Defeatism Isn't A Virtue

How a party anthem by The Fratellis gives me hope in the midst of despair

Well, it terrifies the life from out of me

It's really such a lazy way to be

Hiding in the bedroom, climbing up the walls

You've got to kick it out of me gently

'Til it begs and pleads, and crawls

— “Shameless,” The Fratellis

Not to get too personal, but lately I’ve been feeling like I’m coming out the other end of a bad time. The past two plus years have been personally challenging for a lot of reasons, and I’m not even factoring the pandemic into that calculus.

It’s like a crack has opened in some dark storm cloud.

I’m convinced that some of the progress I’ve made has to do with being more deliberate about what I subject myself to. There are influences I’m trying to keep out, and there are things I’m trying to replace them with.

One thing I’ve been adding to my life is music, particularly music that either calms me, like Miles Davis, or music that brings me joy. And a band that has always just made me happy is the great Scottish trio, The Fratellis. There’s something about the way they combine scruffy, gritty, amateurism with musical virtuosity that doesn’t interfere with a wild energy. And the joyous melodies of those anthemic choruses. The Fratellis have a direct line to my soul.

One Fratellis song that I can’t stop listening to lately is “Shameless” from their second album Here We Stand.

The song’s composition and energy represents basically everything I described about the band above. But there’s something about the lyrics that just seem so right at this moment in history, and it boils down to that wildly raucous chorus:

I’m so sick of hearing

How your love for this has died

Don’t tell me

You can do it if you tried.

Until fairly recently, I’ve too often been “self-caring myself to death,” to put a twist on Neil Postman’s famous cultural diagnosis. Things have been hard, and I suppose I needed to withdraw into things that brought me some comfort and peace. Television, solitude, naps, comfort foods.

Eventually, however, I began to realize that I wasn’t recharging my emotional batteries anymore, I was draining them. And the things that brought me peace and blissful distraction from my problems were becoming something akin to narcotics. The safe spaces I’d carved out for myself had, imperceptibly, become a vortex, pulling me further and further down into some psychological quicksand.

I also know that this experience is not unique to me. A while back, I wrote for Popular Culture and Theology about how the Disney + series WandaVision captured the potential toxicity of morose self-care. Very quickly, let me reiterate a point I made in that piece, lest I be accused of making simplistic “bootstrapping” arguments here:

It is a very good thing that our culture has become more open to the mental health needs of people living and working in alienating, tragic times. I do not wish to go back to a time when struggling individuals were just expected to “suck it up.”

However, as with most things in life, there is an inherent tension in this development. On one end of this tension, there is a force pulling in the direction of social and societal progress and functionality, which demands individuals to push their struggles to the side. At the other end is the need for individuals to put their own comfort and well-being above all else. I argue that, as with most of life’s tensions, both of these opposing forces are morally neutral. To choose one as “good” and the other as “bad” is to make a catastrophic mistake. They work together and the individual’s responsibility is to negotiate their position inside that tension in any given time and place.

The problem that has arisen in our rush to claim all self-care as “good,” is that, as I have found, it sometimes isn’t. Sometimes we do indeed need to pick our asses up from the ground and choose to live life, forcing our way past our comfort zones, thereby expanding our capabilities and general experience with life.

Here We Stand, The Fratellis (2008). Island Records.

And as the Fratellis sing in this song, we have reached a point where I’m so sick of hearing about everyone’s sadness and struggles. Yes you have the right to express your feelings, but you also have the responsibility to not drag the rest of society down with you. At some point, you and everyone else would be better off if you stop hiding in the bedroom, climbing up the walls.

With all the talk of what a post-Twitter world might look like, I cannot help but think it would be way better than the mental health hellscape we live in now. Our social lives are increasingly mediated by algorithms that force us into ideological positions about our identities. If a person is an introvert, there is now an expectation that the world completely conform to whatever-the-Hell makes them feel comfortable, regardless of what damage it does to the social fabric. Before typing an angry defense of introverts and lumping me into some pre-fabricated negative moral category, believe me when I say I’m not anti-introvert here — I fall into that category myself (I was voted shyest as a senior in high school, therefore I have street cred on this issue). Once again, I point back to the metaphor of tension that I used above. Individual comfort levels and needs necessarily exist in tension with larger social and, dare I say, political goods.

I get distressed by what I see as a mass withdraw into the identities of disorder that our social platforms have popularized. Yes, these public social platforms have, beneficially, given voice to people with these diagnoses, and made them visible, which is a very good thing. But the algorithmic nature of these same platforms has also encouraged people to adopt these conditions as their very identities, not conditions to cope with and overcome, which is what they by-and-large are. Anxiety is not an excuse to get out of the work of life, it is part of your work.

Speaking as someone who has been at various times treated for anxiety, I understand that this is difficult, but this is the road I found myself on. My anxiety is not a reason for me to feel special or excused from contributing to making the world better in whatever small ways I can.

This is what I have been learning, and this is why this song by this crazy, Scottish rock band means so much to me.

What terrifies me about the future is that, as a college teacher, I see every day, people who are quite literally “half as old as I am,” as the Fratellis put it, giving up on living full and meaningful lives. What makes the situation doubly tragic for me is that these are often the best people. These are the people who are sensitive and caring and who believe in treating people with respect, regardless of color or creed. These wounded young people who withdraw into their afflictions and call it good self-care are exactly the people the rest of us need to be making the world better. (And do not tell me that shitposting or wailing about injustice on social media is making the world better).

It depresses me because someone will be running the world whether you like it or not. I would prefer it to be the sensitive, caring ones, but for too many of them, “their love for this has died.” Who will be left to fill the spaces they’ve abandoned?

I just want to grab them by the shoulders, throw their phones into the gutter and point them to a beautiful horizon and beg them not to waste the best years of their lives in defeatist self-pity, deluding themselves that that makes them virtuous. I want them to watch that scene in Lord of the Rings with me, the one where Sam talks about why folks should struggle through hopelessness. “Because there’s some good in this world…and it’s worth fighting for.”

This is the energy driving the joy in the Fratellis anthem I’ve shared with you today. This is what makes “you can do it if you tried” so powerful to me, here in my time of recovery.