Reality Bites: Navigating Stress and Transition with the First Noble Truth
It's rough out there. How can you be anything but kind?
Whether you're dealing with life after graduation or everyday ennui, this mindfulness series grounded in the Four Noble Truths provides a framework for stability.
If we haven’t met: hello! My name is Logan and I help folks mindfully integrate complex identities through practice, theory, and cultural critique. I facilitate workshops, privately mentor, and share resources here. Onward!
Key Points:
The four noble truths guide and ground Buddhist practice. The first truth, explored here, is that everyone experiences pain and suffering.
Reality Bites (1994) provides one parallel to the stress many in the graduating class of 2024 (and anyone experiencing transition) may feel.
Stress and disappointment can look different to different demographics.
Structural and systemic trauma is no one individual’s “fault.”
Takeaway practices to begin working with stress and un-ease are at the bottom.
The Four Noble Truths
Once we are born, we are destined to die, and this journey can sometimes be disappointing. The Four Noble Truths can help orient us in times of stress.
If the Heart Practices give meat and muscle to mindfulness practice, the Four Noble Truths serve as the skeleton. They are
Life is innately unsatisfactory (dukkha)
Understanding Dukkha: The First Noble Truth
Dukkha (“doo-kah”), often translated as suffering, can also be understood as a pervasive sense of unease. Given this, the first Noble Truth is that none of this is personal.
If it’s not yet clear, the rumors are true! Buddhism deals a lot with suffering. And friends, looking outside, there’s a lot to be less-than-satisfied with, ranging from the exponential acceleration of climate change to the rate of political change. And that’s not even the personal and interpersonal ways of relating: navigating career transitions, finding fulfilling relationships, or the sudden death of a pet.
“Wellness” is a hip new term, but zero out of 40 upper-division students could offer how to “do” it without buying or binging anything. Indeed, according to one SEO tool, “what is wellness” ranks fifth for related keyword chains.
Meanwhile, hyper focus on “wellness” without knowing why or how is a parallel form of toxic positivity. The insistence to “just be positive” and “don’t be so negative,” can range from dismissive to psychologically harmful. As Natalie Y. Gutiérrez writes in The Pain We Carry, “To dismiss your feelings or to hide from your emotions is invalidating yourself once more, unintentionally repeating cycles of abandonment.”
So one place to begin is looking at what is blocking “wellness” in the first place. The goal is to interface with these challenges and understand your responses to serve yourself and others better in the future.
Now, meditation is not “Become open to your unpaid rent. Breathe, knowing that in this present moment, last month’s groceries are adding interest to your credit card bill. Relax into your job search because…abundance.” This is “spiritual bypassing”: assuming some higher power will swoop in and save you from needing to live your life.
Mindfulness and meditation won’t fix the material things above: rent, money, job search. But they can help you take action. Looking at what works, and what doesn’t, allows you to build confidence and freedom. Given this, you can do this. As Rev. Dr. angel Kyodo williams writes,
Learning to be with suffering as an experience is part and parcel of what it means to live, and it radically alters our relationship to all of life and to the suffering of others. […] far from dragging you down, one of the most liberating things you can do is to come to terms with the fact that some form of your suffering will always be there.
That’s the beginning of practice. Because life is difficult, it is literally in the ancient texts to take things easy, practice joy, and cultivate goodwill toward all (including yourself).
One might say…
Reality Bites
Reality Bites (1994), shows the first noble truth in action via the discomfort and existential dread of four friends as they move from university to “reality.”
Lainie (Winona Ryder) cannot find a job despite being university valedictorian. She struggles with finding work that fulfills her creative talent, honors her intellect as a university valedictorian, and her need for rent. Stuck to an internal narrative which, if you’ve forgotten, includes being university valedictorian, she opts for toilet paper coffee filters over accepting Vickie’s offer for part-time work at The Gap.
Troy (Ethan Hawke) is a Coke-drinking, Snickers bar-stealing, chain-smoking legend of 90s slacker culture. Informed by his father’s neglect and prostate cancer diagnosis, he rejects all forms of “selling out,” including family, employment, and emotional intimacy. It’s not that Troy can’t, Troy rejects.
Can you spot the added dukkha (actions that invite more suffering, rather than alleviate it)? Can you relate to any of this?
For Lainie, being mindful of the first noble truth in daily life might mean recognizing she’s more than a university valedictorian and that this honor is really keeping her stuck. For Troy, confirming he is the “ultra modern version of the American man,” as he growls through song, and no longer the child his dying father neglected.
Reality bites when these things do not come as easily as we hoped or at all.
Being marginalized, however, can mean practice takes a slightly different flavor.
Dukkha for Queers
Sammy (Steve Zahn) represents how the first noble truth might operate in a heteronormative society.
Sammy’s story happens in two consecutive scenes. In the first, he practices coming out on camera with Vickie, who plays his mother. He comes into the living room and, with wilting bravado, identifies himself as a homosexual. Vickie, as his mom, accepts this disclosure with comedic blandness.
As a baby queer, Sammy’s mise-en-scene (scene within a scene) was a revelation. There’s an entire organization of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG)? This “pre-enactment” is indeed still practiced to foster confidence before these kinds of conversations.
In the next scene, Sammy sits on the curb outside his family home and talks to Lainie/’s audience:
Well... I came out to her, and… she's still a little bit upset. But you know… You know, I think the real reason… that I've been celibate for so long… isn't really because I'm that terrified of the big "A"... but because I can't really start my life… without being honest about who I am and… I want to be in there, too. I want to feel miserable and happy and all of that. I mean, I... I want to… I want to be let back in the house.
After being outcast by his mother, his disjointed, pained speech is full of dukkha: he’s celibate (like other “sex-less so safe” white gay male representations at the time, see Greg Kinnear in As Good As It Gets), while he’s not “terrified” he still uses the word, he can’t start his life but, really, he wants to be let back into the safety of heteronormative family structures.
They are, after all, all he’s known. All many of us have known. How can we begin to differentiate these structures from who we might be without them? As Katherine Morgan Schafler writes,
In systemic trauma, you can’t remove yourself from the situation because the situation is the culture. Dismal access to quality health care, exposure to cycles of violence, geographical isolation from community care, living in poverty, living under white supremacy, racism—these chronic psychosocial stressors are examples of systemic traumas.
By really looking at what’s “blocking wellness,” we can better understand the systems that render us isolated, uncertain, afraid to start our lives, afraid to feel.
A practice grounded in the first noble truth might look like titration and pendulation (going back and forth): this suffering is real and valid. And the sky above me is blue. It’s happening within a very real larger context (like the big “A”). My friends are with me. I have been removed from my family home. I am healthy.
This is the path. So while reality bites, we can remember our agency and ability to respond. This alone is a liberatory act.
Radical Realness
Some queer scholars, like Lee Edelman, have advocated for a kind of “radical negativity,” wherein we surrender the idea of cultures based on labor and (re)production to ever fully accept us.
Edelman’s point is that child-centrism—thinking of our inner child, thinking of future children, thinking of children’s futures—removes responsibility to today’s adults. (I will add, language like “will this really galvanize you and others into fighting for the planet and your children’s futures?” keeps us anywhere but our bodies in the present.)
Queer people (his focus centers gay men), can demand accountability for the people that exist here and now, rather than imagined future children.
Hard agree, not out of raw anger, out of wrathful compassion. Stop hoping to become acceptable. You are already whole and fucking beautiful.
Once we accept that, we can begin to really see the communities and friends that support and uplift us.
Call me radically negative: I’m not hopeful for wider acceptance.
I rest, meditate, and love toward broad inner acceptance.
To revise Descartes: we feel, therefore we do.
We aren’t our traumas. We aren’t our suffering. We are the actions we take.
What world will you create through your actions?
Takeaway Practice
Beginners
The physical act of writing helps instill a somatic connection between the words on the page and your emotional understanding of the concepts.
I invite you to create a kind of reverse-affirmation and write out: “I am not [my problem]” five times. Insert some stressor, “my job,” “my family,” “my income.” Three is the minimum. Five times really helps the message stick.
Then write what you are through things you do. Try to avoid things you buy and focus on actions. “I take care of my cats. I go for walks. I journal.”
Everyone else
The next time you get caught up in something, see if you can remember reality bites.
Breathe and remember it’s not personal. If, after, you are reactive, that’s ok. It’s all practice.
LGBTQ+ Resources
The Gay Therapy Center: LGBTQ+ affirming therapy services
GLAAD: Media monitoring and representation advocacy for LGBTQ+ representation
Lambda Legal: Advocates for the civil rights of LGBTQ+ people and those living with HIV
LGBT National Help Center: Confidential peer support, information, and local resources
Youth talkline: 1-800-246-PRIDE (7743)
Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays: As seen in Reality Bites!
The Trevor Project offers crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ+ youth
hotline: 1-866-488-7386
text: “START” to 678-678
Currently Watching
Fallout, via Amazon Prime
I’m watching this with my friend Steven. We’re both gamers, but the last one I played was New Vegas. The atompunk elements come through, as does a lot of the game lore. I hope to see more of Dane!
Bio and Coaching Info
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) writes this here Substack and mentors via Light Hive Integration. The website has been in development for a while, so if you’re interested in private mentoring, go ahead and shoot me an email. [myfirstname]@lighthiveintegration.org.
As a GenX-er, glad to see that “Reality Bites” is still relevant 🤓
As someone who's graduating in 2024 (25 days left!!), who's also queer and newly exploring Buddhism, this kinda feels like it was written for me! I also did, in fact, run to watch Reality Bites after this lol.