Conscious Optimism, Living Delusionally, and Jordan Peterson
Like much of my generation, my humor is built on references that slowly morph semantic content into a weaving, near-unrecognisable, and insular jargon. And a few months ago, a new sentence made it into the hivemind-like vernacular of my friends. The importance of the reference can be anything espoused by an ironically beholden figure, or a play on a niche event that cements itself into eternity through repetition, and which is thereby altered into oblivion.
The victim of the month was an infamous tweet by none other than Jordan Peterson: “There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see”, which was posted alongside a poorly framed photo of an Evian water bottle. Peterson has made himself a figure of ridicule, beyond his reprehensible views on (gender) politics, through his publicly declining mental health, odd opinions, and emotional crashouts, all rooted in his obstinate logical persona and his attempt at profoundness. The quote, which likens a blurry water vessel to something divine , while maybe sincere and endearing from another source, evoked nonsense in its medium and context. For months, friends and I would say this sentence at the unveiling of anything novel, as a way to shorthand a sort of ironic gratitude, or would invoke it when we saw a literal cathedral, often followed by a playful pensiveness.
Though as much as I’ve drawn joy from its applications, my desire for logical consistency has left me wanting. I don’t delight in mocking gratitude or the human desire to find divinity in the mundane. It is possible to Dr. Muppet that there is a bit of god in an Evian bottle; who am I to take that away from him? Far beyond ridicule, I find myself quite ideologically attracted and dedicated to these kinds of meaning makers in life: people who look at the everydayness, and decide that there is something beautiful therein. Like in much of today’s fast-paced world, this endeavor requires some degree of mindfulness and effort. I remember encountering a pinstating that the way to take a “coffee vacation” is to sit, without doing anything else, and take in the flavor and sensation of the coffee, inevitably finding it more wonderful and robust. But, this is not easy to do. To do so is to remove distractions and be present, which is as active a choice as any.
If used to our advantage, our brains support this decision, endeavoring to gradually make trodden paths of thought more easy to access by adding new neurotransmitter receptors, which enable certain clusters of neural pathways to be more easily stimulated. The more in life I repeat to myself that I believe people are good, and things are joyful, the more I find that beautiful things jump out at me. The muscle that sees kindness in others, and is shocked by how generous people can be to each other, blindly finds things to support this perspective. If you’re like me at all, upon reading this, you just thought to yourself, “right, but that's true of anything you dedicate attention to. Biases in perspective keep you noticing things that are readily available to you, and enforce their presence in the first place. It is just as possible, and potentially as realistic, to see everything as shit.” Luckily, that’s my point exactly. Our perspectives as humans are incredibly flawed, beholden to past experience and heuristics. Accepting our limitations in perspective, why not choose for the unavoidable lens we peer through to recursively construct beauty and generosity in our environments? Knowing that we cannot strip ourselves of bias entirely, one can choose for their slight skew on reality to improve their quality of life, and engage with life through chronic and habitual earnesty, which is largely connected to the phenomenon of “Romanticising your Life’’. This phrase posits that if you must be thrust into the absurd task of being alive, instead of trying to minimize harm and discomfort, what you can do is to actively make your life more sublime, for no other reason than to do it.
In media, I can think of many such characters: individuals who hold on tight to the perspective that things are wonderful, and who try to make life more fantastical than it is. Hirayama, the Tokyo toilet cleaner from the Wim Wenders film Perfect Days, comes to mind. Everyday at his lunch break, Hirayama looks at the treeline and smiles as he watches the breeze rustle through the leaves; a cathedral, one might say. While this character may have the natural predilection to look to the skies and see something more transcendent than the average person, I am of the strong opinion that his positive interpretation of his surroundings is a choice that requires discipline and care. He could just as easily focus on the hundreds of terrible smells he encounters everyday, and keep his perspective tethered to his belt of cleaning tools. While it is assumed as the film goes on that he is especially privileged with some form of supernatural contentment, it is revealed later that his life is not without difficulty. It is only through continuous diligence that he is able to be rooted in joy and fulfillment. The active nature of contentment is summed up excellently by Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Waymond Wang, who states, “When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I learned to survive through everything.” He further emphasizes that seeking joy in hard things is as much of an active choice as is fighting.
It is my ontological belief that meaning makers are some of the more enriching and brave people in our society. One reason people don’t do this more is the burden of failure. In joining the league of meaning makers, one must have a firm grasp on their wants, desires and discomforts, and therefore face the possibility that they might not get them. Disappointment only possesses any power when it arrives holding the hand of thwarted expectations. The more nuanced and painful human emotions are beholden to our involvement in our own emotional lives; to be hurt, let down, disappointed, shocked, betrayed, grieving, or empty implies the expectation that people would’ve treated us better, would’ve shown up, or that things would’ve gone differently, whether realised or not. To brazenly believe in the goodness of things is to fall farther when they are spiteful, ugly, and cruel, thus enforcing the cultural reliance on ironic interpretation and nonchalance. If nothing is done earnestly and one is never vulnerable, it is tempting to believe that we are above hurt and rejection. The irony-laden way of engaging with the world, beloved by young people, is a widespread anti-earnesty, anti-vulnerability crusade.
I am tempted as any other to flatten my experiences, to make them ironical and thereby make myself untouchable. Yet, when I am deep in these moments of hurt, I am reminded that the agony of feeling is the dual-process that privileges me to awe, wonder, beauty, and joy. Though it may be a conscious process to contend with fantastical living and commit to the effort of meaning-making, I am overcome with the gratitude that my eyes can take in the stained glass, my nose the incense, my ears the echoed stepping of boots, of the cathedrals everywhere.
