Master of None #8: Entitlement
The sinister manifestations of Relentless Optimism
I haven’t written in a while — again. But this time I have somewhat of an excuse. Life’s been tough! Shilpa and I took a short trip with my parents to Nagaland. It was an exciting trip with interesting things to watch but it exhausted us. That exhaustion triggered a bunch of health issues one by one, mostly for her and half the times for me as well.
Now I’m an optimist. Say I wake up to my wife feeling low because of some pain, my reaction goes like this:
Rationalisation — “Oh it’s nothing! It’s just that X happened yesterday, so you’re having pain in Y fashion today. All we need to do is give it rest today and you should be good to go”
Regret — “If only we would have had done A instead of B, X wouldn’t have had happened and you’d have had been fine“
Attack — “Why don’t you take this soup, this medicine, do this stretch, apply this ointment” — I incessantly attack the problem till I exhaust myself.
Burdening with (Irrational) optimism — “Arey, it’s nothing, We did all these ‘correct’ things, and now you’re going to have a good night’s sleep, and you’re going to be fine tomorrow morning.”
Repeat with rapidly depleting energy everyday — “Hmm, it’s there today too? That’s ok, I guess we should be super wary of letting X happen again. It’s ok, Let me help you as much as possible today too.”
Crash — “I’m so sick of this situation repeating itself, how come we let X happen, Why couldn’t we have prevented X from happening “ — I cry as naive optimism crashes with indifferent reality.
Escapism — After the crash, I become irritable, indulge in escapism, and slide into apathy for a bit till the problem goes away with time.
Over the course of the past 3 months, I went through this process a good 4-5 times. Enough for me to find myself in a corner, where I had to ask, “What the hell am I doing?”.‘
In 2018, I had applied for PhDs a second time. I was supposed to hear back from the last school that I had interviewed at and was hopeful for. We were on vacation in Italy at that time and while going out to rent scooters to ride along the breathtaking Amalfi Coast that day, I told my father about my plans for when the inevitable acceptance comes. He cautioned me, “don’t expect it that much, what if its not positive? It will hurt a lot!”. I replied with perhaps the most idealistic bullshit I have ever spewed. “I can’t help being an optimist, that is who I am, and that optimism is what makes me a good co-worker and an enthusiast about the work that I do. It is my passion that shows up as this relentless expectation of the good and I will stick to it, even if it causes me more hurt”
Less than an hour later, I got a rejection letter. I pushed it down and honestly enjoyed the magnificent waters of the Mediterranean sea glistening along side the road on which we rode poorly maintained old Vespas. I remember that day to be joyful, not hurtful. Maybe because life turned out to be great anyway. But I made a choice that day, to announce to myself what kind of person I planned on being. Relentlessly optimistic.
Like the classic fall of the addict manifests itself as the hurt the addict causes to those they hold dear, the folly of my optimism became clear to me in the way I was hurting others around me.
Over the course of the last few weeks it became clear that it wasn’t that optimism in isolation was the problem, but rather how it stemmed from and fed into, entitlement.
When I say the word entitlement, I am wary of invoking a pandora’s box worth of social, political and economic contexts but I haven’t had the time to reflect on. I want to talk about the context that I have in mind at this time and write about the other ones(in more detail) later.
I have found that my optimism isn’t “Oh Gee! Tomorrow’s gonna be a good day!”. It’s more like “Tomorrow better be a good day because if it isn’t, someone’s responsible, and I will find out who”. 80% of the times, I find myself liable for the damages I cause to myself, and I make myself pay by marinating in guilt for extended periods of time.
This manifests as me carrying around a picture of the ideal. If it’s a workday, it ideally should look like a well rested night, a fresh morning, a productive day, and an eventful evening finishing with warm fuzzy feelings that my home is supposed to evoke. With the slightest aberrations in ANY of these steps, I get extremely off-centered inside of me. Haven’t rested well?! Let’s get tea/coffee. Don’t feel productive at work?! Feel panic and try to install a new productivity app. Feel off-center still?! Indulge in procrastination and escapism. By the evening, these feelings are too much and I MUST feel cozy, so get a drink and order take-out!
Broadly, should there be even a slight mismatch of my expectation with how things are going, my instinct is to try and remedy it because until i’m feeling nearly euphoric all the time. It is the Myth of Sisyphus, made more sad by Sisyphus being behind his own indictment.
As it turns out, I have been delluding myself into thinking I’m a “chill” person. I was perhaps chill back in college because there weren’t enough variables to go wrong in the first place. But in the post-college real world ever since then, entering the real world, I’ve not been classifiably chill! With daily irritants, I seem to have a sense of entitlement, which when infringed upon, I react strongly to!
My reactions show up as everything from anger to anxiety to escapism.
Depending on the flavour of the disappointment of the day, I pick a response. If the day hasn’t been warm enough, I will chose food and drinks to escape. If I find inconveniences caused by others, I will desire to lash out at them.
The sad part is, ALL my reactions, later cause me guilt. Which is arguably the worst place to be. Either don’t do things you aren’t proud of. Or take learnings and forgive yourself!
Enter stoicism lite
I used to idealise the Dev Anand song, “main zingagi ka saath nibhata chala gaya” at one point of time in college. The lyrics that REALLY spoke to me were : “Gham aur khushi mein fark na mehsoos ho jahan, main khud ko us mukaam pe pahunchata chala gaya” (“ I kept pushing myself to the place where joy and sorrow feel the same to me”).
Now I haven’t read Marcus Arellius and I don’t recommend following pages on Twitter that quote his works out of context. Greek Stoicism is a study unto-itself and not all ideas are useful to us! BUT, it is surely useful to meditate on the most fundamental principle, i.e., be less perturbed by both good and bad.
This internal dialogue helps loosen the coils of the monster’s tentacles from around my neck:
Why should it be that I deserve a life in which what old people call “Bad times” never come?
Why should it be that all interactions that I have be pleasant to me?
Why am I entitled to professionalism from EVERYONE I deal with in life where as I myself am excused for my state of mind?
Why would it be that problems that plague EVERYONE else, I wouldn’t have to deal with?
To be clear, I don’t mean to say that I’m being defeatest or a doormat where in I just take whatever is being handed out to me and not aspire for better! But, I also want to surely do away with the feeling of entitlement that I have about not being in uncomfortable states of mind.
The connection between optimism and entitlement is made clear by inverting these stataments
I WILL have a life in which bad times don’t come. I manage to ward them off
I’m pleasant to everyone so everyone’s pleasant to me. I’m in a bubble where only nice interactions happen
Since I pay the ppl around me to do things for me, they will do them correctly
I’m smarter than ppl around me so I will setup systems where issues that everyone else has, I don’t!
New directions
I took a deep breath and said to myself, “I am no longer going to be optimistic about our health getting better just tomorrow. It’s going to be bad for 2 weeks. And I guess that’s that!”
Good things started to happen! Since I wasn’t expecting issues to go away by the next day, I didn’t feel it necessary to indulge in escapism. I spent a little time doing something productive, and the rest of the time resting. Every morning I woke up still feeling sick, I didn’t have a strong reaction to it. I was kinder to myself.
Most importantly, I was kinder to Shilpa. When the issue she had in the morning, became about her suffering instead of an act of infringement over my default-state-of-pleasantness, I could do better to help her. I was able to kindly support her in fixing her health that day without medications. We both slept that night with a lot more euphoria than normal.
I don’t imagine there will be a lot of readers who would relate to the experience I have tried to articulate here, but please reach out to me in case you do!
See you soon!
PS: The illustrations in this blog are generated via DALL-E