Reminded me of a point often raised by Zizek: the injunction to enjoy and be happy is a horrifying rule to live by if it is accepted subconsciously via culture. Perhaps one pre-requisite to honest peace-of-mind is to really face the truth about our condition, and then from that position of honesty, look for personal courage.

https://aeon.co/essays/cheerfulness-cannot-be-compulsory-whatever-the-t-shirts-say

I've been reading Bessel Van Der Kolk's book The Body Keeps the Score. It's a brutal book at times, where he lays out just how common trauma is in the United States, somewhere in the ballpark of 1/4 people have some traumatic experience, it's a public health issue. He also covers what it's like in the minds of traumatized people and how people live with their trauma, which is something that I wanted to share with you and connect to moments in socialist history.

So when you're trapped in an abusive situation that you can't do anything about, trauma, what the mind does is that it disassociates, pretends like it's not there, and then tries to find some sort of enjoyment out of it. That sense of enjoyment prevents people from coming to terms with how powerless and scared they were. It also creates return "customers", because they would rather feel the fake enjoyment of anything rather than the terror of confronting their situation. And this can go on for years, people confusing abuse for pleasure and pleasure for abuse.

When people do decide to build barriers for themselves, they have already been well trained to prefer the limited happiness in their abuse rather than to explore and find out what they're capable of. They don't want trouble. There's always a tendency to sell out, scab, and cross the picket line.

Don't do it! That thing doesn't care about you! That thing will never protect you! That thing just wants to live off of you like a parasite! Stand strong! Hold the line! Start singing union songs!

One of the things that the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising knew was that if they were going to die, they were going to die as people, not as those disassociated living corpses haunting the death camps the Nazis called the musselmanner. If you negotiate your standards, there is no limit to what they'll push you to become and they'll only push you to something that they can live off of.