DailyJim: Maybe we would have less grievance culture if we learned how to grieve in culture

Hello everyone welcome to another daily gym another um today's episode is for thursday july 18th 2024 but i'm recording it also on july 19th 2024 and it's also for today what i want to talk about today is maybe we would have less grievance culture if we learned how to who grieve in culture.

Okay, so what do I really mean by this? So I'll start off and just be very honest. Today is the birthday of my mother who passed away a year and a half ago. And last year I celebrated her birthday with my dad in Michigan at the cemetery. This year I am in Nairobi. I'm in East Africa. It's a very surreal feeling to be so far away.

And but even being this far away, sometimes I'll dream and I'll see my mom in the dream and even sometimes think, but wait, you're supposed to be dead. Why are you here? And have conversations with her and then maybe apologize for things that I didn't say or things that I did say and whatever.

I think we have this belief that there's a grief process, there's a start, there's a finish, there's step-by-step, and this is how it goes. I think that's just a fundamental misunderstanding of how humans work. But I think grief, I can't remember what somebody said, it was something about grief is just loving someone when they're not here.

And as long as the love is still there even as long as the memories are still there because sometimes we may not even want the love to be there we may not want the connection to be there but the memories pop up because we see a certain flower or we smell a certain smell or we walk into a certain environment where the light shines in a certain angle and we think of that person.

And so this whole episode could be about my mom and there's a lot of things I could talk about there, but I'm not the only one who's grieving. And I think we're grieving all the time. We as human beings lose things all the time. And it could be something as profound as losing a mother, or it could be something as simple as losing a phone, or losing a key that we've misplaced, or losing an opportunity that we tried for, or missing a call, or something very, seemingly facetious, or just kind of pointless. But these losses can add up real quick. And And we can feel the pain of that missing and the anger, the sadness, the fear, the joy, like so many emotions when that thing is no longer around.

I think we just don't talk about grief and grieving very much. I think we don't talk about the feelings that we have when someone is really far away, whether they've passed on or whether they're still alive. And the relationship has just become estranged and we miss our friends.

I have a friend who went through a pretty wretched divorce and lost custody of her daughter, didn't even fight very hard for it because it was so brutal in some ways.

And just thinking about how much she misses her daughter, who is still alive, and how much her daughter misses her, and frankly, how much the ex-husband probably misses her too. The pain that we carry and don't talk about and don't feel, we project all over other people and situations. And I'm so tired of us not addressing what we're actually feeling and not admitting that we're human beings that feel and we miss each other. And frankly, we will probably love these people and these things for the rest of our lives. So can we please just accept it and appreciate the fact that we love?

I think our inability or unwillingness to grieve is a fear of loving. Because if we don't really love something, then it doesn't really hurt if it's gone.

I was in a bar in Michigan and just went into the, used the bathroom, the urinals. And I talked with one guy and I said, you know what, we're not even, this is a dive bar. And I said, you know, we're not even talking about what happened in the pandemic. My mom was going through chemotherapy. I didn't leave the house for a year. I didn't go into like another building pretty much for one solid year. And the guy starts telling me, I think his mom died and his brother died. And we're crying in the bathroom of a dive bar. Holding back the tears. I talked to someone in Kenya about this. The guy tells, I said the same story from my side. The guy says his mother was dying of COVID and he went into the room with her and everyone in his family told him not to do it, but he said, I'm not going to let my mother die alone.

We're not talking about these things. and therefore projecting it all over everything else.

How much of the political situation in the U.S. and in Kenya and in Ukraine and Russia and in Sudan and in all these places around the world is because we were going through a lot and then we went through a pandemic on top of it. And many, many people died. Many people lost jobs. Many people had broken estranged relationships with some of the people they care about the most.

Can we please start talking about these things and stop pretending that it's just the political figure? It's not just the political figure. It's not just the thing that happened today. There is so much going on underneath the surface. There's so much pain. There's so much estranged love that I think is driving us crazy.

And I just hope we start talking about this stuff because it hurts me to see this much pain and people pretend like there's no pain. There was a girl I was dating here before and she came over and she kept saying to me, I was like, oh, every time I'm around you, you're sad. And I'm thinking, I'm sad because you're sad. I can feel the sadness when you walk into the room. It just spreads. Even if you say you're fine, even if you say you're living your best life, I can feel it. And other people can feel it too. But then we put on some rationalization on top of it and we say, oh, it's because of this thing. This is the sole reason that I'm feeling this way. And that is rarely, if ever, true. There's almost always something else that's bringing this pain, that's bringing these feelings, bringing the joy, bringing the excitement, the fear, the anxiety, the anger, the discomfort, the uncertainty, the fatigue, the helplessness. There's almost something, almost always something else bringing that. And we just don't talk about it. We pretend as if it's the one thing in our lives. It's completely this political figure that's making me feel this way. No, it's not. It's not. It's not. Maybe 5%, 10%, 20%, 30%, maybe. But there's a lot of other stuff going on.

I just hope we start talking about this stuff. because I worry, I fear what happens as we continue to suppress more and more of the grief, more and more of the feelings, more and more of the love that we have. In a world where we're connected to each other by cell phones, by internet, by transportation, the ease at which we can communicate with each other is greater than it has been. At any point in human history. And yet, we keep trying to suppress it, I guess.

So.

Yeah, I think sometimes when we suppress this, it comes out in really bad ways and sometimes it might come out in physical ailments. Who knows what impact this has on the body? who knows what impact it has on cancer who knows what impact it has on heart attack who knows what impact it has on stroke or suicide or overdose or homicide or just general malaise or dementia or who knows, i think there's actually some strong evidence for it but.

What I can say is just, personally, I'm tired of seeing it. And I just want people to show up as human beings. Just show me what you're feeling. Tell me what you're feeling. Listen to what I'm feeling. Can we please just be human beings together and stop this charade of us being robots that are 100% happy all the time or productive or whatever value we stamp through our culture, as the supreme value while every other emotion is deprioritized or, frankly, squashed.

So it's okay to grieve. It's okay to feel. It's okay to love.

And I just imagine what would this world look like if we actually let ourselves love each other while we are here with each other, and while we are gone.

On that note, I will talk to you all next week. I appreciate you being here with me.

And, yeah, I miss my mom. I miss my mom. All right, take care, y'all. Bye.