Thinking Too Much is Bad.

I've never been good at being satisfied with where I am. I used to just consider it wanderlust, and not a bad thing at that. But sometimes one sees a pattern develop: settle in, get a bit stir-crazy, launch grandiose plans; next thing you know you have moved several time zones, have a new career and a tattoo of Uruguay on your ass. What's the problem with that, besides that Uruguay is not of an attractive shape for assink, you might ask? The problem is that when you look at how lives are built and lived, starting over every three years is not the way to do it. Leaving on the next jet plane to escape mild boredom, while definitely exciting, becomes a repeating pattern. “Insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results”, Benjamin Franklin purportedly said; to repeatedly flee normal feelings of boredom and expect that in the new place contentment and placidity will be found seems to fit that definition.

That said, how do we remain happy when all becomes humdrum and routine? I suppose, and I fear this more than a little bit, the answer is to entertain ourselves. Eep.

I am reading Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton (pronounce in bad French accent for P.F. Points). I started reading it because even though I have just arrived in DC, and I spent the last four years living abroad, and I haven't even been to the Jefferson Memorial yet, the dreams have already started. The dreams always are what start my exodus from what ever life I am living. They are not the kind of dreams that one awakes from in a cold sweat. They are day dreams, of me, being smarter and having a more glamorous job, and having more time to write, and smoke cigarettes and drink red wine at noon, while sitting at a cafe, and speaking in round vowel sounds of romantic languages to bowtied men who bring more red wine and we all laugh that I once lived in penurious slavery for a wage. Or eating roasted new potatoes and lamb shank and sipping on cold martinis while prattling on in Danish about new art and the article I just wrote about South Africa, while sitting on blond ashwood furniture in an apartment looking over the Kobenhagen harbour. See what these have in common? If I move there, I become smarter and more witty and more successful in everyway. Yes, I am completely insane.

The common theme that de Botton follows is that status anxiety, something we all feel even if we don't talk about it, is caused by assuming that we are all in control of everything, a modern concept indeed. How else does one explain Blackberries (the buzzing electronic kind, not the delicious fruit)? His writing is refreshingly not self help, but it does analyze the idea that, in the west, we prize our meritocracy but that egalitarianism comes with a harsh wind of judgment. If everyone can compete on equal footing in a meritocracy, then the failure to succeed cannot be attributed to external events; in a true meritocracy, which we like to think we live in, my failure to be more important, smarter and more successful is deserved because that failure is my doing. Ouch. That's an ugly thought for a Sunday afternoon.