The Importance of Being Miserable

Just for the avoidance of doubt, before we get into this, I want to make it clear that I am not miserable. Of course I have been, in the past, but for quite some time now I have been happy and optimistic. What I mean by optimistic is that I am totally up for the collapse of Western civilisation and all that flows from it. Naturally, it would have been nicer if this didn’t have to happen, but it is happening and cannot be stopped. So I take the attitude first proposed by the great spiritual teachers REM when they sang “it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine”.

I feel fine because I am blessed in all sorts of ways that I never used to be. I can see the benefit in even the most tricky and painful situations and I am looking forward to what comes next, for me personally and for the world. If you asked me to take a view on the overall world situation I might say that I am short term pessimistic, long term optimistic, but even that pessimism is not black-hearted, because a great deal will be learned as we continue to watch two and half thousand years of civilisation being flushed down the toilet by a self-identified group of know it alls.

So I am not miserable, but plenty of people are - and that is just fine. If your authentic self is a little gloomy and downcast then so what? In my experience though, the most miserable people are the ones who are smiling all the time, because there is definitely such a thing as toxic positivity. You know what I mean, we all know people like this, people who no matter what happens will continue to believe that it’s all for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

This is nothing new of course, Voltaire told us all about this in his 1759 novel Candide. Here, the main character in the story, having been educated into an absurdly naïve view of life, goes out into the world to encounter every possible kind of setback, humiliation and disaster. All the while his teacher, Professor Pangloss, is on hand to say that however bad it gets it’s all for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.

The point here is that Professor Pangloss’ optimism didn’t help, and in fact only made matters worse. This is because authentically miserable people bring great benefit to society, not because they are right, but because they provide a corrective to the insane belief that things can only get better.

These words, the battle cry of Tony Blair’s landslide election victory way back in 1997, must rank among the most deceitful and delusional of all time. “Things can only get better” might be useful when applied to a specific and difficult situation. Say for example you draw the 10 of Swords as your Card of the Day and then fall down the stairs, break your leg, get to work late, find that you’ve been sacked and then get home just in time for your partner to dump you. In that situation it might be very necessary to believe that things can only get better, because surely they can’t get any worse, right? But when these words are applied to society in general, then you know you are in the grip of one ginormous lie.

It is true that misery-guts, nay-sayers, whiners and moaners can be very difficult to deal with, and can, if you aren’t very careful, bring your own mood and energy right down. So we have to protect ourselves from this. But we shouldn’t do that by shutting them up. We need to hear what they have to say, because they are often far more clued into reality than the ‘things can only get better, it’s all for the best in the best of all possible worlds, we know best’ mob.

This is where affirmations and positive thinking come in. These are the means whereby we can hear difficult information (because it might be useful), and not be derailed by it. But affirmations and positive thinking don’t exist in order to remove the darkness, they exist to keep your reaction to it in check. If you think affirmations can defeat the darkness then sorry, but you are in for a shock.

The highest vibration is not positivity, it is truth. And the truth of the matter is that our civilisation has been bought to its current state not by bad actors, despots or the far-right, but by progressives and utopians. Everything that has gone wrong with our world in recent years is rooted in the delusional idea that the arc of history bends only one way, toward progress, and if we can only have some more progress – now please! – then things will get even better, even faster.

We saw this in the Covid response, when people rushed to scream that science will save us, because science saves everyone, all the time, doesn’t it? Answer, no. It does not, and sometimes it actually does the opposite.

We see this in the Ukraine conflict. Sure, Putin was wrong, wrong, wrong to invade. Killing is wrong, mass killing in war is even wronger. But there is absolutely no doubt that he was egged on, over the course years, by Western leaders wedded to the values of left-liberal progressive improvement, who saw Russian values of orthodoxy and tradition not just as different but bad. These people had completely swallowed the idea that progress is inevitable, so they felt themselves free to poke, prod and generally undermine Russia because, obviously, the West is the future and Russia is the past. This is an insane belief because it provides carte blanche to do whatever it takes to bring about the imagined utopia. As World War Three intensifies (yes, that’s right it’s already started) you will hear the excuse time and time again that the West is fighting for progress, democracy and human rights while all the time Zelenskyy continues to build an authoritarian government and Wall Street gets busy carving up Ukraine for its own ends.

There are endless further examples I could give, but maybe you can see them for yourself? Everywhere you look – presuming you do look – you will see a progressive agenda pushing hard for improvement, but everywhere this is implemented it just brings more division, unhappiness and conflict.

This is because progressivism, utopianism, the belief that the arc of history bends only one way, that so long as you have more democracy, more human rights and more cultural diversity then things can only get better is itself a denial of reality, because there is no such thing as progress, only change.

Every example of progress that you could ever think of comes with a downside, and delivers unequal benefits. Some people do well from the ‘progress’ while others suffer. Write something in the comments if you can think of a single piece of progress that has been universally good, for everyone, without any downside or cost. But think carefully, because as far as I can see there isn’t one.

Now, some people might call this a miserable view of the world! Ha! Well, I call it an encounter with reality and it makes me quite happy. There is no such thing as progress, but there are such things as change and difference, and that’s good enough. Something interesting happens over there, and then something different, but equally interesting happens over there. That is the nature of life and that is true diversity. You can’t have universal progress until everyone is internally healed and at peace with the actions and choices they made in their past lives. If you were a psychotic tyrant in a previous life, who raped and pillaged their way across the world, then you will be powerless and alone in this life, until you learn. For some progressive utopian to come along and say “I’ll make your life better” will, in fact, only make it worse, because the force of karma trumps everything else. There can be no utopia, no peace, until we each resolve what we came here to resolve, individually, one by one. This is the basic reason why all attempts to make the world a better place are doomed to make the world an even worse place. Because it is not our environment which forms our attitude to life, it is our attitude to life that determines our environment. You can call this miserable if you like, but I think it is the most amazingly optimistic proposition that anyone could ever make. There is nothing wrong with the world, it doesn’t need improving, or saving. If a fraction of the energy that is put into progressive utopian projects were re-directed to self-awareness and self-healing then the doors to paradise would open tomorrow. But transformation is an inside job, and no amount of ‘progress’ will make up for that.

I look forward to every new day, because I can see that each new dawn causes someone else to see that the progressive mindset is the cause of, not the solution to, problems. So, stay miserable, or happy, if you like, just don’t believe the hype. Things aren’t getting better, but nor are they getting worse, not if you look at things from a higher perspective. They are simply changing, and amidst that change there will be winners and losers. The question is which one are you going to be? And the answer to that can only be found within.