It’s Okay to Feel Bad for a Bit
“If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.”—Epictetus
“Whatever suffering arises, all arises due to attachment; with the cessation of attachment, there is the cessation of suffering.”—Pali canon
“An arahant would feel physical pain if struck, but no mental pain. If his mother died, he would organize the funeral, but would feel no grief, no sense of loss.”—the Dhammapada
“Receive without pride, let go without attachment.”—Marcus Aurelius
I.
Stoic and Buddhist philosophies are pretty popular these days. I don’t like them. I think they’re mostly bad for you if you take them too seriously.
About a decade ago I meditated for an hour a day every day for a few weeks, then sat down to breakfast with my delightful (at the time) toddlers and realized that I felt nothing. There was only the perfect crystalline clarity and spaciousness of total emotional detachment. “Oh,” I said, and never meditated again.
It’s better to sometimes feel bad for a bit, than to feel nothing.
II.
Young adults should probably put some effort into becoming less emotionally reactive. Being volatile makes you unpleasant to be around, and undercuts your ability to achieve pretty much any goals you may have.
If you have any traumas, it’s likely positive-EV for you to devote time and energy to learning some kind of therapy modality with a good evidence base, and then taking the time to resolve those issues.
In my opinion—for most people—once you have fixed about 60% of your emotional reactivity and 90% of your psychological triggers, you have hit a point of diminishing returns. In fact, past that point, I think further investment in making yourself “nonreactive” and “unattached,” and removing all minor triggers from your psyche, is pathological from the perspective of actually trying to be happy and to do things with your life.
If your fear of feeling bad for a bit is so great that it causes you to self-obsess, consider that self-obsession is just a more convoluted and drawn-out way of feeling bad.
III.
If you try to do something, and things don’t go your way, and you feel bad about that, the problem isn’t that you felt bad about it. The problem isn’t that you are insufficiently stoic. The problem isn’t that you care too much about the outcome.
The problem … is that things didn’t go your way. You are allowed to feel bad about that, for a little bit.
It’s okay to care about things.
I know that somehow this doesn’t sound deeply wise but I think sometimes we are too wise for our own good.
The solution to the problem isn’t to meditate on impermanence or to visualize your mother’s funeral. The best thing to do when you feel bad because things didn’t go the way you wanted, essentially always, is to determine what you can do to practically address the actual situation as it exists in objective, external reality, and then act upon your decision.
If the impacts of your mistake can be mitigated, then you should use the negative emotion you feel to motivate you to take the actions necessary to do that.
If there’s nothing meaningful to be done to mitigate the impact of the damage, then you should use the negative emotion you feel to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that this won’t happen again.
You will still feel somewhat bad during this process, but that’s okay. The actions you take will make you feel less bad.
And it’s okay to feel bad for a bit.
IV.
In fact, it’s probably good for you to feel bad for a bit.
Negative emotions provide motivation for action. Guilt motivates you to avoid making choices you will regret. Anger, in context of an overall emotionally healthy mind, motivates you to overcome fear. Fear, in turn, motivates you to avoid risk, and your sense of risk will become well-calibrated the more things you actually try to do.
Emotional suppression/detachment results in a bias toward inaction. In contrast, a bias toward action cultivates synergy and integration with your emotions, and becomes self-reinforcing. You learn to trust yourself. The more you expose yourself to the risk of feeling bad for a bit, the more experience you gain, and the less likely you are to make a serious mistake that would cause you to feel very bad for a long time.
I think it’s good that this community has gradually moved away from the language of akrasia and the conceptual frameworks of hyperanalytical self-awareness that lead to analysis paralysis and emotional suppression. Paul Atreides was not a role model.
There is a big risk that I am misunderstood here as saying that you should do the opposite of the Stoics and just behave emotionally and chaotically. I’m not saying that. I am saying that it’s easy to take self-control too seriously.
But it’s hard to fit “Take Epictetus 60% Seriously, Meditate for 20 Minutes per Day for 3 Months and Then Stop” on a bumper sticker.
It’s okay if this post is misunderstood.
I’ll only feel bad for a bit.
FWIW, as someone who’s into Buddhism quite a bit, on my interpretation of it something is going seriously wrong if it makes you feel detached and emotionless.
That’s not to deny that there are interpretations of it that would endorse that; I don’t have an interest in arguing over what the “true” interpretation of Buddhism is. But there are definitely also ones where “attachment” is interpreted in exactly the opposite way—where one is “attached” (to mental content) if one wants to control their emotions and avoid unpleasant ones.
On that interpretation, the goal is the same as yours—to be open to the full spectrum of emotion and let go of the need to suppress emotion, trusting that the mind will learn to act better as long as you just let it see all the relevant data implicit in the emotion.
(It’ll take me a while to answer any responses to this because, appropriately enough, I’m leaving for a 10-day meditation retreat today.)
I always appreciate your insights and opinions on this general topic.
At the time, I was following the instructions in The Mind Illuminated very closely. I will grant that this may have been user error/skill issue, but given that The Mind Illuminated is often put forth as a remarkably accessible and lucid map through the stages of vipassana, and given that I still went this badly wrong, you have to wonder if maybe the path itself is perhaps too dangerous to be worth it.
The outcome I reached may have been predictable, given that the ultimate reason I was meditating at the time was to get some relief from the the ongoing suffering of a chronic migraine condition. In that specific sense, I was seeking detachment.
In the end I am left wondering if I would have been better off if I had taken up mountain biking instead of meditation, given that it turned out that the path to integrating my emotions led through action more than reflection.
A somewhat unpopular thing to say is that vipassana (and theravada Buddhism more generally) often pushes people towards a “disconnect from reality to stop suffering” trap. Not all Buddhism is like this, but it’s unfortunately the flavor that is currently most popular in the West because it’s what people constructed secular mindfulness practices out of.
Meditation should not result in leaving anything out. Maybe you need to focus and overcome reactive distractions for a time, but eventually that type of practice becomes pathological.
I actually hope you try meditating again. I think the lesson to take away is not “meditation bad after a point” but “a specific type of meditation stops being helpful after you learn what it has to teach you”.
It sounds to me like you maybe should take up mountain biking. ⛰️🚲
Bicycling isn’t just great for your physical health. It’s also great for your mental health. I don’t know any avid bicyclists who are stressed and unhappy.
I have known these people personally with broken bones from bicycling: two people each with a broken collarbone from mountain biking, one broken arm, one minor skull fracture that would only have been considered a bump if it were not observed with modern imaging equipment, and one broken pelvis. It also killed Steven Covey but I never met him.
The minor skull fracture was interesting because I knew the person to be successful at a job that required mostly conscientiousness. He fell during his work commute and was riding a bike that had no clear purpose other than being safe. He went back to the place he fell and tried to find some mistake he made so he could prevent a reoccurrence, and he couldn’t find anything he could have done differently given that he was commuting to work on a bike.
For context, I do not ride a bike, there is nothing about my life that would tend to make me meet bicyclists, and not I am not especially friendly, so there is no unusually large number of bicyclists passing through my life who chat about their injuries.
So I’m not sure I agree that bicycling is great for your physical health. I could easily believe is is good for the health of people who don’t fall.
FWIW there are a fair number of meditation people who anti-endorse TMI as a practice guide, see e.g. this twitter thread.
<3
Yeah I think there are various potential subtle traps that can be hard to catch on your own and where it’d be good to have a competent teacher checking in on you and giving you feedback. (The teacher on our retreat happened to just be talking about two possible failure modes with meditation: going “hazy”, which you described, and going “crazy”, which is the opposite where you get super emotional and reactive.)
Unfortunately it’s hard to know who the competent and trustworthy teachers are, especially since some of them would hold up a lack of feeling as something positive.
Shinzen Young’s Five Ways to Know Yourself https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FiveWaystoKnowYourself_ver1.6.pdf uses the words “spacey” and “racy” instead of “hazy” and “crazy”, but they might be talking about the same thing. He has specific antidotes for each. There are YouTube videos in addition to the document I just cited. He has a newer book out that is probably about the same topics, but I haven’t read it.
I had a related (and admittedly somewhat strange) experience to this. I had a dream in which I was given a koan and told to use it to seek enlightenment. When I woke up I wrote down the koan and decided to meditate on it. I gained some wisdom from it, but I also noticed that I was starting to feel empty. Not a peaceful one-ness kind of empty- just empty empty. I realized that if experienced anything like ego death in my present state, it would go very, very badly. It seems counterintuitive, but knew I had to find myself before I continued on the path- to find myself before I lost myself, if that makes any sense. It’s as if in order to reach transcendence, there had to be something worth transcending.
Would you be willing to share the koan?
I generally don’t believe that dreams or omens come from a place with some special connection to the truth, but if following a clue from a mysterious source is cheap, I generally follow it. If one doesn’t accept prompts to go on an adventure, one cannot reasonably claim disappointment if life has too few adventures.
There was no special connection to the truth in this koan. It was actually a little lame- just my brain pattern-matching. But pattern matching can do some odd things things. I won’t reach enlightenment with this koan- I’ve already followed it as far as it will go. It was “where is your voice located.” It’s a very “if a tree falls in the forest” type of koan, but I learned just a little from following it in its expected loop.
1) I don’t know what kind of meditation you did, but for me, inner work and meditation tend to unlock more capacity for love. I can clearly see that I’d feel less pain if one of my closest friends left or died—and yet, I love them more than ever, with fewer contractions of insecurity or clinging, less of that sense that they’re the only thing standing between me and the abyss. That kind of love just feels better to me.
2) I love that you acknowledge feeling bad is okay. But one reads in III that you are still striving to not feel bad by considering stuff not going your way as a problem. I think, you’re walking along the same path as the Pali Canon, except solving your problems in an external way. Letting your inner desires out is undeniably great, at any rate, so I support not actively repressing your agentic side.
3) Where I’d also push back is on the assumption that feeling less bad when things go wrong would necessarily make you apathetic. My experience has been the opposite: intrinsic motivation works better for me, and Nate Soares makes a similar case somewhere in Replacing Guilt—that caring from a place other than guilt or pain can actually be more sustainable and energizing.
I had a conversation in Washington DC with a Tibetan monk who was an assistant of the Dalai Lama, and I asked him directly if love was also an attachment that should be let go of, and he said yes.
There is “normal” love (with attachment)
There is higher (Christian / lovingkindness—like) love.
How is that mutually exclusive with (1)?
As to (1), I was following The Mind Illuminated, for what it’s worth. And I am a big fan of emotional integration. Spiritual practices can help with that, but I think they can also get in the way, and it’s really hard to know in advance which direction you’re going.
I think we are basically on the same page with (2).
As for (3) I think it’s a matter of degree, requiring the kind of nuance that doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker. If you feel so much persistent guilt that it’s causing daily suffering, then that’s probably something you need to sort out. I was intentional in adding the phrase “for a bit” in “It’s okay to feel bad for a bit,” because I don’t actually think it’s okay to feel persistently bad forever! Those are definitely two different situations. If you have ongoing intrusive negative emotions, that sounds adjacent to trauma, and that can be sorted out with some work.
I think we still misunderstood each other on (3) - I was pushing back only on the part saying “some amount of negative feelings create a positive feedback loop making you more agentic”. I’m saying, less negative feelings, more intrinsic motivation, by any amount, is, up to sacrificing impact for personal happiness, always better.
I love the jumbled version of Siddhartha’s story in your opening. For narrative purposes, I’d just add you seeing the first three of the Four Sights (an old man, a sick man, and a dead man) without any kind mental anguish before the breakfast with your toddlers that made you walk away from the Bodhi tree and renounce meditation and “enlightment.”
Excellent post.
My only (very minor) disagreement with the thesis is that, IMO, Stoicism and Buddhism are not quite the same thing or equivalent, and the difference is relevant to your point. I think that you should take Stoicism slightly more seriously than Buddhism (but still not too seriously). (But I think that your “bumper sticker” advice is basically correct.)
This really is a very minor quibble, though. On the whole, this post is simply correct, period.
In case someone wants a more extreme version of this post: https://ninapanickssery.substack.com/p/stormicism
Yeah. I stumbled upon a similar idea a decade ago and it pretty much changed my life. When feeling something, just feel it, lean into it instead of away. A small discussion here.
Agreed.
Here’s how I think of it: very happy people exist. Their default state is cheerful, they rarely worry, they only feel bad if something seriously bad happens to them, and they recover faster than average from misfortunes. I think it makes sense to aspire to be a very happy person.
I don’t think the same is true of people who literally never feel even slightly bad, no matter how bad the situation is. What I’ve heard is that even advanced meditators will e.g. feel grief if their children die. They just won’t add to the grief by acting it out unskillfully and being dicks to everyone around. Literal equanimity, in literally all circumstances, is an abstraction. I haven’t seen it in real life, I’m not sure it exists, and I doubt it would be good if it did exist.
It is probably difficult or impossible to permanently reduce all your “negative” emotions to zero. It is definitely not possible to reduce their strength in any kind of uniform way. But in my experience you can most certainly reduce the intensity of your negative* emotions. The effect is uneven but it is certainly not small.
I would prefer to experience no mental pain upon learning Titania, my partner of eleven years, has died. I honestly don’t think I would be very sad. When I consider the situation, I imagine myself thinking:
Of course there is some sadness mixed in. I experience a bit of sadness writing those words. Even the time we have already had together is wonderful. How much more wonderful will things be, by the time we say goodbye? The Dawn too is beautiful. I look forward to seeing what Tomorrow holds.
While sharing your belief that we should reduce suffering however we can, with the caveat that it doesn’t hamper maximizing our other values, still I sense that it is wrong somehow.
The idea of a person ending, when considering all that has happened, the gratitude that arises for them having lived their lives at all… well it makes me feel as if it’s enough. As if they’ve exhausted some fundamental reserve of goodness, and so it’s fine to let them go.
I think we should appreciate the good in the lives of those lost, but never sever the old tie, to accept it as the natural order. It should motivate us to improve this world for all.
Im not sure we should do anything in particular. But I don’t personally desire to suffer. I don’t think it adds any beauty to things. Nor does it make me a kinder or more beautiful person. Many hamrful behaviors are downstream of clinging tightly. Thats my perspective anyway.
I am personally content with whenever my own story ends. I had an interesting life. There is a limit to my equanimity. I would pretty strongly prefer not to get tortured badly. But otherwise I am fairly happy with any ending.
I wonder what you mean by the second paragraph.
How does this not lead to reinforcing the resigned attitude towards death? Why would someone do their best to take care of their life, if they truly fully embrace death as a normal part of said life?
I’m not sure if I understand your question. I am using the initial quotes from Stoic/Buddhist texts as examples of perverse thinking that I don’t endorse.
My comment was in reply to Sapphire’s, not your post Matt :)
Sorry, that’s what I get for replying from the Notification interface.
One of my favorites quotes goes something like “No man has ever accumulated enough wealth, knowledge, or power to escape the simple fact that ‘you win some, you lose some’.” Now, the guy who wrote that wrote a lot of stuff I don’t like or agree with, but this quote has always rang deeply true for me. I adapted it into “All life comes with problems, but I have the agency to arrange my life to have better problems than worse ones.” When the worst part of my day is, say, blisters from walking or a rude cashier, I genuinely feel happy to realize, ahhh, these are great life problems.
While part 1 had me ranting to my partner about the nuances of attachment & aversion, wondering if this article would frustrate me, haha, I ultimately found this piece to be such a breath of fresh air.
The part about negative emotions being motivating seems critical. In my opinion (and experience), it makes far more sense to cultivate skills that properly digest emotion (a middle ground between expelling & repressing), instead of cultivating a practice to never ever feel negative emotion at all. The latter sounds like a recipe for neuroticism.
As I was reading another post, I encountered this comment by gwern discussing an article about psychological risks of meditation; interestingly, one of the people interviewed, like you, found themself temporarily unable to feel for their children.
You know I. The traditional story the Buddha de facto abandoned his wife and young child...
I feel like people are getting into Buddhist practice without any agree lme t with its underlying philosophy
I’m generally confused by the notion that Buddhism entails suppressing one’s emotions. Stoicism maybe, but Buddhism?
Buddhism is about what to do if one has no option but to feel one’s emotions.