“You Can’t Fix This” — Why We Suck at Grief

6 Distortions of American Culture that make a problem out of Grief

Cue the music and M.C. Hammer: Da, da-da DA: You can’t touch this. Repeat: da, da-da DA: Can’t fix this.

Though the original lyric is altered, the bass, beat, and bravado dead-on describe how our culture handles death, loss, and grief.

“The way we deal with grief in our culture is broken,” claims Megan Devine in her book, It’s OK that You’re Not OK.

Grief — Don’t see it, acknowledge it, encourage it, or address it. Let’s just ignore it, fix it, or turn the other way.

The problem is that, eventually, everyone grieves. If you live long enough, you will lose someone you love. It happens sooner for some, later for others, but grief visits us all. Outside of love, it may be the most universal human experience.

“Loving each other means losing each other,” Devine reminds.

So why can’t we deal with death, this ubiquitous end to life? Why do we suck at grief?

Culture as Culprit

For humans, culture is vital.

Culture is a “socially shared understanding” (Fiske and Fiske). We are social creatures. We crave a sense of belonging. We join groups and communities because they enable us to survive and thrive.

We need each other, it turns out.

But culture’s perks conceal a darker brutality. If you’ve ever found yourself on the outside of the recess ring, you know that ostracism, estrangement, and isolation are also powerful forces. Culture pushes people to conform to norms even when those norms are dubious. Don’t comply, and you may take your own turn outside the playground circle.

In Tribe, Sebastian Junger asserts that “many modern societies are… hierarchical and alienating.”

Renowned psychologist Jerome Bruner calls culture a “shared warping of the world,” highlighting its insidious undertone. Bruner states that it is our “shared, distorting preconceptions [that] constitute what we call culture.”

“Culture polices grief,” researchers Dennis Klass and Amy Yin Man Chow contend. “All cultures regulate the mourning of their members, subtly or overtly, and implicitly or explicitly.”

So: what American distortions dictate how we deal with grief?

Six Distortions that Make Grief Suck

1. Happy, Happy, Happy

We can all recite the democratic mantra in our sleep, the rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In recent years, the happiness explosion has, well, exploded. Fueled in part by the wide-reaching Positive Psychology movement, happiness has become the commodity most likely to be found on a bookshelf near you.

The upshot? Happy is in; sad is out.

I mean, who desires the downers of grief, mourning, and all those ‘ickier’ emotions?

One danger of our relentless pursuit of all things happy is the duality of either/or thinking. When dealing in dichotomies, we set ideas in opposition to the other. We carve rifts, divides, and canyons that people are forced to scramble across — or tumble into.

Happy — Sad. Celebrate — Mourn. Joy — Despair.

Splicing emotion along a positive/negative graph sneakily implies a good/bad evaluation of experience. Would you rather be a Happy Hannah or Sad Sophie? Whose Insta do you think would do better?

Another problem with the Happiness movement is the “dumbing down” of the human experience. Life is far too complex to be reduced to single syllables: “Yay,” “Boo,” “Sigh,” “Ugh.” A blind focus on the bright side of life negates and marginalizes those in the shadow. And goodness knows, we all will take our turn there.

2. Talk is Cheap

Silence is hard to come by.

These days, it seems like everyone has something to say about everything. Our Western cult of individuality can be caricatured as a mass of black, squawking crows. It’s hard to find one bird willing to shut up.

The problem with too much talking is that no one is really listening.

In a PBS radio interview, Aaron Wolf, professor and international conflict mediator (and author of The Spirit of Dialogue), revealed that, across the world, Americans are considered poor listeners. We don’t practice “compassionate listening,” — a deep, silent, empathetic skill especially important when emotions run high.

“We have a reputation as bad listeners. We’re just waiting for the words to stop, we’re just holding back for a minute, before it’s our turn to talk again.”

“That’s not listening,” Wolf laughed.

Words, words, and more words. People going through grief and trauma are aswim in words, often hard to swallow ones, uttered by everyone and anyone. Grieving people are frequently injured or marginalized by spoken words. Awkward condolences. Stilted greetings. Sugary sentiments. False reassurance. The-stages-of-grief nonsense. ‘My uncle died too’ tales. Un-asked-for advice. And more.

Too many words, and too few people who will sit, be silent, and listen with compassionate ears.

3. Fast Forward Lives

We live hurried, busied, crazed lives. We stuff as much into each day as we can: we work, shop, run households, raise kids, and have a side gig or two. According to Gallup, Americans work more hours than ever.

Consumerism dictates quick solutions. Here, grief is a problem to be fixed, an issue to be resolved. Then: quick! Back to business! Parse it, graph it, solve it: let’s stick grief on the stock exchange and predict its course. Otherwise, what use is it?

Grief becomes a casualty of our uber-busy lives. Who has time for it? Our patience has a limit — especially for those who grieve past the expiration date (3 months? 6?).

Grief, however, lacks a timeline. It resists block scheduling. It won’t be tidied into a paper pile. People with extraordinary losses — those experiencing multiple losses, the loss of a child or children, multiple and past trauma survivors — can feel left behind as others rush onward, ever on.

4. The Digital Divide

Our harried lives keep changing as technology speeds from integration to infiltration –where do our online selves end and where do our real lives begin?

We live on fast forward and, increasingly, on digital display.

Sebastian Junger faults contemporary culture for its lack of deep community as well its over-reliance on all things tech: “The individualized lifestyles that [technology] spawns seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.”

And sadness, death, loss? On social media, accidents, tragedy, and death may work as sensationalism — for a split second. But after: who wants to see that negativity? After all, Facebook is meant to be the Disneyland of your life, not your personal Purgatory.

Online commentary encourages quick, trite responses. Comments of depth remain rare. More often, social media remarks match the communication style our culture prefers: quick, off-hand, prescribed, and shallow.

What we quickly toss off as a rapid comment disguises our societal inability to communicate with emotional depth. Perhaps social media has rendered us emotionally inept, our low EQ comments outpaced only by quick-thumbed emojis.

Our superficial online language conceals a reluctance to brave deeper conversations with those who hurt. When we emphasize shallow engagement, and when we defer deep discussion, we resist authentic connection with death and dying.

‘Because we don’t talk about loss, most people — including professionals — think of grief and loss as aberrations, detours from a normal, happy life,” says Devine.

5. Secularity and Super-Science, sans Spirituality

Everything can be quantified. The existence of God/goddess is up to you and Sheila. Relativism is, well, relative. And Lord Science was crowned king a while back.

The secularity of American culture presses grievers up against a metaphysical wall. Here, death is the end of life, grief is a medicalized condition treated with anti-depressants, and let’s just bury the whole shebang and get back to business, shall we?

In our culture, we measure an individual’s net value in dollars and cents. Dead: what’s he worth? Doesn’t matter. That only counts to those who grieve (a convenience that the funeral business will happily monetize).

Those who mourn are often stuck between this earthy life, and an otherworldly one with the beloved. This spiritual division increases the more a dominant culture ignores it.

Such spiritual divide did not always exist. Aaron Wolf reveals: “The concept that the worlds of rationality and spirituality are separate and distinct is a relatively recent phenomenon,” dating back to the Enlightenment, when science began to overtake notions of mystery, spirituality, and subjectivity.

Functionally, when we are reluctant to broach the topics of spirit, soul, and eternity, we limit our outreach to grievers who may (or may not) believe beyond an objective reality. Likewise, grievers exploring ideas outside of the norms of accepted faiths may feel ignored, ridiculed, silenced, or misunderstood.

6. Tribe-less

In the last twenty years, the chasms in American society and culture have deepened. Wealth inequality, class warfare, educational inequity, political dissension: we seem more divided than united.

As society has shifted, our tolerance for tough topics dwindles. Good problems are those with quick fixes; complex issues are shoved aside.

Grief, with its patched-up jeans and muddy boots, is made to wait. Let grief eat outside, under the tree where we buried the dog. At a safe distance.

While living, we’d rather not deal with death, dying, and other unrealities.

But this pushing, this distancing, this shoving outside the circle: these are not actions of care, concern, or community.

In Tribe,Sebastian Junger mourns the lack of deep connection in our culture. We have, he claims, chosen affluence, individuality, and security over connection, community, and caring. In contrast, tribal cultures share their resources, and rise in defense of each other.

A “sense of solidarity is at the core of what it means to be human,” he writes.

Bringing Grief Into the Circle –

Changing culture takes time, thought, and action. One by one, though, we can take concrete steps:

1. De-emphasize our happiness preoccupation, and accept grief as a relatable, universal experience.

2. Practice silence and compassionate listening, especially for those living with grief and trauma.

3. Stop seeing grief as a problem to be solved. Remove grief’s timeline.

4. Engage in deeper, more authentic online discussions. Allow grief, death, trauma, and loss equal space online.

5. Let spirituality be part of the conversation. Don’t impose your beliefs on grievers.

6. Help build tribe and solidarity. Bring grief into the circle.

Full Circle

To help those that grieve, those who suffer, those who live and relive trauma, we must strive to form a tribe that welcomes talk of death as well as life, that celebrates spirit alongside science, that acknowledges that everyone will suffer loss, that everyone will grieve, and that all of us will die.

We can face these actualities, together. We can form a circle and draw those hanging on the fringe inside. We can seek grief where he stands, underneath that shattered tree. Hold out your hand. Ask him to join.

Grief is just waiting to be asked.