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Do you take life seriously?

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

07:57 / 01.10.03

Not the public persona, mind you, since most personae tend to like to maintain the appearance of 'having a laugh', and indeed, haviong a laugh does not mutually exclude any 'inherent' seriousness to life.

What I want to know is, deep down, in the final analysis, do you take life and it's happenstance seriously, or are you mostly just larking about?

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

07:58 / 01.10.03

btw, is this a bit Conversational? Feel free to move if you think so...

08:02 / 01.10.03

I aim for both. It's easy to take life seriously when you're in shit, and just as easy to laugh about it when you're happy.
Mostly I try to remember not to laugh, and attempt to take things seriously, but sometimes the world is just so ludicrous I crack up into hysterics.
If you take the world too seriously, look at a monkey.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

08:08 / 01.10.03

That's good advice, I'm going to give it a go.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

12:59 / 01.10.03

For some reason best known to my subconscious, I read that as "...just look like a monkey."

13:03 / 01.10.03

I think anything worth doing is worth taking seriously, even if it is something one does purely for enjoyment. I don't think taking things seriously means that one has to be completely po-faced. Keep meaning to read Erasmus on this topic, but haven't got round to it yet...

13:25 / 01.10.03

I do take life seriously. But that's not reciprocal.

13:45 / 01.10.03

I take life WAY too seriously and wish I could find a way not to. I didn't use to, things were fun a decade or so ago but these days there's too much at stake to be able to relax enough.

Whereas once I could survive on a diet of beer, hash and pizza, now I need blood pressure and cholesterol tablets just to keep breathing, apparently. So my doctor tells me anyway. I still stick to much the same diet though, except I've substituted whisky for beer and home grown for hash coz you just can't GET hash in Australia.

Life isn't about what it seems to be. Working, money, politics, and television were never part of the original proposal for existence. I don't know how we got to where we are but Christ I wish 'civilisation' would fuck off and leave me alone to enjoy myself. I still maintain that we were better off as cavemen. If the most you could hope for at the end of any given day was simply to have survived, think what a sense of achievement you would have every night when you went to sleep.

15:00 / 01.10.03

Lord Arthur Balfour:

"Nothing matters very much, and very few things matter at all."

Words to live by, indeed.

15:14 / 01.10.03

Jade, true dat!

Life is a joke of the general at the expense of the particular.

From A. Crowley. I hope I quoted correctly. I haven't finished my tea *grog*

Larking. Well, I did for most of my life, thus far. I just can't anymore. Oh my! I must be an adult now!

*has tantrum*

19:09 / 01.10.03

The Sages agree.

20:15 / 01.10.03

I think anything worth doing is worth taking seriously, even if it is something one does purely for enjoyment. I don't think taking things seriously means that one has to be completely po-faced.

I pretty much agree with this. I'm probably too serious overall, but I take most things seriously, even having fun. Some people don't think I'm much fun at all at times; others tell me I'm great fun. It all depends on how you get your fun. I don't need to be doing a lot sometimes to enjoy myself, but trying to explain the subtelties of why I enjoy something (when I don't seem to produce much of a reaction) can be tricky. Doing things right does tend to matter a lot to me, probably too much, but if I give too much of a shit about things, it means someone else can give less of a shit, I guess. Equilibrium or something. I'm happy with the way I see things - I have enough fun, even if it's not always obvious - so don't see my behaviour as "serious" but "normal".

23:45 / 01.10.03

"Nothing matters very much, and very few things matter at all."

And I guess love is all we need, hmm?

One small aspect of the standard psychiatric interview is the supposed importance of establishing Premorbid Personality ie. what the individual was like before they became unwell (assuming they're unwell). How do we do that? In the absence of sophisticated assessment tools or helpfully objective relatives/friends, we ask them. And what do they, without a single exception, say?

"Happy-go-lucky."

It's all I can do to avoid punching them (I swear the fingers on my right hand get twitchy when I start to ask the question). I mean, what the fuck is 'happy-go-lucky'? On what other occasion would anyone ever use a phrase like this?

So, as interview questions go, it's pretty useless.

Equally, I'm a tad suspicious of those individuals who describe everything in terms of being 'a bit of a laugh' (or even 'a JOKE!!) and claim they take nothing seriously. As often as not, in the style of Radio 1 DJs of the 1980s, it's a desperately creaky psychic defence mechanism; give it a year or two, and they'll be swaying on the end of a rope. (I expect even Sylvia Plath, during her spell in a psychiatric hospital, described herself as 'happy-go-lucky' - and doubtless has a piece of undiscovered juvenilia titled 'I'm a right joker, me').

So... I suppose I take life seriously in the sense that I think it often needs to be approached strategically. I'm an optimist, though, and I'd say I enjoy a larf as much as the next wrist-slashing DJ.

I am not happy-go-lucky, though.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

08:24 / 02.10.03

Interesting.

To borrow a phrase from hereabouts, I holidayed in Selfawaria this weekend, and realised, for the first 'Oh, what a turn up' time that in spite of a kind of neo-cortex self image of myself as *gulp* 'devil may care' (hows that for a horrid bedfellow of 'happy go lucky'?), actually, that's bullshit - I'm intensely serious, and take the whole life schtick seriously, at a very core level.

I actually don't like this fact. I feel I take it far more seriously than it *probabl;y* warrants, and wish I could take it with more of a pinch of salt than I actually do.

Don't get me wrong, I love piss arsing around, and having 'a laugh'. Who doesn't?

BTW, Ganesh, since I understand you are in the Head profession, would you say that a core paradigm that life is serious is a necessary pre-requisite for depression?

08:50 / 02.10.03

Isn’t the phrase “taking life seriously” generally used a pejorative? – ie. “you take things too seriously? Doesn’t that imply a kind of value judgement at work – a serious/humour dichotomy going on (I’ve just thought that sentence sounds soooo Barbelith – dichotomy, value judgement, both stock phrases I tend to use a lot while I’m here) . I guess the whole concept implied – life as serious vs. having a laugh isn’t one I really relate to.

I kind of feel that the business of life is intensely serious, in a sense, expressing yourself, finding your place in the world, relations with loved ones – all valuable things worthy of “high seriousness” but just ‘cos I think that about my activity and involvements with the world that doesn’t mean I walk around laden with doom and gloom. On the contrary, things that you take seriously can be a source of great joy, and personally, I’m generally pretty happy and humorous I'm lucky in that I’ve never been afflicted with depression or the like. When I am fucked off, or having a pissyfit, it’s normally for an identifiable reason.

09:27 / 02.10.03

BTW, Ganesh, since I understand you are in the Head profession, would you say that a core paradigm that life is serious is a necessary pre-requisite for depression?

Probably on some level. My point is, those who claim they never take life seriously (because, as Illmatic says, it's vaguely pejorative to admit to being anything other than a laid-back yet laugh-a-minute, lawks-a-lordy, serious? moi? japester) are almost certainly lying, either consciously or unconsciously. And saying one is 'happy-go-lucky' likely relates to happiness in the same way as claiming to be 'zany' relates to wit.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

11:59 / 02.10.03

I have a strong predisposition to fall into a mood of thinking that life is something that someone somewhere is doing to piss me off, but really I'm probably like most other people, if I'm having a good time I'm having a good time, if I'm stressed out then I find it very difficult to take the requisite steps back.