I am going to try to be blunt but not offensive here. It will be hard for me, but in the interests of not seeming too ignorant, I have a nascent thought about what I have always privately called “indulged redemption”.
I was reading Metafilter today and came across this post.
In my mind, indulgent redemption is when one squanders a good deal of time and energy in things that don’t matter and then (TA-DA) finds their redemption in something outside of themselves. Usually it involves lots of judgment and sometimes it even gives birth to screeds or political movements. In my mind, it is almost always a negative thing.
I started thinking about it when I was a kid. My dad, when he first met my mother in the early 1970s, was a fraternity party-boy. My mother grew up with alcoholics and so wasn’t thrilled with being around it.
So in order to court her, he made a HUGE deal of not drinking anymore. He was from a teetotaling family anyway, so it was fairly easy for him to do it. So I grew up with one side of the family raging alcoholics and the other side prim teetotaling Methodists. It was interesting, to say the least.
And that was my first introduction to indulgent redemption. It comes close to martyrdom, but not quite. It is more like wearing a judge’s gavel around your neck 24/7 because you deserve it.
This is just the beginning of an idea… Maybe I’ll get more into it later.