I’ve said it before, so have you, so has that one person over there: seems like everyone’s tired, stretched thin, there’s either entirely too much to do and not enough time to do it, or else time stretches before us like a bare desert and we’re hard-pressed to find good things with which to fill it.
No torso of Apollo even ornaments my home, but still there’s the directive in the air: “you must change your life.” This change would have nothing to do with the typical features of a mid-life crisis (although, at forty, I’m nearing the right age for it). Instead it has to do with a transformation of my relationship to time, to my physical environment, to my body and my thoughts, to the rhythms and harmonies which would make all of these feel integrated. Sometimes I feel like a perpetual student, but in the sense that I am forever learning and cultivating—though less so in the sense that I’m constantly preparing for examinations. I have had to wrestle with this latter connotation, as well, but more and more it feels like a costume I once wore and now no longer do.
So I try to change my habits. I try to remind myself of better ways of thinking or processing feelings. I plan for the future in ways that I can. For all the many things that are impossible to plan, I try to develop equanimity and flexibility. When I remind myself to breathe through my nose more often than I do—to not take the shallow, irregular breaths through the mouth that can occur naturally when one is in the state described by this letter’s opening lines—I combine with that conscious calibration of my breathing the reminder that each breath is a gift. All of these things—the body, brain and gut, the mind, the environment, stimuli, our orientation towards time—work as a system and there’s no vantage point from which we can see it all. But it the responsibility of each one of us to cultivate our place in this unclosed system (or this infinite game).
It is sometimes pointed out that responding to a problem that can be described in structural or systemic terms with a suggestion focused on personal agency is tone-deaf, and implicitly if not explicitly right-wing. The complaint (“I hate my service industry job,” “the dating market is horrible,” “rent in this neighborhood is unbearable,” “I’m exhausted and health care in this country won’t do anything to help me,” etc.) becomes reinforced by an ironclad rejoinder-in-waiting about the systemic foundation of the complaint. It’s capitalism, or maybe it’s late capitalism, or maybe brain chemistry, or epigenetics, or maybe a power dynamic that can be described but preferably in a special way that conforms to the complainer’s particular way of apprehending the problem in the first place.
For one thing, a lot of these generalizations rooted in a person’s experiences are true. Or at least they are partly true. A lot of jobs do suck; the system of needing to sell labor to eat and sleep sucks; health care and the insurance system in the USA, at least, are horrific; the way people and systems treat other people is too often punishing and taxing and toxic.
Still, beyond these acknowledgments there exist a troubling malaise and anomie. It can feel easier and even more comforting to nuzzle into the consumerist embraces of the very same systems that are harming you. So I’ll see people—ones I know, ones I don’t—fall back into the small-stakes debates of simultaneously imbibing and criticizing pop culture “content” as a way of channeling ferocious yet impotent reserves of anger, frustration, and disappointment. Attributing individual misery to systemic or structural problems—or to statistical trends—frequently has truth to it, but can sometimes be an opiate, too, and this inhibits the individual’s ability to improve the situation. Instead, the gesture toward the larger social force becomes a shield and allows someone to inhabit a type of fatalism. And then being “against” those systems, such as capitalism, becomes akin to being against a Fate you believe in—you’re granting your enemy victory right at the start.
The people who inspire me are those who make difficult choices or compromises or sacrifices but who do not let themselves be coaxed into complacency, or into a merely spectatorial resistance. They are those who, even when dealt tough hands, respond neither by shrinking nor by simply reacting, but by adapting and growing. Those we might learn the most from are those who stand a bit askew, a bit oblique, to whatever “social force” vectors they have no choice but to contend with.
One more thing to be thankful for: crises of meaning that emerge with one’s basic material and physical needs being met are still better than crises of survival. Although sometimes people in the former situation will fantasize about the latter (see, post-apocalyptic movies or outlandish persecution complexes).
(a suggestion…)
“Bodies are vessels. The meaning of life is to fortify them with ever more precious essences, with unguents for eternity. If this happens completely, whether the receptable breaks or not is irrelevant. This is the meaning contained in a maxim in the Wisdom of Solomon, that the death of the wise man is only illusory.” - Ernst Jünger, May 5, 1943
“In our modern mechanical world, it’s clearly very tempting to embrace the cause of a religious war. It must give one the impression, despite everything, that he is a thinking being. And, after the fate dealt to man in 1930-1940, it must suddenly be so invigorating that it’s difficult to resist. But the quest for the Grail made the knights-errant gallop in a straight line. Even Don Quixote walks straight. Today it seems as though the Grail has shattered and they are chasing all the scattered bits of it in every direction. They charge blindly, noses in the air, radios behind them in teh saddle, newspaper helmets fastened securely on their skulls. Those who have donned secret papers, clandestine publications, think they are wearing the most magical helmets of all. Not a single head remains bare. For my part, I consider it important above all not to be duped.” - Jean Giono, September 20, 1943
If anyone reading this is intrigued by celebrated oddballs Jünger and/or Giono, or specifically their wartime journals, and would like to chat more about these, please don’t hesitate to reach out. There are a couple people I’ve been talking with who share interest in the subject and so I’m opening it up to anyone reading these lines who might be intrigued—whether good friend, old acquaintance, or someone I haven’t met yet. I’ll see what interest develops and what people’s availabilities are, and, who knows, if there’s sufficient critical mass, maybe organize a discussion or a group chat or something else entirely.
I suggest this primarily because, if I’m to change my life, one of the changes I’d like to foreground more is the opportunity for conversations about ideas—conversations that are deep, engaged, entertaining, free-flowing, generative. I seek conversations that are open to application but are not, frankly, instrumental or pro forma. We’re stretched for time and energy but sometimes the best way to get more is to do more: pick something up, see what happens.
As always, your self-awareness is awesomely engaging for the reader.
Zach, since you're really decent at criticism, don't you ever feel like trying your hand at creation? After all, all great creators are usually great because they also happen to be great critics, right? I mean, yes, this blog is sort of a creative endeavour per se, but I wanted to know if you also feel like writing a screenplay, novel or any story in general. Because I think you'd surely knock it out of the park.