9 Exhausting Effects of Falling in Love With Your Misery

“The truth hurts. The more it hurts, the more true it is.”

So, if it’s true that the truth sometimes hurts, does it follow that if something hurts, it must be true? This is obviously crap, and there’s no reason to believe it unless part of you wants to. So why is it so seductive?

It can be a relief to accept the inevitable pain of life and incorporate it into your identity. It’s more healthy, useful, and honorable than ignoring or downplaying it. If you’re part of a group with specific challenges, making that central to your identity can empower you to demand visibility, understanding, and social change.

But there’s a limit to how much you can accomplish by dwelling on your pain. When you worship your suffering long past the point where it’s useful, you’re damning yourself in ways you’ll never even know.

In a video essay from 2018, the YouTuber Natalie “ContraPoints” Wynn analyzes the subculture of incels, violent misogynists whose driving article of faith is that they’re doomed to never get laid because society hates them. Examining how their group dynamics and incentive structures reinforce the most depressing and fatalistic tendencies, Wynn introduces the concept of masochistic epistemology.

As soon as I heard it, I saw it everywhere. It makes me wish some of us had healthier and more creative ways to channel our masochism, although incels and sex dungeons probably don’t mix.

A little rain must fall

Life is suffering. That’s the first noble truth for a reason. Wisdom requires accepting it. But perpetual or perennial self-pity is suicide on the installment plan.

I know this, as I’ve spent most of my life dealing with treatment-resistant depression, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s crept into every corner of my life, soaked and rotted the floorboards, damaged my relationships and career, and made easy things difficult and difficult things seemingly impossible. When I’m on a losing streak, I tend to assume I am, in my ex-wife’s words, “bad at life.” I beat myself up over things that are largely circumstantial. And I attract people who are all too happy to rub it in.

As my friend Ciaran Healy describes it, “depression is not evolution’s failure at crafting humans. It’s evolution’s success at crafting another organism that uses human suffering as nutrition. The master craftsman didn’t fail. He succeeded twice.” It’s a survival strategy that works too well and creates a spectacular prison of your own design. You, my friend, much like me, are an unconscious genius, a sleepwalking giant. Be careful how you use that.

Based on my experience, if you allow your hopeless suffering to serve as a cornerstone of your identity for too long, here’s some of what you can expect:

It doesn’t really keep you safe

Life can be shitty sometimes, for sure. People will let you down, betray your each other’s trust, and sometimes hurt you just for fun. But cutting yourself off from your own strength limits your opportunities to seek real safety and security, which almost always comes from mutually respectful and beneficial connections with other people.

Being in touch with your own insecurities can be empowering nad endearing, at least at first, But fetishizing of your aggrieved sense of victimhood can make you hard to get to know or care about.

Also, you’re probably malnourished and dehydrated. Eat an omelet.

It’s a self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling prophecy

Sometimes focusing entirely on the negative can make me feel like a tough guy, as though the inherent, all-pervasive rottenness of the human condition is some sort of dark truth that only the strongest among us have the fortitude to accept.

In reality, masochistic epistemology runs right along the lines of one of your standard-issue cognitive biases, the negativity bias, which makes bad things stick out much more sharply in our perception than good things.

It’s easy to make yourself miserable. It’s hardwired. For a lifestyle that’s so self-consciously dark and edgy, masochistic epistemology is a lazy, uninspired one. And it’s a a hard habit to break. Especially when you consider what it does to your social calendar.

It makes you a magnet for takers and other toxic people

Misery does love company, so the good news is, you won’t be alone. The bad news is, you’ll find yourself surrounded by people who make things worse, perpetuate your problems, and try to bring you back down if you make any moves toward taking care of yourself, which is their obligation as the worst people in the world.

It’s well-known that confidence can help you get laid. By the flip side of the same token, making yourself miserable, feeling sorry for yourself, and fetishizing your impotent downtroddenness is like a pickup system that only works on screw-ups, assholes, and other foul-weather friends. These people will encourage all your worst tendencies — well, all of them except the fun ones.

It insults people who care for you

I’m not here to deny your pain. You may very well be lonely. I know what it’s like, for sure, and I believe it to be one of the biggest problems in the world right now, along with wealth-hoarding, repressed sexual fetishes, and the continued existence of Trevor Bauer.

But there are probably people who care about you, at least for now. When you discount or disrespect that, you train them to give up on you. We are selfish bastards, and we do help each other partly out of self-interest — it makes us feel good to help people when they’re down because we want to help them improve themselves. If you refuse to do this, people will take the hint and dismiss you as a lost cause. And from there, it only gets worse.

You resent everyone and see enemies everywhere

When you become a suspicious sad sack, you tend to see the worst in everyone and treat them accordingly. This drives away people who could help you. It trains people to treat you poorly. It makes the world a meaner place.

When you let yourself believe that everyone is scum — whether or not that includes you is largely irrelevant, but it certainly doesn’t help if it does — you’re well on your way to giving yourself a pass on bigotry, harassment, and even violence. No bueno.

You don’t know your own strength

What harm could be done by little old you? You’re such a sad little nobody — you could never possibly have the power to inflict harm on anyone else.

I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you’re dead wrong about how powerless you are. When you can’t take responsibility for yourself, you swing like a sad, lazy wrecking ball through the lives of the people around you. You might even take over the world by accident, and then we’re all screwed because you said yourself you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.

Denying that you make a difference makes you an asshole, and not the charismatic or proactive kind of asshole. If you want to be an asshole, be one of those assholes instead.

It makes you more wrong about the world

You’re not a born loser, but you’re not as smart as you think you are. Reality is a controlled hallucination. You dream up stories in your head based on largely outmoded evolutionary imperatives, perceived self-interest, shit your parents said, and other bad ideas.

Focusing on the positive at the expense of discernment can be dangerous and obnoxious. But obsessing about the negative, especially when it makes you feel powerless, has a similar effect It also cuts off your ability to zoom out, go meta, and try out alternate views of things. It makes you even more dangerously ignorant than all of us already are, which takes some doing.

It’s a hell of a hard thing to talk about

It’s hard to discuss masochistic epistemology in mixed company without running the risk of disrespecting someone who really is going through some shit, being judgmental and victim-blamey, possibly causing real harm, or just being a myopic cock.

I know I don’t like it when people say my depression isn’t real. Tell me I’m not a victim, and I want to kick your ass.

There are large communities, particularly online, that help people sustain their sense of victimhood and punish them when they try to change themselves. Contrapoints talks about incels, and that’s not my culture, although I certainly have my dry spells. But it’s also a known issue the left-leaning spaces I frequent, where social hardships can become social currency and there’s no point in trying to improve yourself because nothing good will ever happen under capitalism and being happy is just giving the capitalist pigs what they want.

Most people don’t really want to shovel shit for monstrous corporations, but this attitude makes it hard to get much accomplished.

The wisdom of the middle way

First, if you think you may be clinically depressed, get it checked out. You may not find help in the first place you look, but you might feel better just by doing something. In the meantime, try not to internalize the lies depression tells you.

Even if masochistic epistemology were somehow true and helpful, it’s ultimately unsustainable. You will never fully incorporate it.

You’re not descended from nihilists. Half your DNA comes from the most tenacious sperm cell in a graduating class of millions. The fact that you’ve made it this far is a tribute to your indomitable survival instinct. There’s a part of you that will never stop seeking success, truth, and self-realization. It’s stronger, wiser, and meaner than your masochistic epistemology, and if you try to deny and repress it, it’ll give you nothing but headaches.

Positive thinking gets a bad rap, but I understand the resistance to it, particularly in the shadows of my depression. You don’t have to be obsessively positive to avoid being obsessively negative.

Try the third way. Accept and allow the pain of life’s hardships and unfairness. When that becomes too much, go for a hike, drink a glass of water, or spend an hour in a float tank, Spend time with yourself when you’re at your best.

Not too tight. Not too loose. Maybe a little too sexy.

Pain can make you beautiful, but it doesn’t make you smart. It’s impermanent, it’s ultimately an interpretation and an illusion, and it needn’t define you.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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