A life in which nothing could hurt would be one in which nothing could matter
We live, or so we’re constantly informed, in the era of the Sensitive Snowflake, the twentysomething university student who can’t hear a vaguely challenging opinion without melting into a puddle of panic. I know I’m supposed to dismiss this notion as a rightwing invention, but my reading of the evidence – for example, in the recent book The Coddling Of The American Mind – is that it’s at least partly true. (Although not confined to the left, as often claimed: there are few clearer signs of someone utterly controlled by their emotions than the slogan “facts don’t care about your feelings” in their Twitter bio.) At this point, there are simply too many tales of young people demanding protection from the discomfort of other viewpoints to resist the conclusion that what they really need, in most cases, is to grow a thicker skin.
And yet thick skin has its issues, too. One of the most popular forms of self-help, in recent years, has been aimed at developing a kind of inner toughness – a theme that unites the philosophy of Stoicism, some manifestations of Buddhism, Jordan Peterson’s exhortation to raise your children “strong not safe”, books on becoming “mentally strong”, and more. But as the philosopher Todd May points out, there’s something about all this that smacks of emotional “invulnerabilism”, of the idea that “we might extricate ourselves from the world’s contingencies so that they do not affect us”. The ancient Stoics praised the philosopher Anaxagoras for his reported response to his son’s death: “I always knew that my child was a mortal.” Yet surely that’s a totally inhuman reaction. I have no clue how I’d react to such an excruciating event; but speaking more generally, a meaningful life entails feeling pain, not ensuring you never do.
Continue reading...
0 comments :
Post a Comment