DRMacIver's Notebook
Sometimes things are actually important
Sometimes things are actually important
Buddha: happiness is obtained by embracing the four noble truths and relinquishing desire.
Satan: so what you’re saying is that if I were to relinquish the desire to torture Richard Nixon, that would make me… happy?
Buddha: well, no… I think that might be a special case.
(From “Old Harry’s Game”, paraphrased from memory because I couldn’t be bothered to find the original)
I think Richard Nixon might also struggle to relinquish the desire to not be tortured by Satan.
I’m thinking about this exchange because I’m reading “The option method: the myth of unhappiness”, which is volume one of the collected works of Bruce Di Marsico, and it’s making me want to punch the author in the face and see whether he still believes that how you feel is purely a choice about whether or not to be happy.
In his defence, he does from time to time insist that he’s not telling anyone that they shouldn’t be unhappy. It’s just that he does this sprinkled occasionally throughout constant diatribes about how unhappiness isn’t real and you’re only unhappy if you choose to be.
There’s an attitude that I often wonder about that I generally attribute to inadequate mathematical education, which is when people make grand pronouncements and it’s clear they have not made any attempt to find a counterexample.
This book, in particular, it feels like it suffers from a pervasive problem in a lot of therapy culture: it doesn’t seem to understand that some things actually for real matter, and the nature of them mattering is not fully under your control, and while you do have some choice how to respond to it, many of the responses you could in theory choose are inaccessible to you and would in fact be bad if you could access them.
I’m imagining this method being applied to someone in an abusive relationship and Bruce telling the abused partner that their unhappiness is only in how they react to their partner’s violence, and I want to punch him all over again and this time not in order to make a rhetorical point.
I do not, I think, believe that he would in fact do this. Certainly I hope he would not. But he is making grand pronouncements about how the world works that would not hold up this example.
Similarly, the book talks a big talk about what it means to be crazy, in a way that makes it very clear that he has never experienced anyone having an actual psychotic episode.
There is a pervasive disclaimer that I maintain all advice, therapy, and self help has that it fails to include in the literal test: “this advice has a domain of applicability, and the author is not competent to assess that domain”.
But when you make grand universal claims about the nature of human experience, it tends to get my back up even if there might be something useful there. It does not feel like a genuine attempt to actually engage iwth human experience
Lisa has a good test question when trying to understand a new domain: “where wouldn’t you use this?”
I think this question is a little unfair in general because there are areas where there are easy answers to this but people are bad at answering because they’re not used to using their brains in minimally competent ways. That is, it’s very easy to answer, but only if you actually ever think in terms of looking for counterexamples.
In order to prime this, I often suggest a list of standard examples. For example, when trying to understand a new concept, try asking “is a cat an example of this concept?”. It often forces people to define the outside better than they naturally would.
So far at least, the option method does not do a good job of distinguishing why a cat is not happiness. More relevantly, it doesn’t seem to acknowledge that if you were bitten by a cat you might legitimately be unhappy about it.
In general, this book strikes me as an example of a pervasive problem with a lot of therapy: it fails to recognise that the real world actually exists and matters. It assumes that all problems come from within, and all the changes that matter are in yourself. If you feel bad about an event, the problem is in your response to the event. If you want to change how you feel, change yourself not the world that you are responding to. And often that’s true! I think particularly if you’re a therapist seeing an endless see of mediocrities perfectly normal people who are miserable despite nothing terribly going wrong in their lives, you’re extra prone to thinking it’s true.
I’ve had very frustrating conversations with even otherwise very good therapists in the past where they really didn’t seem to grasp that yes that I recognised that it wasn’t solely my responsibility to solve a particular problem, but that the issue at hand was not my feelings of responsibility but that there was an actual problem that needed to be solved and nobody else who could take responsibility for it was, and regardless of whether it was my fault or not I would still feel bad if the bad thing happened because I cared about the outcome.There’s a wide range of things this could be referring to and I’m not being specific because of privacy reasons, but the actual example I have in mind was really boringly straightforward and obviously a problem in which a real actual person suffered and which only one of a handful of people could do anything about.
Because the reality is that some things do actually matter, and while you can in theory choose how you react to those things, in practice I bet you can’t and also choosing to be happy about things that are actually bad (according to whatever standards are important to you) will go worse for you.
If what you are searching for is really a calm equanimity in the face of all things… well, let me know how it goes for you, and I wish you all the best, but it continues to be my position that what is needed is to help people act better in the world, and gaslighting people into thinking all their problems are in their beliefs about the situation doesn’t achieve that.
Part of why I’m reading about care at the moment is that it seems to provide a better starting point. Regardless of how you feel, some things are actually important, and you want to bring your feelings in line with that importance rather than just seeking happiness whatever happens.