Where the more fortunately educated read to be surprised, the middle class reads to have its notions confirmed, and deviations from customary verbal formulas disconcert and annoy it.
–Paul Fussell, Class (1983)
Someone named “Jonathon Howard,” writing in something called the Savramento Book Review, must be a profoundly middle-class sort of fellow, given how disconcerted and annoyed he was at Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy against the Human Race. His 225-word micro-screed against Conspiracy turned up on one of my Google searches for reviews of that magnificent work of pessimism. I shan’t bother with the substance of the review — I can’t bother with what isn’t there — but I do want to pull out one sentence thereof as a specimen of a larger sentiment.
Mostly it’s the ravings of an impotent teenager who is so upset that existence doesn’t conform itself to expectations that nonexistence, for all, would be better.
That’s a sentiment anyone who has the temerity to be seriously unhappy with the world will hear a lot. “You’re so adolescent.” “Your whining is so immature.” “Grow up!”
Why is it that act-your-age injunctions are so often directed against the unhappy and pessimistic? The folks who hurl these injunctions would have us believe that “adults” have a superior sort of virtue that adolescents generally don’t, the virtue of bearing suffering. But I have a rather different explanation.
Let us begin with the observation that complainers are unloved. It’s not much fun to be around unhappy people, and this antipathetic emotional reaction is easy to understand.
(1) Complaining is a warning that someone might be an unreliable partner. Complaints signal frustration and thwarted desire, and people might be afraid to trust those who are full of unfulfilled desire. A spouse with unfulfilled desires might be more likely to have affairs. The discontented worker may will sit in his cubicle looking for Internet porn rather than industriously laboring over spreadsheets. So complaining people are likely to be avoided in productive relationships.
(2) Complainers have lower status. Status-seeking is one of the most fundamental drives people have. The higher their status, the more content. So signals of discontent signal low status. Associating with people of low status lowers one’s own status. People prefer to affiliate with other people of high status, and avoiding complainers is a way to do this.
(3) Complainers may need scarce resources. And people are selfish, so avoid complainers.
So if you want to get by with people, form productive relationships, win a desirable spouse and a good job and all that, you’d be well advised to stop complaining so much and learn to act contented, even if you’re not.
The trouble with this strategy is that most people aren’t contented. Rather, they’re full of thwarted desires and anxiety and depression. So if they want to project contentment to other people, they need to learn to lie about what they’re really feeling. And as any student of lies knows, you’ll be much a much better liar if you learn to believe your own lies (self-deception is at the core of human social life). You tell yourself that you are a happy person, a successful person, that your hard work will be rewarded (and, when the unreality of that claim becomes too much to bear that virtue is its own reward). And so on.
But lying to yourself successfully takes a lot of time and practice: it takes years to successfully internalize the bullshit that allows us to get along successfully in society. Grown-ups have a lot of practice at this. Adolescents, not so much, and so it is with the adolescent that we see the unhappiness and thwarted desire leaking out so much more readily.
And that is why we associate unhappiness with the world with being “adolescent.”
