I identify a yearning for hygge in hipster nostalgia and in the whole neoteny thing.
I also see it a lot in cartoons popular with older people, like Adventure Time, Steven Universe and Avatar.
(In the last, Uncle Iroh in particular is all about it. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but there’s a whole arc where he tries to get his nephew to abandon his ideas of destiny and honor, as well as his claim to the throne, to help him run a tea shop instead.)
In a odd coincidence, Esther and I just started watching Avatar, and so far (all of 3 episodes in) we both love Uncle Iroh and his tea fixation
The impression I got from my Youtube binge last night – admittedly not an, uh, conclusive investigation of the subject – was that Danish young people do strongly associate associate hygge with hipster culture (the cheerful “vintage shops and indie pop” side of hipster culture, not the “obscure bands and cryptic irony” side). Except that that sort of hipster culture is completely mainstream there, a part of the national ethos.
(Imagine living in small country where Portland, OR was the capital city and 10% of the population lived there. I mean, like, Copenhagen has five times as many bikes as cars and contains a giant 850-person hippie commune with a big open-air weed bazaar)
Anyway, I’ve done a lot of my usual effortpost wanking today, but in actual IRL news, I spent the month of May 17 through June 16 in England (and, briefly, Scotland) visiting Esther, and now I’m back in my messy studio apartment. It’s been a pretty weird psychological jolt, which I guess is not surprising.
The month I spend with Esther was very, very good and made me very hopeful. Part of why it was so very good was that I love Esther and she loves me – but this is going to not going to be that sort of romantic post, because I already knew how much we love each other.
Previously, though, I had known this from daily video chats and a few whirlwind meetings lasting under two weeks each. We both desperately wanted to live together, but “living together” had been an abstraction, a fantasy.
This time, we lived together.
Not in every last detail, of course. But in a lot of respects. We both did a fair number of chores. We both went to the nearby grocery and convenience stores and I eventually got a sense of what they had and what of it I liked. We both worked on a regular schedule – she at her job, me on my dissertation with twice-weekly Skype meetings with my adviser – and we learned we could deal with each other when we both had work and the concomitant stress and tiredness, when we weren’t on a romantic vacation. We cooked some meals together, and enjoyed it.
We both remarked that it was so much easier to cook meals together than it was on our own. “Only doing half the work” is just the beginning: it’s also a collaborative activity with someone you love, and it’s a lot harder to mutually put it off (until you’re too hungry to cook and you just eat junk or takeout) than it is to do that alone.
That last part characterized every aspect of my experience. Cohabiting with someone I love makes the day-to-day stuff of life so much easier. Procrastination is tempting when I’m alone, because it’s only hurting me, and if I (rightly or wrongly) feel like I can “take the hit” then that’s the end of the story. When I’m with Esther, if I say I’ll do something at a certain time I do it – not out of fear she’ll be mad, or out of any crushing sense of duty, but because I feel a positive sense that doing the thing will contribute to the collaborative life that I enjoy having. Although that makes the reasoning sound too explicit; it’s really more like I just do the thing, and there’s no friction. And Esther said similar things about living with me.
There’s also the fact that stress loci for one person often won’t be stress loci for another. I cleaned Esther’s room twice when she was stressed because she had to do it in a hurry, and she thanked me profusely for it, as though I had done something very difficult for her – but to me it was just cleaning a room, no big deal. Yet right now, when I look around my apartment, I see about 4 different kinds of mess that have been around for months, because the idea of cleaning it up makes me anxious. You see the idea.
We’re not just well-matched on the swoony romantic plane, we’re also well-matched on the boring domestic plane, and that I think is very important indeed.
Tomorrow I will say some things about my trip to see Esther. (Spoilers: it was very, very good.) For now I am a caffeine machine who cannot process human matters and will soon shut off for a long defrag.
I really need to start working soon, but for now, here’s the promised follow-up to this post
Esther has gotten me to start watching Doctor Who with her. (Series 5, which is emotionally important to her because it helped her through a really tough time. I have simultaneously gotten her into Homestuck, which it so happens I was clinging to during a bad time of my own – though a comparatively much milder one – at around the same time she was clinging to DW Series 5.)
And Doctor Who is of course ridiculously entertaining and also, of course, a very cartoonish and unrealistic show. The Doctor, in particular, is clearly a kind of savior fantasy, a charismatic man who can waltz into a seemingly hopeless situation, maintain his characteristic cheer and wit and compassion-for-all-beings in spite of that situation, and reliably come up with some combination of clever planning, luck and technobabble that saves the day.
But here is the thing. I have noticed that when I am helping Esther deal with her brain problems, I feel a whole lot like the Doctor.
I do not always enjoy helping people with their brain problems. There are some people whose episodes of anxiety or depression (etc.) produce behavior that reliably scares me, makes me extremely anxious myself, or makes me feel guilty or subhuman. I don’t want it to sound like I am enjoying this process because I get to be some sort of self-sacrificial savior. With some people it would be like that, but with Esther it isn’t. It doesn’t feel hard or self-sacrificial at all.
What it feels like is, well … Esther’s anxieties tend to be about really terrible things – not just losing her job or something, but being a dream figment who’s about to disappear forever, or going to hell, or being the most unethical being in existence. And, first of all, she finds it anxiolytic to just be around me, to see me and hear my voice. And second, these are the kinds of existential or philosophical or science-fictional worries that can actually be helped (in her case) by arguments, about the epistemic grounds for God, about how one might know if one is dreaming, about competing theories of ethics and their troubling flaws.
And those kinds of arguments are my strong suit – I mean, I can generate that sort of thing even when I’m in a state where I can’t remember ordinary words or manage to clothe and feed myself. It comes naturally. (Which, historically, has tended to seem to me like a sign that I’m one of those unworldly Bazinga! nerds who Just Doesn’t Get It in mundane life situations and thus always ends up hurting people)
But now, I can waltz in to a hopeless cosmic-horror scenario, and be instantly comforting just because of who I am and what I look and sound like, and then use the particular sort of cleverness that comes naturally to me to devise a plan and get everyone out safely. While cracking jokes and being gratuitously nice.
(Note: please DO NOT respond to this with any kind of unreality/horror jokes or things designed to make me think the world isn’t real. I am feeling much better now
Last night, Rob was feeling dissociated (possibly because of anti-depressant dose change) and he said he felt like “the feeling when you have just realised you’re in a dram and about to wake up.” He mentioned how in the past he had had dreams where he was in love with a woman and was disappointed on waking to realise that she was a dream figment and not real. And then he said that I was like a dream in many ways and we are very well matched.
A normal person would have just taken this very sweet compliment at face-value, been flattered and kissed him and taken care of their dissociating boyfriend. But I’m crazy and also kind of an asshole who is bad at taking care of people. :( Although he said none of the brain problems were actually unpleasant, just weird.
I became afraid that I was a character in a dream who somehow had subjective experiences and that Rob was going to wake up and I would die. Brian Tomasik thinks imaginary people might have experiences. I was so scared and I was crying on and off for like and hour (and sometimes laughing at the same time as crying because I knew how crazy and ridiculous I was being.)
Rob is the best boyfriend ever and even though he was also having brain problems he looked after me. He did a bunch of reality tests on pieces of text to make sure they didn’t change (text usually changes in a dream), and came up with a bunch of logical arguments for why I wasn’t a dream, and listened to me providing a whole bunch of very specific memories (like the colour of the doors of houses I used to live in) that his brain would have no reason to give a dream lady. And he hugged me a lot and when I was crying I made him promise to have a good life and be happy if he woke up soon and I stopped existing. He is so good.
I actually think it is really good that I can have this kind of brain problem. A few years ago, if I came across evidence I was a person in a dream, I would be like “aww yissss! I get to not exist really soon! And there’s no Hell for dream people!” but last night I was crying because I wanted to have decades of life where I have a good job and kiss many cuties and hang out with my friends and buy malaria nets and eat cookies and get laid and read books and help children learn to read and go swimming and go to the Bay and meet the bonobos and have pet rats and marry Rob and have a nice house together and I would not get to do the cool things if I was a dream and I died. And I am so happy that I am not a dream, because it has been too long now for me to be a dream. I am happy and I am safe and I will not die for a long time. Maybe I will even be a cyborg who lives for centuries in the glorious transhumanist future, although that is very unlikely IMO. But what I have, this life, is wonderful, and not a dream.
For the record, I really didn’t need much taking care of last night – my dissociation was actually fairly pleasant. It mostly consisted of some mild derealization combined with a sense that my circumstances were no longer familiar, as though my self from years ago was viewing them as a glimpse of the future. Since my circumstances were really good, this was very enjoyable – I kept thinking “wow, I’m in England right now, to visit my girlfriend, who is right here, and I am talking to her, and we love each other, and she’s really good-looking, this is actually happening right now,” and of course that led into the conversation about dreams
(Also, I’m going to make a longer post about this sort of thing in a minute, but it is amazing that I can be a good, emotionally supportive boyfriend by, among other things, “coming up with a bunch of logical arguments.” This is not how the television tells me life is supposed to be)
