Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy
sashachapin.substack.com
sashachapin.substack.com
The author likely doesn't realize how privilege influences their worldview and I don't fault them for it, but as readers we do need to bring this awareness with us. Giving up agency is a concept that somehow has traction today in a country founded on every citizen having agency that can only work if we have a complete lack of self awareness.
A good pop-culture analogue is the movie Mr. Holland's Opus. Mr. Holland was a struggling but talented young musician; he dreamed of composing his magnum opus and leaving his mark on the world. But he has take a job teaching music to support his wife and young son, who turns out to be deaf. The job requires long hours and he finds himself lacking much time to connect with his son. 30 years later, he's laid off. His former students come back to stage a performance of his symphony in the high school auditorium.
The point is that the students were the opus. Not the music, which is thoroughly mediocre. The music was just the vehicle to bring the students together. A lot of critics wonder why symphony at the end isn't more impressive, it being Mr. Holland's life's work, but don't realize that that's the point of the movie. Your actual life's work is in the decisions you make, day in and day out, in response to the constraints that your life actually presents you, not some image that you may have formed based on a platonic ideal of no constraints.
My government is currently killing people for looking Mexican. Any advice for how I should apply this belief there?
It is about the deliberate management over one's own internal state which is the only thing one has true control over.
Resentment, especially so-called justified-resentment literally steals from other parts of my life experience that are not connected in any way to the person, place, thing or situation that I am feeling resentment towards.
It is ultimately a choice but not an easy or obvious choice.
Every decision I ever make no matter how trivial it seems, has an associated sacrifice connected to it. Much of the time I want to think and act as if this were not the case.