Mom's Search for Meaning
And small boobs
Welcome to Mess & Noise. Last week, I wrote about about the weird world of work and turning politicians into parents. You can get my non-expert, non-medical guide to Perimenopause here, and I’m dropping a new book about disagreeing at work next week. With a paid subscription you’ll receive all my books, some swag, and I’ll scratch your name into the sidewalk next time I see wet concrete.
Mining for Meaning
Had I been forced to read Man’s Search for Meaning in school or by a parent who wanted to teach me a lesson about real suffering, it wouldn’t have the same impact as it did last week when I was on my own quest for meaning.
I’m good the other 51 weeks of the year*.
*No I’m not
I’ve been thinking about the function of hope versus expectations. This newsletter tries to find meaning and humor (and sandwiches) amidst multiple crises: Our current political one, life under tech’s influence, losing tech jobs (WSJ finally covered the silent recession), and my personal midlife — parenting through grief, the mess and the noise of it, etc.
I try to do it without whining too much, and that requires periodic readings of first-person accounts of objectively horrific nightmares.
Here’s what I found in Viktor Frankl’s holocaust memoir:
A generous definition of suffering
Frankl illustrates the nature of suffering early in the book with an aptly dark metaphor:
Man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.
I don’t think I’d come to this conclusion if I’d survived three years in four different concentration camps. If I had any interest in sharing my story afterward, the title of my memoir would be: You Lucky Motherfuckers Have No Idea!
Frankl was the O.G. “Mindset Coach”
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.
I once worked with someone who said “attitude is a choice you make” in a meeting and he was subsequently teased by a group of assholes at our startup until it went belly-up. I wasn’t in the room when he said it, but I led the charge (Queen Asshole) after a coworker told me about it.
We made fake motivational posters with his quote and photo and changed his Windows Desktop screensaver to mock him with his own optimism. I suppose this was a test of his inner strength because he had a sense of humor about it. He chose his attitude in the face of workplace bullying that would never fly in 2024! We’d be so canceled.
“Mindset,” as it’s called today, has a ring of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, an American mythology that’s fallen out of fashion. Personal resolve and responsibility are necessary for all of us, but there are real systemic barriers and terrible odds that no amount of personal attitude can break.
Frankl’s point was barriers are irrelevant. The barriers he faced at Auschwitz were a high likelihood of death. It’s meeting the obstacles and challenges that matters, not whether or not you conquer them.
I want so badly to be this kind of person! To meet the challenges and “let go of results” as the new-ish adage goes. But I dig deep and find a brat who thinks all her effort should be generously rewarded. And when she’s disappointed, she turns into surly mall punk who just wants to shrug her shoulders and smoke a cigarette until it’s over.
Expectations are pointless
It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.
We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.
“Life” does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life’s tasks are also very real and concrete.
I like this pivot to action. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what the mall punk in the parking lot thinks or expects from life. She can roll her eyes and meet her responsibilities anyway.
There’s also something freeing about not having to figure out any deep meaning and just focus on the next task in front of you. AA and other recovery programs call this “the next right action.” Phil Stutz frames it as putting a pearl on a string, one after the other, a pearl at a time.
Un-warping the idea of suffering
My biggest takeaway was how Frankl’s story and logotherapy (the branch of psychology he developed) reframe what it means to suffer. Similar to buddhism, logotherapy accepts suffering as a necessary part of life instead of pathologizing it.
There’s a very American tendency to treat unhappiness as a crisis rather than a regular part of life. Having old-world European grandparents who lived through a different slice of World War II (the occupation, bombing, and liberation of Naples when they were teenagers), and a First-Gen American dad, I felt explicit pressure to “just be happy.”
I think about this a lot with my own kids. I find myself wanting to remove all their frustrations and disappointments because the world is frustrating and disappointing enough — they may as well be coddled at home. On the other hand, putting my son’s LEGO set together for him doesn’t do him any favors in the long run. He’s got to string his own pearls, you know?
I think of the Dr. Becky adage, “It’s not your job to keep your kids happy, it’s your job to keep them safe.”
It’s sound and practical but also zaps the fun out of parenting. There’s magic in cultivating your kids’ happiness, but there are also endless options for treats, entertainment, gifts…please God anything to get them to stop whining.
It’s easy to forget a certain level of unhappiness, a challenge, a barrier — some tension, as Frankl calls it — is necessary for a meaningful life.
In boob news
I loved and hated this Times story about the growing popularity of breast reductions and how it’s become a feminist issue amidst the post-Roe push for bodily autonomy.
As we slip into a national norm of forced birth, women are pushing back and seeking additional freedoms related to their bodies. Those who feel encumbered by large cup sizes are negotiating with their insurance companies, spending thousands of their own money and taking out loans to ease their suffering (what a theme today!)
What I hated about it was the body-horror angle: the raw post-op shots of scars and blood drains, for what exactly? To frame it as self-mutilation? To scare women away from getting breast reductions, like pictures of fetuses before an abortion?
There are no such pictures accompanying Times stories about vasectomies. Just cute euphemistic photos and illustrations:
You can always rely on the Times to be weirdly sexist when we need it the least!
👋 A quick hello and welcome to new sub, Kerith C!
I’m also happy to report my popularity in the international crypto blogosphere continues to surge, with recent recommendations from Интеллектуальный Инвестор, and El Inversor Intelectual. This is probably attributed to one joke I made about launching PhoebeCoin. I encourage anyone networking on CryptoStack to keep scrolling that post and others, where I shitpost — nay, diarrhea-post — all things crypto and Web3.
That’s all for now. See you next week.