Confessions of a recovering Positivity Addict

Life has been one hell of a rollercoaster lately. Periods of anxiety, insecurity, overwhelm and just general lost-ness. Not constantly - but they've become a part of my emotional landscape in a way they just weren't even a year ago.

For the longest time, I was convinced that there is no point in feeling anything but joy & contentment. As a result, I got great at optimising for exactly that. Obviously, I wasn’t completely immune to challenges - I just made myself feel good through it all. But these days, I struggle. I have days of doubt, days of deep insecurity - and I feel them fully. So last weekend, I found myself wondering:

Has this change resulted from an actual downturn in my life’s trajectory? Is life worse now? Have I made a wrong choice somewhere?

Well, if you frame this hedonically, "feeling bad" more often is definitely a bad thing. But I’ve arrived at a point where that metric just seems a bit one-dimensional and flat. From the standpoint of a vivid, full life, it feels like living that way misses a crucial part of the human experience.

What has brought this change about then? I think it was understanding (and experiencing repeatedly) what Buddhist philosophy calls “mutual arising”. This gets rather funky, but put super-oversimplified, it’s the idea of “You can’t have one without the other”.

🌊 My main man Roger

We have this amazing capability to, by limiting the scale of perception, create the illusion of separate entities. Look at the ocean: From our everyday perspective, we see a wave and assume it to be a "thing” of its own. To a degree, that’s true - we can measure the speed, angle & size of the wave. We could even give this one a name if we wanted to - let’s call it Roger. But give it 15 seconds and it’s gone, broken and washed away. What happened? Roger was here just a moment ago, and now he’s gone?

Well, it only takes a change of scale and watching the ocean from above - hopping on a plane, for example - that you realise what we called “Roger” was merely a form of the current northeasterly swell. Moreover, by studying the aquadynamics of waves, one realises that water isn’t really moving towards the shore - It’s just moving up and down creating the illusion of a moving object.

🌊 My imaginary main man Roger

The thing that appeared as a distinct entity moments ago now reveals itself to be no thing at all - merely a changing appearance, a form. The “Roger” breaking on the shore contains none of the water molecules of the “Roger” 5 seconds before. Therefore, he’s not an object, but an action. There’s no separation between the ocean and the wave - the ocean is just waving.

Or is it? Let's adjust the scale of perception again and play the same game for the ocean. Integrate the geological and meteorological influences on swell systems and you see the separation between Ocean and Earth becomes pointless too. Roger is inseparable from the ocean as much as he is from the last week's Hurricane in North America and the current position of sandbanks on the beach. So in that sense, it’s not the Ocean that’s waving - it’s the whole Earth. Or repeat the same process to include the heat energy from the Sun needed to fuel weather systems and you can expand the scale indefinitely. So what we call Roger is just the Universe waving. How lovely for Roger, but what does that have to do with my hedonic addiction?

The point here: You can’t lift a phenomenon from its context and expect it to be an independent thing. I mean, you can for everyday reasons - It’s fun to call a wave “Roger” and give it a personality. It’s rather practical to point at a piece of ceramic full of bean infusion and just say “Can you pass me the coffee?” instead of drowning in the overwhelm of causes and conditions that lead to the universe “coffeeing” at this point in time. But beyond the practicality, this excursion into the world of Roger & friends sets up the central idea that helped me recover from my addiction to “positivity”.

🪦 RIP Roger

You see, if one assumes that there are distinct entities called “waves” that could be lifted from their context and create independent things, all sorts of funky stuff happens. Catch me crying about the death of Roger: First he broke, then he disappeared - and now he’s gone forever. It sounds absolutely ridiculous, right?

But here’s the thing: At some point in my upbringing, I developed the assumption that there are distinct entities called “emotional states”. With the scale of perception small enough, this makes total sense: Ask me at any given moment “How do you feel?” and I’ll give you a nice little made-up name. Instead of “Roger”, I’ll say “excited”, “exhausted”, “bored”, or whatever I feel like saying.

Now, I’m not saying that’s not real. These states are real the very same way Roger is real: I can measure Roger’s height at any point in time - He’s really 2m tall. I can jump into an MRI scanner at a point in time where I’m really content & the elevated activity in my anterior cingulate cortex will tell you the same thing - I’m really content.

But you can probably tell where this is going: Adjust the scale of perception and you see that my current contentment is inseparably linked to the rest of my experience. It’s not a thing, it’s a form - a momentary state in an ever-changing interdependent system.

The human nervous system can only perceive through contrast - it’s how we see, how we smell - and how we feel. The same way you can’t smell your own perfume after 30mins because your senses have adapted to the new normal, constant contentment would quickly become a bland, flat nothing. Therefore, trying to hold on to this state forever, attempting to lift it from its context and replicate this point in time as a constant, is an exquisitely pointless endeavour! Let’s make it practical:

If I reflect on the past few months, the most incredible moments of joy and contentment were all direct results of deeply uncomfortable periods that came before. Just last week, I had an invigorating moment of joyful relief after finally setting up a working solution to a problem I’d been failing to solve for days. Common wisdom would have it that “it wouldn’t have been half as sweet” without the days of doubt and insecurity that arose from my inability to solve the problem. In reality, it wouldn’t have been at all! Had it worked without any journey to it, it wouldn’t have sparked an emotional reaction. It would’ve been just another task, something like answering an e-mail. It’s not that it wouldn’t have felt as nice - it wouldn’t have felt at all!

You see, the space between two waves doesn't make a wave “nicer” - it makes it a wave. A wave without a dip isn’t a wave, it’s a flat rectangle. You can’t have one without the other, the same way you can’t have a back without a front. It is an equally integral part of the ocean waving. Sure, if we zoom in enough, we can convince ourselves that the peak and the trough are two distinct entities. However, the ocean couldn’t care less about the names we put on different forms. It’ll wave regardless, troughs and all.

🎢 Enjoying the Rollercoaster Ride

What does one gain then from acknowledging the inseparability of these things we thought to be separate? I think mainly one gains the liberty to take some of the heaviness out of unpleasant states. To simply feel anxious when you feel anxious, confused when you feel confused, joyful when you feel joyful, and so on.

Traditionally, I would go into full alarm when experiencing anything short of bliss, convinced that this is a terrible mistake, that I did something horribly wrong - not reframed right, not prepared correctly. Even worse: externalise the cause and create blame, hostility and resentment towards the one that “made me feel like this”. In short: immediately declare war on this experience, aiming to get rid of it ASAP, at all costs. In all honesty, a solid chunk of that tendency still resides in me, evoking mayhem when anxiety or exhaustion comes up.

But there’s another option now. A new approach to viewing this sort of experience. One that takes all experience lightly, as an ephemeral facet of human existence simply based on causes & conditions. One that recognises the inseparability of experience and therefore embraces each facet instead of loving one side of the coin while trying to get rid of the other. A rollercoaster that never goes down wouldn't be any fun, would it? So might as well enjoy all of it.

In this way, the illusion that these states of experience exist separately - that one could somehow have one side of the coin without the other - that results in an enormous missed opportunity: One of the full, vivid life!

For a more broad example, I just have to look at my current situation. If I were still optimising for “positivity only”, the dive into total uncertainty that was flying back to Australia without a job, a place to stay and/or a plan for either would’ve been a pretty dumb choice - the month and a bit of constant anxiety was rather foreseeable. But then again, where I am today isn’t “extra sweet” as a result of the period of anxiety that came before it, it is as a result of it. Inseparably linked.

By embracing all that is offered, one gets to experience life in its fullness. Not the rosy, flat version that results from ignorance. But the whole rollercoaster, the whole wave with its peaks and troughs and whatever else there is to it.

In the words of Alan Watts, wonderfully sampled in Jeremias’ ‘Sommer’: “

There is always this curious tie at some point between the fall and the creation.

For a while now, I've been working with the idea that a good life is merely a bunch of good days in a row. I think it was important to change my definition of a "good day". Not just a pleasant day, but a vivid one.

This essay was a bit of a double experiment. Firstly, it’s basically just an edited version of a journal entry, where I was trying to figure out what’s going on with the recent volatility. Second, I wanted to play around with an approach that Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights in his magnum opus, “Nature”. His point is that for all ideas worth expressing, there are analogous phenomena in nature that can beautifully illustrate the idea. Therefore the heavy reliance on analogy and constant callbacks to Roger (RIP my G 🥹).

A man conversing in earnest, if he watches his intellectual processes, will find that a material image more or less luminous arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind.