Failure to Thrive

Failure to Thrive

Bad Animal

I make for a pretty lousy animal. Animal survival – species survival – is fundamentally nothing more than ruthless competition for scarce resources. Those animals and species insufficiently motivated to compete, die. It’s quite simple.

Now, I’ve never been in a genuine life or death competition. I doubt any readers of this blog have (unless they have served in combat). I strongly suspect that I would do whatever required if it came to such a point.

But such is not the substance of our day to day life. Even though that’s the way we often seem to approach it.

I grew up, and live today, in California. Here, each day can feel like a battle to hold ground while one’s ability to maintain a basic standard of living is inexorably eroded (if such a thing were accessible in the first place). Here, the desirable places to live are often hotbeds of aggression and hostility.

Of course you’d never know that if you haven’t lived here and have only seen the advertisement. California is still milking a long-obsolete reputation as a relaxed and laid-back environment.

Failure to Thrive

Just How Badly Do You Want It?

For whatever reason, THIS dog is extremely, perhaps pathologically, reluctant to eat other dog. I can’t explain it. I don’t have it in me to compete directly with another person for scarce social resources – at least if I am conscious of that other person as an individual. My defective motivation center just doesn’t provide enough impetus; I just don’t want it badly enough.

There are a few exceptions I think. I am terribly passionate about my observations and perspectives. I’ve always been highly motivated to debate, but I’ve learned to consciously resist that impulse. The internet has taught me that argument and debate are futile forms of persuasion.

But that doesn’t prevent attempts to articulate my theses and present them in a coherent way.

I’ve made my peace with institutional religion’s place in the life of the individual. I have no interest in trying to take your religion away from you. That said, I wouldn’t mind seeing some of my own ideas displace some of Christianity’s market share. And any of those other monotheistic religions are also fair game, so look out Islam and Judaism! [Hey! On the topic of aggressive competition, monotheistic religions are the most dog-eat-dog operations running!]

But the point is, I just don’t seem to care about anything else badly enough to try to take it away from another person who wants it. I think part of this phenomenon rooted in Scandinavian culture. But I think it could also have a genetic component.

Failure to Thrive

My surname is incredibly rare. If you find one of us in the states, they are a direct blood relative who I know personally, (or else a family member who has shunned the rare reunions). On my mother’s side there are even fewer – a search on Forebears says there are only 8 in the world, and I know all of them. The holocaust hit that side of the family hard.

My genes will soon make their exit from the evolutionary experiment. If this blog’s stats are any indication, my observations will die with me as well. And perhaps it is my capacity to make peace with extinction that signs the death warrant of my genetic contribution.

If I weren’t able to laugh at it all I would probably be reduced to tears. While I’m sure there are more spiritually refined approaches to dealing with all the pathos, (and maybe someday I will become adept in one of them), laughter is immediately accessible and provides such a great relief!

Tragedy or Comedy? Take Your Pick!

Consider this illustration of the Tragedy | Comedy dilemma.

In his book “The Selfish Gene,” brilliant evolutionary biologist and philosopher Richard Dawkins introduced a wonderful conceptual object that could help us better map our cultural reality. This elegant contribution was an observation that there exists discrete and transmissible units of information that encapsulate and preserve ideas or concepts, which could then be spread throughout a society and impact human culture for as long as culture exists. As Dawkins described it, this object was to culture what a gene is to life. He stressed its significance, noting that long after Socrates’ genes dissolved through the sea of humanity, by virtue of these bits of information his observations live on more powerfully today than they ever had in his lifetime.

Dawkins called this object the “meme.”

The tragedy (or alternatively, hilarity!) should be apparent –

Failure to Thrive

I’ll Take the Comedy, Thank You Very Much!

Look, I’m just not going to dwell on the tragedy. I embrace the hilarity wrought by the perverse mechanics of civilization. I mean, come on! It really IS hilarious!!!

And in my conception, it simply could not be otherwise! To reject this reality is to reject life itself, and that is something I do not want to do. But there is only so much tragedy I can absorb. I reserve my faculty for the genuine tragedy that afflicts knowable human beings. And I try to direct my limited tragedy-processing capacity to towards that which is most accessible to me.

But, after my reserves are depleted, any further attempts to identify with tragedy simply erode my own soul. So, I try to limit my awareness of a great deal of the tragedy that is entirely beyond my ability to change. As for the enormous, spastic tragedy that is the manifestation of our species, All I can do is try to find a way to endure it with laughter!

This coping mechanism of laughing in the face of absurd tragedy must sometimes be applied to my own very personal failure to thrive as a human individual. I believe that my path to wellbeing is to wholeheartedly embrace my perpetual failure, with compassion, while continuing to express myself authentically with as much style, grace, and humor as I can. I sum up this posture in two words –

MAINTAIN BUOYANCY!

I aspire to be a cork in a violent sea. I’m never going to actually get anywhere, but, while great and proud ships may succumb to Poseidon’s invincible wrath, with any luck, after his fury is spent, perhaps I will be found bobbing cheerfully in the sun.

🙂