My boyfriend says he should meditate for one hour every single day. Why does this annoy me a lot? He works in tech, if that’s related. —Looking for Enlightenment
Expensive Looking for,
I feel it’s fairly apparent. On the one hand, meditation is probably the most self-centered, delinquent behavior there’s—or one in every of them, at the very least. (I can consider one other intensely solitary act that some individuals insist they “should” do each day to keep up a transparent head.) Its motives are normally overtly egotistical: private productiveness, sleep hacking, enhanced creativity. Alternatively, additionally it is a religious self-discipline whose highest purpose, historically, is ego demise, self-transcendence, and the eventual enlightenment of the whole world. The contradictions pile up. No marvel meditation is so standard in tech, an trade during which the persistent effort to extend market share typically sails beneath utopian language about connecting the world, obliterating human limitations, and making life for all beings unimaginably nice.
I’m not saying that you need to inform him this, in fact. In case your boyfriend is way sufficient alongside his path to enlightenment (God assist him), he’ll seemingly level out that such “contradictions” are literally paradoxes, koans, the very best type of religious fact. The dualistic thoughts is clouded by both/or considering, you see, a form of binary logic that can’t but glimpse that loftier aircraft the place all 0s are concurrently 1s and obvious hypocrisies synthesize into unified Fact. I’m positive you’ve gotten this lecture earlier than, and as tiresome as it’s, he’s not fully unsuitable. We waste a lot of our lives attempting to repair the frictions and logical oppositions that make our world significant within the first place. The thorn is critical to the fantastic thing about the rose. The bug is definitely a function. The failings in our family members are inseparable, in the long run, from their strengths.
All of which is to say: Be grateful that your boyfriend is just not but so advanced that he eludes all inconsistencies. The one factor extra annoying than human contradictions is the one who has efficiently transcended them.
Why is it that when a pal asks to take a photograph of me it’s advantageous, however when my beloved mother does it I wish to scream? —Brat
This query may truly be above my pay grade, Brat. A sure form of psychotherapist would inform you that any photograph is an act of acquisition—the photographer is attempting to own, to seize, to make static—and that the shutter-happy mother embodies the archetype of the Oedipal Mom, who’s attempting to devour her personal kids. Perhaps your hostility stems out of your conflation of the digital camera with the maternal gaze, the ever-present eye that threatens to obliterate your individual perspective. Or perhaps the violent language of images (to shoot, to seize) evokes, on some unconscious degree, the sublimated aggression of the mother-child relationship that have to be repressed to keep up a viable household life.
You most likely don’t discover these explanations very convincing. I don’t both. The reality is that I might most likely checklist dozens of actions—asking about your day, checking in about your well being, shopping for unsolicited items—that function in response to the identical double customary: advantageous when it’s a pal, annoying as hell when it’s a mum or dad. The issue has nothing to do with images and eachfactor to do with proximity. It’s straightforward to resent your mother exactly as a result of she is your mother, an all-purpose dispenser of affection and help whose sole function is to be obsessively attentive to your wants and delicate to what irks you. It’s straightforward to neglect that she can be an autonomous being who might be getting into the second half of her life and easily attempting to doc, in some small manner, the fleeting moments of happiness that appear to be passing extra shortly yearly.
