The expressions of unbridled joylessness I've seen from the usual sectors over the #MetGala are illustrative.
I will keep repeating this: Seize the things which make you joyful. It will work out better for you in the end. Nobody's going to keep you company in your misery. I certainly won't.— Liberal Librarian, Emotional Support Cuban 📚 🥃 (@liberallibrarian.bsky.social) May 7, 2025 at 2:55 PM
I keep forgetting to find a place to post this. @LiberalLibrarian for the win…
… The theme for this year’s [Met] gala was “Black Dandyism”. The co-chairs, besides the ever-present Anna Wintour, were Sir Lewis Hamilton, Colman Domingo, A$asp Rocky, and Pharrell Williams. The gala celebrated Black fashion and culture, and how Black people persevere in a racist society. And, of course, the Met Gala is also a yearly fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the only part of the Met which must raise its own yearly budget. Far from a “Bonfire of the Vanities,” the yearly event is what philanthropy is made for. And the gala raises $4 for every $1 spent. Not a bad return on money.
However, on social media one could be forgiven if one were to think from the general reaction that the attendees were fiddling while Rome burned. That they were out of touch elites who should be put to the sword. That the entire event was worthless, pointless, and everyone involved should be marched off to the guillotine. I could imagine mobs of the proletariat storming the venue and violently ripping the attendees’ clothing from their bodies before delivering the coup de grâce.
Did race have something to do with it? Of course it did. When does it not? But I think there is something deeper at work…
The reaction to the Met Gala—and would the reaction have been the same had the theme not centered the Black experience?—led me to this realization: Unbridled joylessness.
Unbridled joylessness is the dark counterpart to unbridled joy. Someone who lives in unbridled joy does not ignore the world and its state. She doesn’t dismiss the suffering which afflicts so much of humanity. But in her joy, in living her best life, she can effect change, because she is not paralyzed in anger and fear. She meets the darkness with light. She meets the sorrow with happiness. She shows that there is a better path the fear and animus. That love is always greater than hate, if you just reach for it and choose it. She comes from a position of hope and agency, where nothing is beyond her powers.
Those who dwell in unbridled joylessness have no hope. The world is black, and so are they. They live in an inky darkness of despair, unable to see any light, unable to see any way out. They are the people in Plato’s Cave, seeing only the flickering, faint shadows of what they perceive to be existence, unaware—and unwilling to become aware—of the light and color outside of the cave…
Unbridled joylessness is more than misery loves company. It’s a position that you don’t root yourself in the darkness, you can’t fix the darkness. But that has it the wrong way. When you are stuck in a problem, subsumed in it, you can see no way out. You can see no way out because your view is myopic. You take the problem as the entirety of reality. When, in fact, any problem is just a minor part of the world’s greater reality. It is only when you step back and look at things in a holistic manner that you can tackle the issue. Unbridled joylessness demands purity of sorrow. But you can’t conquer hatred with hatred, and you can’t assuage sorrow with more sorrow.
The answer to sorrow is joy, not joylessness. Joylessness embeds the sorrow in the soil, letting it take deep root. Joylessness strengthens those roots. But the roots are imaginary. Refuse to give into that joylessness, and they are as loose string.
Our enemies on all fronts want us to feel despairing and despondent. They want us to feel hopeless. They want us to feel joyless. When we give them that, they win. Refuse them. As I say, seize your joy. It is what will get us through these troubled times.
SpaceUnit
Mostly I’ve been going with unbridled stoicism.
lowtechcyclist
And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. – John 1:5, KJV
Baud
@SpaceUnit:
That describes me well.
Steve LaBonne
Hell yes. I will do what I can to fight the motherfuckers but they will never, ever take away my joy at being alive, in food, music, art, and nature, and in my loving UU community (which is also a source of allies in the fight). I do not and will never give them that kind of hold over my mind. They don’t begin to rise to the stature where they would be capable of that.
zhena gogolia
@lowtechcyclist: Yeah!
I definitely notice that the technique of this regime is to try to frighten everyone. And of course there is reason to be afraid. But the WAY they parcel out their announcements is designed to keep everyone afraid all the time, which makes everyone helpless and hopeless. We have to find a way not to let them do this.
ETA: The whole TACO thing — “oh, the tariffs start tomorrow!” “oh, the tariffs start next week!” and “Oh, he’s going to make a big announcement about Russia” FUCK OFF
Suzanne
I love looking at the Met Gala outfits every year. Such creativity.
It’s always easy for people to crap on fashion. Girls-and-gays, and therefore deeply unserious.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
100%
I can’t figure out why people haven’t adapted to it. It’s been a decade since he came down that elevator.
sab
Frustrating day today. Last Friday we could not catch our shyest cat four her quadricenniel vet visit. She seems healthy but she is not a spring chicken. Also, being olspd, she is not naive. She figured something was up, so she secaped us until her appointment was past.
We had a pretty good plan, sneaking up on her asleep. Until our pitbull decided to join the fun.
We rescheduled. We snuck around today keeping an eye on her. We kept an eye on the pitbull, to lock her up before the final pounce.
Useless. Cat knew we were coming. We chased her a lot.
It will take months before she trusts me again.
During the chase we had two cats stressed into asthma attacks and another cat looking shocked.
Solomon our new cat was actually a Judas goat, sniffing around the cat carrier like it was harmless ( in his defense, last vet visit with him it was harmless.) His sister had an asthma attack.
satby
Lost a longer comment, but the post reminds me of one of my favorite Substack subscriptions, gurdeep.ca/. He writes and dances the joy of living.
Edit: apologies for the naked link. My phone substituted the website for Gurdeep of the Yukon’s name.
bbleh
Our enemies on all fronts want us to feel despairing and despondent. They want us to feel hopeless. They want us to feel joyless.
Oh they want more than that. They ACTIVELY OPPOSE our joy. They think it’s inappropriate or immoral. They don’t just want us to feel bad, or nothing at all; they want to prevent us from feeling good. It’s akin to, “if I can’t have it, I’ll destroy it so nobody can have it.”
Fk them! (and no NOT literally, because ew! and I’ll leave the rest to the previous thread.)
bluefoot
This post makes me think of the Beyonce concert I was at this past weekend. I’d say 3/4 of the audience were people of color, all dressed up and completely fabulous, taking joy in the moment and the music and being all together. It’s not like people of color are unaware of the existential threat to us right now but everybody made room to be beautiful in themselves and joyful for the night.
Baud
@bbleh:
I’ve always felt that what they really oppose is our successes. They were told we would fail at life and society would crumble because we rejected the right wing world view. But we’ve been relatively successful, so much so that they often have to exaggerate or manufacturer problems so they don’t have to face how wrong they are.
Harrison Wesley
This post triggered me into thinkng about Little Alex’s “Joy,joy, joy” in A Clockwork Orange. Not the best place to go.
Matt McIrvin
Having been there now and then, I think it’s not that.
It’s that the darkness is unfixable. That it was caused by all of us, that we are all at fault in some small way, just by contributing to the system and living within it. And that the best thing we can still accomplish is to punish ourselves for contributing to it. To punish everyone.
We can’t punish the people in power–they are beyond our reach. But we can sure punish ourselves.
Darkrose
The Met Gala was an amazing celebration of Black joy, which bugs so many non-Black people all along the political spectrum. What do you mean, Black folks created a space that centers us and isn’t about ancestral and generational trauma performed for others? How dare you! Don’t know know what’s happening right now?
Answer: We been knew. We warned you and y’all didn’t listen. So now we’re going to use our survival strategies–including celebrating ourselves because we know no one else will–to get through this. Because it’s what we do.
scav
To thy own self be true.
bbleh
@Baud: having some facility with economics, I find it amusing occasionally to look at various measures of one of their hallowed virtues, for example which states on net contribute the most and which receive the most federal dollars per capita, or per-capita GDP by region within states and the corresponding flows of state money. And it’s kinda funny how … one-sided those things tend to be.
Baud
@scav:
Neither a borrower nor a lender be.
bbleh
@Baud: don’t sweat the petty things. And don’t pet the sweaty things.
Miss Bianca
@Darkrose: I was feeling guilty about spending so much time working on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and ignoring the news when the US is going to shit, and then I thought, ‘Fuck that shit. The US is going to shit whether I do this production or not, and GODDAMN, I am not going to let these bastards rob me of my joy.’
So there.
Now I gotta go find some photos of the Met Gala…
scav
@Baud: Don’t hide behind arrasses.
KrackenJack
I’m a “curse the dark” kinda guy myself, but I don’t begrudge others their joy…
mappy!
Joyless? They’re mostly a collection of drunks. It’s either getting hammered or crawling out from the hangover. What’s Joy got to do with it?
O. Felix Culpa
@Darkrose: Agree. The Met Gala was gorgeous and joyful. And rightfully so.
Thank you, AL, for this genuinely uplifting post.
O. Felix Culpa
@Miss Bianca: Well worth the effort. There were some stunning outfits on display.
Another Scott
Joy is good.
Mandani seems to understand that as well.
This video ad strikes me as a nearly perfect piece of political advertising. Shows that he will go anywhere. Has an expert on the neighborhood show him around and introduce him and endorse him. Has him talking to real people, listening to them, and showing he shares their concerns and will work to address them.
Will it work? Dunno. But I don’t see how it could be better.
(via bsky.app/profile/dicknixon.bsky.social )
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
mrmoshpotato
Less than an hour before gametime! Go National League!
Miss Bianca
@O. Felix Culpa: Well, having looked at the photos, I have two observations:
1. Wow…trains. Like, huge, huge trains that gathered around the wearer like flower petals were A Thing with several designers.
2. Most of those styles I couldn’t begin to pull off, but if I had a million bucks and wanted to get a Designer Something, based on what I saw that I really liked, I’d probably go for Burberry. And here I thought they just did stuff like overcoats!
O. Felix Culpa
@Miss Bianca: Yeah, the trains were amazing. I could never pull that off (would trip over myself in a trice), but more power to those who wore them so elegantly. There were some other suit-type outfits that I totally loved. It’s been a while, so I don’t remember who wore or designed them. I don’t normally (ever) inhabit that world, but I get a kick out of looking at it.
WTFGhost
@Miss Bianca: That’s the perfect attitude. While you can’t fix the world, detachment from its misery is the correct attitude. Detachment isn’t avoidance – it’s saying “any agony I feel over this is wasted energy – I should do something else, unless/until I can help.”
No doomscrolling, but, yeah, catch up on the atrocities, so you don’t forget.
RevRick
@lowtechcyclist: @zhena gogolia: @bbleh: @Matt McIrvin:
Joy, from my Christian perspective, is something stronger and more resilient than happiness, and real happiness is something with clout. The ancient philosophers’ attitude toward happiness, as summed up by Mortimer Adler, is that happiness is getting what you want, but wanting only what you ought to want. Happiness is more than ephemeral, pleasant psychological states in this view. It is anchored in living a moral life.
There’s something strenuous about this definition of happiness. It’s an exertion of the mind, heart, and will. It’s work. Hard work. You are always under the glare of your own judging eye. You want that chocolate sundae, bub? Think again.
Joy is a nevertheless emotion… no strike that, it’s a passion. For me, it’s rooted in a confidence that despite all evidence to the contrary, there’s a divine love that welcomes all of us home. It is thus possible to be experiencing the deepest grief and still know joy. For me, it comes as no surprise that black joy is rooted in the black church experience. It’s the profound knowledge that while Pharaoh/Caesar/slavers/Trump may hold sway for a time, there’s a liberating God working in us and through us to break all empires. That sort of confidence allows us to endure in the face of the worst, to care when caring is despised, to see the world with the new eyes of hope. Joy is a yes spoken against the suffering that is an inevitable part of existence. Joy is resistant and carries the world lightly.
Please understand that Christian faith doesn’t have a monopoly on joy. There’s a book about a great dialogue between the Dalai Lama and the late Bishop Desmond Tutu that illustrates this.
WTFGhost
You know, it was a totally different ‘Ghost who went to college in Ohio, lo these many years ago (holy crap, over 40!).
I believed in happiness, wit, and humor, and I loved to get people jolly, and brat around, to tease people, but only in playful ways.
Touch was something else I believed in. In college, you can give a lot of young women backrubs; even more so, if you are just there to give a relaxing backrub and talk, and not cop a feel or anything. It was a great equalizer for me, because I wasn’t always sure how to talk, so I let my fingers do the talking.
You can give a mini-backrub doing a hug, or stroke someone’s back, or – this is cool! – walk your fingers gently, but firmly, over a person’s back, once you’re cool with you doing the rubbing/stroking. Affectionate touch is a powerful healing agent. Even if you get to clasp someone’s hands warmly, and mean it, that says, and does, a lot, especially with real eye contact.
If you do energy work of any form, this is done while grounded and centered, with your full intent into warming the heart of the other person. It comes across, when done with strong intentionality.
Laughter, joy, touch, affection – those are all powerful tools against tyranny.
Betty
@Another Scott: Did you see Cuomo trying to imitate Mamdani and just fall flat? He doesn’t have the joy.
moonbat
I remembered running across a photo of Diana Ross’ beautiful white outfit with the insane train at the time, but not much else. I went back to look and WOW! That was awesome! Some of those ‘fits were so perfectly stylized it was like looking at a living breathing fashion book illustration. Amazing, beautiful stuff.
Thanks for pointing it up, AL!
Jackie
@mrmoshpotato:
Especially Cal Raleigh and M’s all stars! ;-)
Anne Laurie
IIRC, GoFugYourself had a nice portfolio of Getty Images, and they properly appreciated the dandyism!
Anne Laurie
@RevRick: That’s why Godspell is a better musical than Jesus Christ Superstar. Joy is hard work, but it lasts longer…
Miss Bianca
@Anne Laurie: oh, that looks like a fun site. I’m actually supposed to be closely following the arguments at Town Council meeting over licensing a beer cave at the local Alta, *not* looking at fashion plates!
RevRick
@Anne Laurie: I don’t think joy is hard work since, for me, it stems from an affirmation. Joy is kind of a claim about reality.
H.E.Wolf
The fashion bloggers at Go Fug Yourself (two women) did a series of slideshow posts about the 2025 Met Gala.
The writer of the first post said: “one of my favorite Met Galas in a while — a diverse, joyous, and creative affair.”
gofugyourself.com/the-met-gala-hosts-put-on-a-superfine-red-carpet-display-05-2025
To see the other posts, click on the tag at the bottom of the post: 2025 Met Ball.
O. Felix Culpa
@Miss Bianca: Zendaya! That’s the one I particularly loved.
Thank you AL and H.E. Wolf for the source references.
Eolirin
I do my best to try to live this, but it isn’t always so easy.
And right now it feels really hard.
But I still want to encourage it in everyone, even if it’s beyond my reach right now. It’s that important.
Find beauty, find joy, connect with love. Shine brighter the darker it gets. That’s the greatest resistance we can make. The most defiant act we can take is to love without restraint or hesitation. To be kind. Despite the fear, despite the suffering. Despite the losses that will surround us, and all the sorrow that’ll bring.
Bupalos
I don’t think this reaction (which has been building year after year for some time) has anything to do with “unbridled joylessness.” In context I think the term itself is something that sounds like it would have been translated from pre-revolutionary France. The fashion is interesting, the cause is good, it does raise significant dollars, and… it’s also kind of gross in a bunch of ways. Its overwhelming cultural meaning, as inequality and climate change spirals on, is simply exclusion and the loud excesses of the super-wealthy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bupalos: Speaking of unbridled joylessness…
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah.
ETA: I think it was okay when AOC went in a white gown that said Tax the Rich.
prostratedragon
Plato’s Cave, from The Conformist
It is told here by Marcello Clerici, who has gone on a fascist mission to murder his former thesis advisor, under cover of a honeymoon trip to France. In many ways, Marcello reminds me specifically of Rubio.
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: QED. And shit.
NaijaGal
@Omnes Omnibus: I choked laughing at this…
O. Felix Culpa
@Omnes Omnibus: @zhena gogolia: @Miss Bianca: @NaijaGal:
Thank you. What all of you said.
LAC
@H.E.Wolf: And if anyone is interested in the backstory of the Gala’s theme, the Met museum’s short film makes for an interesting viewing I cannot wait to see the exhibition.
youtu.be/Kx2OCPXU4QU?si=SbLWIDR0TlKf1Cpd
twbrandt
@RevRick: Thank you for that, it’s a wonderful description of joy.
Bupalos
@Omnes Omnibus: Let them eat black dandiness!
I actually have mixed reactions to the Gala, as I said, but my disdain for a term like “unbridled joylessness” simply applied because some folks don’t get joy from this kind of competitive celebrity ostentation thing isn’t mixed. It’s just the internet being dumb and mean.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bupalos: Dude, it’s not that you don’t get joy from it. That’s fine. I don’t get joy from the gardening shit that a lot of people around here seem to enjoy. I just avoid the Sunday Morning Gardening threads. I don’t explain that people are just playing at being farmers like Marie Antoinette at the Hameau de la Reine.
Kathleen
@zhena gogolia: Word. Joyfulness to these ghouls (including mainstream media) is like sunlight to vampires.
Kathleen
@Darkrose: Perfection!
Bupalos
Because that would make utterly no sense in context. My stronger reaction here than to the grosser cultural elements of the Met Gala is to the idea embodied in “unbridled joylessness” – that mentioning or reacting to those grosser elements when others are just having fun is evidence of a kind of derangement syndrome or surrender.
Giving the oldest social bully move in the book this a new dumb name doesn’t make it better. I think this is indistinguishable in form from Trump’s calling out Gretta as a sad kid that needs to go to the movies or whatever.
The Met Gala as a cultural phenomenon can and should be criticized for its exclusionary excesses and the ways it expresses our ethical insufficiency. AND people can and should enjoy the beautiful and creative parts of it that speak to them, celebrate the good it does, etc. There doesn’t need to be any stupid purity/character tests about it either way. You aren’t cooperating with or being defeated by the enemy if you see the regressive elements here more viscerally than the beauty, and you say so. It’s not an act of resistance to just swallow it whole and say “yummy.”
I feel the same way about the phenomenon Liberal Librarian starts with, professional sports. I fully enjoy watching José Ramirez as a nearly perfect beautiful object of a beautiful game. I also appreciate and applaud those who call out the way the trillion dollar business of profession sports harms society and intrudes on that beauty. Talking about the regressive stadium scams and discarded and damaged human beings isn’t “unbridled joylessness” or “being a hater” (to strip the highfalutin nonsense.) It’s healthy. It’s good. It’s secretly hopeful in a way rolling your eyes and saying “WTF is wrong with you?” isn’t.
Bupalos
I think that was an absolute baller move.
Paul in KY
@sab: Usually, to catch a cat you leave one of your sock drawers or underwear drawers open and then wait 2 hours. Then go in and shut drawer & you’ll be surprised how many times the cat is in there.
I have used it myself from time to time.
This may be a special case though.
Paul in KY
@Bupalos: The enemies of my enemies are my friends, hater…
Kayla Rudbek
@RevRick: this reminds me of the Belisarius series where one of the Indian Hindu heroes dances the great dance of time (and the author Eric Flint gets to wax poetical about how empires fall and the people remain)