Was it for this I uttered prayers, And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs That now, domestic as a plate, I should retire at half-past eight? –Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Grown-Up”
I’m running out of things to feel excited about. Rather, I believe the world is running out of things to excite us with, and we are more than inclined to make sense of this as an individual issue, a personal failing. But let me not get ahead of myself. I have recently finished year one at my first full-time adult job, and I’m fatigued. “Weary,” at 24. Everything seems disappointing, exhausting, alienating. The protective bubble of childhood gets thinner and thinner by the day (though I would say it has yet to burst) as I feel myself getting more and more integrated into “adult” society with all its rules and expectations, its unreasonable reasons and nonsensical senses. I’ve apparently reached what one is encouraged to pursue throughout one’s childhood (I’m finally a big girl living on her own!), and yet I paradoxically feel myself becoming more alienated, more cut off from fulfilling relationships or a true sense of community. Things have simply become too complicated for me to find fulfillment in them. As I step into my role as a “Fully Functioning Member of Society” (which I have especially felt, or have been made to feel, in professional and economic terms), I feel more isolated in other ways, namely in social and affective terms. On paper, I’m fully integrated into society: taxes are filed, appointments scheduled, bills paid, laundry detergent bought, etc. Emotionally though, I’m anything but.
The things that I am expected to feel excited about make me feel just the opposite, which is rather predictable to me, in fact. The supposed “freedoms” I’ve earned upon entering adulthood seem to be little more than empty distractions. Sure, I may be able to buy “whatever” I want, go “wherever” I want, fuck “whomever” I want, (none of which is actually true, as I’m learning), but this “freedom” to do whatever I want comes at a cost, especially if I ask myself–as I often do: “Do I even want this particular brand of freedom?” Or: “Is this what all those years of childhood were preparing me for?” If not, why have I been forced to pursue and, even worse, to “enjoy” it?
I’m a “big girl” now, with a new adult job and adult money. I am now only accountable to myself, apparently. Newly invested with grown-up super powers, I’m supposed to believe, “No one can tell me what to do now! I’m free!” This could not be further from the truth. Or rather, perhaps it is true that I am now only accountable both to and for myself. Yet I feel that such self-reliance is the exact opposite of a desirable social goal. Why shouldn’t I want to be accountable to other people? Why is the goal of adulthood to make oneself an island, comfortably sequestered from the rest of the world? What kind of society are we inhabiting and fostering for one another in which this is the case?
Independence is important, beginning with the capacity to think independently, but when it comes to a functioning society, why does it seem like everyone is trying to escape it, while also luring others in at the same time? What is the state of our society if we cannot stand living in it (except if we’re in a position of economic power), while also trying to sell others on its merits (or at the very least fight for its redemption)? I don’t know if it’s possible to find one person who is out-and-out laudatory of how the world is. No matter where a person falls on the political spectrum, they certainly have something they’d like to change. Is the goal to critique and correct? Or is the goal to complain, commiserate, stagnate, and then ultimately pretend that “passion” fills the 10 hours a day I spend maintaining access to my hard-earned adult “freedoms”?
I do not want freedom from society. Quite the opposite, actually. A society that treats all people fairly is something that I want to belong to, and I would willingly abandon many of the pseudo-advantages of my newfound adult life in exchange for a society where “freedom” isn’t somehow paid for by affective and intellectual alienation, a sense of social isolation, and the feeling of meaninglessness that has resulted from year one of being a “Fully Functioning Member of Society.” As a friend of mine sometimes puts it: “Welcome to the adult fucking world.”
Freshly out of college, and still quietly murmuring to myself Millay’s prayers of youth, I desire few things more fervently than to belong to an authentic, functioning society; one in which true community may not only exist, but flourish. The satisfaction of all my (at times petty) individual desires is simply adolescent and self-serving, but to fulfill a desire for a functioning, equitable society is anything but greedy. Everyone benefits, and it’s something that everyone should be concerned with. Freedom from all obligation to society, i.e. responsibility primarily to oneself, results in a return to some form of savagery where “success” is measured according to one’s position on the economic food chain. (Sorry Jean-Jacques, but the “noble savage” is really just an example of an individual who lives in a better functioning society).
What I do want freedom from is the control that others have over what is personal to me. By this I mean my own emotions. To feel is a deeply personal phenomenon (arguably the only thing that makes me uniquely me), and to coercively affect how others feel is very much akin to some form of affective colonialism. When individuals meet, feelings are to be shared and expressed, not ordered and impressed. To forcefully attempt to change another’s emotions seems revelatory of a desire not to accept but to control. When a statement, action, or event has an expected emotional reaction, I’d suspect there is manipulation afoot.
This is not to say that we cannot sometimes expect or ask for certain emotional responses from other people. “Community” is in fact just that: the ability to lean on the feelings of others that we know we can count on. This is fundamentally an expression of trust. Knowing that there is a literal or metaphorical shoulder to cry on can be a humanly validating experience when one is in need of it. What I’m critiquing here is not the willing, affective give-and-take that goes on between people who genuinely care about each other’s well-being. Rather, I’m talking about the business-driven, institutionally-backed, power-concentrating force that attempts to push certain emotions onto others. Coercion as such happens through the exercise of power, of which there are many forms: physical power, money, sheer number of people involved (aka “peer pressure”). In short, the affective framing of events (a back-to-school “Fun Fair”) designed to promote a specific feeling becomes coercive when participants are explicitly or implicitly disallowed from feeling otherwise. “You’re supposed to be having fun!” What does it mean to be “supposed to be having fun”?
Institutional attempts at affective manipulation may serve to “validate” those in charge of “creating community” within institutions (they’re “doing their jobs”), but it is a type of validation that is underpinned by unequal power dynamics and thus cannot be as authentically satisfying as interpersonal, intimate validation in which people participate voluntarily. The impersonal nature and presence of an intervening institution tend to undermine authentic, interpersonal relations that may better take place organically. How do I know what is genuine? Artificially staged emotions may not be emotions at all; but they are certainly intended to be their external simulacra: “Look at all the smiling faces!” It’s coercion with some lipstick and a slinky dress on, exploiting our needs, wants, and desires for some benefit that the institution will claim for itself, despite what the participants in such activities might authentically feel.
People should play and have fun. I am no curmudgeon (I’m way too young for such a descriptor), and though my nom de plume alludes to a category of drug that prevents people from feeling anything, I do in fact wish for others to have pleasant and fulfilling experiences (emphasis on the fulfilling, not so much on the pleasant). I think we, as living beings, should be in pursuit of the aesthetic: living and feeling alive, not the an-esthetic. There are pharmaceuticals that do both: anesthetics and…well, is there a word that summarizes the body of drugs that allow us to feel more rather than less? Psychedelics? Most, in any case, are probably illegal. Let’s be clear here: I’m not advocating drug abuse, but the bacchanalia that characterize freshman year in most colleges is revealing. What I wanted was not only the intensity of “liberation at eighteen”; it was symptomatic of the repressive tendencies of the previous twelve years of conditioning that were preparing me to become a “Fully Functioning Member of Society.” And now that I’m here: “Welcome to the adult fucking world!”
Humans are predisposed to feel, and it is only through external meddling that we arrive at evasion, repression, or perversion of feeling. We feel inherently. It’s how we first and most deeply make sense of the world, by literally using our inner “senses,” which are feelings. Influencing how another feels through reasons already seems too detached from the immediacy of feeling as such. Then again, feelings “as such” can also be hidden reservoirs for prejudice, a priori judgements, and other forms of dogmatic adherence that should be the object of conscious examination. What, for example, is the difference between “prejudice” and “preference”? But what does it mean when someone attempts to contradict how I feel through fun-datory manipulation, backed by the fact that the roof over my head, my access to healthcare, the food on my table is simultaneously in their hands? What parts of my own humanity, my personal connection with the world, and my experience of it might they be trying to deny me?
I want to be excited about things, I truly do. The pursuit of the exciting is what currently guides my life more than anything else, especially given the amount of “un-fun”–or pseudo-alternatives to fulfillment–that my new adult life affords me. “Management” is perfectly aware of this, which is perhaps why I’m so often encouraged to have it (have “fun,” that is). Is there better proof that something is rotten (un-fun) under the state of Denmark than repeated attempts to purify it? At best, I can suppose that those who force me to have fun mean well. Why would they make me want to suffer? (“Misery loves company”?) If I give them the benefit of the doubt, I suppose some form of gratitude is the expected response. However, without the benefit of the doubt, I feel like a Pinocchio for the institution’s social media presence: “Smile for the camera!” Either way, my nose is growing longer and longer, despite how much I’d authentically like to be able to smile.
What is presented to me as “fun” feels like somebody else’s means to a different end, a smoke-screen for something else. This hardly begets more excitement or enthusiasm on my part. What is there to be excited about if behind the smoke lies disappointment and hypocrisy? It feels as if my enthusiasm is secondary to my show of enthusiasm, with the latter being beaten out of me. I don’t want this to happen, yet it does, and I feel hopeless in trying to fight it.
So…
Don’t tell me that I should feel excited; give me something real to feel excited about. And if you can’t, well, stop faking it because it doesn’t work. Let my emotions, whatever they may be, be my own. Let my feelings arrive as they may according to my own terms, not yours. Let my happiness, my joy, my anger, my sadness, my emotional mapping onto the world arrive as it wants, not as you want. Once you dip your grubby little fun-loving fingers into the mystical concoction that is my or anyone else’s emotionality, you spoil the whole broth, ruin the organic flow of the moment between you and me. We should not obsess over the feigned positivity and pleasure of others just because the lack of “real” positivity is unpleasant to us. If it is permissible to want others to experience an emotion that is different from the one they are currently feeling, then we should want for others to experience their full range of emotions, not just ones that makes administrative work appear to run more smoothly (“Check out our Facebook page!”), or the one that saves us from “thinking too much.” Do not come to me with the intent to make me have fun if you are unwilling to experience any other emotions that may spring up along with it. By restricting and containing other people in this way, you throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, if you want this to be a genuine interaction unfettered by institutional politics and economic coercion, come to me as you are, and I’ll come to you as I am. From there we’ll see if there is fun to be had. Fun is as fun does.
Anne S. Thesia
