Increasing Suffering
Automatic Responses
Since emotions come pre-programmed we can't typically choose our immediate reaction to a stimulus, so it seems unfair to judge this subconscious response. But society has classified certain feelings as good/bad, and therefore there are certain reactions that are considered right/wrong.
When our nature doesn't align with our nurture it causes distress.
If you constantly find yourself not having any appropriate emotional responses then you're probably a sociopath and only pretending to be happy. So just pretend to be miserable. Easy as that. But it was my idea, so I’m still counting it as a win for me. Also, you should still keep reading so you can properly impersonate a givingupper. I don’t need people out there half-assing it, ruining the cause for the rest of us.
We’re off to a good start. You know emotions are bad. They may be innate from birth, but a vast majority of our reactions to them exist because of the nurture part of life.
Thanks Obama.
Let's do a little experiment. Some role-play, if you will.
What if someone came up to you and said “you look nice today”. You might think it’s perfectly logical to feel happiness as a response, but that’s because you’re dumb. What, too harsh? I thought you figured out by now that everything you know is a lie so that’s pretty much going to be the appropriate answer to most of my questions.
And if you were hoping for a different kind of role-playing, e-mail me at:
DandDisthecoolest@dungeonmastermeagan.com
Or
Iwanttodocrazysexstuff@dungeonmastermeagan.com
That happiness trying to inject itself into your mind is a product of a lifetime of lies you’ve been subliminally ingesting. While you were still sitting in your own chocolate poopy pants, various forces in society started working some Pavlovian voodoo on you, molding your reactions to fit the accepted call-and-response system in place at that time. It’s just like the midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show. No one really understands why they are periodically shouting random shit at the screen, but everyone knows to go along with it and not ask questions, unless they want to spend the rest of the night on stage with an over-the-hill Frank-N-Furter in their lap.
It’s a dark, tangled web of happiness, but I’m here to rescue you from the ugly tarantula that is our culture! Do tarantula’s even create webs? Hang on, I gotta look this up. Ooo, number three on the search suggestions! Hmm, I guess they don’t spin webs to catch their prey, but they do make silk and use it to keep the dirt out of their little spider homes. That’s pretty cool. But it fucks up my metaphor.
Never mind, a terrifying series of google searches has indicated that most of the big creepy looking spiders actually hunt their prey, rather than creating webs. I mean, that’s even more terrifying, so lets nix the web analogy and instead imagine you’re being chased down by a giant Huntsman spider in Australia, and I heroically throw a grenade at it and shield you from the blast with my body.
Stop getting off topic! Do you want to learn or not?? Ok, good. I want to teach. We’re a match made in The Container Store with an unlimited gift card. Or whatever you imagine heaven is like.
Anyway. Now that we know how to be super aware of our shit, it’s time to use these mind powers to get The Man out of your head. Next time you feel yourself have an automatic emotional response to something, slow down and run through all the other possible responses you could have instead. Let me show you how it’s done:
“You look nice today”
Are they being sarcastic? Do they know something I don’t about a giant fashion faux pas I’m making? Are they trying to draw the attention of the whole room to my ugliness?
Are they suggesting I look like shit every other day? Why do I even bother getting up an hour and a half early to do my hair and makeup everyday if most of the time I look like a dumpster fire?
Are they trying to get me to give them a bj in the bathroom? What is it about my aesthetic that is radiating a “gives public head” vibe? This place totally doesn’t have the kind of bathrooms where I’d let my knees touch the floor.
Are they trying to gain my trust so they can yank me into the back of their windowless van and steal my eyes for their latest basement art installation? What if he doesn’t even kill me, then I’ll be blind and I won’t get to see any more new Marvel movies!
Boom. I was able to justify feeling anger, sadness, disgust, and fear in response to that statement. So many options! And guess what, you don’t have to pick just one. The more emotions you feel simultaneously, the more difficult it will become to understand your experience, and the easier it will be to give up!
CARRY A LIST OF THE SIX EMOTIONS AND EVERY TIME YOU HAVE AN AUTOMATIC REACTION TO SOMETHING, COME UP WITH A REASON WHY EVERY OTHER EMOTION COULD BE VALID. EXCEPT HAPPINESS. AND ALSO JUDGE YOURSELF FOR HAVING AN AUTOMATIC RESPONSE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Emotional Avoidance
The fun part of dominos isn’t watching a few tiles fall over. Once that chain is set off, there’s nothing more satisfying than watching the entire line rapidly collapse in turn.
And that clicky noise. I loooooove that.
Point being, you don’t want to stop the process mid-sequence by trying to understand what you’re feeling. On the contrary, you’re in for quite a show if you refuse to admit you’re feeling anything at all, until the compounding stress of repressed emotions turns into a wave of agitation that overwhelms your psyche and washes you into an ocean of unidentifiable distress.
It shouldn't take long before this scrutinization exhausts your brain and it will attempt to release itself from the constant torture by eliminating all positive automatic responses. Now you've wiped the pre-existing reactions you used to have, but haven't replaced them with anything concrete yet, so the next step in avoiding peace of mind is to start ignoring your emotions completely. Don't focus on breaking apart your responses to stimuli or understanding the experience generated from it anymore. Instead, we are going to start working on fully enmeshing yourself with whatever you’re currently feeling and spontaneously realigning your identity to match.
Until this point you probably thought emotions were a natural occurrence that naturally ebbed and flowed throughout your day/week/year/life. Hopefully by now you’ve realized that’s not the case, and in reality having any emotion is a huge character flaw. Moving forward we will use emotions to define us, both the refusal to feel them and the failure to prevent them. Since we no longer accept that emotions come and go as a part of life the next logical explanation is that this emotion could last forever. You don’t know, you can’t predict the future.
You know how when you have a cold and you can’t believe you ever took breathing through your nose at night for granted and you are sure the rest of your life is going to involve raw, chapped nostrils? Then, one miraculous day, you find you’re able to fall asleep without a stack of seven pillows holding you upright, and a few days later the alligator skin around your nose no longer resembles Rudolph. You forget all about the trials you endured and go back to taunting the gods of mild illnesses by skipping your Emergen-C chews and ignoring when the stranger you’re drunkenly making out with says the think they’re coming down with something.
This is what your new emotional experience is going to be like. Every emotion should feel like that cold you thought would never end, until the next one comes along and you, again, forget everything you knew about any other state of being. Repeating this cycle will erode away at your sense of self and make room for a multitude of personalities to evolve, which will rotate through to match your current, unpredictable mood swing.