[420] Suffer the Fool

How do you make someone suffer?

Regard the quiet hell of resenting everyone in a room as they play out tired stories and pretend to be a family. Think of the infinitely remote place you must inhabit to criticize your own silence with more self-deprecating passion than you could ever spew in hate-fueled epithets. Sitting and simmering, how you manage to keep your hands or voice from shaking is beyond comprehension. You want them to feel it.

This is a fairly dramatic depiction of what I’ll call “the fire in my belly.” While I’m arguably always primed to recognize or comment on what I consider shitty and stupid about the world, I’m so used to it that I’m not a 1 to 1 mock up against a ticking time bomb, but under the right circumstances, I’d deeply enjoy the explosion.

You can suffer your existence. I think in no small way a significant, if not the majority, of people are in fact doing so. Any “intellectual” failing I could point out about society is many degrees removed from some failure in health I could be experiencing. I wouldn’t try to equate the two. And for my purposes, I want other people to “feel my pain” in the realm of suffering fools.

This is going to be a struggle to speak deliberately about.

I’ve said a number of times how I’d be happy to never hear another opinion. Maybe it’s something easy like TV. I’ve seen somewhere around 350 shows to completion and 1400 movies. At a certain point, it becomes really dumb to ask things like “what’s your favorite” or “which one is the best.” Same goes with food. It can literally be trying to compare apples and oranges and open a window into arguing about what’s happening on your tongue. I suffer the person who tries to “logically” explain why “Arrow” is cooler than “Agents of SHIELD.”

But I consider the problem more serious and don’t feel the TV and food analogy selling it. Take your family. The majority of my friends have divorced parents, and the few that I can think of as still being together are arguably lying to themselves. If I were to make a claim about marriage, how much would we be comfortable allocating points towards opinion verses data? Can we claim a mutually identifiable and representative number related to the problem that informs the opinion? I think so.

The consequences of disagreeing about how apples taste or whether or not “Arrow” has some of the shittiest dialogue you’ve ever heard are significantly less than if you disagree about what constitutes a healthy relationship. But, in my experience, people seem to want to treat the playing field equally. Moreover, they seem to have an impossibly hard time differentiating the emotional component that would hold a grudge or break a friendship as they scream, “of course Stephen Arnell’s face moves!”

The problem is when it gets personal. “But she’s my MOM!” You have years of experiences with a person who stands for a hardly defined amount of good or bad things towards your life. Here I suppose is where I would try to visualize a layering of suffering. At the top, say superficial layer, you put up with rules you don’t like or maybe quantify every “I hate you” from your teenage years. Maybe around the middle, you hold your tongue about some of her views regarding “the fags” or “how she wishes you’d come back to god.” The third is the most encompassing layer. It’s the one I wish I could teach people how to suffer deeper.

Call it the “existential level.” It’s where things get overtly impersonal, paradoxically by virtue of doing so, all the more personal as decision making takes on a defining significance. It’s where you do your best to stand back and appreciate the feelings for what they are and attempt to “count” how this person would rate on your ideal conception of someone you got along with. It gives you rules, sets goals, and allows you to approach your interactions with them in a context that shows regard for more than your gut impulse feelings. You try to adopt the persona of their most “real” friend who’s not clouded by ever having had her read bed time stories to them.

I consider this suffering a kind of, if not a better conception, of empathy. In a family structure, a lot of bad behavior is protected because of, what I consider very tired and very bad lumped together ideas of what constitutes a “family.” I’ve had an aunt who was regularly beaten by her husband. They’re still together not least of which because they’re on the overtly religious side of the family. My mom is bat shit,  and my uncles have stolen money, time, and been completely unappreciative of anything my dad has done for them. My dad is a man after my grandma’s heart in wanting to be there for his family in continued dinners and interactions.

My question is what happens next if we don’t suffer these “fools?” What if instead of getting bogged down, abused, and hurt by people who are either too lazy, unwilling, or incapable of recognizing and respecting, we focused on smaller worlds we put together? My mom is a mind fuck. I goaded her into filing a restraining order. I got to sit back comfortably for 2 years knowing she couldn’t contact me. All I see is a win.

The bigger point seems to be that when we allow it in our “shells,” be it personal lives or families, we’re saying “that’s okay” to the behavior at large. We give license. We establish it as “normal” and “acceptable.” How many huge issues like war or poverty aren’t really small “it’s cool if he dies” or “I’m still good if they don’t eat?” The shitty behavior doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  What that person is or isn’t made to think about will bleed into the rest of the world.

I think at this juncture someone would say “well, treating them well is a good behavior that would bleed into the world as well.” And I’d have to disagree that it’s treating them well. Think of a spoiled child. If they don’t see privileges reduced or are set up to be encouraged when they’re doing the right things, they’re going to carry on being a little asshole. Being a “base animal” is easy. We’re always struggling with our roots. Ignoring our role in sustaining an environment that would raise everyone up is at our own peril.

And this is why I want people to feel that “existential suffering.” I want the world tomorrow to be a little better than the one today. The only way that’s possible or quantifiable is to be aware of when, why, and that you in fact speak up or change your behavior to expect something more out of our animal instincts. While I still don’t think there’s some sort of “peak man” and that we may be racing to nowhere in the nothingness, I still prefer motivated goal-oriented discussions to shit slinging.

The worst part is that it’s lonely, for a while. The thing for me though is that I prefer to be a loner shitting on things than jumping between groups of things I hate. I don’t need crazy ideas from my “mom” anymore than I need the hundred bucks at Christmas from my uncles who’ve stolen thousands from my dad. It’s the same habit that cuts out friends who arbitrarily start hating me after becoming afraid I’m going to disrupt their “cozy” life invariably built on some lie I’ll find it impossible not to put a voice to.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this is going to happen. I’m as much choosing my little island as you may choose to suffer the people in your life. The important difference, to me, is I’m doing me very deliberately. I slut-shame myself when I’m reduced to shitty company or poor decision making. My default isn’t “but it’s family!”-esc cop-outs, as if I had a choice to be born to a crazy person.

I do not get the impression, at all, that people feel even remotely in control of what they’re doing or what their world looks like. They’ll claim they are, but ask them five pointed questions and you’ll learn how quickly you’re a terrible asshole who shouldn’t dare question the integrity of their decision making!

So maybe try a little harder. Confront your least confrontational friend with what you actually think. Refrain from “going along” with something that makes you sick. Find an island from which you can advocate for something more, not just to retreat to because you’re too stressed out or afraid. And then, maybe tell me when you get there. Because as I get older, I seem to only find people getting worse.  It’s like they’re trying to duct-tape together frames from a Disney dream world of ideas ever-justified by their waning enthusiasm for being alive. Seemingly stuck as they forget what it feels like to live for something more.