How to not lead a life of quiet desperation
On novelty
[For context, this post was first drafted last Thursday, April 3rd.]
I kind of felt like crap yesterday, but I’m feeling a lot better today. Perhaps because I didn’t stay up until midnight staring at a television last night . . .
Even though, as noted in Wednesday’s post, I do love being home since it’s a nice reset from the chaotic outside world, I think it’ll be good for me to head out tomorrow. Because I get too in my head when I’m home sometimes, I assume because I have a little too much free time.
I suppose it’s not really that I have too much free time (although I certainly wouldn’t be staying up late staring at the television as much if I weren’t home); I find ways to occupy my days pretty well, actually. I think what it is is a lack of something.
When I’m in Charleston, I’m out and about, doing different things and having a variety of experiences . . . I’m not walking the exact same steps every single day. But because my routine is so routine at home, because my days mostly lack any sort of novelty that might break me free of tumbling into a habitual slumber, it’s quite easy for me to, after two or three weeks, become overly cerebral and, in turn, restlessly anxious.
Part of this certainly has to do with the colder winters—we’re inside more up here, and because there is less square footage inside than there is outside, there are fewer opportunities for encountering things we haven’t yet before, or in a while. (It is partly for this reason I love the ocean so much: you never know what it may bring.)
But it’s also the nature of living in the suburbs as a 25-year-old. There’s just not much else to do besides what I already do.
Of course, that’s not true. I could always do different things if I really wanted to. I could always break myself out of this mundane wavelength if I made a conscious decision. I could, if I were feeling a little crazy, take my tent and camp out in my local park and hunt down a rabbit and cook it up in a hole in the ground and look out at the stars, listening to the wind and the coyotes.
But, instead, I come home from the gym each night, take a shower, eat dinner, watch some TV, read a book, and go to bed.
Now, I get the fact that I’m in a building stage of my life—building my body, building my “business,” building my wealth—and I get that the path to success is mostly a bunch of repetition and that, indeed, this sort of progression is a novelty in itself. Not to mention, I’m certain I wouldn’t be near as fulfilled, and I’d be injecting a whole lot of unwanted chaos into my life, if I made a habit of aimlessly embarking on a bunch of wanton adventures that had nothing to do with my goals.
But I still feel sometimes, or am reminded on occasion by my subconscious (in other words, when I become “overly cerebral” and anxious), that I ought to be doing something a little more wild, a little more uncomfortable . . . Something deep within me cries out every now and then, saying I’m forgoing some things I’ll one day wish I had done with this time and mistakenly sleepwalking my way through life.
I think when Thoreau said, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” this might have been what he was talking about. Because what most people want deep down is to be broken out of life’s routine, this way of life in which we know every single day what’s going to happen, what we’re going to feel, see, taste, smell—this way of life in which, having not much to explore (or feeling like there’s not much else to do) out there, retreat to the deceptively alluring trap of cerebral indulgence and subsequent despair, a state that ultimately further distances ourselves from the adventurous sort of life we most deeply want to live.
This repetitive form of existence can, indeed, lead one to a desolate, desperate state of mind, as there is incredible dread in realizing or believing that one’s life, one’s precious time, is slipping by day in and day out without meaning. And it is for this reason, I reckon, that people chase the flashy things they do, despite however unwise such pursuits might be. We all want novelty, we all want to dip our toes into the magical unknown, we all want to feel things we haven’t felt before, or at least, as I said, in a long while. We all want life to mean something.
We just don’t always see a path forward . . . we don’t always know how.
Perhaps it is for this reason I’ll be driving my ass to South Carolina tomorrow . . . Perhaps this is how I bring novelty into my life. Maybe this is why I leave home as often as I do.
But there must be other ways, too, other things I could, or should, do to elicit this novelty I speak of. Because the fact is that no matter where I go, I’m still experiencing things from the same perspective . . . I’m still riding the same cerebral wavelength. I can sleepwalk here, and I sleepwalk there, but it makes no difference because I’m still, at the end of the day, sleepwalking.
I admit, I’ve fallen into mundane routines even in Charleston before, and I notice intermittently that these changes in my environment don’t exactly check the box I want checked, per se. They don’t scratch that itch.
This isn’t always the case—I don’t always feel this way. I’m speaking right now to a particular state of being that comes around every now and then . . .
Even though place undoubtedly has a very significant hand in what you can and can’t do, I think people (myself included) generally over-attribute how they feel about the world and their life to their external environment, thereby overlooking the things within their control to bring forth this novelty, ultimately missing the point altogether.
Because the degree to which we experience novelty has, I believe, far more to do with who we are (what sorts of habits we have) than it does with what opportunities might be around us (and, indeed, who we are—what we become—changes, enhances what opportunities we have ).
Now, to be honest, I’m having a little trouble here nailing down exactly what I’m trying to say. So let me first, before I dig into those things within one’s control, contemplate what’s going on in the world, in today’s culture.
Hasn’t something about the world changed? Has life not always been this way? I am no history buff, but I feel, and you may as well, like it can be incredibly difficult to get oneself involved in “novelty” these days, especially.
It’s like this cookie-cutter world—in which everything is or isn’t, in which there are perfectly rounded curbs and doors that seal so well they can without fail keep inside any establishment an air temperature different from that of the outside world, in which you must sign yourself up for things rather than just walking through the door—is far less conducive to the novelty we all need compared to the world of times past. It’s like everyone needs to ask permission, or worse, to be told, urged to go do or try something new.
Whereas in the old days, novelty was built into society—people talked to strangers, jumped into watering holes, built their own skiff from forest wood, and opened lemonade stands—it seems novelty today is something that must be commissioned, accessible only to those who caught word of it through their mysterious, seemingly royal inner circle.
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