There is something really wonderful about the word “chill.”
Long long ago, I was telling a friend that I didn’t like certain of my parents’ behavior patterns, and doing so in very formal nerdy language full of phrases like “behavior patterns,” and after a lot of verbiage he just replied, “you wish they were more chill.” And I said, “huh, yeah,” and he said something about how it’s great that colloquial language can be so efficiently expressive, and I nodded along, and it seemed like one of those feel-good sentiments that’s true but not all that deep, and that was that. But maybe it was deeper than I gave it credit for?
So, a few things about “chill.” First, the boring one: it’s a positive thing. Describing someone as “chill” is almost always praise, and when someone tells someone else to “chill out,” they are telling them “do this good thing you aren’t currently doing.” So far, so obvious.
But “chill” is unusual as terms of praise go. It has a certain contextless quality; it doesn’t feel like something you can discard the moment some other value becomes more important. Sure, you can have arguments about whether being chill is appropriate – if your house is on fire and someone tells you to chill out, you’ll probably say this isn’t the time for that. But the very concept of “chilling out” contains the notion that we are frequently less chill than we should be – that there are lots of times when our minds are telling us our houses are metaphorically on fire, and we need to see them for the liars they are.
I’m not just talking about anxiety here, although it’s a clear-cut example of the dynamic. The bigger point is that by treating “chill” as a generically good thing – by taking “they’re chill” as praise even if nothing else is said about “them” – we’re acknowledging that stepping back, taking a wider perspective, asking whether you maybe should chill out, is a good thing to do in virtually any situation. Sure, sometimes you ask the question and the answer is “nope, my house is on fire.” But you don’t get to circumvent the question entirely because the matter at hand is just so serious; that itself is un-chill.
Compare this to something like “kindness.” Kindness is also a “generically good thing.” But while we have the concept of kindness as generally good, we don’t have the concept of “making sure to ask whether you ought to be kind, even if it seems like you shouldn’t” as generically good. (We could have a word like “chill” for this, but I don’t think we do.) Chill isn’t just a state of relaxation, it’s the trait of being able to notice when relaxation is called for, even though we didn’t realize it at first. Hence “chilling out”: if it were just a matter of having a high average level of relaxation, we wouldn’t have this special associated verb for becoming more relaxed, because there would just be relaxed people (who never have to “chill out”) and non-relaxed people. (Back in the kindness comparison, there’s no analogous term like “kinding out.”)
This is all pretty abstract, so I should give you the concrete example that got me thinking about it, which was this @porpentine post:
the most important advice i give to people who write me about being in abusive activist cults / hot allostatic load situations is to dis-identify with their language and leave their universe …getting invested in that po-faced neo-1950′s pious language and the culture makes you a huge target…i don’t know if i made that clear enough in the original but yeah…then resist the urge to join some polarized faction that vaguely hates the thing that hurt you but for different stupid reasons, and make friends who are real people and know how to chill the fuck out lol
And like, I can imagine a version of this post that ends with some theoretical language about why it’s important to value a certain kind of “asking whether one should relax” in all contexts even highly fraught contexts because you see etc etc, and ends up sounding like it’s taking some “political” “position” … but porpentine just says “know how to chill the fuck out,” and we all know what that means.
…I don’t think I’m familiar with this usage of “chill”.
Or, I mean, I *am*, but I associate it strongly with trolls, the kind of people who think that people who have ~opinions~ or ~emotions~ about things deserve only contempt. In my own experience, “chill” has a positive connotation mostly among assholes (and even then, only a certain subtype of asshole).
Like, I was kind of nodding along with the advice in that quote *until I got to the part about chilling the fuck out*, at which point I recoiled, went on my guard, thought “this is likely not a person I want to be taking advice from, I ought to be more suspicious of what they said”.
I guess if starting from high levels of anxiety, it could be *useful* to try to inhabit the mindset of a “lol who cares” troll in an attempt to counterbalance that. But I’d want to be cautious about doing so.
(To me, “they’re chill” doesn’t connote pure praise, but rather a mixed bag: they’re good as a casual conversation partner, because they won’t drag you into a political debate or anything like that, but don’t let them see you upset or passionate, because they will respond with at best incomprehension and at worst contempt.)
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(This was originally a tag ramble, but I think it should remain part of the thread if reblogged, so I will convert it to a suitable format.)
I suspect it’s relevant that I hail from a culture that generally errs *heavily* on the side of giving too many fucks. But like, IME “people who use phrases like ‘chill the fuck out lol’” are *themselves* a polarised faction that vaguely hates the thing that hurt me but for stupid reasons. I’m not gonna backlash straight to the other end of the fuck-giving spectrum: the goal here is to allow my own choices and/or inclinations to determine what I care (and don’t care) about rather than forcing myself to care about things because I was ordered to, not to ~chill the fuck out lol~.
(although I suppose it might be *mistaken* for ~chilling the fuck out lol~ by an outside observer, given how many passionate subjects I’ve had to fake over the years)
Tags:
#our roads may be golden or broken or lost #reply via reblog #language #I’m not sure this *exactly* fits but it feels close enough that I’m going to include it: #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #discourse cw? #(I’m not trying to Start An Argument here) #(but I worry it might turn out that way) #([wryly] possibly I should chill)
Brinens and Things 