The argument against celebration carries an implicit belief in a fixed emotional economy: if you are joyful, you are stealing from the shared pool of grief or outrage. But emotions are not a zero-sum ledger. Your neighbor’s delight at a Taylor Swift album does not drain the reservoir of compassion available for those in Gaza, Ukraine, or a flooded Midwestern town.
4/9
Scolding joy = a cynical performance. Publicly shaming people for being happy allows the scolder to signal virtue without necessarily contributing to the cause they claim to defend. Cicero warned against the "empty honor" of those who court esteem without doing the work to deserve it. Social media has made this tendency both easier and more visible.
5/9
It would be odd, even cruel, to blast party anthems at a funeral. But the private thrill of an album release, or a Superbowl win, or a damned fine cup of coffee is not an act of betrayal. And the alternative - universalized austerity until the world is perfect according to a set of twitchy goalposts - is both unworkable and historically impossible. No such time has ever existed.
6/9
Part of living well is the cultivation of joy that is not contingent on the disappearance of all misfortune. If we wait for that, we'll never bloody celebrate anything at all.
7/9
Life is lived on overlapping frequencies. One of us is falling in love while another is getting told they have cancer. A parent somewhere is watching their child take a first step, even as someone else buries theirs. Trying to synchronize the emotional weather of billions is a doomed endeavor. Better to accept that joy and grief will always coexist, and each gives contour to the other.
8/9
@Daojoan@mastodon.social I love this analogy, overlapping frequencies, not the same frequency nor the same phase - just on the same spectrum
If you find yourself unmoved by the latest Taylor Swift release, that’s fine. But the person who is moved - who finds in it a brief reprieve from their own troubles or from the heavy news cycle - is not your enemy. They're braving the same churning sea as you, just with a different sail.
9/9
JA Westenberg
