smiling

After working at The Container Store in 2014 I grok that what they're calling for in their employees is not just the pretense of happiness/friendliness from employee to customer, but employees who are SO good at "deep acting," ie actually convincing themselves that they DO feel happy/friendly, that the customer can't tell the difference.

TCS does somewhat support their employees' actual happiness by paying a higher hourly wage, giving advance notice of work schedules, and some other comforts, but NO mention will be made of the specifics of what they're demanding, which is nonstop emotional labor at a v high level.

I'm only on Chap 4 so I'll let you know if I have more realizations (there's a whole chapter on "Gender, Status, and Feeling" so HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS, INTERNET FRIENDS!).

I may have to force smile my way thru the rest of this one huh

Don't worry, there are parts here for you too.

On the whole, I would guess that women, Protestants, and middle-class people cultivate the habit of suppressing their own feelings more than men, Catholics, and lower-class people do. Our culture invites women, more than men, to focus on feeling rather than action; it invites Protestants into an inner dialogue with God, without benefit of church, sacrament, or confession as an intermediary structure; and it invites those in middle-class occupations to manage feeling in service jobs.

It's quite interesting btw that the auth counts "service" jobs like sales "clerks" and flight attendants as solid middle-class earners whereas today retail is lumped in with fast food and low-wage, low-job security work. Combine that with a podcast I just listened to saying that car dealerships are actually barely scraping by due to ever-thinner margins whereas they used to be money-makers, and I don't know what it means yet but probably something.

I can def vouch for Protestantism strongly encouraging (actually, requiring) the believer to police their own mind constantly--to basically surveil themselves for any natural feeling and kill it off according to scriptural demands. Not only your actions but every single thought is never private or free.

protestants here are a much freer, more liberal and expansive lot but sure why wouldn't they be they took it all out on us

protestantism might be more lonely than Catholicism in its mechanics but not nec more severe

I still can't really decide to what extent I've got rid of this way of thinking, or how real the resignation to a background awareness that I'll never be a Good Person is, but I suppose I struggle to identify other ways of being ethical (in general/yourself). Mb giving a shit about this at all indicates it's lingering influence

not sure if this means protestants force smiles more, I'm generally resistant to this large scale/causal way of talking about religion, but I can believe all that fostering of a conscience & internalisation plays into it sometimes.

I remember having a little crisis/mini breakdown big enough to be public & visible when I was 21 & amidst all the other nonsense there was something very relaxing even liberating about being unhappy in polite company. get a sense of humour with it & you feel like yr going places

autocorrelation ruining my grammar'll teach me to write big posts on my phone

ah, well,

Mb giving a shit about this at all indicates it's lingering influence

im not trying to be harsh but i think this is almost as much a cop-out mechanism as not thinking at all about this stuff, its essentially the one-step better option or w/e a lot of the time, or for a lot of ppl, ime - not directed at you or anything obv. not thinking about this stuff at all and just existing a la goon is the ideal to which we should all strive imo.

like when we morally police ourselves and then feel guilty the guilt expiates the bad behaviour somehow? whereas there's no reason to believe that somebody without an oppressive self-surveillance regime wd actually behave any worse than anybody else? that feels plausible tbh

not following this quite. I mean giving a shit about to what extent I might have escaped/still be shaped by church-nurtured thought-policing. agree with NV's point; it's v hard to recognise the limits of the influence of this way of thinking because the similarity/difference of other ways of being ethical/existing in the world is unknown. this is partly why the explanatory potential of looking at things like this seems dubious to me. straying off-topic but my friends all had much less religious upbringings and where I'm close enough to tell at least I'd say they are less obsessed/suffocated by the same sorts of ethics. idk this sort of stuff is on my mind a lot but I don't want to start posting about my parents so I'll leave it there

all the free and easy protestants ive met (since moving to dublin, obv, jaysus) are lovely. as a broad swathe statement, since im making them and don't much plan to stop, they're much more socially engaged and conscious, but it seems to be in a less-broody way, more of a 'roll-up-the-sleeves, do lets' get stuck in chaps, this wants fixing' kind of way.

again i don't discount that they are all genuinely much fuckin wealthier and happier and less prone to having come from demented alcoholic abusive homes than the crowd im use to (oh that's probably covered in 'protestant' i guess)

no idea how engaged they are with their religion vs our lot, afaicglean its more of a social outing thing with them, that and knowing they're better than we are, which probably helps in a million unfelt ways.

like when we morally police ourselves and then feel guilty the guilt expiates the bad behaviour somehow? whereas there's no reason to believe that somebody without an oppressive self-surveillance regime wd actually behave any worse than anybody else? that feels plausible tbh

― Gombeen Dance Band (Noodle Vague)

idk, that, yeah, definitely, that and giving yrself the slap on the back for little or nothing as opposed to the (always? often? never?) truthier 'fuck it we're all in it and trying to get out of it and preferably me first' but tbrrwu i dont see how this links in any way to ogmors post and im only typing now out of reflex so