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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   38166 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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People are deeply hostile to the reality, no matter who you are, that fulfilment and happiness and ‘living a worthwhile life’ essentially come down to a very simple recipe.

Marry young(ish) to someone of good temperament, have a reasonable number of children (three or more), work a job you can somewhat stand, have some kind of spiritual life. Above all, tend to a dense circle of friends and family who you trust and who trust you, who live nearby and who you see often. Save a little money if you can. Try to do good by those who care about you.

This advice is proven over countless generations. It applies to almost all people, everywhere in the world. It is attainable for everyone in the global middle class and above, which is everyone here and certainly everyone writing political commentary on the internet.

But it’s also kind of scary, because if it’s that easy to be happy and fulfilled despite living in a decadent, empty, atomized, soulless, blah blah blah modern hellscape (etc etc), then why aren’t you doing it? Masturbation about joining Wagner or the Foreign Legion or fighting a war against China or leading The Revolution is much more interesting, because the very fact that these things are unlikely to happen means that they confer no obligation or even pressure to improve.

The fact that the recipe for happiness is so easy is precisely what makes it so terrifying, because it means failure to achieve it is usually our own fault.

if it’s that easy to be happy and fulfilled despite living in a decadent, empty, atomized, soulless, blah blah blah modern hellscape (etc etc), then why aren’t you doing it?

Quite a few thinkers have engaged this question. It was a central motivating concern for Lacan, for example:

"To be a psychoanalyst is simply to open your eyes to the evident fact that nothing malfunctions more than human reality. If you believe that you have a well-adapted, reasonable ego, which knows its way around, how to recognize what is to be done and not to be done, and how to take reality into account, then there is nothing left to do but send you packing. Psychoanalysis, and this it shares with common experience, shows you that nothing is more stupid than human destiny, that is, that one is always being fooled. Even when one does do something successfully, it is precisely not what one wanted to do. There is nothing more disappointed than a gentleman who is supposed to have attained the pinnacle of his wishes. One only need speak with him for three minutes, frankly, as perhaps only the artifice of the psychoanalytic couch permits, to know that in the end all that stuff is just the sort of thing he could not care less about and, furthermore, that he is particularly troubled by all sorts of things. Analysis is about becoming aware of this and taking it into account."

To cut a long story short, people are as inherently self-destructive as they are self-interested, if not more so.

Marry young(ish) to someone of good temperament, have a reasonable number of children (three or more), work a job you can somewhat stand, have some kind of spiritual life. Above all, tend to a dense circle of friends and family who you trust and who trust you, who live nearby and who you see often. Save a little money if you can. Try to do good by those who care about you.

Well, if it's that easy, why are there unhappy married people? How do you explain divorce? People fall in love, they have kids, they fall out of love, they separate, everyone winds up bitter. Or they stay bitter together, either way. Not every marriage ends in unhappiness of course, but it happens often enough to undercut your thesis that it's "just that easy".

It sounds like the guy quoted in the OP already is following your advice, but he still has doubts:

I have a perfect wife that loves me and who I love, and I still want to go and die in some war.

It’s no guarantee of happiness; nothing is. But it’s as close as it gets.

So it's not actually a simple recipe, because a recipe is something that should give you expected result as long as you follow the steps, and the steps themselves should be simple, mechanical, and not contain any unexplained complexity.

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