Questioning Life Assumptions (Audio Version)
This is the audio version of a blog post I wrote in May 2021. Everyone eventually reaches a point in life where the need to question assumptions arises; this may manifest in different ways at different points in life. Whenever I pass the apartment nearby my girlfriend’s house where the teenager loudly plays the electric guitar, I like to joke, “You don’t understand me, mom!” My girlfriend says the teenager and the mother actually seem to get along quite well. A lot of people might look around in their twenties and say, “Why are all these people doing this?” Or, they might pose this question’s twin sibling, “Why am I not?” Cultures, beliefs, assumptions evolve over decades, centuries, millennia. The end result for beings who can think and feel is, ultimately, the perpetuation of the human race, the reward of evolution. So, if you feel like something is “missing” or if you aren’t happy, maybe it’s time to take a step back and evaluate, because evolution doesn’t necessarily reward us with happiness. Karen Horney was a psychoanalyst. I, decidedly, am not, nor am I a psychologist or a therapist; I’m just a person trying to figure things out. I excitedly read Karen Horney’s 1950 book Neurosis and Human Growth after finding it as a footnote in another book by a social psychologist named Carol Tavris (I would recommend both her books Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion and Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)). I really liked Neurosis and Human Growth, though I am told by Dr. Tavris, whom I emailed about it, that psychoanalysis has fallen out of vogue and is quite dated. But, I still find a number of things Ms. Horney has to say to be extremely compelling. She talks about our expectations of life, of others, and of ourselves, dubbing this, “The Tyranny of the Should.” This is how things “should” be, as we esteem them, as individuals, societies, and cultures; I “should” be doing this, you “should” be doing that, you “should” be treating me a certain way. She illustrates what she calls a “neurotic claim” (Dr. Tavris also informed me psychology students today would no longer use the word “neurosis”) with an example about a train not being available when she wants to take it, and the resulting frustration that can result. The train “should” be available at 2:30PM, when I want to take it; how stupid that it is not available then! Certainly some injustices in our day-to-day life are more grave than others, but when you learn to see how you think about little things such as the dawdling pedestrian crossing the road or the driver who is having a hard time parallel parking, you can start to calm down a bit and go through life giving other parties a bit more benefit of the doubt. People often assume they are omniscient, as any connoisseur of Fox News or CNN might notice. We think we have all available facts, that if you just do X, Y, and Z, life will fall into place, and a magical happiness and utopia will result. And in a lot of ways, if you do the things you “should” do, you might be setting yourself up for success. But, evolution didn’t reward human happiness; it rewarded the conditions that led to seven billion humans on Earth, a number that has increased over 10-fold in the last 500 years. If you’ve ever been to the natural history museum, humans are really old;like hundreds of thousands of years old. So, you don’t have to be a math whiz to gather that modernity and civilization are, relatively speaking, kind of a new thing. In light of this, if you are feeling unsatisfied, unfulfilled, unhappy, maybe that, actually, makes quite a bit of sense. Modernity isn’t quite as soul-crushing as history was, so we have a lot more time to think, take it easy, and ponder what exactly is going on. If you are feeling “something is missing,” maybe a personal re-evaluation of your philosoph