In the summer of 2004, I took a class with beloved professor and “philosophical grammarian” Julian Boyd; it was the only class he continued teaching after his retirement as a UC Berkeley Distinguished Professor 10 years earlier. I was lucky to have the opportunity. It was my last set of classes before the year of studying for orals for my PhD, and it was his last year of teaching before he died. The breezy classroom’s open doors and windows allowed his shouting and joyful cursing, and the roaring laughter of the students, to carry across the colonnade. The entire syllabus focused on modal auxiliary verbs, and hours were spent dissecting the implications of the word “could,” for example, in a paragraph by Hemingway. The course was a revelation.
Here’s what Merriam-Webster says about modals.
Professor Boyd liked to joke that he and his wife had a favorite—or at least most-used—modal: gonna hafta. As in, someone’s gonna hafta take out the trash.
Should is one modal that plays a central role in most people’s mental life, at least most of the people I talk to, read, and listen to, epitomes of WEIRDness. Therapists and gurus are always pointing out all the “shoulding” we do, and how detrimental it is to our emotional equilibrium.
Are you always shoulding yourself? I found myself wondering the other night what is really going on when I’m shoulding. So I performed a Boydian grammatical analysis on my self-talk.
Should, the past tense of shall, has a few definitions, but the one that is used most often in our internal monologues is #2: “used in auxiliary function to express obligation, propriety, or expediency.”
In moments when thoughts crowd out awareness and self-judgments weave a web that thickens into a thicket I can’t grope through, the voice insinuates: I should do less of this, I should do more of that, I should be less this, I should be more that. Take out the this and that: I should do less, I should do more, I should be less, I should be more. Take out the less and more: I should do, I should be. Take out the doing and being: I should. And if I should, implicitly, I don’t enough, I’m not enough. Here we are at the bottom, in what Tara Brach calls “the trance of unworthiness.” The underlying assumption of all the shoulding is I am not enough.
What is left grammatically when all the verbs and adjectives and nouns are gone? Only the obligation, propriety, or expediency floating over a foundation of scarcity. But this is where it gets interesting: in the privacy of my mind where the self-referential narrative thoughts continuously unspool from the activity of the default mode network, to whom am I obligated? Who defines what is proper? Why is expediency important?
I find myself shoulding most zealously when the reality isn’t lining up with the narrative of my life I believed in, when my life dissatisfies me because it isn’t what I expected or wanted. We should ourselves when the “reality,” summed up as a story with a main character (named I), isn’t fitting with our idea of how it should work out. The feeling of shoulding is discomfort with the idea that others will only see the “reality” and not the “truth,” the “real” story on the outside and not the “true” story on the inside, the one that should be. Our lives haven’t worked out as we wanted; somehow the true story got lost beneath the real one.
What, in this, is the obligation, the propriety, or expediency? It seems that the obligation implied is to the me that exists in the alternate storyline, the one that’s not really happening, the one we think of as true. I should have a different life is a thought about the impropriety of the current reality in relation to the ideal self, or the failure to meet an obligation to be that ideal self. Interestingly, propriety has to do with what is right for the self; from Latin proprius “one’s own, particular to itself.”
Shoulding is disowning oneself for an idea-self, a fiction, a fantasy.
The problem with this kind of internal self-flagellation—shoulding ourselves—is that it is premised on a rejection of what is really happening, of reality, of one’s real life right here, right now. It’s just a facet of dukkha, of dissatisfaction that drives us to clinging and aversion. When you notice yourself shoulding, remember its basis in false belief, drop into awareness, and say, “This is enough.”