Quick, think of the last time you got mad. I mean, like, really mad. Chances are, it had to with another person–a spouse, discourteous driver, customer service rep, a Real Housewife, your actual wife, the shirtless guy selling muscle powder ruining your late-night YouTube viewing or, if you’re anything like me, anybody wearing a Gratitude T-shirt.
Since quarantine has thankfully limited my exposure to the Gratitude wackos, I have relied primarily on my wife and kids to pick up the rage-inducing slack. They have eagerly obliged.
Just this week in fact, dashing through the house like subjects in a methamphetamine clinical trial, my kids “accidentally” ran into the kitchen table for the tenth time that day, sending the model ship I’d been building for my daughter sailing through the air and crashing into hundreds of little pieces.
All that work. Gone. I was infuriated–no no, I was fucken pissed.
But wait! Then I remembered…
Nobody Can Make Me Feel Anything Without My Permission
I, and I alone, am in control of how I think, feel and act. And no one–no matter how annoying, or related-to-me, they are–can dictate how I feel. That, according to the self-empowerment obsessed experts in positive psychology, is entirely up to me.
Knowing this, I silently surveyed three days worth of painstaking work lying in disarray beneath me, doing my best to ignore the children’s verbal mockery of my heartache.
Then, I closed my eyes, drew a c-a-l-m-i-n-g breath–inhaling the spiritual wisdom that teaches emotional imperturbability–and ever gently and peacefully pointed out to my kids: “Goddamit, look what you did! You believe this shit, Kasey?” I rhetorically asked my wife, whose name is Kasey otherwise it would have been decidedly weird to address her in that way.
“Three days…three days goddammit!”
“Kids,” she giggled, shrugging her shoulders and throwing her hands up in an “Oh well” gesture.
Oh well. Oh well? OH WELL?!
My rage now re-directed itself at her.
In fact, if not for my formal training in the Nobody can make you feel anything without your permission School of Retarded Nonsense, I would have gotten pretty pissed. But nope, not this time…Instead, after a quick mental reminder that My Serenity Never Depends On Others, and that Only I Can Choose How Others Make Me Feel, I decide (as, of course, only I can) to take a drive and cool off.
And it’s a good thing I did, too, because on my drive through the city later that day, the following happened:
First, I was cut off by a hipster on a Bird scooter whose T-shirt read–you guessed it–I Am Grateful…
Later, I was handed the wrong order by the creepy drive-thru guy/aspiring mass murderer, whose cold-eyed insistence that the mistake was ‘yooours, friend, not mine’ was reason enough to be on my way with someone else’s lunch…
To top off the afternoon, a delightfully rageful minivan mom flipped me off when I got the jump on her at a four-way stop. (Apparently the cutesy sticker of her five-person cartoon family had the opposite effect on me it intended.)
As for me? Ommm…
People Don’t Need Your Permission To F*** You Up
How how far gone into the self-help (SH), pseudo-spiritual empty talk do you need to dive in order for scenarios like the above to be believable? That none of it would affect you unless you “let it”? Seriously?
The idea that we as humans have complete and total control over our emotional responses to other people and, through sheer mental discipline, can determine entirely the impact they have on us is astoundingly stupid and, worse, widespread.
Just as money doesn’t bring happiness and the perfect lover doesn’t provide wholeness, we’re told, no one can make you feel, think or do anything without your permission.
You own your thoughts and emotions, goes the fuzzy logic, and nobody–not demanding spouses, unreasonable bosses, corrupt politicians, unruly children–I mean nobody, can eff with your serenity without your permission.
Really? No one? Not one single person? Have these delusional morons spent any time interacting with actual real people in the actual real world? Be honest, sometimes people don’t even have to do anything wrong and they still bug us. Hell, sometimes they can do everything right and still annoy the shit out of us.
Like it or not, people affect us; in fact, nothing affects us more.
Besides, if it were really true that we’re sooo self-regulated, surely we’d see fewer men murdering their unfaithful girlfriends and fewer post-partem mothers throwing their colicky babies into lakes.
Hell, even the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would be a thing of the past (Shal-Ommm…)
The better question is, why is this whole “being affected by other people” thing viewed as a weakness?
Everyone Can Be F***ed With, Even Stanford Geniuses
So, what is it? Why does the self-help (SH) world encourage its drivel-swallowing acolytes to view as weak being, um, affected by other human beings (sounds pretty stupid when you say it out loud, doesn’t it?)
Well, for one thing, our tendency to overrate our ability to not be affected by others. None of us are immune to this.
While we may think of ourselves as independent thinking and emotionally immovable, immune to the perception of others and guided only by personal insight and wisdom, research flatly contradicts this view.
In fact, not only do we conform to others expectations of us, but often do so without even realizing it.
In Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment, subjects were willing, however reluctantly, to administer what they believed to be dangerously high levels of shock to people just because a bespectacled man in a white lab coat was giving the orders.
Neither the writhing pain nor desperate pleas to “please stop!” were enough to convince the subjects to stop electrocuting the actors. Nope, not with Dr. Psycho standing beside them.
Pretty fucked up, right? How about the famous study in the 70’s of Stanford students, of all people thought to be independent thinkers, torturing pretend prisoners repeatedly because, well, they were instructed to do so?
But perhaps the most vivid (and shocking) smackdown of the Nobody Can Make Me Feel Anything theory occurred in a study in which subjects were asked simply, which of three lines was longest. When faced with pressure from others in the group (actors) with whom the subject disagreed, in 75% cases the subject eventually caved to the opinion of the group, however absurd their claim of the relative lengths of the lines.
Can you say for certain you would respond any differently?
All of us at some point mentally editorialize how we would react in different scenarios we see played out by others–whether it’s on Survivor, a story related to us by our spouse about another couple’s marital woes, John McCain’s POW ordeal, precarious situations on game shows, or whether we would have the intestinal fortitude to defy orders to electrocute people in a study.
We superimpose ourselves in that same situation, imagining how we’d outperform expectations and not be as subject to unwanted influence. We’re smarter than that, stronger than that, surely they couldn’t pull that shit on me?
But psychological study after psychological study proves that you ain’t shit compared to the power of social influence. Marketers and branding experts have known this for years, as have YouTubers and the shirtless powder pushers that pay their bills.
But what does it say about us as individuals that we’re so defiant in admitting it about ourselves.
Could it be that we want to take credit for our own happiness? That acknowledging other people affect how we feel implies that, on some level anyway, our happiness is tied to–the horror!–other people?
Peeps Who Need Peeps Are The Luckiest Peeps
If ever you had questions about the intellectual legitimacy of some of the self-help slogans we tend to digest without objection, “Nobody Can Make You Feel Anything” would be a good place to start.
Not surprisingly, SH authors and pop psychologists make it one of their regular go-tos.
The reason is because SH books are built around the notion of personal empowerment. In their dubious commitment to “keep things positive”, SH authors suspend logic and instead dispense squishy feel-good concepts such as “No one can make you feel anything” that give you the false feeling of omnipotence.
If human connection, rather than money and possessions, is the main determinant of a happy life, a notion that is backed up by all modern studies on happiness, then wouldn’t it be a good sign if we were affected by the people around us?
After all, there’s a word for someone immune to the emotions, behaviors and actions of others–it’s called a sociopath.
If you think about it, the entire record of human history is merely a collection of the consequences of what happens when human beings rub up against one another (in so many ways).
The Roman Empire was fought for, built, and later destroyed as a direct result of the lust, anger, assassination, betrayal and power trips caused by–surprise, surprise–people. Who could deny, for instance, that the poetry of the Romantics–Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Dickinson, Whitman–was inspired by the lovelorn heartache and intoxicating infatuation arising from loss and love–neither of which, according to the SH emotion police, need arise without your consent.
The buildings we’ve built, science we’ve come to understand, medicine we’ve advanced, music we’ve composed, art we’ve been inspired to create and murder we’ve been compelled to commit, all of it–all of it–is thanks to our inability to choreograph the way we are affected by encounters with others.
In fact, if you really consider it for a moment, the degree to which we are affected by other people is immeasurable. The degree to which we think we’re immune is, plain and simply, vain delusion.
So…why is any of this important?
Two reasons: Maturity and Happiness. Let’s examine both. First: Maturity.
Maturity
Before examining maturity, as concept and virtue, it’s worth making a distinction between reaction and response.
A good way to think about this is that reacting is involuntary and responding is voluntary. In other words, we are powerless over our reaction but have some (and I stress, some) say in how we respond.
One way to think of maturity is the gap between how you react to something (involuntarily) and how you respond (outwardly). Creating this gap obviously requires some psychological distance between the two.
Meditation and a mindfulness practice are two of the best ways that I have found (and have chosen to ignore) to expand this distance, giving you more time to assemble a thoughtful response.
Parents know this better than anyone. Other than a spouse, your more successful or prettier friend, or a Fox News contributor, few people will ever push your buttons like your kids.
But imagine if you reacted to them the same way you would to your husband, douchey friend, or the TV every time your buttons were pushed. Few children would ever make it to see the age of ten.
The point is, without first acknowledging that people have the ability to cause us to feel stuff (duh!), you can’t make the leap from reaction to response. You just become a passive-aggressive shitbag with a Mean People Suck sticker on your Prius. Or worse, some yoga nutball who believes that chakras, secret portals and past lives can stand in place of the messy business of human emotions, jobs and relationships.
After all, faking maturity is what pretending to be an adult is all about, right?
Come Along If You Feel, Like…
Happiness. Big concept.
If you find the idea that your state of being is self chosen and invulnerable to the actions, deeds, words, betrayals and ship model-wrecking of others, that’s one thing. But keep in mind, there’s a flip side to that coin: affection, warmth, sincerity, flattery, respect, gratitude and, yes, love, are all off the table as well.
You’re untouchable, remember?
And that’s the problem with the pursuit of happiness packaged as self-sufficiency, a SH meme that strains you to make your search for fulfillment and contentment an internal one, separate from the exhausting business of human interaction. Call it the pursuit of solitary happiness:
Step 1: You Can’t Affect Me
Step 2: Never Mind, I’ll Do It Myself
In 1990, the great social theorist and philosopher, Stanley Kirk Burrell, foretold this moral decline into individualism and emotional isolationism with his brilliant social treatise “U Can’t Touch This!” Burrell, who later came to be known by his less scholarly stage name, MC Hammer, made the case with his incisive, intellectually provocative lyrics:
You can’t touch this.
You can’t touch this.
You can’t touch this.
You can’t touch this.
Brilliant.
(Hey, laugh all you want but give the guy credit for creating four different lines with the same four words.)
If happiness is connection and connection is messiness, then happiness, in some unavoidable way, is messy.
Look, given enough pandemic-causing quarantines the divorce rate would no doubt be 100% in no time. Being with people is messy business. Most friendships wouldn’t last a week in quarantine.
But under more normal circumstances, when the smile from the barista at Starbucks offsets the glower from the vagrant sitting outside it; when the hurt from a marital blowup is tempered by the soothing voice of a friend; when the shithead at Whole Foods with a Gratitude T-shirt winds up surprising you by gesturing you to go ahead of him in line, making you feel like a shithead for thinking he’s the shithead…then I think we’ll all find it’s fun to be human again.
We’ll also find that, thankfully, people can make us feel some stuff from time to time. And that’s a good (and bad) thing. Besides, what’s the alternative–buying into SH’s moronic guiding principle that the search for happiness is an individual, self-focused pursuit?
Fuck that.
(After all, remember what the ‘S’ in the phrase SH depressingly stands for.)