Our modern era abounds in remedies to nearly every form of human suffering. Technological advances, once unimaginable, provide genuine cures to diseased and damaged bodies. Unfortunately, our modern advances have met with less success in providing genuine cures to diseased and damaged minds. We reach for anything to alleviate depression, self-loathing, or the agony of losing a loved one. And as we reach out, our society reaches back with counterfeit remedies to cure our mental agony: these remedies include intoxicants, entertainment, consumerism, and even systems of belief, religious or otherwise, to name a few. Such remedies don't cure; they numb, removing us from an understanding of the source of our suffering and undermining our ability to heal. In short, a counterfeit remedy is anything we consume to numb us to the experience of mental agony. They prevent genuine healing and operate to remove us from true self-understanding.
As an additional side effect, counterfeit remedies not only preclude us from self-discovery, but also make us more susceptible to subsequent mental suffering. In numbing us, these remedies bypass, as it were, our mental immune system, preventing our minds from developing the antibodies to resist future traumatic events. So weakened, our minds become more dependent on counterfeit remedies and more susceptible to ever more pedestrian experiences of mental suffering. As an example from my own life, after my brother's death, I became dependent on my music. I would spend hours composing, channeling my inner agony onto an outer medium--usually my piano. Soon, the slightest reminder of my brother--a picture or a place we would spend time together--would produce immense depression and anger. I would rush to my instrument to stem the suffering. What should have been a welcomed reminder of my brother's life and our shared friendship became an unacceptable experience that needed suppression. In fact, I relied so heavily on music to suppress these reminders that to this day I have few memories of my brother left. In some strange way, I have forgotten so much of my brother's life. This forgetting was by design and was accomplished by employing a counterfeit remedy to suppress the emotions and the memories. My life continued in this course for quite some time. In the process, I hindered myself from those experiences that cultivate individual growth. In fact, in blinding myself to the experiences, I lost the ability to even grasp the experiences necessary for healing. Again, the very 'remedies' we employ to stem suffering actually enhance that suffering--ensuring that at some future point, when the suffering returns, we will become more reliant on the remedy to face it. And our awareness of our diminishing capacity to confront future experiences, forces us to employ our remedies around the clock to prohibit potentially upsetting experiences from presenting themselves. In all of this, one important truth comes to the fore: we cannot develop into fully formed moral agents unless we learn from the experiences of mental suffering in all its forms. The dangers in such pacifying remedies are that they prevent us from flowering into the moral agents that we otherwise could be.
One particularly important experience of suffering is grief. The importance of this experience lies in its commonality. It is common in two sense of the term: (1) everyone will experience grief, and (2) we experience grief every day and in the most mundane ways. This latter statement may appear less than credulous. However, its improbability results precisely from the fact that we all numb ourselves against grieving. As a result, we fail to recognize its more mundane manifestations. To better recognize such mundane grief, I want to divide our daily experiences of grief into two categories: grief over tangibles and grief over intangibles. Such mundane grief, importantly, excludes those monumental events--such as the death of a loved one--that alter one's life course. Mundane grief occurs daily and in subtle ways. Yet such pedestrian experiences bear this resemblance to more monumental events of grief: loss. Grief, after all, is quintessentially the experience of loss. Whenever we lose something we value or cherish, we experience grief.
As to tangible grief, we experience such events of loss daily. Broken computer, dead phone, lost car keys, burnt dinner, etc. Naming such experiences borders on the absurd. Such daily events cannot constitute a grief experience. And yet, all such events--and we could name a thousand more--include the experience of an expectation and the disappoint that attends the frustration of that expectation. It is a small experience, but one not wholly dissimilar from major grief experiences.
Another form of mundane grief results from the loss of intangibles: the goals, expectations, and hopes that structure our day-to-day lives. Such intangibles are not the lofty aims of which life dreams are made. They are the smaller events that constitute the aims of a given day. When those aims meet resistance, we experience a form of grief. For example, the failed hope that a spouse will notice your efforts around the house; the dashed expectation that a friend will appreciate a gesture of kindness; the frustrated goal that you will complete a project at work by day's end. We could name a thousand other examples.
The point remains that every day we experience numerous events of loss. We quietly and subtly morn such losses since we feel that we somehow deserved the lost tangibles or the unfulfilled goals, expectations, and hopes. Such things--both tangible and intangible--draw our hearts and minds to them like points of intense gravity. And when that point of gravity vanishes, we are left to drift, which is a state we strive to avoid. Though these experiences are small, they mount. And when we weary sufficiently of the experiences, we reach for a remedy to shortly alleviate our frayed nerves. We've already mentioned such remedies above (and I encourage you to think of your preferred remedies). The danger with such remedies quickly manifests itself, however.
Such remedies once instrumental--i.e. used to alleviate our frayed nerves--become an end in themselves. We shift our focus away from the most meaningful life experiences and towards those cheap thrills that we can easily obtain. As I've already noted, I turned to music. While fulfilling, music distracted me from the suffering of my family around me and from my deeply experiencing my own grief and obtaining the understanding that could have arisen therefrom. So instead of tending to loved ones around me or into my inner psyche, I looked to experiences--remedies--that stunted moral growth. Yet the greatest danger with remedies lies in their fungibility. Once we pursue a remedial experience as an end in itself, we eventually tire of it. When that happens, we simply take up a new remedy--in my case philosophical studies, as ironic as that is. And when we tire of that remedy, we move on to the next. Further, even if we don't tire of a remedy, but instead the currents of life somehow deprive us of it, we can always find another remedy. For example, if I lose the ability to hear, I can abandon music and take up philosophy. In short, remedies stand more firmly under our control, precisely because they are fungible. As such, they create the illusion of power and while under their experience we begin to believe that we are in control of our lives. Yet while under the illusion of our own power, we are actually becoming powerless. Every time we experience mundane loss, we must turn towards a greater application of our chosen remedy. The frustration of that remedy becomes an experience of loss we cannot bear and so we turn to something else. And all along the way we bleed ourselves of the vital energy we need to confront life's challenges.
It seems, therefore, that grief is a two-edged sword that hangs over us every day. One edge can strike at the core of what is weakest within us, providing the conditions for moral growth. The other edge can strike at the core of what is strongest within us, providing the conditions for moral degradation. My advice--and it is advice I give to myself--is to experience grief. Attend to the daily experiences that frustrate your expectations and aims. Drink deeply from those experiences. And when you do, you will begin to recognize that life doesn't owe you a thing. You will also experience your own powerlessness to shape and control the contours of your life. And in those experiences, grief, like a blade, will cut off that which is weakest from you, leaving a strong, humble, fully-formed moral agent. Seeking to avoid that blade, as we've seen, ensures that grief will cut away that which is best in you. When you avoid grief through remedies, you feed your experience of entitlement. You say, "I shouldn't have to experience this loss." And in avoiding grief you begin to feel your own power, which makes you anemic, dependant, and practically worthless when confronting future hardships.
That is the irony of this entire situation: confronting grief forces us to experience our powerlessness and in that experience we become morally powerful; avoiding grief, on the other hand, allows us to feel powerful and in that illusory feeling we become morally enfeebled. Regardless of what we choose, the sword of grief, daily experienced, will fall on us. We get to choose where it falls, so choose wisely.
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