From TEDx:
Synopsis: In our anxious world, we often protect ourselves by closing off parts of our lives that leave us feeling most vulnerable. Yet invulnerability has a price. When we knowingly or unknowingly numb ourselves to what we sense threatens us, we sacrifice an essential tool for navigating uncertain times -- joy. This talk by Brené Brown will explore how and why fear and collective scarcity has profoundly dangerous consequences on how we live, love, parent, work and engage in relationships -- and how simple acts can restore our sense of purpose and meaning:
Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work where she has spent a lifetime studying courage, shame, authenticity, wholeheartedness and vulnerability. She is the Behavioral Health Scholar-in-Residence at the Council on Alcohol and Drugs and has written several books on her research.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
6 comments:
"disappointment as a lifestyle", this is a damn fine definition of cynicism.
Really enjoying Brene Brown. Thanks for the pointer.
Don't mean to spam, but meant to say I also like the idea of a kind of production of existential scarcity.
These ideas need to be connected to what Levi is calling "the new symptom".
Cynicism, yes. Check out William Connolly on 'resentment' as well.
I think the move would be to get past resentment and cynicism (which nihilism brings at first) to the stage of radical freedom AND response-ability: a mode that generates creative evolution (non-Bergsonian)? This is the 'post' of post-nihilism maybe?
PS-you can search Connolly her on my blog for a few good resources..
Where would a zen-like minimalist mentality and lifestyle fit in with existential scarcity you think?
Yeh. On my blog dmf noted that Brown lacks the 'tragic' flavour of the names I regularly draw on and situate myself as in the shadow of (Schopenhauer, for instance). Yet I'd say that the tragic belongs to pessimism and that pessimists can still be optimistic (Francis Bacon's "optimism without hope").
I was discussing the "post" of "post-nihilism" with a friend last night, actually. I was trying to express something to the effect of 'so we have someone like Ray Brassier telling us meaning is gone, everything's going to die, we're in the situation of Ozymandias. But we still have to live, we seem incapable of not... why don't we all kill ourselves? We have this unquenchable will to live. So now we know our illusions are illusions, we are left to choose them. Except without meaning what do we have? What are we thrown back on...our bodies and the bodies that surround and interpenetrate them. Hence, our meaninglessness isn't without a carnal ground'.
As far as zen-minimalism goes...my approach to all this has lead me through pessimism to Stoicism. The Stoics inherited the Cynic school's desire for spartan living. Epictetus is a bit like my version of Derrida's Heidegger, he stands behind me and says "why are you doing that?" Epictetus has two heroes, Socrates and Diogenes of Sinope. Yet, like all Stoics, he thinks Cynic simplicity is too hard, and, anyway, it is just a fanaticism that thinks material things can possess moral value. I am totally in favour of the Stoic practice of eliminating unnecessary things from one's life, and of trying to detach desire from things that can't satisfy desire. There is nothing wrong with having a nice house, but cultivate a relationship to it such that if it was burnt to the ground you wouldn't mourn its loss. Recognise things for what they are, temporary and never yours to begin with.
Existential scarcity can only be an acute problem if we don't recognise that we've been looking to outside sources and to higher things ("externalities") for our satisfaction. My own attempted practising of Stoic virtue is born out of a will to adjust to existential scarcity.
I think what we need to be careful of is being accused of quietism, an accusation that conflates questions of meaning and desire with the organisation and messiness of living.
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2013/03/13/the-end-of-growth/
Post a Comment