I'm in a bad mood lately, can you tell?
Apropos of Thanksgiving and facebook: Thankfulness is not reveling in your easy life and comparing it to people with more struggles. Thankfulness is being grateful whatever your circumstances. Easy circumstances are not necessarily better. (At least from the Christian perspective.) Also, we can't just pick apart our lives and focus only on what's good and pretend that the bad stuff isn't happening--it's all part of a whole.
What we need more of is: The kid woke me up four or five times last night for who the heck knows why (including some crying about his toes hurting--I checked this morning and they're perfectly fine) and I ended up spending half the night in his bed. #blessed #thankful #winning
6 comments:
Mine woke up every 20 minutes between 2 and 4 am because she wanted "Black Sheep" (the song, sung to her, several times in a row).
The problem is that telling the entire world about the whole results mainly in a lot of public whining, which is also bad.
Yes--agreed about public whining, too. Maybe this is just a problem with public chattering? Which I'm doing, just in another format. And somewhat less publicly.
P.S. Oh no--what a night. What a song.
I think yes, the problem is with non-targeted or decontextualized publicizing of one's life. You can talk about how hard it is to get your kids to sleep to other people who have kids and will commiserate rather than be annoyed, or you can talk about how blessed you are to a casual acquaintance or someone interviewing you for a job who needs to be assured that you're not a sad sack. But when you talk in either mode on social media, you're reaching all possible audiences, and thereby violating one or another group's expectations. So you're annoyed when people whose kids don't sleep at night write about being grateful not to be living in Syria right now b/c you're intimate enough with them to expect them more, while at the same time, some other portion of their social media connections really wishes they'd STFU about their kids and find something positive to say.
Yeah, makes sense.
Although I think there's something else that bothers me--and that is this vaguely Christian idea that we're supposed to be thankful. And that we should be thankful for the good things that happen to us. And I guess that's part of it--but we're also supposed to be thankful/content/at peace even in the midst of really terrible and difficult situations. It seems like American Christianity aspires to comfort and sees that comfort as a sign of God's blessing and I think that's baloney.
The health and wealth gospel goes middle class.
Hm, I've never thought of the #blessed thing in that light (although in honesty, I have largely just ignored it altogether). Could it be that the necessity of hiding terrible and difficult aspects of your life from social media (due to the fact of the many audiences) leads to the sense that people are expressing gratitude for only the comfort they do display to us, while in their own minds, they're expressing it for the whole of their lives, many parts of which are just not visible to us? I don't know, just a thought.
I do agree that the secular sense of blessedness is pretty much just "I'm grateful for the hygge, and that I don't live in Syria right now." But as one of my friends long ago blogged, it's a weird construction, because to WHAT or WHOM are you grateful even for that if not a deity in which you do not believe? So she was, as I recall, against the whole term as being a kind of religious decapitation.
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