“Spiteful optimism” is a form of resistance.
They want you scared and hopeless.
You cannot function or work towards a meaningful future if you are constantly drained from a lack of happiness. It’s those moments of hope and bliss which drive us forward. To deny yourself those moments is to remove your drive for better times.
It is not a matter of whether it’s morally acceptable - you must be happy at times in order to renew your fighting spirit. To question whether happiness is OK is like questioning whether eating or breathing are OK.
Who are you and how did you end up with this philosophy in life?
JayDee Vance?
YES! The answer is yes.
Everyone knows the world is fucked at the moment and the future is looking pretty grim. I think allowing yourself to be happy when you can benefits other people around you who are trying to feel the same. I think it’s ok to be both aware of what’s going on and be kind toward to your friends and community (in addition to being kind toward yourself). It’s literally the only thing most people can do, and it’s better than letting the powers of the world break you down over something you probably have no control over.
Good read, thanks for sharing!
Yes
I don’t agree with this article - I think there’s a lot more suffering than happiness in the world. Most people aren’t suffering most of the time, but suffering when it happens is so much more intense than even the greatest happiness. Thus experiencing everyone’s suffering and everyone’s happiness would be about as miserable as only experiencing everyone’s suffering.
However, it doesn’t do anyone any good to increase the amount of suffering in the world by suffering yourself whenever you hear bad news. Thus the way I look at it is that bad things happening now over which one has absolutely no control should be treated the same as bad things that happened in the distant past. My usual example is this: let’s say historians find evidence that 800 years ago, Genghis Khan killed one thousand more people than their prior estimates indicated. You’ve just read this, it’s news to you, and it’s pretty bad. However, you probably don’t respond with much emotion. It feels like dry history, and you didn’t even know what the previous estimates of how many people he killed were. How is a thousand people dying today on the other side of the world any different? You are no more able to save them than you are to save people who have been dead for centuries, and you don’t have any more personal connection to them than you do to those long-dead people either. You probably don’t even know how many people die on a normal day, just as you don’t know the number of victims of Genghis Khan’s wars. (The answer is about 180,000, so two deaths every second.)
Hey, it’s still a smile no matter how beaten senseless the face is. Technically. 🤘🏼🤷🏻♂️
Assuming one is looking at the world from the a U.S. perspective:
I heard someone say “With everything else that conservatism has already taken from us, and will continue to try to take, it’s important that we don’t let them steal our happiness, too. Ordinary people still have weddings in North Korea and birthday parties in Russia.”
Being trapped in an inhumane totalitarian state means it’s even more important than ever to hang on to our humanity. Fight, feel sadness and anger and all of the other dark emotions that this time calls for, but feel happiness, too, because there are forces at work that are going to tell you that you don’t deserve happiness, and those forces must be defeated using every weapon at our disposal.
