August 2026
(After Paul Graham's How to Disagree, applied to the actualist gradient from resentment to appreciation.)
Every moment of being alive makes the same offer: you are here. And every moment, one answers it—with a mood, a grievance, a shrug, a pleasure. Most people answer thousands of times a day without noticing they are answering at all. Actualism's central question—"How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?"—is nothing but the question that surfaces the current answer.
Graham's point about disagreement was that "be civil" is a rule about tone that never touches structure, so he named the structural forms instead. The same applies here: "be positive" touches nothing. What helps is names for the forms an answer to the moment can take. So here is an attempt at a hierarchy—the Resentment-to-Appreciation scale, RA0 at the bottom.
RA0. The Basic Grievance.
The lowest form is to denounce existence itself. "I didn't ask to be born!" "Life's a sick joke." "Life's a bitch with death at the end." This is the name-calling of being alive: it says nothing about this moment, because it applies with equal force to every moment—which is how you can tell it isn't about any of them. Richard, the founder of actualism, calls it the basic resentment: the flat objection to being here that feeds anger and malice outward as much as sorrow inward.
Like name-calling, it has an educated register that fools people into ranking it higher. "Existence is absurd; consciousness is an evolutionary accident condemned to suffer" is "u r a fag" with a bibliography. The level is set by the structure—a verdict against being-here as such—not by the vocabulary.
RA1. The Grievance.
One rung up: attack the circumstances instead of the moment. Born in the wrong place, dealt a bad hand, the game is rigged, years of effort with nothing to show. This outranks the basic grievance because it engages particulars, and the particulars may even be true—just as an ad hominem may truly describe the speaker and still not touch the argument. Facts about one's circumstances do not touch the moment. Each grievance decomposes into a fact, which can stand as plain data, and a grievance-add—"…and this is unjust, and I'm owed"—which is the part doing the resenting.
The test mirrors Graham's: even if the hand is exactly as bad as claimed, what does that change about what is actually here now? The coffee does not taste of the rigging.
RA2. Responding to Mood.
Next up: objecting to the coloration in which the moment arrives rather than to the moment. "Today feels grey." "I woke up flat, so the day is nothing." Mood is the tone of the moment—the least substantive thing about it, and a notoriously fickle witness: the same walk, the same cup, will read differently within the hour. The first half-hour after waking is this level's chief habitat—the standing background-grumble arrives before any content has, and gets read as a verdict on the day. Whether the moment reached you flat matters much less than what the moment actually contains.
RA3. Resignation.
The first form that addresses the moment itself—but only to state, without evidence or delight, the bare opposite of the grievance. "It is what it is." "Could be worse." "Mustn't grumble." These are what Richard calls the grey-coloured glasses: cynical, world-weary, resigned. Stoicism is resignation with better branding.
Resignation looks like progress because it produces quiet. But it concedes the vale-of-tears premise and merely agrees to stop litigating it—putting up with being here is still a verdict against being here, delivered in a calmer voice. Graham notes that contradiction can sometimes carry an implicit argument; likewise resignation occasionally shelters a near-appreciation ("it is what it is" said with a genuine shrug of release is almost "this is fine"). But mostly it is endurance wearing acceptance's costume.
RA4. Conditional Enjoyment.
Contradiction plus evidence: "Life is good—look: the career, the trip booked for October, the weekend." The first form that can feel convincing. But counterarguments, Graham observes, are often aimed at something slightly different from the original point—and conditional enjoyment is usually aimed at some other moment than this one. What is being enjoyed is the plan, the payoff, the anticipated weekend: content located elsewhere on the timeline, while the moment actually in front of one goes unmet.
And it is conditional in the fatal sense: when the goods wobble, it collapses straight back to RA1, because the grievances were only outbid, never renounced. These are the rose-coloured glasses—the hopeful pair—and per Richard they come off together with the grey.
RA5. Enjoyment.
The first genuinely powerful form, and rarer than it should be for the same reason refutation is: it takes work. To refute you have to quote the actual words; to enjoy at this level you have to quote the moment—engage its actual content. Direct sensate pleasure in what is here: the coffee, sun on skin, the texture of light, a swim, the mental machinery humming on a good problem (thinking counts; sensuousness is not anti-cognitive). Nothing at this level is being disparaged—enjoying is half the actualism method by name: "consistently enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive."
Its structural weakness is hedonic adaptation: the nervous system normalizes any particular content, and enjoyment of a content fades. Like a refutation that triumphs over a minor point, one can enjoy all day—completely, genuinely—and leave the central matter standing: underneath, life remains a vale of tears agreeably interrupted by coffee. Whole pleasant lives are lived at RA5 on exactly those terms.
RA6. Appreciation.
The central point of this moment is not the coffee. It is that you are alive to taste it—alive, rather than dead. Appreciation engages exactly that: active valuation of this-mode-of-being-alive, of the sheer fact of being here at all. Its maximum register runs against oblivion—the recognition, landing freshly rather than as a platitude, that the alternative to this moment was never a better moment but no moment. Ain't life grand is the micro-pulse of it.
Appreciation is what enjoyment isn't: adaptation-proof. Each appreciation-event refreshes a contrast (alive versus not) rather than re-consuming a stimulus. And just as truly refuting requires finding the central point, appreciating requires explicitly locating it—I am here, and being here is good—said of the very moment one is in, not of life in the abstract.
At its purest grade appreciation shades into what actualism calls naiveté: wide-eyed wonder that anything exists at all—"the joy of being here for no reason at all"—marvelling that no longer needs its contrast term. Not gullibility: Richard's naiveté is the child's wonder recovered with adult discernment, and he holds that it is the worldly-wise cynic, credulous toward his culture's decrees, who is the truly gullible one. That is the top of the scale as available to a self. There is a rung above—the pure consciousness experience—but it does not belong on the hierarchy, because it is not a better answer to the moment: it is what remains when no one is left answering.
What It Means
Like DH levels, RA levels describe the form of an answer, not the truth about the day. A grievance at RA1 can cite perfectly accurate facts—the facts stand; the level describes the grievance-add. Conversely, meeting a moment at RA6 does not certify that the day was pleasant. But classifying is useful anyway, for the reason Graham gives: it tells you what carries information. A basic grievance tells you nothing about the moment (it would be uttered identically in any moment); an appreciation at RA6 is about precisely this one.
The practical use is that "How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?" returns your current rung. Most sinking down the hierarchy is unintentional, exactly as Graham says most intellectual dishonesty is: nobody chooses resentment each morning. The vale-of-tears commitment runs as a standing mode, inculcated and defended by worldly-wisdom, and the sinking feels like perceiving rather than answering. Naming rungs converts the standing mode into a visible position on a ladder—that's RA2, a mood-response; the moment hasn't even been consulted—and a position can be moved.
Two cautions this hierarchy needs that the disagreement one doesn't. First, the bottom is exited by renunciation, not by climbing: RA0 and RA1 are not out-argued—refuting grievances one by one is whack-a-mole, since the standing mode keeps generating new ones. Richard again: "Only by firmly renouncing resentment, by abandoning one's commitment to proving that life on earth is a 'vale of tears,' can one's commitment be staunch only to the ultimate goal." Renounced as a commitment, the upper rungs have room. Second, do not climb by swapping resentment for its companion emotion: "To successfully dispense with the despised resentment, its companion emotion, the extolled gratitude, must also go." RA6 is active valuation—seeing that this mode is good—not tearful thankfulness.
Graham ends by observing that most people don't really enjoy being mean; they do it because they can't help it. Just so here: nobody enjoys resenting being alive; they do it because they can't help it—the ladder was never named, and its top rungs were scorned into hiding by the same worldly-wise voices that buried naiveté. And where moving up his hierarchy merely makes conversations less mean, moving up this one and living there is not an improvement in manners. Consistently answering this moment at RA5-and-RA6 is the actualism method.