She realizes her hopes have been dashed. She bites her lips. Her eyes flutter without focusing on anything in particular. She becomes hot behind the ears. She breathes in sharply, as if the air is at least one thing over which she has control. She screams to no one in particular. She is present in the moment, to her anger, searching for a way to negotiate with reality even though she knows it is impossible. “Why me?!?” she cries.
Disappointment is a naturally common experience in life, occurring frequently. Disappointment challenges us again and again to exercise maturity, acceptance, and wisdom. It is easy to become discouraged, frustrated, even angry when we ignore the responsibility to our own self or the power over our own reactions. Or perhaps our ambitions reached so high we imagined and even started designing our future according to our dream, and the fall seems too much to bear. When this takes place, disappointment is difficult to process. Here, anger enters. A rejection of the reality of qualifications, chance, and fate; a lack of maturity; and a blame game in the mentality of victimhood point to pissappointment.
Rejection of Reality. With how frequent disappointment must be confronted, we would expect that we could deal with it like we deal with routine hunger or exercise. Yet we reject that disappointment is a normal part of being mature. It is easy to believe that the world ought to treat us better, that life should be easier, that we should have more advantages or fortune than struggles and setbacks. The emotions bring us suffering into the moment, unable to consider the past or future, ways to process, paths to take, agency over our emotions, freedom over our reactions.
Immaturity. When those moments occur that let down our high hopes, our lofty dreams, we rage against the universe, scream to the fates, burn at the unfairness. We throw a fit. Our own private logic does gymnastics to reason how the problem is not our own illusions, and processing the disparity between reality and our ideal is not our burden. So we reject our ability to adapt in resilience, our responsibility to understand in maturity. Our emotions cry. We blame instead of accept. Our friends dare not interrupt our crusade, or they are given no heed, or they join our crusade ever faithfully supporting whatever nonsense we create. It even feels good to have some quest to bring meaning to our self.
Victimhood. We are the main character, and the universe has decided that the drama is a tragedy. The gods have forsaken us, but we forget that the hero’s journey involves challenges, and the hero exercises courage, resolution, fortitude, and devotion. We reject agency and responsibility, so the other is at fault. This shift beautifully takes the burden off of ourself and puts it elsewhere, a much more pleasant adversary to oppose and object of our ire. Everything and anything is a persecutor with the malicious intent to make us suffer. Our being rages at the sense of injustice—after all, raging is what one does when confronted with suffering and injustice.
Especially in a world that encourages ambition, promises happiness, and idolizes as heroes those who have achieved greater than life and increasingly impressive herculean tasks, we suffer. Contrast this modern dream with the odds of one individual in a world of eight million to be the next name to make headlines. The ancient Greeks had a more skeptical perspective of hope. Pandora was able to put the lid back on her jar to trap hope alone as humanity’s double edged characteristic that uplifts and shatters those who dare play its game. Yet we strive to be greater and greater, developing the art of the blame game in place of maturity when we fail and taking credit when we succeed. Perhaps we do it because we savor these moments where we create some drama, we feel the blood flow, we get to be the star of our own show. At the very least, they break up the monotony of life and make us feel alive.
Essence of Humanity
Recently I read Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. The main character Grenouille is born and lives without a bodily smell, without a sense of morality, with an extremely heightened sense of smell, and without a moral judgment of various smells. The author compels the reader into this universe where smell is the es…
Existential Expression
As rational beings, we have a need for existential expression. It is not enough for us to be born, work and consume, and die without having a sense of vocation, a taste of leaving a legacy, or creating meaningful relations to have some effect on the world, however small. We develop our existential voice, far beyond what is necess…
Value of Dialogue
I was invited to give a talk at an Iranian school during an event joining philosophical practice and debate. The idea that there is a middle ground between these two activities that I passionately engage in was odd to me at first. While in practice the two look to be in conflict, they share many similarities in qual…
The universe is not a person so talking about life's unfairness and life's injustice makes no sense. Nobody is persecuting you since there is nobody out-there. If you have found that all your hopes and dreams ("great expectations") have just fallen apart since you have got cancer at 20, and you will be dead in say 2 years time, then it is just something which has happened/happens. As when "it rains". Neither you nor the universe is at fault. It is just bad luck, misfortune, bad circumstances.
But if instead you do believe that the universe is a sort of sentient being with whom you are in a sort of human-like, interpersonal relationship, or that the universe is ruled by a person, by God, and therefore that your misfortunes are due to a deliberate, intended, act of God (as Job did believe) then your rage and victimization are justified. Morally justified. Practically they are useless since they are directed against the almighty God. You can not sue him or use your force to coax him to change course, make amends and redress the wrongs which he has done to you.
Conversely, you may believe yourself as being a sort of God who could anticipate and prevent everything. That happenes to some people as well. They think themselves as responsible. They think that they are at fault somehow, that they could have prevented it had they been more thoughtful and careful, or that must have done something wrong to "deserve it". Instead of blaming God, they feel guilt and blame themselves for having got cancer.