Experience Counts
On Monday, Miriam and I watched Little Miss Sunshine, and it got me thinking about an odd paradox concerning childhood and degrees of happiness. (I’ll tell you when to stop reading before I give anything away.)
Little Miss Sunshine is about an extended family from Albuquerque who travel to Los Angeles to take their young daughter to a beauty pageant. The mother is under stress from her sloganeering second-husband, an unsuccessful motivational speaker; her obscene father-in-law, kicked out of a nursing home for heroin use; her brother, a clinically depressed Proust scholar who just attempted suicide; and her mute teenage son who “hate[s] everyone”. (If you haven’t seen the movie but are planning to, stop here.)
Following a freak-out, the sullen son begins to speak again, and takes his frustrations out on everyone around him. This is believable enough, but I started thinking about why he would have so much angst, other than that which might be attributable to teenage affectation. Though this boy seemed to be suffering no more than any spoiled American teen, he was so angry.
We are the sum of our genes and experiences. The latter contribute most significantly to our personalities. It is easy to look in retrospect at childhood and marvel at how blissful everything was; we had no cares, no worries, etc. What we forget, however, is that when we are children, and have had relatively few experiences, every negative experience is amplified by our foreshortened perspective, like looking at life through an extremely telephoto lens: things are bigger, but the distance between what seems bad and what is really terrible is deceptive.
Thus, for a child, every boo-boo is the worst injury ever, every disappointment is the worst disappointment of their life. By the time you’re older and have suffered the loss of loved ones, a broken marriage, a terrible illness, insolvency, unemployment and so on, you can skin you knee and spill your milk, and still have a pretty good day.
So, next time you want to grab a crying kid and shout in his face, “You want something to be sad about? I have to take a pill everyday to keep from killing myself!”, remember: to them, their broken toy is a pretty big deal.
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