On Crankiness
On a bright summer afternoon in the last days of my thirties, I found myself sitting beside the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, reflecting on one of my long-term goals: to avoid becoming a crank. I think I was prompted by the way I noticed my reaction to the tourists around me, who just kept doing the same dumb things tourists always do (some of them the very same dumb things I do when I am a tourist). But in any case it seemed important, staring down my fortieth birthday, to renew this commitment to myself.
Crankiness, as I would define it, is an instinct to find fault with the world, and with other people, and a habit of internalizing these grievances to the point where the grievances begin to define you. It’s a species of anger, shaped by a sense of futility: cranks, I think, do not really believe in their own power to make meaningful change in the world; faced with the world’s dysfunctions—big and small, real or perceived—cranks seem to consign themselves to the role of spectators or victims (I suspect that this is why cranks are also often associated with conspiracy thinking).
The objects of one’s crankiness don’t matter much. Whether your grievances are legitimate or not is beside the point. The point is the cultivation of the grievances as an internal process, as a way of living.
As I age, I find myself drawn toward the notion of learning to let go, which seems like an antidote to crankiness. I google Buddhist philosophies of living, landing on the same results no doubt turned up by millions of my fellow middle-aged happiness seekers. I try to teach myself meditation, again and again.
I’m sure it’s all very healthy, letting go. I have learned how much of the world, and how much of what happens to me in life, really is beyond my control—and it’s so much more than I had once believed.
And yet I’m not sure that letting go is the right antidote to crankiness. Anger has its place. Righteous anger comes so naturally when you’re young, when you come to understand how much is wrong with the world, and when you discover new personal boundaries with which you will begin to define yourself as an adult, and you have not yet been persuaded that there is anything beyond your power to change. As you age, your anger might not abate, but your sense of your own power often does. And then what do you do? Become a crank, or let go?
Neither feels right. Of course I don’t want to be governed by my own emotions—the Buddhists are right; it’s too much suffering. But detachment, I think, ought to include a better understanding of my own power, and a relationship with the emotions and desires that might drive me to make use of that power. It’s important to me both to embrace uncertainty and to be able to make change in the world, and in my own life.
But I can’t pretend to be nearly wise enough to know how to do that.