Cynics are just fine
Published by marco on
I sent the following quote to a friend:
“But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.”
—Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
She wrote back:
“Oooooo interesting.
“Don’t you think thistles are more useful than some people? 😁
🤣
Sorry, it’s Friday. I need another day to become human again.”
She’s a middle-school teacher. She lives in a war zone for five days a week. It makes her deeply cynical, nearly matching my own cynicism, but with much better reason.
I wrote back:
That a thistle is incapable of hypocrisy puts it insurmountably ahead in the race.
And don’t worry about your creeping (or surging?) cynicism. It’s just on the spectrum:
- optimism
- cynicism
- realism
- pessimism
- defeatism
Cynics are still willing to laugh about what realists cry about, and thus are more human. There’s nothing more human than gallows humor.
“I’ll take it!! 🤣🤣”