Upon reading Alan & Dona’s Questions to Richard & Vineeto page, I started to think about the basic resentment of being alive. Historically it always seemed to present itself like a fixed trait that I couldn’t see a way to get past. It sounds obvious in retrospect, but I’d never really considered before this however, the resentment of being alive to be at least in part, a belief or series of beliefs.
It seems with beliefs that the phrasing is quite particular to each individual in terms of what will make sense or not. For example, “life is a vale of tears”, or “I didn’t ask to be born” didn’t click so much for me, as the phrasing “life sucks”.
So I start dissecting this belief - does life suck in general for everybody, or just for me. Does it suck all the time for me, or only sometimes? What do I specifically mean by “life sucks”… Surely my life doesn’t actually suck; on the whole my life circumstances are quite positive and favorable, so what I really mean is that despite those favorable life circumstances, I still don’t feel consistently as good as I would like/expect to. Well this is very different from a vague and seemingly absolute statement that life sucks. So now we are back to something which is actionable - I can get back to feeling good and maintain that minimum standard for myself. I think back to times when I was feeling good or great and I remember what is possible in this life
Now the resentment seems to hold less weight. It’s like one of the table legs of belief that holds that worldview up has been removed and the whole structure becomes more shaky
I appreciate your foray into resentment – in your case framed as “life sucks” and specified as the experience that “despite those favourable life circumstances, I still don’t feel consistently as good as I would like/ expect to”. Resentment is rather more than a belief – a feeling-backed thought – it is a general attitude to life: if things don’t go my way, the fault lies in ‘them’, the other people, the world, the weather or general circumstances. This automatic self-centric perception is part and parcel of every identity in varying degrees – just think of a helpless baby equipped with only instinctual feelings and passions needing to express, and having fulfilled, their essential survival needs. It’s the primary template/ attitude out of which the identity forms itself.
To become aware of this primal attitude, and then experientially recognize that it is detrimental to your wellbeing by preventing you from enjoying and appreciating being alive requires not only an overall conceptual rational consideration but, because it is a long-standing habit, requires paying affective attention to whenever it occurs, in order to replace this habit with its opposite – appreciation [antonym: depreciation].
Of course, I am not talking about faking feeling good as a superficial antidote but that by becoming aware of what is happening and remembering your sincere intent to feeling good more consistently and being as benign and harmless as much as possible you will be able to shift your very attitude in the other direction each time it occurs. It may not always be easy because you notice that most people around you find it ‘cool’ to be indifferent, sneering, complaining and fault-finding, so you have to instead rely on your own experiential conviction that resentment does not make you a happy and harmless person.
That means whenever you notice an attitude of resentment, of depreciation, of indifference to the world happening, then actively increase your enjoyment of being alive, by “adding value”, “cherishing”, marvelling and living in wide-eyed wonder regarding your enjoyment of being alive, i.e. by appreciating and deeply contemplating the wondrousness and mirificence of the world around, including one’s fellow human beings.
When you take a walk outside, notice the friendliness of the air on your skin, the vast expanse of the sky above, the delightful sounds of lapping water and/or twittering birds, the sun glittering on reflective surfaces, the wind gracefully moving the grass back and forth, and perhaps even the fact that matter is not merely passive. The very appreciation of the marvellous wonders of the world we live in is the best antidote to resentment (see also Richard, Selected Correspondence, Resentment, #stars).