Today is Not a Bad Day

I posted this (as well as my brief acknowledgement that *I* had been misframing Democracy, which you should probably read first) to Facebook yesterday. I'm throwing it up here as well:


This is not a bad day. This is a day when the risk of future bad days elevated substantially. That's a different thing from a bad day.

I’ve trained myself not to pre-suffer, because it needlessly makes good days bad. That strikes me as the goofiest, stupidest thing a person can do. Just for one thing, it delegitimizes any professed desire for good days.

What's more, good/bad is a simplistic and childish concept. Innocent children would have gotten cancer under Harris, and joy will exist under Trump (unless we deliberately inhibit ourselves out of pique). The sun came up this morning and my toast smells nice. My desired outcome did not occur, but I've lost my sense of entitlement to desired outcomes, just as I've lost any impulse to inhibit joy out of pique.