were happy.
They often were a good deal happier than the people
who were convinced they were miserable.

It isn’t that there isn’t awful suffering, but when you find
it, it often isn’t like what you expect. It isn’t like the pictures
of it we run in our head; it turns out
there are these people in the midst of their own lives,
and often they have other concerns than the ones
you expect. Just as you never meet The Savage, but a fellow
not so terribly different from yourself but without many clothes on and with a bone through his nose, you seldom meet The Suffering.
No cartoons. Reality usually turns out to be different than
what we thought; reality is quite surprising.

The cartoons tend to create a gulf between us and them.
We are the priviledged who get enough to eat, they
are the Malnourished, the Brain Damaged. But they
are us, it turns out, with brain damage or without
enough to eat, and sooner or later, one way or another,
we will be there too, and we will live our lives
that way; it isn’t so terribly different from what we
go through already, it seems to me, when it finds you.
Mother Theresa didn’t care for The Poor and The Dying,
but for who ever was before her right then and there.

My father-in-law is 78, he’s an attorney,
and he’s got aggressive cancer, and my
wife and I spend a good deal of time shepherding him
to chemo and radiation. He’s happy.

You, Cranberry, are suffering more than many of the suffering
people you are suffering over. And I daresay it’s largely about pictures
in your head that don’t accurately represent what’s going on.
So if you wish to do something
to alleviate suffering, cheer up. I think Carol
said something like this, too.

When you have something good to eat, you can get romantic
about the malnourished and the starving. It’s an option. Better to simply
eat the food, I say.
Maybe the greatest human accomplishment is to live
in reality, and that always starts right in front of you right now.
And that is also a good deal of the secret of dealing with
the suffering in human life. It’s compatible with not taking
things so seriously.

14

A very nice post, Jim.
Sadly there are none so blind as will not see, and others who are happiest revelling in their own misery and basking in perpetual victimhood.

I’d post more but too much money, time, and effort is spent on internet bulletin boards when we could be feeding homeless children in China instead.

15

I can see laughing about starving children or leprosy victims…

But when you start laughing about football, damnit, you’ve just gone too far.

:laughing:

16

Cran - no matter how much we may want to, we can’t save the world. Remember, even Jesus said “The poor will be with us always”.

Do what you can in your own little space. Hopefully it will be like a pebble dropped in a lake, and the ripple effect will move throughout the world.

And learn to laugh at yourself. I do a lot of that. Like “whistling past a graveyard” - life is too short AND too long to take very seriously. I truly believe G_d has a wicked sense of humor (otherwise how to explain humans???).

It doesn’t mean I don’t care about others. It means I do what I can. But I’m just a pebble, and can’t make the impact of a rock or meteor on the world. If I help a neighbor, who then helps another, who helps another… perhaps that will eventually turn into a cure for cancer or something. You never know.

Don’t be guilty over what you have, be thankful for it.

17

You’ve got me thinking.

Maybe it will help if I tell you what happened to me regarding this same issue.

I’ve spent my life trying to save the world, so much so that I spent many years working for a charitable organization so intensely that I burned myself out and ruined my health.

As I was recovering from the disaster I had created for myself, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I had made such a mess with my life. After all, all I had tried to do was to help other people.

Eventually it dawned on me, and it was the sort of dawning where the sky opens up and you can imagine that you hear the actual voice of God speaking directly to you.

“OK, Jerry. Now let’s get this straight. You were trying to save the world, right?”

“Yes.”

“Because you want to help relieve the suffering of humanity, right?”

“Yes.”

“Are you human?”

“Well, I suppose so, but I never really thought about that very much.”

“It’s time for you to start counting yourself as part of humanity. It doesn’t please me at all if you pretend that you want all humanity to be happy and you make yourself miserable in the process.”

Somehow, after that epiphony, I was able to reset something in my thinking, and I began to discover that I can help people much more if I take care of my own happiness as part of the package. Another way to look at it is, if I’m to be a tool of God for good in the world, I will be showing respect for him if I take good care of myself. After all, if a carpenter had lent me a tool to use, it would be disrespectful (not to mention ineffective) in the extreme if I abused that tool as I set out to do the work.

There’s a dangerous pattern in Christianity (and other religions as well), of seeking to suffer, of seeking to sacrifice, in the belief that there’s something inherently spiritual in suffering and sacrifice. In my opinion, much of this is an exercise of small human ego and has nothing to do with God. In my opinion, great damage has been done in the world by a misunderstanding of the symbol of the cross.

There’s a profound truth in the symbolism of the cross, and in the sacrament of the Eucharist, and that truth is very much worth seeking and assimilating. However, to misunderstand and try to live suffering and sacrifice as if they are inherent goods themselves is, in my opinion, a tragedy and even a sacrilege. There is such a thing as spiritual suffering and sacrifice, but in my opinion, it is dangerous to seek it, and especially to romanticize it.

One of the things that happened to me after I became sick from overwork trying to save the world was that my condition became quite “brittle.” Little things would cause me to crash and I had to (and still have to) be extremely careful to take care of myself, to get enough sleep, to stop pushing before I start to get overtired, to avoid conditions that might be too stressful, etc.

The boundary between staying OK and “falling off the edge” is very thin, and I have to be attentive to a sort of inner voice. Whenever it tells me, “You’re starting to overdo it. Take care of YOURSELF FIRST,” I must back off. If I don’t listen to that voice, I will crash, and the main symptoms will be exhaustion and a crushing depression I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

On the other hand, if I take care of myself well enough to avoid crashing, I don’t just feel OK. Much of the time, I feel a sense of profound joy. But there’s hardly any middle ground for me. I MUST take care of myself or I will crash and find myself in a living hell. But if I do take care of myself, I find myself in something more like heaven on earth.

In the beginning, as I was acclimating to this state of affairs, I went through another episode where I could almost hear the voice of God speaking directly to me.

I had been pushing myself to try to do something for someone despite the fact that, at that point in my recovery I was still very sick. I went through the usual crash, which threw me out of that state where I could maintain the capacity for joy and put me into the living hell of depression. But in this case, because I was so weak to begin with, I also had to deal with physical complications of having pushed myself too hard that were dangerous to the point of being life threatening.

I considered the fact that I now seemed to have only two choices, really. Either:

  1. Take care of myself first and foremost, which meant I would feel pretty happy and joyful much of the time, or

  2. Let myself be seduced by the impulse to rescue everyone and everything and be miserable to the point of risking not only my happiness but my life.

As I mulled over this dichotomy I heard, quite clearly, these words:

“BE HAPPY, or I will KILL you.”

I have no doubt, they came from the Almighty.

Sometimes it takes something like that to get the message. God wants every one of us to be happy, and he will do whatever it takes to get that message across.

“All things work for good for them that love the Lord.” You know I’m not a Christian, at least not in the conventional sense. However, there’s a truth in those words that is universal no matter what religious label one happens to wear.

Best wishes,
Jerry

18

With regard to over-population, I read that the population of the USA will reach 300 million this year. Yet the population of China is four times that amount at 1.2 billion. In the next twenty years the population of the world is expected to increase by 1.5 billion, more than the current population of China.

I try to keep a positive outlook about things in general, but I must admit that I still worry about what these population numbers mean. For today, however, I am going to try to do something to help someone, if only to make a simple flute that they will enjoy playing. And I am going to sing a few songs. That always makes me feel better.

19

Man, that could have gone so wrong. But it didn’t . Deft touch.

20

It has been said with so much more eloquence than I can say it at the moment. There’s a ton of collective wisdom here.

God gave you one person to be. One role to play. You. You can’t play everyone else. That’s not in the contract. Work on you, and spread what light you can. You can do it with joy, like the Dalai Lama, or you can do it obsessively. But that obsessive thing doesn’t seem to help much.