The Feeling of Consent and the Feeling of Loss

What does consent feel like? Is it a tangible expression that tells everyone exactly what they want? No. Far from it. Consent is something largely undefined.

When one says the agree to something, they don't explain exactly what it is they agree to. Most signatures are made with a large amount of fine print that nobody reads. The point is not to gain some level of understanding or transmit it to someone else - the point is to feel like you've consented to something.

A primal instinct is not sufficient to account for what it is that people love about consenting to something. That is, there is no animal in the kingdom that actually displays a similar trait, nor a trait that could be stretched to a similar cause, with any reasonable explicating. Something herds one to the ability to feel in control of their environment. Certainly that's a regular thing to hear, but in context it's something radically different from what one could easily explain. There are many things meant by "control of one's environment."

Consider seals for example. Floating on a brick of ice without very much movement over the wide sea of killer whales … such a thing has no control over what happens to it, or very little. The same goes for father black widows.

These are not the sorts of control we're discussing here. Control means choosing what you want and getting feedback. It's being able to say "yes" or "no" and have that impact what goes on around you. It doesn't matter how things change, as much as just that they change. If you scream and yell and nothing happens, if you muster your might and end up stuck where you are, there's a wretched feeling of being at the mercy of what comes next that you can't handle; you need influence.

The thoughts occurred to me today when my sister partook of the flu shot this afternoon. Crying and screaming at the thought of the needle she yelled: "wait! wait! give me one more minute!" … the doctors did not. They gave her the shot. Was it painful to her? No. When it was said and done, was there a reason to feel hurt? Yes. And she did. The problem was not that the flu shot was administered, but that it was administered when she specifically asked that it not be. It was the pain of a situation that was entirely under the control of something other than herself. Nobody likes that.

The feeling of loss plays into this nicely. When one begins a game and assumes the rules, they partake on an adventure for the purpose of getting a reward. The game has enormous effort involved, multiple decisions are made one after the other… and what if you lose? If you win, sure, you have an advantage you conceived - even if just the "moral victory"… but if you lose you've gained nothing. It was as though you'd never played. It is a feeling of non-consent when you put yourself in an environment and then nothing changes when you envelope yourself in it.

Ok, so what does this change? For you, I suppose it changes a number of things. One, each time a consent is offered, you can examine the feeling inside you. Does it click? Does it make sense? Do you wish it were something different? These are the questions that can highlight fear based on non-consent, that is, based entirely on non-consent, and then you can work to deal with it. Whatever coping mechanism suits you for that specific type of feeling that drives more feelings that you might suppose, which it hides underneath, you can utilize at this time. Some things are much harder to remove from within oneself than is worth the effort - and feeling out of control is probably not a feeling you should enjoy anyway - but you can certainly deal with it if you know what it is.

Being a good sport means accepting it. When you play a game and somebody loses and feels down in their own little world, the other players become disinclined for future games. Nobody wants to make someone else feel down - it's not the purpose. In a good game with good players, people are trying to stretch themselves and learn things by accomplishing foreseeable goals (see the post below). If you can't be a part of that without demanding the fabricated reward, then you aren't meant to be gaming with other people who take that reward seriously.

There's something beautiful about the way this instinct arises within us. Nothing screams freedom more than struggling to the death to change a scenario simply because you need to have influence over what's around you. Freedom to at least some degree is literally the alternative to death, because what's life without choices? If you're not going to make choices, you'd like it even less to know you aren't making choices, than to be stone cold unconscious, or be somewhere anywhere else in the afterlife. It displays man's determination to retain agency above every other value. It is the infinite reward that supersedes even happiness, as though happiness is never joy until fathered by the freedom to exercise it - to retain it in one's mind and acknowledge it as the product of your own choices.

God makes way for our agency in all things. It's crucial that man retain his agency - indeed, it is the most crucial thing, as evidenced by the fact that God chooses to let man be free to do whatever he wants. Without that freedom there is no progression, and without progression their is no new happiness. This is defined by stepping to a new vantage point one couldn't have seen from the last. If you progress, you're taking a step into a direction you've never known before - a point I'll continue to reiterate - and so you find a whole new realm of joy you could have never conceived. Freedom, not happiness, is the only path to that view.