I 'like' this

May 28, 2011

Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.

By JONATHAN FRANZEN

A COUPLE of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far the technology had advanced in three years. Even when I didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the silky action of its track pad, the shocking speed of its responses, the beguiling elegance of its graphics.

I was, in short, infatuated with my new device. I’d been similarly infatuated with my old device, of course; but over the years the bloom had faded from our relationship. I’d developed trust issues with my Pearl, accountability issues, compatibility issues and even, toward the end, some doubts about my Pearl’s very sanity, until I’d finally had to admit to myself that I’d outgrown the relationship.

Do I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.

Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to describe late-model gadgets; and how the extremely cool things that we can do now with these gadgets — like impelling them to action with voice commands, or doing that spreading-the-fingers iPhone thing that makes images get bigger — would have looked, to people a hundred years ago, like a magician’s incantations, a magician’s hand gestures; and how, when we want to describe an erotic relationship that’s working perfectly, we speak, indeed, of magic.

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.

A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.

If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).

Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.

And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors. (Think about it...I think this is one of his most powerful assertions)

I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.

And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. (and here, you will probably think of that old adage "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" but I would venture to say that surviving the pain isn't about making you stronger, but about making your life as beautiful as it is meant to be, helping you to be as beautiful as you are meant to be) When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer.

When I was in college, and for many years after, I liked the natural world. Didn’t love it, but definitely liked it. It can be very pretty, nature. And since I was looking for things to find wrong with the world, I naturally gravitated to environmentalism, because there were certainly plenty of things wrong with the environment. And the more I looked at what was wrong — an exploding world population, exploding levels of resource consumption, rising global temperatures, the trashing of the oceans, the logging of our last old-growth forests — the angrier I became.

Finally, in the mid-1990s, I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment. There was nothing meaningful that I personally could do to save the planet, and I wanted to get on with devoting myself to the things I loved. I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small, but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair.

BUT then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love.

And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But, no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin.

Because now, not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved.

And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.

How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.

And who knows what might happen to you then?

Jonathan Franzen is the author, most recently, of “Freedom.” This essay is adapted from a commencement speech he delivered on May 21 at Kenyon College.

(notes and emphasis was personally added)

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interesting, ja? 

some rambling thoughts that were bouncing around in my head after reading it...

don't take up space and think that by changing the world population by a single digit, you are changing the world. change the space you take up. be active. love by going outside of yourself, your boundaries, your safety nets and into another person's life and heart. don't just find them likeable, or worth your sympathy, or your pocket change....love them--give them yourself when you are happy and encouraged and desire to give of yourself, but also when that is the last thing you want to do. 

give them the time you may not seem to have

be interested in how someone answers the question 'how are you?'

 be interested enough to first ask the question with sincerity

give them the smile that maybe you didn't feel like wearing that day, or specifically after that meeting or exam went badly

thank them for the little things they have done for you that you forgot to thank them for

give them your thanksgiving, not for doing things, but for being. simply being

give them the last serving, the last beer, the better portion, the better seat, the warmer jacket, the cooler shady spot, the attention to their problems, to their latest artwork, to their wiggling tooth, to their music preference. 

its the little things. the seconds which over-stressed and time-hungry humans overdramatize into not being able to sacrifice. 

And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

thats why saving the world, working for world peace, changing the world, starts with you. and you choosing to love another person. just ONE other. and then another and then another. The personal remains intact. The friendships are sought to be lived in ways in which you remember the others' birthdays, the names of their brothers and sisters, their favorite food. Personal love retains its primacy and is not subordinated to caring for or fixing the lives of hundreds of others. (both are important in their own ways...the key is always RIGHT ORDER) true love is personal--a gift of self, a reception of the other. not others. other. and another. and another. 

I've been thinking a lot recently about our mission here. 

How difficult the question is from me when people ask me: So, you have been here for 6 months--what is your mission here in Vienna? What have you done so far? What are your activities? 

My thoughts and words stumble because I don't know how to explain it. 

I experience the humility of not being understood...of the weight of our 'mission' not being understood, when I respond--we have made friends. we have renovated an apartment. we visit our friends, play with our friends, invite them to our house for lunch or dinner or just coffee, we go to the movies with our friends, go to the piano concerts of our friends, we pray for our friends--

those asking want results. numbers more than the names of our friends and their beautiful stories. 

the consumer industry spans even into volunteer work, service work, helping people

and in this way...a mission of simple love is not readily or universally 'liked'

and my mind is also caught up in the consumerism mindset. when someone asks me what we are doing here for volunteer work I feel as if I have to sell what I am doing. that I have to make them understand its value and worth, and I need to present it in such a way so that they will 'like' it and buy it. all of the sudden, our consumer minds conform this mission of loving into something to be sold, something to be bought. 

but no. it is something to be lived. the people are people to be loved, not numbers with which we can convince others of our worth, the worth of our work, the worth of our time here, the worth of our 'product' as if we are trying to sell something to the people of Vienna, to the people of the world who will hopefully support us. 

the people are people to be loved. individually. slowly. in suffering. in joy. in silence. and abundant conversation. sometimes alone and one-on-one, and sometimes in the middle of a room full of other loving and loved people. 

but of all these..i think the first two of most important. loving individually. loving slowly. to be interested in the individual. not in the individual because he embodies something that unites him to a greater group of socially deemed 'needy'. it has become increasingly clear to me that this is an equal opportunity mission in which sometimes even I need to be on the receiving end of some of this Heart's Home service. We are by nature 'needy', we are all by nature 'poor' because we are all born individual and in need of experiences of friendship and love. community and belonging. I am just as poor as anyone else. 

so our mission is a universal mission applying to everyone, and yet only one person, the individual, at each moment. changing the world happens with one person, and in one moment.

thus it is also slow. you must love patiently. slowly. at the pace of the other. it is not 'liking' that is adjusted to your own pace and our own timetable and your own preferences. it is walking at the pace of the elderly woman whose arm you support, the cue of your next step taken from her movement, not from yours. what love would their be in take the time to take a stroll with this woman if you were dragging her behind you, walking faster than she was able and thus forcing her into physical discomfort as well as embarrassment, or of forcing her to sit in a wheelchair so that you can control how fast she goes and where she goes according to your own preferences and abilities. it is not forcing a child to continue to play a game when he is no longer interested in playing, or he is tired. it is constantly being flexible. your every moment being a gift of yourself and everything you are and have, to the other. 

the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

it has struck me recently how important, beautiful, difficult, tiring, irritating, and blessed it is to live in community while living these 14 months with Heart's Home. and how it is only a spring board for the rest of my life. how it is one of the biggest lessons I think I could possibly learn here. we live in community. we learn the truth about ourselves--how beautiful and nice and loving we can be, and how ugly and cruel and short-tempered we can be. what he described....is exactly what we have lived. what I have lived. what has surprised me. disgusted me. taught me. you see how beautiful and ugly you are....and you struggle with the balance of not having pride in your shining moments, and not despairing at the humility must embrace in your ugliest moments. it is hard enough to have to face these moments with yourselves, when no one else is looking. But in those moments when there are others, when you see your shining self-image shattering, when you are disgusting yourself and are in disbelief at your own actions or words and you look at the person standing in front of you expecting them to be as disgusted as you, to reject you, to throw you away with all your faults and failures--there are those moments in which you are almost breathless with overwhelming confusion, thanksgiving, and that sense of debt that necessarily comes with and is never quenched with love. Why? because that person saw you when you were utterly unlikeable. that person who by all consumer standards would be completely justified in throwing you away and finding himself a new friend, a more likeable and convenient person...chooses you. chooses to love you. to react not with anger and retaliation, but with a softening of the eyes and of the voice, and sometimes even silence. chooses to wait. to understand. to see you as a whole person, not just as an object that has lost its value, interest, worth.  and it works the other way around too. you choose them. you choose to love them. 

I once read a commentary by Church Father St. Gregory the Great on Mark 6:7 (And He called unto Him the twelve, and began to send them forth by TWO AND TWO, and gave them power over unclean spirits) in which he explained: "Further, the Lord sent the disciples to preach, two and two, because there are two precepts of charity; namely, the love of God, and of our neighbor; and charity cannot be between less than two; by this therefore He implies to us, that he who has not charity towards his neighbor, ought in no way to take upon himself the office of preaching."

Well, I certainly don't have the office of preaching...but I find that this certainly has everything to do with community life and why it is so important, especially for our mission of love and friendship. Simply put, we must first choose to love one another, unconditionally, in everything good and bad, living out patience and understanding and forgiveness so that we can 'preach' the kind of love we hope other's will begin to live out, but preach it without words. simply by loving one another in this way. and also, if we cannot love one another, we who are united by our desire to be doing this work together, united by our faith, by our prayers, by our love for God and humanity--then how are we going to be able to choose to love those who are harder to love, those who reject us or judge us, how are we going to assure other's of our unconditional love--a love that will not stop upon seeing their own faults and failures--faults and failures that often drive everyone else away from them and leave them lonely, leave them in the most imprisoning and suffocating poverty that can be experienced? 

thoughts??