Don't vent. Think. Plan. And Win.
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“These are your first steps into a larger world”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Stephen Kent
May 27, 2022 Human Being, Not A Brand
WHAT WILL YOU DECLARE THIS TIME?
You may not want to hear this and your friends may not either. Here we go regardless. Every individual private citizen is not under any kind of obligation or social contract to pen posts that are akin to your own personal press release, anytime something awful happens in the world. There are a number of deeply unhealthy behaviors and complexes eating away at our civilization, chief among them the social media induced notion that you have to devise (every few days) a public statement as if reporters are asking you for comment, when in fact, nobody is. You are sovereign. You are a person. You are actually within your rights to ruminate on emotionally challenging news in solitude, free from the often self-imposed social pressure to issue a statement and then anxiously watch your notification box for reaction from your friends, family and obscure acquaintances.
You know you’ve done it. Written a post for social that was like a press release for yourself. In a way, this very statement above which was made on my Facebook is in the same category in that its a stress-inducing flag planted in the ground. A line drawn in the sand that I hope people will cross to join me, rather than scorn me. Nobody likes that. But if they do? Oh well. What I found in the response to this anti-stand stand, was a sigh of relief among so many people around me who I actually thought would be marginally offended or contend that this call to silence…. is violence, or some other clever slogan.
There is a time for standing. Speaking. Shouting. Is it possible we’ve confused those moments with the times we need to instead think, feel, and be alone?
I know what everyone has been feeling this week about Uvalde. I spent more time yesterday than I should have watching the gut-wrenching videos of parents outside the school wailing for their children as police blocked them from taking action to save their kids. Their kids are their hearts. The reason for living. I watched those videos because I thought it was important to do. Burying the pain of others for your comfort isn’t right. But what happens next matters most.
Anger is quick. It’s far too easy. It’s also routine and increasingly expected of you, with no care in the public square for how that anger might make your life worse over time. Its claws dig in under the skin. They’re still there long after you think you’ve cooled off, if you were the one who called on them in the first place. Summoning them. Thinking they serve you when it’s actually the other way around. Indignation in the digital world has emerged as a social norm in place of harder things, such as mourning. In place of feeling the awful dark of sadness and powerlessness.
I talk a lot here about the Stoic tradition, which I’m still in the infancy of learning about. But the Stoics were often and remain accused of being anti-emotion or cut off from the human experience of feeling. You see this commentary reflected in how George Lucas crafted the Jedi in Star Wars. Skeptical of emotion. Eager to suppress it.
This is not the case.
The challenge of the Stoics to the public and their many critics was to know themselves, and search their feelings. Because often the quick and easy feeling, anger…..was a direct path to blame.
What is blame? It’s diversion. Deflection. Finger pointing. What does that mean for the blamer? Absolution. Sanctification. Not their responsibility.
You see? When you willingly go down this path you are absolved of needing to call on actual courage to do hard things. Making declarations on social media in these moments of fervor do not require courage. It’s a release valve. Often, silence and reflection is what requires discipline and courage.
When’s the last time something awful happened and you didn’t have the words to express what you felt about it? So you stared at the screen with your fingers hovering over the keyboard toiling to find them. Type-backspace—type-backspace again. You were afraid because to not find the words and post something, anything, would be seen as an endorsement of the event causing so much pain. I know more than a few of you have been there. These are the times we live in.
I want you to know that you’re not alone. Is this a call to nihilism and jaded disengagement. No. Never. I want you to think about the problems you see, deeply, and search the pain you may or may not feel. Then do the hard work of making plans to take those problems on. Win. Don’t vent. Win.
This is the way.
After a rage, a loss of temper, does one ever think, "Gosh, that was really the right thing to do, I feel so much better having done that?" Probably no. Even if one is in the right, the rage justified or at least understandable, the post rage feelings are never very good. One likely re-lives the incident, playing it over and over in the mind creating new rages or regret or shame. Does that ever feel very good?
Certainly not as good as a reconciliation, an apology accepted, an embrace from one's love or family that begins the world anew in forbearance and temperance.
Anonymous Emotion unfettered by shame is a modern akin cheap booze, porn, prolific gambling, sugar or drugs. Like those other stimulants, only self-discipline can defeat their destructive effects. But unlike those stimulants, public emotional proclamations covet affirmation and insidiously demand compliance..."I feel this way. Which side are you on?"
The Jedi say, "search your feelings," and the Stoic (or Christian) would say, "Take stock of your emotions; are they justified? Are you worried about those thing which are NOT in your control?"
Mr. Kent, your admonition is a tall order to a society long addicted to emotional immediacy. Unfortunately, Yoda did not leave us a handbook. But Epictetus did.
I would like this developed into a podcast.