Reverse-Engineering Mindfulness
Going from “this is stupid” to living in the moment.
I used to think everyone around me was stupid. There’s a quote from BoJack Horseman that summarizes the sentiment. If you haven’t seen BoJack Horseman, it’s a cartoon about a depressive alcoholic actor who, after one successful sitcom in the 1990s, is still riding the same wave twenty years later. Oh, and he’s a horse.
Opposite to gloomy BoJack, there’s charismatic, carefree, excitable, Mr. Peanutbutter, the yellow labrador. BoJack doesn’t understand how Mr. Peanutbutter can even be happy in the first place. “He’s so stupid, he doesn’t realize how miserable he should be. I envy that,” says BoJack.
That used to be me, and that used to be how I saw everybody else. I didn’t understand how anyone could be both smart and happy. Didn’t they know they were supposed to be miserable? Didn’t they understand the many ways in which the world is messed up? Couldn’t they see the thousands of things that could go wrong the very next minute?
In many instances of the show, BoJack sees the world for what it is, even when everyone around him doesn’t. When Princess Carolyn is dating three boys stacked under a trenchcoat, BoJack is the only one who sees the boys for who they are, not as the adult man they are pretending to be. What BoJack…
