Thank you for your inspirational morning message. Your article reads like a hesitant disciple of Victor Frankl. He believed that meaning is the key to getting through a shitty day, and reconnecting with your inner cynic, or as Freud calls it, the unholy trinity (Id, Ego & SuperEgo). Here is a quote to illustrate:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
When you wrote, “like sucks”, it is simply an attitude, not a truth. In our Post-Truth Era, we mistake strong emotions as truths, especially if you gain power. I don’t know what happiness is as a permanent state, but I’ve seen it come and go like slaves and hungry children know; our attitude in the face of adversity is what defines us above our biology. I think Victor would agree that having a positive goal regardless of what others think gets you through the day, but if that goal is money, sex, drugs, and even people you will always be chasing that anticlimax. And don’t forget control, a major vice of 1st world nations. If we focus our day on Jesus (son of God ;), our kids, or the pilgrim soul in our lovers, we would never say “life sucks” rather we might think at the end of the day, “I gave it my all with a smile in my heart no one will see but God and my true love. “
I agree that Christians are too focused on eternal life, but that’s not short-sighted; it’s just infinitely tiresome. I think when you turn Eternal into a lover you want to sleep with, the magic is gone. I don’t care what Jesus thinks of the Church Peter built, but truly devout people pray there and I wouldn’t want to tear it down because it became a whore as St. John wrote in Revelations.
Yes, no person feels good all the time. Buddha might say nothing lasts forever, so just keep swimming upstream with peace in your heart & mind. The world isn’t as rosy as you wanted to be but isn’t it a lack of imagination from parenting and all our ancestors? Just look at Mulan and what she had to go through to have a non-sucky day. It all starts right now for the next generation. It asks us to be present and directed. Poor people have no time for Twitter. If you dream it, build a brighter future rather than tearing down the past like Mao, Lenin (not John), every king or queen that blasted a hole off the Sphinx, or enslaving billions to the iPhone; and perhaps Jesus, too. Look what came out of his sermons. I think he would be horrified and ashamed to be an American. 10% of OUR People go hungry every night and 12.3% of Americans are food insecure. Perhaps we all need a reality check and find that reset button.
Sometimes in my darkest moments, I think the Bible got it backward. We are the children of the Morning Star, God’s BFF angel. It is reflected in our global attitude to the planet and God’s children during this time of another pandemic, racial unrest, and division. Rinse and repeat, yo.
He called a little child to him and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little kids, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. So, whoever bends their knees to this Child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such kiddo in my name welcomes me. But, if anyone causes one of these little ones — those who believe in me — to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
Matthew 18:2–6