The pros and cons of being bound to things
Striking a balance between responsibility and freedom
I have had a few thoughts in this past day or so about what I’d actually like to do with my life.
I’ve been saying quite a bit about how I will live in a van, and I still think it’s what I’m gonna do, but I am wondering if I should get some sort of job or find a way to be involved in something.
Because right now, I am a part of nothing.
I have no obligations other than a few catering shifts a week. And this thought occurred to me—that perhaps it is not so bad a thing to be bound to certain things because these things provide community—because it is sometimes a desolate thing not to have something to engage in with others.
After a day on the beach yesterday, Memorial Day, my friends and I sat on my buddy's porch for several hours and conversed while downing some barbeque, and then several hours later, proceeded to put together some delicious tuna over rice at my house.
My friend and I talked about it, saying how nice it was we managed to ease the woes of the end of a good weekend—which, counterintuitively, tend to be more extreme than those of a not-so-good weekend—with each other’s company and how we should really do stuff like that more often.
And it’s true: it was much better to be with others than alone last night.
I’d fallen into the desperate way of being—that self-improvement way of life—where I thought I needed to be alone as much as possible because I thought of others as mere distractions rather than the actual sustenance of life.
I thought, in the name of productivity, it would be better to spend days and end nights alone.
I don’t know. There is something I’m trying to get at here. Being with people last night cured a lot of my anxieties.
There is something about a community that I so deeply crave. But for some reason, these days, they’re not so easy to come by. Even though we all live so closely together with others, we’re not very connected. Most people we encounter, I’d say most people, by far, are strangers.
We can even spend a lot of time with certain people and never actually get to know them because the environment in which we socialize with them is “professional” or “formal,” and so people put forth these facades and are scared to move past certain degrees of intimacy.
Imagine how weird it’d be if a bunch of other primates, like chimps, spent the majority of their days around chimps who they did not know and with which they did not interact.
It’s a weird world we live in, isn’t it?
When you look at things this way, it makes you wonder what the hell is going on.
It’s hard to put a finger on the feeling I’m trying to articulate . . . Because there are particular, I’d say, necessities, or prerequisites, to true interconnectedness. Things like physical touch and depth and shared strife.
And these requisites are not present at corporate jobs, or most jobs for that matter, and really, not even within the communities that we live in.
Most neighbors, for example, don’t interact, and if they do, it’s now quite often on a superficial level, from a distance, and it almost always seems like the interaction, or at least one party in the interaction, wants it to end sooner rather than later.
Everyone is in a rush these days; people just don’t have time—or give time—to do fuck all, because where is fuck all gonna get you in life? People are always so focused on getting to the next thing. And before they have given due time to the thing before them, the thing they just recently anticipated with such vigor, they’re on to the next one.
I’ve come to reject that way of life in which I must push out good human “distractions” (I’m not talking about TikTok, I’m talking about friends and family) in order to “succeed.” In fact, I think one reason we always feel in so much a rush is because we only like to be present for quantifiable things and backfill the rest of our time with distraction.
Gioia is right . . . We have lost the Romantic touch that makes human life good.
If the good life is the one in which friends and family are always around, then how could isolating for the sake of monetary success be so good?
I know there are nuances to this stuff, but it’s really quite simple to me.
But, of course, it’s not. One reason people are always in a rush now is that if they aren’t sprinting ahead, they’ll very easily trip and stumble and fall and get shot backward off the treadmill.
If the treadmill was set to a four or five half a century ago, it’s now gotta be at least somewhere around a ten.
And it doesn’t help that work is now ever-present. As in, no matter where you are, you could be getting work done.
And so, this adds an anxiety to people’s lives because they bear this guilt, constantly. Any time not spent making money is “unproductive” and sets them backward. And what a horrible belief this is.
I do wonder: what could be done to make places more communal? Indeed, the people are weird today . . . In all honesty, not the sort I’d like to be all communal with. And I think people are always doing things to mitigate for this lack of communality. Things like yoga, and church, and pickleball.
Sometimes I think that those who struggle the most, those who are the most lonely, are those who have the least amount of money and so have to give most of their time to work, and are—as a consequence of their stress—least aware, or least willing to be aware, of the addictions that anchor them.
But the truth is that anyone of any class could be struggling to be communal because what this really is—this lonesomeness—is a way of life . . . It is the prioritization of appearance over essence.
Because lonesomeness is a lack of deep interconnectedness. And if you value the surface—nice clothes, and TikTok, and labels, and hairstyles, and covers, and pictures—over what lies underneath, you will never achieve depth, no matter how many relationships you have.
Most people are reluctant to be okay with less. They’re under the impression that they need to take rather than give; at the very least, they think, as I once did, that they must take in order that they might one day give, failing to acknowledge that they have become—as in, built the habits of—a taker, and can’t so easily flip a switch to become a giver.
People become lonely because they become bound to things: images, houses, cars, reputations, employment . . .
And so it becomes the case that even apparently well-off people may not, in fact, be living so well because they are, not unlike the enslaved, quite bound to these certain things.
It is one of the greatest regrets of the dying that they worked too hard.