Chinups: An Exercise in Annoyance

I’m all for keeping my chin up.  It’s slenderizing – I dig that.  I wonder, however, if keeping one’s chin up is useful for anything else.  As much as people say it, you’d think it was a cure-all for all of life’s woes.  Lost your job? Keep your chin up!  Checking account overdrawn? Keep your chin up! House in foreclosure? Let’s see that chipper chin!

Granted, I haven’t actually tried walking around with my chin tilted skyward, but I’m hesitant to believe that it could really resolve any serious problems.  OK, I’m no shrink.  I’m just a bitter gal with a downward-shifting chin and a chip on my shoulder.   I don’t profess to hold the key to eternal happiness, or internal happiness, or external happiness.  I’m just a gal with an attitude.  Yep.  I’ve got an attitude against platitudes.

I know, shame on me, hating on the helpless, mindless platitude.   I have misdirected anger.  It’s not the platitudes themselves that bother me.  It’s the fact that anyone thinks they would make anyone else feel better.

“I decided one day that I could either really enjoy life, or die,” a self-proclaimed profound man said to me.  I dared counter Mr. Profound that for most people it’s not a choice of one extreme or the other, that perhaps there’s a mid-range between ecstasy and suicide.  He responded with the following deep thought.   “Well, if you don’t like your life change it.” Ingenious.   Acting on his advice, I made a change.  I vowed to ignore Mr. Profound for the foreseeable future.  I do feel better making that small yet refreshing improvement. 

“There was a reason you had that depthless discussion,” some platituders would tell me.  It couldn’t be random dumb luck.  Everything happens for a reason.  Of course that fate-centered approach directly contradicts Mr. Profound’s message that one has sole control over one’s life.   Slap me for questioning long-proffered wisdom, but which witless wisdom is worthwhile? It’s impossible to be simultaneously in charge of one’s life and leaving it all up to some unnamed inexplicable “reason.”  Either theory sounds cockamamie to me.  Life sucks? Well, you can change it.  Or not.  Maybe your life sucks for a reason.  Either way, there’s no use getting upset about it.   It is what it is. 

I should have gratitude for platitudes.   They require no special talent or skill to deliver.  They require no thought.  Hell, I don’t have to believe them, so long as I graciously spread them wherever I go.  And the next time something bad happens to you, I’ll look at you, chin up, and baselessly promise that things will get better.

Comments

[Charlotte Vark]

Hi!

You might be interested in a book I've been meaning to pick up myself... It's called: Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich.

She did an interview on The Daily Show and was really brilliant...

Here's a couple links!

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-14-2009/barbara-ehrenreich

http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/brightsided.htm

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[Katherine]

"Bright-Sided" is a really good book - I second that recommendation!