High Fidelity and Tracking Your Misery
The moral case for letting go of the list of what makes you miserable.
Authorās Note: It looks like Smallville will be the show that Iām going to focus on in the near future. Which will beā¦ interesting. Really diving into a 10 season show will be epic.
Misery loves company, or so the saying goes.
But how much company exactly? Lots of people prefer to be alone in their misery. Particularly because those in a bad mood tend to bring others down. Which people generally don't appreciate. They don't like to be around people who are likely to make them feel terrible. Especially if the one who is miserable tends to talk about how everything and everyone around them sucks. This explains in part why those who are miserable get less invitations to things. People don't like what misery does to others. At some point though these people become better to be around and they can be the life of the party... to a point. So how much is too much and at what point is there an acceptable level of misery to be around someone?
One way to do this is to keep track of what's making you miserable. Perhaps by making a list of sorts to understand the people they believe have destroyed their current circumstances. To look back at the things which made their life turn out the way it has ended up. Knowing what makes you feel the way you're feeling helps in the process of achieving happiness. It's part of how you contrast the feeling of misery and depression with the idea of being happy. The problem with thinking in these terms however is that you can decide to focus almost entirely on your misery and the things that make you feel that way.
You can become obsessed with understanding the decisions that lead you to create the pain you're in now. Endlessly thinking about what you've done and how things could've been different if only you had acted better. Or perhaps even worse in some circumstances. As a way to make sure that people don't inflict terrible consequences on you. Though it's not necessarily the case. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Each time you think about a new reason your life is the way it is, you end up more depressed and that just becomes another thing to feel bad about.
High Fidelity is fundamentally about what happens to someone who can't stop obsessing over the people they loved in the past. Rob, as played brilliantly by either John Cusack in the original movie or Zoe Kravitz in the television adaptation, refuses to accept that their misery is partly their own fault. In large part because they're trapped in the circular thinking of wondering what went wrong. If only they could learn the lessons they believe are missing from these experiences. The obsession they have with other people's affect on them is so all consuming they can't move forward without coming to terms with the outcome of relationships that have to this point defined their lives.
Only in revisiting it can they move forward in any serious way. So long as they can get out of their own way and accept the part they played in those circumstances.
Do yourself a favour and check out High Fidelity, either the original movie or the television adaptation, as soon as you can.
Check out the TV show on Hulu and the movie on Amazon.