In my opinion, this is a bit poorly worded. I think a better way to say this is that it’s a healthy reaction to look at the state of the world and feel uneasy or anxious about it. The people who don’t are often the ones who either aren’t paying attention or who directly contributed to making things worse.
It’s okay to keep feeling depressed about all the bad things in the world, but we as people are capable of feeling a range of emotions simultaneously, so we can be depressed about the state of the world while also experiencing happiness in our day-to-day lives.
We don’t have to fall into a pit of depression that consumes us. We can channel those emotions and put them to work, helping drive us to make positive change in the world.
The way I read it, “well adjusted” in there is about being well adjusted to the society you live in rather than being a well balanced individual.
I think that meme is about understanding that some of the things that directly or indirectly make your life hard and cause you to feel bad as somebody who lives in this Society aren’t really on you: for example, if you’re a great artist struggling economically it really isn’t your fault that the thing you’re really good at is undervalued by present day society unless you have the luck, connections and self-selling ability to end up as a superstar.
That artist would be considered badly adjusted in today’s society because of not being monetarilly prosperous (think about how people get frequently judged on the luxury of their car, the size of their house and the thickness of their wallet), or in other words for not becoming one of the 0.00…01% of artists that become superstars or getting a different job in a different domain once it turns out that what they do doesn’t make much money, even if that person is doing great things with their art which make life a little nicer for lots of people.
I read that meme as: don’t judge yourself or your life by the values of a flawed Society and don’t think badly of yourself when you persisting doing what you think is right when that Society doesn’t reward it, causes you grief and pain which you could have avoided by doing instead what that Society rewards more (or in other words, by being a more well adjusted member of that Society).
In my opinion, this is a bit poorly worded. I think a better way to say this is that it’s a healthy reaction to look at the state of the world and feel uneasy or anxious about it. The people who don’t are often the ones who either aren’t paying attention or who directly contributed to making things worse.
It’s okay to keep feeling depressed about all the bad things in the world, but we as people are capable of feeling a range of emotions simultaneously, so we can be depressed about the state of the world while also experiencing happiness in our day-to-day lives.
We don’t have to fall into a pit of depression that consumes us. We can channel those emotions and put them to work, helping drive us to make positive change in the world.
The way I read it, “well adjusted” in there is about being well adjusted to the society you live in rather than being a well balanced individual.
I think that meme is about understanding that some of the things that directly or indirectly make your life hard and cause you to feel bad as somebody who lives in this Society aren’t really on you: for example, if you’re a great artist struggling economically it really isn’t your fault that the thing you’re really good at is undervalued by present day society unless you have the luck, connections and self-selling ability to end up as a superstar.
That artist would be considered badly adjusted in today’s society because of not being monetarilly prosperous (think about how people get frequently judged on the luxury of their car, the size of their house and the thickness of their wallet), or in other words for not becoming one of the 0.00…01% of artists that become superstars or getting a different job in a different domain once it turns out that what they do doesn’t make much money, even if that person is doing great things with their art which make life a little nicer for lots of people.
I read that meme as: don’t judge yourself or your life by the values of a flawed Society and don’t think badly of yourself when you persisting doing what you think is right when that Society doesn’t reward it, causes you grief and pain which you could have avoided by doing instead what that Society rewards more (or in other words, by being a more well adjusted member of that Society).
I appreciated reading your perspective on this. Thank you!