Is my longstanding annoyance with phrases like “I like going out but also staying in” on dating profiles just me beefing with people who can find joy in whatever they do?
I do wonder if introspective people are so because they’re sad or traumatized in some way. If true, then perhaps having a charmed life means you don’t need to go rooting around in your psyche. What if happiness just DID come easier for some people?
And yet, I still find myself making up justifications, like “introspective people might be better off in the long run”! The idea that some folks might simply be better at being happy than me is tough to swallow, and I’m not even a particularly happy person. There’s plenty of space on the distribution that’s right of me!
My sense of superiority relies on people who seem happy actually being dumb basic normies. Ugly.
A good friend of mine skews pretty close to the stereotype. He recently said to me, completely offhand: “you don’t have to heal from everything, you know”. It wasn’t a dig or a gotcha – it was said almost in passing, like it was nothing. I think about it a lot.
What if some folks have a healthy + functional relationship to themselves and enough distress tolerance to muddle through and be generally content? Maybe that’s it – that’s the bar to clear.
What if I already had those skills, but I wail and gnash because I’m always looking for m o r e ?