Stop Hitting Yourself
By: August Oppenheimer
Tags: Mental Health, Human Behavior, Mindfulness, Introspection, Criticality

If you were once a child, there’s a good chance you’ve heard this phrase.

“Stop hitting yourself.”

As a kid, bullies bark these words and twist the meaning with vile inflection. On the surface, the words reflect some sort of domineering yet caring position, but in practice we know them to be an emphasis on the victim’s state of helplessness. The words underline how you’re powerless against whatever punishment your bully has in store for you.

In this case, it’s usually being slapped with your own hand.

Classic. Also appreciate how dated this is — season 11 was actually 20 full years ago folks.

What I’ve found growing up is that bullies don’t disappear. There’s the slightly cliche idea that high school never ends, and bullies then are bullies now. While it’s definitely hackneyed, that’s also somewhat true.

There’s also the notion that bullying begets bullying, or that all bullies act out of being bullied themselves. In my experience, I’ve found that to be true as well. I’ve had the great fortune to meet a few of my bullies’ bullies — I get it.

I’ve become frustrated and fascinated at the spaces undefined by these tropes. The latter really says that just about everyone plays the part of the bully at some point, because bullying acts like an uncurable virus spreading ruthlessly throughout time. The former would further indicate that being a bully doesn’t recede naturally over the years either — so we’re not particularly building an immunity to it. Carrying the medical analogy too far, I’ll argue that this happens because we internalize the bully and make it our own, and in this way it becomes a cancer. For those unaware, our body does have a slightly harder time fighting cancer because only a select portion of our immune system has the ability to differentiate cancer cells from healthy cells.

I think we all get bullied a fair bit as kids. Innocently, or otherwise.

I think being bullied, and living in a world that displays normative helplessness against bullying as a social behavior (inherent in the throwaways like “kids will be kids,” or “take the high road”) means that we have no choice but to internalize a bit of the bully. We almost willingly take in this viral behavior, and began to spread it by bullying others.

But more importantly, at least in my opinion. When we internalize bullying, we just begin to bully ourselves.

A lot.

I think this resonates with a lot of folks. “We’re our own worst critics.” And I do think that’s important, but not really what I’m interested in. As a society, we’re told to look a certain way, to live a certain life, to dream certain dreams.

We live on display for all to see, but we’re also the only one paying attention most of the time.

As a white man, raised in a mostly nuclear household my expectations for 31 look like: Steady income, married and gaining weight, two kids with plans for a third. Up until a few years, my dreams weren’t far off. I was aiming for academia, I was hoping for a Disney romance, and I could imagine kids. I would say that my twenties were a slowly decay of those dreams. Personally I feel like I have more realistic goals that align more with my actual personality and desires now. I want a supportive partner or partners, and space to indulge learning.

For a long time, I beat myself up with those expectations and did a lot of damage to my ego. Afterall, as the years went by I was further and further along a track of failure against my own standards for what successful adult life looks like.

Since this is so prevalent, I think it’s worth giving some space before I make the more interesting point, even just to set the stage. I had to appreciate that the dreams I was following were not my own. It was death, in a way to watch each one shatter and fail me as I failed it. Accordingly, I went (and am still proceeding) through each stage of grief for each of these losses, but also I found the death to leave behind a bare truth of something I more genuinely want for myself. Recognizing that my parent’s model of romance (or even my dad’s relationship with my step-mother) will likely not work for me meant that I sought other forms of intimacy and new ways to define love and romance.

I am not alone. As a generation, our “failure” has gone noticed but I think we sneer at the attempts made to stifle our internal demons. Self-care, redefining our priorities and goals, choosing experiences over materials — these are claims of autonomy against the expected narratives.

Avocado toast is success. You did it, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Good job, us.

Now, I want to push you to love yourself even more radically. The context is pretty banal, and may seem trite but it gets the job done. Rather, it showcases the dissonance I hope to dissolve.

We have apps. Blind dates are so outlandish that we’ve redefined them out of terror (cat fishing). We’re pretty set on the idea that looks matter.

But we toe a weird line with that. Specifically I worry about how we think about shallow people. Shallow people care about looks, and the narrative I hear often is that they care too much about looks. Claiming “too much” here implies that there is some healthy, right, or moral amount of caring when it comes to aesthetics.

Flatly, that’s absurd.

First and foremost, that line is assuredly different for everyone. As we push to deconstruct gender, sexuality, professionalism, etc. I urge you all to deconstruct other ideas that you might innocently generalize or project from your own internal values. If someone wants to care about looks above all else, they can have a blast. They can’t have me, but that’s more to do with our values misaligning than a judgment of theirs.

On that point, if you’re a shallow person — stop hitting yourself. Be shallow. You clearly enjoy it, you just don’t like the social stigma. Take a note from several anonymous celebrities… you’ll drive yourself mad caring more about what others think of you. Aesthetics are amoral, and if you love em, go get em.

Some things are shallow and they’re perfect that way. Look at how happy all the humans are with this shallow thing.

The danger in this logic seems to obviously lie in stances like racism, misogyny, homophobia — xenophobia in general. There may be clamors of “Thats where I place value.”

I posit another line. The analogy fails because shallow people who think “ugly people” aren’t people are acting immorally. Shallow people who don’t interact with “ugly people” are just being selfish, not dangerous. Xenophobes don’t seem to have a healthy stance. They reach out to demand others are wrong, immoral, and in need of correction.

This isn’t about them. We know Nazis are awful, even when diluted. Nazi-lite is still Nazi.

This is about ME.

Very selfishly, I’m bored and tired of hearing people fight themselves and beat themselves up for wanting something “shameful.” When you buy into ideas like “vanity is wrong,” while being shallow you’re creating your own dissonance. At a deeper level that dissonance happens because you’re trying to follow rules and ideals that you don’t seem to believe or value. This isn’t only true of vanity, but also resonates with values like greed, anger, laziness, horniness (really, any of the deadly “sins”). These are all human behaviors and of course there’s a point at which you take the behavior too far.

Most people will not take it too far. Admonishing ourselves for engaging in these (VERY) human behaviors is adding dead weight to our internal bully’s arsenal of torture.

While self-flagellation can be fun to say, just stop. It’s dated and weird (at least for punishment) and really, who is it serving?

I won’t try to hide my goal. I want you to be more critical — if that means you sound more affirmed and less whiny, I’m all for it. The “bottom of the barrel” message is “follow your heart.” Implicit in that is a directive to listen to your heart, and begin to remove your own judgments of yourself and your wants. If that also means that you and I aren’t compatible because you value aesthetics more than I do, I’m also all for it. Sounds like we’ll both end up happier that way.

Phew, now I can sound selfish (even though I’m still going to be acting selfishly)! When one cedes themselves to ideals they don’t value, they’re needlessly sewing discord and unhappiness. I can do my part to care less about you being unhappy, and you can return the favor.

OR

We can stop hitting ourselves at the very least. We can stop making ourselves unhappy by listening and trusting our inner voices more.

And once we’ve stopped hitting ourselves, the only people left causing damage are probably xenophobic asswads that we can more easily identify and exile.

Sound like a plan? Go team.

Sincerely Not Nice,

August