It is difficult for me to submit to joy. It comes clunkily. I look around, abashed. I don’t want to dance too excitedly, sing too loudly, joke too freely—extend myself too much. My joy could be another person’s lame, weird, gross, strange.
We were miseducated to cringe at the free expression of those kids, either without social sense or wise beyond their years, who did express themselves freely (“band kids” or “theater kids” maybe, guys who moved their bodies a little too much like girls). We cringed for them, already seeing the social consequences of their free joy: “weirdness,” ostracization, the cringes of everyone else. And we learned how to cringe away from them, not willing to risk our own social banishment by association. Joy, play, and extension of the self became dangerous, weird, and cringeworthy, and we constricted ourselves. Joy could only be shown in the right ways, in the right amounts.[1]
I was miseducated, and this miseducation is still deeply embedded in me. I still feel myself involuntarily cringe when someone starts singing or dancing, not in a cool way, but in a lame way: singing kitschy songs or dancing with dorky robot arms. I feel myself cringe when someone makes an over-exuberant joke in a group they don’t really know. “Ouch…hang back” the miseducated part of me wants to say. I feel an instinct to diminish my association to them, to not risk myself being too weird.
It is easy to mock unapologetic joy. A social stigma and superiority can be created with a single raised eyebrow, a single sideways smirk to a friend. As social apes, being the target of one of these smirks is one of our greatest fears. Ostracization—social death—is not so far from biological death. Mating prospects also depend on one’s place in the social hierarchy.
We can reach beyond this conditioning, though, and re-educate ourselves to submit to joy. We are all both weird and joyful, and we can create a social situation in which we can submit to this core of our being through practicing loving non-judgement. [2] We must allow others to extend themselves, rather than snapping down with eyerolls or cringes when they do. Social propriety is a force field effecting every movement we make, a field created simply by the gaze of others. This means that we can lessen its grip on other’s actions by changing the way we gaze. When someone submits to joy in public space—a spontaneous dance move, a weird joke—we must not look away and hurry along, we must not look at our friends with eyebrows raised, we must not cringe. We must laugh, smile, move with them, say “Yeah! Yeah you, keep grooving how you do!” We can’t leave the comedy club when the act starts to bomb and all the other guests are forced by their discomfort to shuffle out. This is socialized discomfort, and it can be transcended. We need to stick around, support the act and their expression of joy.
This re-education is revolutionary. At its outset this revolution will not be cool, shiny and attractive. It will be cringeworthy, because we’ve been taught to shy away from what really matters: shameless human expression of joy. Allowing the expression of joy through unconditional social acceptance is basis of freedom, self-love, and genuine vulnerability. Thus, it is also the basis of social peace.
[1] This note is dedicated to those with secure positions in the social hierarchy who have used this security to be joyful in weird ways, thus pushing the limit of what is acceptable.
[2] This is our core, and it's apparent in contemporary culture—no matter how much we cringe at Michael Scott or Leslie Knope they are sympathetic figures.
I promise, I didn't cringe once while reading this. Great stuff
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