First, I want to apologize for my hysterics. The types of viewpoints I described are real things I've read, or seen that others believe. I admitted I have a hard time believing in the lighter version: that life has ups and downs, but significantly more downs.
However, I found some quotes from the person who popularized the term, and it seems the internet took it out of context:
Quote:
“Depressive realism” is a phrase from psychoanalysis. I learned it from Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, which is an account of his depression in relation to other people’s accounts of it and theories of it. Solomon writes there that most people self-idealize, imagining themselves to be more beautiful and more efficacious than they are: and he says that this kind of self-optimism is genuinely adaptive. Depressive realists, in contrast, are more accurate: their sense of realism isn’t dark or tragic, but less defended against taking in the awkwardness and difficulty of living on in the world. So when I said I write as a depressive realist, I meant that I see awkwardness, incoherence, and the difficulty of staying in sync with the world at the heart of what also binds people to the social. What doesn’t work, makes no sense, or is ungainly always accompanies fantasies of the good life, and other clarifying genres of optimism, and the question of fantasy is centrally about how it helps people remain attached to worlds and situations (and find ways of thriving within them) that are also quite toxic, difficult, infelicitous, or just messy. I look at the ways people bear how life proceeds without guarantees. This positioning—as my blog and my next book, Cruel Optimism (2011), argue—asks “Why do people stay attached to lives that don’t work?” There, I am not interested centrally in asking how they could work, first; I am interested in how fantasies of belonging clash with the conditions of belonging in particular historical moments.
Depressive realism allows for an account of the utility of fantasy in maintaining but also imagining alternative modes of life.
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The part I bolded seems to contradict much of what I inferred from the existence of DR, and the beliefs many use DR to justify. However, the talk of being less defended against the chaos of life rings painfully true. I said several times I don't hold too many positive illusions in this sense: it really, honestly surprises me that most people do.
Also this mention of "fantasies of belonging" piques my interest, and the last sentence in that quote is downright validating to someone as fantasy-prone as myself.
In addition, I found this after trying to self-soothe with a box of cookies (no luck), and shortly after I found out there's a mini series adapted from one of my favorite novels - amazing how interest in that made me forget my problems so quickly.
Perhaps we could try to have a real discussion about this now, if anyone's interested? Like what counts as delusion/illusion (I worry most about perceptions of meaning and purpose. Okay, there's nothing objective - how much does the subjective count? I recall one commenter saying it's cruel to rip away people's illusions, whether it's Santa, God, or a purpose). What is a "life that doesn't work"?
I'm still lost, life is still terrifying, but at least I'm a little calmer.