Three (Not Very) Easy Steps to Becoming Less Cynical

A couple disclaimers up front:

1. I'm going to make a few assertions of alleged fact in this post. I'm not going to defend them thoroughly, because that's not my point. If I say something you disagree with, I encourage you to do your own research, but defending those points isn't really my aim here.
2. If you're upset by mild profanity, sorry. Feel free to skip by this post.
3. I cited an article at one point. I didn't vet it carefully. The general premise seems reasonable, but some specifics may be off.

And now, without further ado...the post. My first in three years, actually. But I had a random thought while heading home today, and I felt like sharing.

Much has been said about the increase in cynicism over the last few decades. There would seem to be good reason for it. After all, our lives are full of bullshit, and cynicism makes excellent armor against bullshit.

When an advertiser insinuates that Coca-Cola will make your problems evaporate in a paradise of bubbly Christmas cheer, that's bullshit.

When your company's executive tells you that their key strategic objective is to "enhance cross-functional synergy and deepen investment in a wide variety of verticals," that's probably bullshit.

And when the head of the Environmental Protection Agency tells you that the jury is still out on human activity as a primary driver of increasing global temperatures? Yeah, that's definitely bullshit.

Cynicism is really helpful in these situations. Cynicism tells you that Coke probably won't cure your depression, that you probably shouldn't bother researching what your exec is talking about, and that the EPA head is probably speaking more from his cozy relationship with energy companies than from any particular scientific understanding.

But yet we have this feeling that cynicism is somehow bad. It makes us angry, makes us depressed. It's bad for your health (http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/28/health/cynical-dementia/index.html). At the end of the day, we need our defense against bullshit, but most of us are also looking for some reason not to be cynical. We may even feel resentment towards those people who just seem to be happy all the time: "Why are you so irrationally happy? We've got a lot of problems here!"

I want to share three simple decisions that I've made recently that have made me less cynical (but hardly less skeptical).

1. Decide that you matter.

I don't know what percentage of people have trouble with this one, but it's not zero. There are all kinds of reasons why we may not think we matter, even though the deep instinctual part of our brains seems pretty dedicated to keeping us alive.

I'm naturally prone to depression and harsh self-criticism. My nature is to put my internal judge in the driver's seat, always to reflect on what I do, and typically to find a lot of things that I did wrong. I tend to be out of touch with my emotions and desires and instincts.

Low self-worth is a natural partner of cynicism--in many cases, it's basically cynicism directed at oneself. "You criticize everything else; what makes you any different?" And if you're being honest with yourself, it's easier to start picking up on your own faults.

There are lots of possible reasons for deciding that you matter. For me it was largely a matter of learning the proper place of my internal judge. Reflection is important--else we never learn--but the judge doesn't need to drive all the time. At some point, I realized that I had these emotions and desires, and that often enough, it was OK to act on them even if I couldn't give a complete rational justification as to why. And that less rational part of my brain thinks I matter. So OK, I matter.

2. Decide that how you live matters.

Cynicism tends towards inaction. It's a distant stance that criticizes but doesn't build anything unless coupled with an equally strong notion of what is good and valuable. And if you don't think that how you live matters, then nothing really is good and valuable, and sure you might decide to keep living and try to be comfortable or achieve something or just mix things up, but it's all a little absurd.

I started struggling with this when I lost my belief in Christianity (the conservative, American kind). That launched me on an internal struggle that started in 2007 and was pretty intense until just a few months ago. So much of my sense of self-worth was predicated on a certain understanding of the Christian God that it evaporated when I lost hold of that.

I'm not able to be a satisfied humanist. Some people are, and fair enough--I'm not willing to say (and honestly don't believe) that they're all deluding themselves. But the way I see it, I can live a lot of ways, but in the end I'll die. And some people may remember me, but eventually they'll die. And even if I'm the most famous person there ever was and my memory lasts as long as life itself, eventually the sun will consume the Earth, eventually the universe will die in entropic heat death, eventually all traces of everything I ever did will vanish from existence.

For me, my willingness to decide that how I live matters came from a very simple assertion: I believe that God exists (whatever that means) and that he(/she/it) will always remember me (whatever that means). It's a pretty ambiguous notion of God that's at play here, but I can hold to it when all else fails. And the fact that God will remember me--and, I hope, remember me perfectly, in a way somehow more substantial than human memory--means that I want to be a person and live a life that will be remembered positively.

(An aside: I personally choose to continue engaging with the Christian tradition because it's what I know and it's meaningful to me. That said, I've come to hold a lot of elements of it more loosely than I used to, and I feel far less anxiety than I used to about the fact that lots of people don't care about or reject Christianity.)

The point is simply this: To be anything but a cynic and an absurdist, you need a reason.

3. Decide that the results don't matter.

This one's tricky. But let me explain.

In any human venture, success or failure is predicated on three basic things:

1. Your advantages. This includes natural talents (intelligence, athleticism, etc.) and privileged circumstances (family wealth, social stability, etc.).
2. Hard work.
3. Dumb luck.

We go off the rails when we forget any of these three. Forget the first, and we start looking down on poor people because they're clearly not working hard enough. Forget the second, and we slack off and then blame our failures on not being smart enough. Forget the third, and we forget that no matter how many advantages we have and how hard we work, sometimes life throws curveballs and it all goes to hell anyway. Sometimes, you work hard in school, you work hard on your sales pitch, and you lose the business you were angling for because a snowstorm hit and your flight got cancelled.

One defense against cynicism is to ignore the role of luck. We just decide that if we're good enough and work hard enough, success is guaranteed. But it isn't. And in my opinion, this viewpoint usually leads either to a lot of stress and perfectionism, or else a very fragile worldview that crumbles in the face of catastrophe.

And so we have to acknowledge luck. Which means that no matter how hard we try, we might fail. And not only might we fail, everyone might hate us for it and we might die in rejection and squalor. And that feeling of vulnerability is where cynicism comes rushing in. It says, "Yes, life really does suck after all, doesn't it? It's not fair. Best to reject the real world and laugh at all the poor lemmings who keep trying to make something of their lives."

The key to overcoming this, as I see it, is not to reject the premise, at least not entirely. Life can be terribly random, and it seems uncompassionate to deny that. But that means that if the worth of my life is judged by the results, then my life is judged by something fundamentally out of my control.

The alternative is that the results don't matter. The only things that matter are the choices you make the and person you choose to be.

As for me, I decided that how I live matters because I want God to remember me well. And so the results don't matter because no matter how things turn out, God will remember me for who I really was.

Maybe that doesn't work for you. But I think lots of us have an intuition that "good people" are defined not by how things worked out for them, but by their desires and their character. So I hope you'll also find some way to define your worth based the choices that you can control, and not the results that you can't.

And then, sure. We can be a little cynical when someone tells us that because you're a Gemini, this and that and you should definitely do this today. But we can also smile, and recognize the person's potentially good intentions, and take to heart anything in that advice that might actually help with the lives we're trying to lead.