Shankar Vedantam explores how emotional armor protects us from pain but also blocks joy. Drawing on philosopher Charles Taylor's idea of the "buffered self," he argues that our attempts to avoid uncertainty and hurt create a prison that excludes wonder and delight.
Is it possible to protect yourself from pain without also becoming numb to joy? Many of us spend our lives building armor. We harden the outside so the world cannot hurt us. It works the way a shell works for a turtle, but it comes at a cost. This hardened shell leaves us less open to the delights we can experience when we allow ourselves to be more vulnerable. The philosopher Charles Taylor has a name for these 2 ways of being. He called the sealed-off version the buffered self. It's the modern self, the optimizer, the one who treats their own life as a project to be completed and checked off. Safe and a little numb. He referred to the other way of being as porous, open to the world as it is. Open to terror and grief, yes, but also to awe, to beauty, and to other people. Kate Bowler, who lived through cancer, puts it this way. When we try to protect ourselves from uncertainty, she says, we accidentally build ourselves a prison. And the walls that keep out fear also keep the wonder out.
