I'd say "only people who live in their parents basements and haven't put in The Work are able to make comments like this", but then I'd look like the big dumb-dumb.

Complaining without action is equivalent to ignoring it. Sharing the same news headline everyone's already read with your "This is bad!" caption isn't helping. We all know, we can read the words and see it's bad.

Enjoying the world in all its messiness means engaging with it - not this woke schtick of avoiding touching the entire subject because of some trigger word, then spewing generic, inactionable drivel like "did you know the world is bad?"

Yes, we know. We all know. Every single one of us. Welcome to the conversation. Work on yourself so you're not bringing more misery and uselessness into an already-miserable world that needs help.

(Have you tried meditation? /s)

> Only narcissists and not very aware people are able to "enjoy the world as it is, in all its messiness."

I do not believe myself to be a narcissist and I think I am at least somewhat aware of the world and it’s problems.

Yet, despite this, I do “ enjoy the world as it is, in all its messiness”.

I think what is preventing you from doing the same is ideology and close mindedness. From the comment, you come across like a fundamentalist christian refusing to enjoy life because “the world is sinful”.

Enjoy life man. Since we’re on the article, take a page from the Buddhist philosophy and let go, for a moment at least :)

It’s funny you say this, because it’s precisely because of my fundamentalist Christian worldview that allows me to love and accept the world as it is.

Sounds like you’ve had some bad run-ins with Christian fundamentalists. Sure the world is broken, but most Christians realize the world is inherently beautiful (not to be confused with ‘good’).

If the God of the universe died to save it, there’s got to be fundamental value there. Therefore if someone thinks the world is ugly and can’t enjoy it, that’s an internal thing they gotta fix, not an immutable, self-evident truth about the world… again it’s precisely because of the Bible that I believe these things.

What you describing doesn’t sound fundamentalist to me.

I was referring more to the sort of people who, for example, see homosexuals having gay pride and start worrying it’s the end times and they must cleanse the world through adherence to their religion or something like that.

Let me re-write the comment I was responding as a fundamentalist would write it.

—-

Only sinners and heathens are able to "enjoy the world as it is, in all its messiness."

Because that's what it takes to ignore abusive levels of homosexuality and systemic threats to the continued survival of the church.

The point is not about what happened in the past, it's about what is still happening now - and how the narratives from the past continue to be used to justify it.

Ignoring this is neither compassionate nor realistic - although it is heretical, pretty much by definition.

—-

I am 100% percent convinced that there are fundamentalist christians or islamists or whatever who would read that re-written comment as go “oh yeah, that makes complete sense”.

> Only narcissists and not very aware people are able to "enjoy the world as it is, in all its messiness."

I don't know if you meant to come off as harshly as you did, but this is needlessly reductive, which is especially ironic in a discussion about Buddhism.

What you propose is that there are two extremes: enjoyment of the world while ignoring suffering and self mortification while trying to solve it. These are, in essence, the two extremes which the Buddha argued against in favor of the Middle Path[0]:

> There is an addiction to indulgence of sense-pleasures, which is low, coarse, the way of ordinary people, unworthy, and unprofitable; and there is an addiction to self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable. Avoiding both these extremes, the Perfect One has realized the Middle Path; it gives vision, gives knowledge, and leads to calm, to insight, to enlightenment and to Nibbana.

I don't think that OP is saying we should ignore suffering and not try to address it, but they are saying that self-flagellation is unhelpful and toxic, and we should approach suffering with a forward eye not a backward one.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Way

If it requires being “not very aware” to enjoy life without frothing at the mouth in anger at all the messiness of the world, I consider myself a proud narcissist / “not very aware” person.

I think you’ve missed the commenters main point which is that all this hand-wringing about how terrible things are—isn’t actively solving any problems we have today, or any problems we had yesterday. I would even dare to guess it won’t solve the problems we’ll have tomorrow.

Obsessing over injustices you have no control over is neither normal nor healthy.

Right, but we've built a world where people are loudly obsessed with issues they have (infinitesimal) control over because if they paid attention to issues closer to home they might look up from their phones, and the advertisers can't have that.

Except we do have control over it, if we didn't people wouldn't be complaining so loudly about being shunned for the biggotted and ignorant crap that comes out of their mouths.

Except we do have control over it, if we didn't people wouldn't be complaining so loudly about being shunned for the sinful and heretical crap that comes out of their mouths.

A puritan explaining the importance of enforcing moral cohesion - cca 1750