The blessed and the wretched

In my everyday life I often observe people — myself and others — behaving as if blessed or as if wretched. (I borrow this language from Visakan Veerasamy; any confusions or different interpretations introduced are my own.)

There's a conventional meaning for blessed vs. wretched, but that's not exactly what I mean. It's not about having a conventionally good vs. bad life. It's not about supernatural entities causing benefits or harms to a person. I'm talking about a way of assessing a person's behaviors in a specific situation as apparently coming from a blessed or wretched place. When I'm assessing my own blessedness or wretchedness, there are specific patterns of things happening or not happening. When I'm assessing others' blessedness or wretchedness, it's my interpretation based on my experience so I could be wrong.

To illustrate this distinction, here's some examples, drawn from actual memory but with most of the details stripped away:

• Blessed: Making positive observations (often but not always compliments).
  • For example: "Oh, that color's really nice, I like that."
  • ... Without thinking about how are the people around me going to receive this.
  • Thinking about it first and then saying it doesn't make it wretchedness, I think. One could view it as subtly wretched or as neither wretched nor blessed. But it doesn't feel to me like typical blessedness.
• Blessed: Experienced dancer dancing with a new dancer in apparent total good cheer.
  • Have seen this multiple times, and have been on both sides from the inside myself. Lots of people I know are good at being the experienced dancer in this situation but I especially want to call out Diane, Andrea, Vicki, Ester, Abby, Mark and Andrew as providing particularly memorable and positive examples in my mind.
• Blessed: Line dancers cheerfully doing wild or excessive styling — sharp, giant kicks or claps, booty-shaking, all kinds of movements that seem somehow "big" or attention-getting.
  • Lots of great line dancers, but I am thinking of for example Ben, Brynn, Brynn, Sheena, Savannah, Taylor, Susan, and Nathan, again as providing particularly memorable and positive examples.
  • You know, it's like these people, at these times, know they want attention and don't hate themselves for it! It's like they think that wanting attention does not mean they suck! Wild. I also don't think this means they suck, but I often feel like if I want attention it means I suck.
  • Sometimes it bothers me seeing this but on the whole I'm glad I do, because it challenges my belief that wanting attention means I suck. It only bothers me to see such things when I'm believing this belief. When I'm not believing that wanting attention means I suck, I don't want to believe it, so it doesn't bother me to see such things.
• Blessed: Team lead making a joke about a bug we discovered in our software.
• Wretched: Shutting up and shutting down about things I notice that I like.
  • E.g. I have found myself noticing, "I like this woman's top," or "those earrings look great," or "that was a cool dance move you did there," or "I like this song," and not said them, out of some vague generalized anxiety or worry that it would hurt the situation to share my experience.
  • Conversely, it has basically never worked out poorly when I said these things — the worst thing that's happened is once or twice people have deflected the compliment, which doesn't bother me personally although I wish for their sake they could have received the compliment.
• Wretched: Having thoughts, and then having second thoughts — because I had that thought, therefore I am a bad person and I suck. E.g. that was a rude/unflattering thought about that person, they don't deserve that —thinking that thought even without believing it or voicing it still means I suck.
• Wretched: At a social dance, often "this is the right way to do it."
• Wretched: Any kind of doing-because-I-feel-like-I-have-to.
• Wretched: I am hurt therefore I want to hurt someone who I can somehow blame for or connect to my hurt.
• Wretched: Self-critical "modesty." When someone gives a compliment, turning that compliment away by saying either aloud or to oneself or in one's attitude, "Well, that thing I participated in, did, made, wore, it wasn't really that good, it had this, that, and the other wrong with it."
  • It's funny because I think there is a kind of modesty that is okay, which even people who seem blessed express — it seems less like making oneself small and more like making others also seem big. I'm thinking of a skilled dancer I know taking a compliment on one of their dances and saying, "I had some really good partners." I'm thinking of how I've often said when people complimented my dancing that "I have a great teacher" — I don't have any interest in downplaying my own efforts, but I do like to acknowledge the help I've gotten. And I'm thinking of how mediators I respect talk about their teachers and lineage.

This is a hard distinction to describe, but here's some thoughts on what I'm getting at:

• The blessed seem to glide through life. It's not that the blessed never face challenges but they seem to be facing only the challenges actually present in the situation.
• The wretched in contrast seem to be tilting at windmills, jumping at shadows, and generally creating a bad time for themselves through how they react to uncertainty and ambiguous experience/evidence.
  • Examples: "Making up a guy to get mad at"; scrupulosity
• This isn't to say the wretched are to blame for how they interpret things. I see this the same way that as Bruce DiMarsico's saying about unhappiness: That nobody wakes up and says in full clarity, gee, it would be a great idea to drive a nail through my head. Although in his terms unhappiness is a choice, that doesn't mean anyone's to blame for their being unhappy. Wretchedness seems much the same.
• Being blessed vs. wretched is not about circumstances. People can have apparently great circumstances and still be wretched.
  • I've personally known people in apparently great circumstances that seemed still wretched — that I understood as feeling paranoid, fearful-angry, lonely, worthless, or depressed.
  • People in terrible circumstances still seem blessed at times — obviously not in a conventional sense that they have good circumstances, but that they seem to be enjoying and working with the circumstances they have to the best of their abilities.
• Blessedness and wretchedness in this term-of-art sense do seem complicatedly related to their conventional definitions.
  • Conventional blessedness can give someone the space/resources to find term-of-art blessedness. Conversely, conventional wretchedness may complicate finding term-of-art blessedness.
  • Term-of-art blessedness vs. wretchedness maybe reinforce or serve, sometimes, conventional blessedness or wretchedness respectively.
  • It looks to me like the correlation runs both ways while also being pretty messy in practice.
• Being blessed vs. wretched is not permanent. It's not written on your soul or something, if you believe in those (and I don't). Sometimes I notice myself acting blessed, other times wretched, and I observe this in other people too.
  • It's crazy how ephemeral blessedness can be. It feels timeless when I'm in it. It has so far slipped away in minutes or hours.
• People seem differently disposed to becoming blessed vs. wretched. Some are often blessed, others are often wretched, at least in my interpretation and in the scope of situations that I encounter them in.
• For reasons philosophical and religious*, I don't believe in blessed-wretched as a "real" binary or even a spectrum.
  • *I wanted to say theological for the repeated sound but I don't believe in gods so that's not right.
  • Inasmuch as being blessed/wretched is an attitude and has something to do with happiness or satisfaction, one could feel
• Blessedness feels strongest when it seems "pervasive," when I can't detect any trace of wretchedness operating in the person/situation. I can think of a few examples where this seemed to be true of myself or of others. It usually isn't true of me.
• Being blessed vs. wretched seems to have something to do with attitude or mindset. In fact, the thing I mean by blessed vs. wretched might reduce entirely to an attitude.
• Blessedness and wretchedness recognize and relate to each other.
  • The blessed sees wretchedness and feels compassion for that and also in a certain sense does not believe it — does not buy into it as necessary, does not buy that it is the result of a cause, and does not buy that it is permanent.
  • The wretched sees blessedness and scrambles. The wretched recognizes, on some level, that blessedness is an alternative possible attitude. From wretchedness, one scrambles to ignore or reject the blessed. Either get that evidence out of sight and out of mind, or insist it isn't evidence of any such thing, to fight back against it and/or test it in some way.
• Speculating even more wildly: If being blessed in this sense does reduce to an attitude, it's this kind of attitude.
• Still speculating wildly: If being blessed in this sense does reduce to something like an attitude, it's also the attitude that nothing can make you unhappy.
  • Conversely, wretchedness would be believing that something could make you unhappy.
  • Since I don't believe in supernatural punishment, I interpret believing in sin as believing that something could make you unhappy. In this view, believing in sin means believing there is something you could do or want or feel or experience that would cause unhappiness (alternatively, "would be cause for unhappiness," or "should cause unhappiness"). It's maybe a subset of all believing-in-unhappiness but it's definitely at least a type of believing that something could cause unhappiness.
• Still speculating wildly: Being blessed in this sense seems to have something to do with parts of the constellation of spaciousness, self-love, love/loving attention.
• Final thought: Maybe describing what seems blessed vs. wretched is just a way of describing my own happiness, i.e. what I want for myself/the world, the situations I want to experience, the people and behaviors I admire and want to emulate.
  • In other words, maybe the specific details of what blessedness and wretched look like are not universal. They probably aren't universal! I think there's probably substantial overlap between different people's ideas of blessedness and wretchedness but it's not universal by any means. Maybe any specific sense of blessedness/wretchedness is particular to one person, situation/context, and time.