Maturity sees the world’s ugliness with more melancholy than anger

By David McElroy · July 27, 2018

As I drove home from work Friday afternoon, I suddenly realized I was feeling anger. I felt confused about the reason for a moment and then it hit me. I was feeling a combination of anger and despair about something in my personal life which I can’t control.

For a few moments, I let the emotions fill me and I felt them clearly in my body. Then my muscles relaxed. The strength of the anger faded. I still felt despair over something I couldn’t control, but I felt peace.

I used to be a lot angrier than I am today. I was angry at the world and wanted to force it to change. I wanted to fix the world. I wanted to save the world. I was angry about various things in my life — about love, about money, about family, about all sorts of things. I wanted to scheme and manipulate everything in ways to change other people.

About a lot of things, I felt tremendously angry. At times, I felt as though the anger was driving me. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve let go of most of the anger. It still flares up at times — as it did tonight — but I’m far more likely to see the things I hate in the world through the lens of sadness than anger.

Maturity heals a lot of anger. Maturity embraces melancholy.

A lot of good art is driven by anger, but how many good artists stay angry without destroying themselves? When I hear anger in an artist’s work, I smile in recognition. It reminds me of the way I felt when I was young. But when I hear anger in an artist even after he’s been around for years, I wonder what it’s doing to him inside.

When I was young, I strongly identified with a line in a 1985 Steve Taylor song which said, “I just wanna stay angry at the evil.” That’s the way I felt about the world back then. I saw evil. I saw pain. I saw hurt and oppression and all sorts of other terrible things. I felt angry about what I saw. I burned with a passion to force the change I wanted to see.

I still see all the same things in the world. I see evil and pain and hurt and oppression — and everything else I’ve ever seen. But instead of seeing the fiery anger of my youth, I see these things with sadness. I feel melancholy at the choices which we humans make.

I used to want to use my anger to change things, but now I accept melancholy — because I know I can’t make decisions to create change for anybody but myself.

Anger ultimately destroys or else gives way to sadness. Anger leads to reckless attempts to solve problems. It leads to more of the same, because forcing people to do things against their will brings reprisals and more bitterness.

With maturity, the anger falls away and is replaced by sadness, because we see that nothing we say is going to change the human condition. Not today. Not ever. The only thing we can really do is to practice love — when we can get ourselves to be consistent with our beliefs — and suggest that others try the same.

At about the same time that Steve Taylor’s song came out — the one I mentioned above that talks about wanting to hold onto the anger — singer/songwriter Pat Terry had a line that didn’t really connect with me at the time. His line said, “Nothing I say’s gonna change the way of this world.”

I wasn’t mature enough to understand that at the time.

Taylor was expressing the anger of youth: “The world is evil and my righteous anger will keep me motivated enough to force change.”

Terry was expressing the melancholy of experience: “I want to share the truth I know with you, but I know that nothing is going to change how this world operates, so I can’t force you to accept it.”

I no longer feel the need to save the world. I no longer feel the need to force people to reshape the world or their lives into what I think they ought to be. All I feel is sadness about the world’s potential and about how individuals destroy their own lives. To the extent that I understand any truth — and I like to believe I’ve found bits and pieces of it — I know all I can do is share what I’ve learned and hope that a few others find some value in it.

When I was young, I had all sorts of plans. I was going to be great. I was going to change the world. I was going to be a hero. But I have fewer plans than ever today. I just try to keep improving myself and try to figure out how to live the love I want to live — and to have the relationships I so deeply need.

So what happened to the youthful anger of Steve Taylor?

He went on to make more albums and then made several really good films. About four years ago, he finally made another album.

His last song on that album is called “Comedian,” and it casts God as a cosmic comedian of sorts. The song ends with repetition of the line, “Man makes plans, God laughs,” over and over.

I haven’t talked with Taylor about the arc of his understanding, but I see him as a brilliant and angry young artist who thought he could change the world by staying angry at evil, but he’s become a more mature artist — still a brilliant lyricist — who knows that changing the world isn’t within his control.

I still wish I could change the world. I still wish I could change a lot of things about my own world. I still wish I could have immediate success and wealth and — above all — love.

But I’m not angry about it. At least not often. I’m sad about the state of the world. I’m sad about the choices people make. I’m melancholy about the damage we do to each other. I’m melancholy about the unmet needs that I so strongly feel.

I know God laughs at my plans. I pray for others to make better choices. I pray that I will become the man I need to be. And I wait in patience for the change that the world needs — and for the change I need.

God laughs at anything I plan. I’m finally mature enough to accept that.

Share on Social Networks

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Related Posts