Every so often I get this urge to wipe the slate, start fresh in some new life, make a clean break with the life I’ve lived thus far. The fantasy usually involves a move away from Texas, either to another U.S. locale or elsewhere in the world. My NYC move was the only instance in which I gave in to the urge, and while that was very good for me, it didn’t provide the sort of fundamental life change I’d hoped for.
In fact, my NYC experience and subsequent return to my home state taught an important lesson: My problems are not necessarily location-based. While changing the scenery can shake up ossified perceptions and catalyze change, the new scenery eventually becomes familiar, and old behaviors return, prompting yet another urge to move and start afresh.
It’s tempting to think of this as the manifestation of my nomadic Native American genes, and not just someone running from his problems. Honestly, I’m not sure which is more disturbing. If indeed I am predisposed to wandering, I have lent myself to life habits and commitments that will keep me rooted and frustrated for the foreseeable future. If I’m feeling the instinct to seek greener pastures because I am unable to effectively face and correct more fundamental psychological barriers to happiness, the outcome is largely the same.
I have this notion that life in the modern United States is a sick thing. There is opportunity, but only for those willing to work within the system, to learn where the ladders are, and climb them to a higher perch, from which the next forward motion can be best plotted. But the journey changes you. Ten years spent inside the system, learning its geography, finding its handholds, it’s impossible not to have absorbed some of its morality, its logic. It’s the sort of thing that turns people like John Kerry from idealistic revolutionary to milquetoast bureaucrat (take issue if you want, but watch his 1971 Senate testimony and tell me the guy wasn’t sincere; compare and contrast to name-your-2004-press-conference).
It would seem the logical thing to do. Work the system, get your winnings, and with that fortification, set out on a path more to your liking. Cold logic upholds it, but passion cannot. To put aside yearnings of the heart for years on end, in hope of a future day when they can be put to use, that requires a constitution I certainly don’t possess.
But this assumes that the U.S. model is the only one available. What opportunities may lie outside this country? True, the options are limited. Third-world oil-holes, Asian globalized manufacturing hubs, Iron Curtain mob-run industrial scrabblers, most nations would hardly be an improvement over Middle America. The EU, of course, offers some of the highest standards of living, but with corresponding levels of taxation and high hurdles for entry. They don’t want disillusioned Yanks moving in any more than Canada does, and what a waste it would be to go to all that trouble and realize that guess what, the problems are still in yer own head, me bucko.
My wife and I have investigated alternate lifestyles such as commune farming, and while they are logical responses to the resource problems this country faces and may be the sort of fresh perspective on life that could help us, I have a nagging sense that we wouldn’t, in the end, be able to cut the cord from our suburban comforts, meager and inconstant as they may be.
Worse, a factor that will complicate our lives until at least 2024 is that both my son’s sets of grandparents live here. Non-family childcare can be an expensive thing, and though they only see him once a month, I’m glad he has some connection to them. Moving out of state, not to mention out of country, would mean he would see them maybe twice a year; not an arrangement conducive to building a real relationship.
But is that more important than his parents keeping themselves from going stir-crazy, from feeling stuck in lives that make them at best indifferent, at worst miserable? And is that state of affairs at all related to location, or something that will persist, with the added problem of separation from extended family?
I have a little dream in my head, of being the steadfast salaryman and artistic hobbyist throughout my son’s childhood, then at age 50, embarking fully upon my life’s work, armed with decades of experience in Real Life. It doesn’t sound altogether bad on paper, but of course it’s a check written on Swiss cheese. Between 2008 and 2024, I could contract a major illness, suffer a stroke, be involved in a life-changing accident, or even die. There are reasons for lofty maxims of the carpe diem variety, and they are very real. To be within sight of the goal and be stricken down, few fates could be crueler. And though I’m not a Person of the Book, the image of Moses standing helplessly outside his promised land contains enough brutal truth to make me grimace in recognition. Even if I believed in heaven, I have to think that the old man was pissed as hell.
The journey is important. It may be more important than the goal, and the goal may change because of the journey. Mine already has, though whether for good or ill is impossible to say at this point. So what happens when the journey is making you crazy? Change the journey, of course. But to what end? Happiness. And what is that? Doing what I love, and having it pay the bills. Odds: Improbable.
I’ve touched on this before, and it’s a problem philosophers have grappled with over far more sleepless nights than I have so far put in. But I’m catching up.
These recurrent problems I’ve mentioned, the ones that come back after the new car smell of fresh scenery fades, are of a circular nature. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t seem so daunting, because one-time problems can be assessed one at a time. But a cycle suggests a nature, and the more my behaviors reveal my nature, the further I recoil from the image, like Dorian Gray before his mottled, scabrous portrait. I begin to think that the molecules and trajectories I inherited from the Big Bang are traveling a path that I cannot change. More and more, I feel like an observer of my own life, a passenger in this body that does as it shall do, my will be damned.
I compensate. And I compensate in the stupidest areas of life. I know, for instance, that by bringing my own lunch, I would have $35 extra dollars per week, $100 extra per month. I know that forsaking my Starbucks would bring me $45 more dollars per week, $180 extra per month. $280 extra dollars per month could be used to reduce debt and advance my non-dayjob career. But day in and out, I am convinced that my crappy life needs compensations for how crappy it is, so I allow myself a few perks. Which turn into a few more perks, which becomes a lifestyle that eats away at the acceptable profit margin until suddenly I’m tied to a certain income to maintain that lifestyle.
Part of that is due to disillusionment and loss of belief in a positive outcome for my non-dayjob efforts. If I create what I create and no one gives a shit, then all time spent ascetically in hopes of reward is fruitless. Might as well have a good time if you’re going to get ignored anyway. Except of course I’m not having a good time. Certain days I am, and certain times within those days, but overall there is a sense of waste, of frustration, of regret.
The last time I seriously challenged myself to remake my life was when I moved to NYC in 2002. At that time, I hadn’t gotten around to ditching the sky fairy, and I was still under the impression that there was a Way which I would find if I simply regimented myself and worked hard. I was on the Atkins diet at this time, and lost 50 pounds, dropping below 200 for the first time since high school. I was a drill sergeant when it came to that diet. No temptation could get past my vigilance, I had come to meet my destiny, with work ethic and iron will in hand.
It took a while and many ego-beatings, but by late 2004 I was done. The world was a much shittier place than I’d ever imagined it to be, and became more shitty the more I saw of it. And this wasn’t a New York thing, this was New York experience piling onto Texas experience, creating such a gigantic pile of shit that its meaning couldn’t be ignored any longer. Upon seeing such a pile, many start looking for the pony, but I was too tired, and anyway it couldn’t have been a very healthy pony even if I found it. Seeking Pegasus and unearthing a diuretic mule is a real letdown.
But none of this gets me any closer to improving my journey. Delusion is helpful in seeking happiness, but I have a hard time believing it’s essential. And I really don’t seek happiness anymore so much as I seek less unhappiness. I seek meaning.
It may be that I really am too self-centered to find my meaning in fatherhood and marriage. I still seek to create vestibules of meaning, works that contain it, leading to a life lived to pursue it. But what if this is it? What if this, what I mean to my wife and son, and to my friends and family, is a greater meaning than anything I could achieve professionally?
The bastard part is that I’ll never know for sure. No one but the deluded ever has ironclad confidence in the quality of their decisions. I may have passed the point of no return before I even knew it was coming. But I have to think that in a world without a Plan, destiny can be put in the hands of the destined. My molecules may groan, but it has to be possible.
What does that mean? Damned if I know.
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