Our modern society has started to open up about mental health, and this is a genuinely positive thing. More and more Americans seek treatment for mental health and more importantly, stigmas against those who go to counseling or seek other forms of treatment is gradually decreasing. However, we are increasingly bombarded by the Happiness Industrial Complex that frequently markets itself in the forms of books, courses and seminars that promise a cure-all to negativity, as if one can rid themselves entirely of all negative emotions. Putting aside these dubious claims, the concept of removing negative emotion from our lives entirely is not a productive pursuit, even if it were possible (hint: it isn’t).
The fact of the matter is that feelings of anger, greed, resentment and others will always be part of the human experience. Even if eliminating these sensations were possible (hint: it isn’t), then the only surefire way to avoid these feelings would be to isolate oneself in a cocoon while the world passes you by. A better path is to accept that these will occur; only then can one develop valid coping mechanisms.
What if I told you that there is an even better approach to handling these feelings than merely passively coping? Take the unlabeled pill that I have just pulled out of my linty pocket, and I’ll show you a different way. Here’s the path, young Keanu; take these feelings and use them as motivation. That’s right: do not wish away your anger, resentment, or greed, nor try to mitigate them. Instead, apply them towards something constructive.
Greed is one such feeling that I’ve personally used to improve my life exponentially. My upbringing and college years featured a constant shortage of disposable income, and hence the desire for more money took up much of my cognitive bandwidth from my eighteenth birthday onwards. While society viewed it as ambition solely due to my microscopic net worth, the underlying motive was simple: more. To reiterate; there is nothing wrong with being greedy. This motivated me to change my major during my freshman year of college to a STEM field; I wanted something that had a large market and that I had some natural inclination for. My borderline irrational desire for more money, often times just for its own sake, drove me to pick up countless extra shifts at the most toxic job that I’ve ever had-even during literal blizzards. Once the fattened paychecks hit my account, I had little-to-no desire to spend any of it that I absolutely didn’t have to. I even left a job at a company that I loved dearly in favor of a start-up in an uncontested niche that offered me heaps of equity. All of this eventually led to me building a position of strength that enabled me to YOLO myself out of a job.
I spent much of my time as a younger man being irrationally angry, and this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I was eternally angry back then because I felt that I wasn’t progressing towards my life goals at nearly the pace that I wanted to. My rage benefited me in numerous ways. I would often lift weights when I didn’t feel like it. Back in college, I was often the angriest man in nearly every room I walked into, and as a muscular 210 pound 19-year-old, that granted me a lot of physical security. Several years later, I got denied a promotion opportunity in favor of an outsider, and the rejection motivated me to become a non-stop reader of business and psychology books. Rage carried me through writing The Case Against Memes as I weaponized my word choice and aimed it at everyone/everything I disliked about the Pirate Peanut Gallery. To a lesser extent, it helped me write my second book as well.
Rage and resentment often go hand-in-hand, and younger me was certainly no exception. Because I’m such a try-hard, I often resented my lesser-committed college classmates; don’t skip two-thirds of classes, go to all of the parties, never study, forego tutoring and then expect me to view you as my equal or be treated with dignity when you don’t understand something. My undying loathing of my fellow college classmates continued when it came time for the career fair; along with my greed, it motivated me to be uber-prepared. After all, I viewed my peers as competition, more so competition that didn’t deserve to be there (and I sure as hell wasn’t going to lose to them). Hence, I went to nearly every event that the Career Services Department offered. I worked in a call center for several years, and since it was an incredibly metric-driven job, it was easy to see who was productive and who was not. Once I became proficient at the job (a process that took about seven months) I began to view my careless colleagues with utter disdain. However, I realized that I could only keep up my utter torment of the workplace if my numbers remained high, so open resentment made me a more productive employee. Management installing a leaderboard made my productivity (and my contempt) stand-out even more, much to the chagrin of those around me. The leaderboard allowed for multiple entries of the same person, and I used the chance to smear belittling messages aimed at the deadweights when I had highly productive shifts. I’m able to count on one hand the number of colleagues from that job I treated with basic human decency, entirely due to their laziness. Resentment of one of my former toxic employers still helps to keep me motivated from time to time. though as my resume has lengthened and become more decorated, I need overt disdain less and less.
In small doses, fear isn’t always a bad thing. Fear motivated me to lose weight; I was 300 pounds at 18 years old and was absolutely terrified of collapsing due to a heart attack. My intense fear of a very early, unpleasant and preventable demise motivated me to cut soda cold turkey, start reading nutrition labels, drink far more water, and restrict calories from upwards of 4000 per day down to 1500 for the following nine months. While everyone in the fitness and nutrition community is busy sharpening their pitchforks as they read that last sentence, I’d be a fool to say that my life isn’t objectively better off for it.
I’m not saying that using these emotions had no side-effects; they absolutely did. My friend group doesn’t include anyone from my college years; who’d want to spend time with such an insufferable asshole? My greed has occasionally blinded me into making short-sighted financial decisions. I’m also not saying that these fuel sources are effective over the course of several decades; such a life would be pure misery, short as it may be. However, life is not constant happiness and to delude others into designing a false paradise is ignorant at best and dishonest at worst. Living in this fantasy land would be akin to letting opportunities to materially improve your life slip by. “Well Dan, as you always complain about, you are a sample size of one; we can’t make population-level decisions based off of your decade-old anecdotes! Further study is needed!” an attentive reader of mine will bark. Guess what, that’s absolutely right; further study is needed, not complete ostracization.
Only the truly fortunate turn away free fuel…
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