“The second most important fact about Christmas is that it is one of the times of year when the suicide rate increases.” This is how a text by Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most important moral philosophers of the 20th century, begins. circulates on the internet every Christmas.
We know that the data is not true (no more people commit suicide at this time) and, in fact, we are not even sure that this text was written by MacIntyre (although the reference also appears in his main work): However, it is something that keeps repeating itself over and over again.
It will be because, despite the lights and the fanfare, there are many people who approach the ‘happy holidays’ as something deeply sad.
The great Christmas dissonance. There are many ways to view Christmas, but in almost all of them there is something of a great social celebration of happiness. It is the time of sharing, of meeting loved ones, of reconciliation, of taking advantage of the time as if another spring were not going to come after the barren winter.
But what if we don’t want/need/can feel that way? That is, what if in the middle of that chorus of messages, posters and songs that tell us that we should be fine, what we feel is that, simply, “we are not”? Usually, when the implicit norm is “feeling grateful, generous and happy”, anything that goes beyond that is perceived with a mixture of shame and self-criticism; puts on a “good face” (emotional performance) and fatigue, irritability and you end up burning.
And everything we lack. “Christmas is also a recounting”, said the writer Gonzalo Torné. “It is the day that as children they taught us what our family landscape was, the people who were interested in us and whom we could count on. And the day that, absence after absence, we confirmed the fragility of what as children we learned as something stable.”
The duels. It is a quite precise text: during this type of festival, all the duels that we carry behind us are also activated. It’s not just about “nostalgia”, it’s about everything a ritual of remembering absences on which we have built our lives. Just as the idea that MacIntyre mentioned at the beginning does not fit the data, the truth is that, among the population treated in psychiatric emergencies at Christmas, the “stressors that are repeated the most“are loneliness and being-without-family.
A “pressure cooker.” Because, let’s face it, last year up to 20% of Spaniards They experienced political fights at some family dinner. Six out of ten, in fact, avoid talking about controversial topics not to argue: the great “polarization” is converting all in one problem (that adds to material stress and unequal loads).
Many reasons, only one why. MacIntyre said that much of this is because “we have lost any ability to understand our lives as something that embodies a narrative structure—not to mention narratives in which there is hope for a happy ending.” No need to go that far.
Everything seems to indicate that it is something simpler: Christmas runs the risk of becoming something sad when it becomes an emotional obligation. That is the great design problem of these parties, which, being made to “feel accompanied”, by contrast, make losses, inequalities and fractures visible.
We need to reclaim sadness… also at Christmas. In recent years, and with increasing force, positive thinking has become fashionable. Ideas like “You have to be optimistic”, “Don’t give up” or “Always positive, never negative” have become true mantras of our time. But as he says the teacher Jose César Peralesfrom the University of Granada, positive thinking has serious problems that we overlook due to its friendly and adorable appearance.
Our culture, increasingly full of characters, is gradually distancing us from a simple truth: that “we suffer, hate or are envious because they are the way we live reality. Denying it, embracing an irrational and meaningless positivism, is the contemporary way of denying ourselves.”
Isn’t Christmas a good time to accept ourselves?
Image | Bryan Heng
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