I’m trying on a new life philosophy. It lacks elegance, it lacks sophistication, but what it has is the kind of simplicity that life philosophies should have. It’s based on a change in the fundamental premises by which I have built my life: What if I stopped taking things so seriously, stopped assuming that each incident I encounter has deep and lasting meaning (as well as deep and intractable roots to my history). What if very little is of ultimate importance, and that I could stop analyzing the intent, meaning and conscious and unconscious motivations of myself and everyone around me.
Here’s what I’m thinking. Basically, people say and do things – a lot of things. People experience the entire human range of emotions, go through as many stages of the life cycle they are granted. And mostly, they say and do things that have nothing at all to do with me. I am not part of the equation so I ought to remove myself from the analysis. Perhaps the way to get the most out of life is not to understand it fully, but to live it fully. And to do that, sometimes we may need to apply the simplest, briefest analysis, rather than the one that addresses every possibility, every consequence, the unseen costs and benefits, and the lifetime trajectory if the situation were to recur, over and over, like an eternal return, an interpersonal universe that has been and will continue be, in this exact form, an infinite number of times, across all time and space.
Eternal recurrence is a grand philosophy, but I’m looking at something a bit smaller. What if, when I encountered something that wasn’t to my liking, something unexpected (and unhappily so), something that is simply not at all the way I would do things, I had the equivalent of a moral and emotional shrug. “So what?” Because in the next moment, life is waiting to happen. Life is waiting even in the time it takes to shrug the “So what?” moment, but if I tense to it, fight it, get angry about it, subject it to eternal analysis, I’ve missed all of the life moments that were happening during my elegant and sophisticated analysis, which took me, exactly, nowhere I wanted to go.
I like where “So what?” takes me. It takes me, as someone said to me today, to a place where it’s easy to breathe. And what’s so bad about that? I’m sure Schopenhauer and Nietzsche liked breathing, even if they also liked complicated concepts and lost themselves in the struggle to make sense of things.
I like “So what?” far better than some of its well-known alternatives, which seem to convey something that is quite impossible for most mortals, at least for me, let alone the ones that convey disregard or even contempt for another person.
- the ever-popular: “Don’t sweat the small stuff”
- the spiritual: “Let go, let God”
- the flip: “Whatever” (a more recent variant of the colder, older, snottier, “Who cares?”)
- the hip: “No problem”
- the impossible: “Like water off a duck’s back”
None of these have ever worked for me, and certainly none ever felt OK when I was on the receiving end of one of these pithy phrases, which seem to belittle me rather than make me feel better.
But the shrug – I’m starting to believe in it.
Here’s a sampling that I think I could live with:
So … my husband’s too tired from his work week to take me out for dinner. So what? It isn’t a statement about the viability of my marriage or the extent to which I am treasured and loved; it’s a statement about how tired my over-worked, intense guy is. And, it makes a ton of sense. We’re staying in tonight – so what?
So … my mother called and managed not to ask about me. So what? It’s not proof of what was, what is and what will be. It’s today, and it’s over. And it’s a clue to the life moment I might wish to engage in next – I should ask if there’s anything I can do to help, as I know she’s a touch down in the dumps these days. She’s distracted – so what?
So … a couple we invited for dinner has not invited us over. So what? We might have liked to get to know them better, but that may not happen. It doesn’t mean or predict anything about my future, my cooking (the tagine of lamb, apricots and chickpeas was flavorful and welcoming), or whether we said or did anything stupid in their presence (we probably did, but no more stupid than the stuff other people say or do). No analysis needed. They’ll invite us if or when they do, and until then, we explore other friendships we wish to deepen. This friendship didn’t progress – so what?
So … my friend wants to change plans and I’ll be out a bit longer. So what? Sure, I had an idea of something else I was going to do, but what about what I’d experience by doing it differently? I’ll be off track from the way I thought my day was going to go – so what?
Here’s one my son could use on me, and I think I could totally live with it and appreciate being saved the piercing child-to-parent eye-roll and sarcastic, “whatever”:
So … my Mom wants me to do my homework and nags me every night to brush my teeth. So what? That’s my Mom – she’s a stickler for chores – so what?
Are you getting the feel for this thing? It’s powerful. I’m gonna work on perfecting the upper body shrug, one shoulder raised toward a downward-turned cheek, perhaps even a two-handed, palms-up gesture, the single raised eyebrow – all to help create the total experience of “So what?” I don’t want to start shrugging things off, only to have it begin a whole new phase of analysis. I want an effective shrug, a total shrug, and its inevitable slide into the next moment.
Perhaps I’ll even create a French name for this act of seeming indifference: Le Shrug. Like the Le Car, an inelegant-at-best, sturdy little vehicle, European in origin, transported to American engineering with the attempt to lure customers with a 1970’s American idea of the French – those cigarette-smoking, topless beach-going, casual-sensualists who have affairs, drink wine at lunch, eat whole meals of baguettes, cheese, and endless tiny cups of bitter espresso – oh, we long for their indifference, their aloofness, their down-looking glances of superiority and small little wry smiles saying, over and over, to anything important, anything over which we might fret: “Et alors?”
Perhaps it’s impossible to change my fundamental personality, temperament, nature and history.
I’m an analyzer and I take things seriously.
My kid doesn’t like the soup I that I spent 6 hours cooking.
Insert Le Shrug, utter at will: “So what?”