01.08.06
Naomi Wolf
I like this article in today’s ST. If furrin readers can’t access the link let me know and I’ll mail you a copy.
 Update: here’s a follow up interview. It’s frustrating because how can we judge whether or not she did the right thing without knowing why the marriage broke up? And she’s happy now but will she still be in 10 years? Or even 5?
auds said,
January 9, 2006 at 9:51 pm
I felt the same frustration – I wanted to say – so what’s your point Naomi?
I was half thinking of getting the book when I heard it was coming out but after reading that yesterday I have no desire to know anymore about her life.
She’s an excellent writer and tries to be an original, but her ST articles will do me.
The only garaunteed good piece of advice her father did give her, imho, was to stay away from Al Gore. We certainly know how badly that one turned out.
Sarah said,
January 10, 2006 at 12:48 pm
He was right about Gore, wasn’t he? However, I was a bit uncomfortable with her bragging about he’d changed people’s lives and got them to give up jobs and relationships. How lovely for the other half of those relationships. I am really starting to wonder about the culture of the right to individual happiness. How long does that last? Sure I’d be quite happy if I ran off and left the responsibilities of husband and family behind me. But I’d die alone. How happy is that? I might enjoy my 30′s and 40′s a bit more but, a bit of the old unconditional love never goes astray and you just don’t get that in single life, even if there are periods of great relationships. They all end, in the end.
auds said,
January 10, 2006 at 5:08 pm
The real meaning and pursuit of happiness is something that nobody could probably agree on but several studies have examined traits of happy people – while I can’t produce references here and now, a constant theme throughout them was constancy. People who described themselves as happy and fulfilled committed to relationships and things outside of themselves and in giving of themselves to this ideal were fulfilled.
They were committed and found personal satisfaction in the committment. Victor Frankl, the psychiatrist who spent time in the Nazi concentration camps and wrote “Man’s Search for Meaning” explaining his new creation of “logotherapy”, a psychological method of finding your goal in life and spending time working for its success. And that happiness was found in the pursuit of something (like a relationship) to which you were committed to, as opposed to achieving the goal.
Pope John Paul II in the role of philosopher instead of pope, spent a lot of time discussing 2 types of love – eros and agape. And believed that the agape, the giving of oneself in an act of love to another human being was ultimately purifying and completing as it raised eros to another level of communion between 2 people.
I’m losing the run of myself in this comment, but JP2′s idea that in giving, one was completed is totally at odds to our culture’s (and Naomi’s Dad’s idea) fixation with receiving emotional succur, the Oprah catch phrase of “loving yourself” which somehow increases our self esteem, our self worth and ultimately our happiness.
It’s all fine and well to decide that your relationship has become stagnated and your needs are not being met and you move on. This is not however the sure route to emotional maturity. All meaningful human relationships that we treasure are not purely for what we can get out of them. Our loved ones don’t just force our egos back into dark corners, but also force us to compromise our wants and to give to them. In expecting all around us to tank our emotional reserve up, we ensure that we will never be satisfied.
Bruce Springsteen, the great philosopher (!) talked about choices and our acceptance of them at his concert in Dublin last year – I was struck by something he said – i paraphrased when I posted about it http://realitycheckdotie.blogspot.com/2005/05/bruce-heaven.html but “Loved the bit where Bruce talked about how mourning for the choices you didn’t make gives weight to the actions you take — I find this message very counter-cultural. We are led to believe that choice is the ultimate value, the most important freedom in our lives — so much so that we coast along cushy materialism choosing “lifestyles†afraid to choose the option of substance and sacrifice. Making 1 choice and sticking to it with integrity is considered restrictive and oppressive. ”
I’ll stop rambling now!
Sarah said,
January 10, 2006 at 8:01 pm
not a ramble at all..just the kind of thing I’ve been trying to figure out myself. So the question is, and we can all only answer this for ourselves, where does the balance lie between compromise and self-sacrifice on the one hand and selfishness and self-entitlement on the other?
If we call happiness the ability to choose what is best for ourselves at any given moment, then I don’t know anyone who is happy. There are those who lead lives of individualness (christ, I know that’s not a word, forgive me while I figure out what the real one is) and the rest of us are hoping that they’ll end up miserable and regretting not putting up with occasional bouts of sacrifice.
Then there are those (and I include myself in this group) who hope that when the final assessment is made, we can say we are happy, even if we scraped through life making sacrifices hoping they will pay off. Brutally, it means we settle for things which don’t really make us happy in the short term, hoping they will in the long term, or that they will lead us to a position where we can make bigger choices which will make us happy. I suppose one easy example is having your sights set on a particular job. You might have to start off doing shitty jobs for shitty pay which might put you in a position to apply for the next job and the next job which leads to the great job. BUT what if you finally get the big job after years of shitty jobs, and OH NO discover it doesn’t make you happy after all. Then what? Was it all a waste? Should you have taken easy jobs?
Are we mad trying to even strive for happiness at all? Is the pursuit of happiness making us miserable? If we keep thinking we’re supposed to be happy, and living in a culture of happiness, then doesn’t it make us all really pissed off just ‘cos everything isn’t perfect? But its never bloody perfect.
sigh.
auds said,
January 11, 2006 at 1:40 am
The concept of happiness is nothing without the experience of unhappiness. Which brings us to sacrifice as suffering vs neccesary stages of life to bring us to a more completed state, a happier state?
Did you ever spend ages looking for a line in a book? And a magazine article that you knew you read years ago?
I’ve just spent the last hour and a bit (and it’s now after 1.30am and I’ve to get up in 5 hours – a definition of unhappiness perhaps?)
I couldn’t find the passage I wanted but here’s an interview with Victor Frankl when he was 90 years old – from First Things, a magazine that I think you would enjoying browsing through if you get time – http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9504/articles/scully.html
I also wanted to find another article I have somewhere on it, becuase it was bugging me, but here’s 2 bits from Frankl’s interview –
“What philosopher and lunatic had in common, Frankl went on to explain, is the certainty that happiness can be attained by furious pursuit and a consequent rage at the unsatisfying results. His useful word for this is “hyperintention,” a tendency that only inflames what is usually the real problem, our own self-centeredness. “Everything can be taken away from man but one thing-to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” The sane are those who accept this charge and do not expect happiness by right. Thus Frankl’s own “logotherapy,” which views suffering not as an obstacle to happiness but often the necessary means to it, less a pathology than a path.”
“Happiness, runs a favored Frankl formulation, “ensues.” “Happiness must happen.” Life should find us out there in the world doing good things for their own sake. Even “if we strive for a good conscience, we are no longer justified in having it. The very fact has made us into Pharisees. And if we make health our main concern we have fallen ill. We have become hypochondriacs.”"
So therefore merely putting up with shitty jobs to wait for the happiness in the expected promotion is one way to ensure unhappiness. Delayed gratification has become a nearly impossible task for many of us in a consumer culture (and don’t you just enjoy your sauce boat more as a result?), but is delaying something to reap the benefits later is different from accepting less now to wait for more?
If you do a shitty job for any other reason than for the work for itself, as a service to you and those around you, you’ll feel shit.
Sigh, is right!
Sarah said,
January 11, 2006 at 12:50 pm
auds, what’s your email address…the one listed on your comment bounced..