My Old Blog

The title just popped into my head while sitting here drinking alone in my apartment. Usually when I just write about something with no direction it turns out shitty.

But this is worth thinking about….not that I can solve or even make any real progress on such a question in the next 30 or 45 minutes. Actually, maybe it isn’t even worth thinking about? Oh well, I’ve already started.

Let me ask this: If you achieved what you wanted, would you be happy? Is happy even a realistic goal?

Happiness, however you wish to define it, is a feeling. Is it realistic to make the goal of your life to be forever chasing a fleeting emotional state??? It sounds like a recipe for disappointment.

And happiness is relative anyway. Success will certainly not guarantee any sort of happiness, especially if you have a history of success. In that case, it would simply be normal and expected. Failure would be bad, success (defined as achievement of what you wanted) would be uneventful.

So you would have to trump your last success for it to make you happy. After that you would have to trump it again. One can easily see how this kind of one-upmanship will quickly lead to unrealistic expectations.

I wrote this probably 4 or 5 years ago in one of my personal journals: “And then you take the last great step: Failure becomes the only viable option, because if you succeed it means you didn’t risk enough, and set your goals too low. Failure is your only consolation, the only time you can be sure the stakes were high enough. You race so hard life becomes too short for anything.”

I used to place a great deal of emphasis on whether or not I was happy. Now I largely ignore it. I’m not that kind of person. I’m not negative, nor am I a pessimist….I am just chronically underwhelmed…always a little dissatified no matter what I achieve. Nothing will ever be enough. I know that…..unless maybe I have a kid and my outlook changes.

Hmm….success and happiness do not appear to be all that related, at least for me. While constant failure is sure to make you unhappy, I don’t think success will make you the opposite.

I believe in goals anyway. They make life more interesting, provide a focus, but achieving them is a temporary high at best. That is nothing to brag about. I can spend a few bucks on some drugs and get a temporary high.

There is a vast amount of information on the study of happiness on the Internet. I have much of it saved on my computer. If anyone is interested maybe I’ll put up some links, but here are a few things I have learned:

• Being married makes you happier. So do kids (though they don’t help your marriage). So do pets.
• Money makes you happier up to about 15,000 bucks a year (the point at which you are no longer starving and cold), after that there is very little correlation.
• Religion makes you happier.
• Old people are generally happier than the young. This is especially true in industrial countries.
• Being disabled does not make you unhappier in the long run.
• Inequality makes you unhappy. It seems to be true that if everyone is poor, you aren’t really poor. Alternatively, no matter how much you have, you will always be dissatisfied if there are others with more.
• Self-reported happiness in the US is decreasing and has been for 50 years. This is also true in most industrialized, Western countries….except for the Scandinavian states, where people are getting happier. Iceland is consider the happiest, most content nation on the planet.

I studied microbiology in college and, while I remember little specifics, the general knowledge that we are all little food-seeking procreators sticks with me.

This leads me back a bit to what the hell we’re all doing on this planet in the first place. To survive and reproduce is pretty much all we owe nature. This is our immediate purpose.

And I never could find any need for her to grant us a clear notion of success, nor any inner contentment. The urge to procreate is strong and unspoken. It is obvious.

Contentment can actually be counterproductive. The content are lazy. The conflicted are driven, creative and anxious. The latter sounds much more likely to survive……so they can produce more anxious, neurotic, driven offspring.

Nature hasn’t hardwired us to be happy, or content. I believe we can trick ourselves into both of those states with a lof of hard work, but the particulars of life remain the same: We are born. We live a little, and then we die. Pour as much sugar as you like on that statement; it will remain equally true.

All is not so dreary though. If I wrote the statement above about failure 5 years ago, I’ve had a while to think of how to get out of the neat intellectual loop I’d created.

That, however, is not the topic of this post. I don’t believe much in preaching. Opinions are overrated and cheap. Advice is nothing more than a form of self-flattery.

I was thinking about all this tonight because I saw a bunch of people at church this morning and at the Mother’s Day lunch this afternoon.

They kept asking me whether or not I liked my job, whether I was happy in Atlanta. I said some shit because they are nice people, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered: You know, I am exactly where I said I wanted to be, but so what?? Aren’t I always? What does achieving my goals have to do with being happy?

What is success to you?

Today is one of the most boring days I can remember. I have been sitting at home all day waiting for one phone call. I’ve received 4 phone calls, which is 4 more than I usually get, but none is the one I’m waiting on. I’m just wasting time, waiting.

Waiting alone is not a good thing. The house is empty. I’ve drunk so much coffee I’m sort of fidgety. My dog is infinitely patient sitting near the gas logs napping, which makes my impatience all the more intolerable. I went to bed at 12:30 and stayed in bed till about 12, again waiting.

You have weird dreams when you sleep that long. The 4 phone calls this morning all woke me up, which is why I remember the dreams. I can’t return those calls otherwise I’d tie up the phone. Of course the minute I get on the phone, they would be trying to call to offer me a job.

I’ve been looking for a job a long time. My dad told me last night he was proud I have been so patient in looking for the right job. “A lesser man would’ve settled for something 6 months ago and been unhappy with it,” he said.

I say a better man would’ve found a good job six months ago, and as far as being happy with it: I’ve never proven I can be happy at a job; what makes me think I can do it now? Actually, I was happy at camp….although that lasted only 10 weeks.

Actually, this time I have a good feeling about my potential job satisfaction. Why? I’ve learned a great deal about self-control over the past 5 years. The best and most sustainable way to achieve some sort satisfaction with your life is to decide that it will be so.

This is exceedingly difficult to do, and requires a degree of mastery of self that is near impossible. How well can you police bad thoughts and remove yourself from negative environments when you often don’t know if the thoughts and environments are negative until after you’ve experienced them? By then it’s too late.

I think, really, the discussion is moot. I’ve said I will get a job, for reasons explained in earlier posts. This is both a decision and a realization that, without working, food clothing and shelter can become a challenge.

Our preoccupation with happiness is a seldom recognized affliction of modern affluence. How wonderful is it to be able to worry over the capriciousness of our wandering spirit? In the past no one cared whether or not you were happy, least of all the unhappy. A hungry stomach is indifferent to the mental state of its vessel.

Before civilization I doubt we even had a dim grasp on the many shades of happiness. It is only with the dawn of excess a few thousand years ago that people were afforded the extended idleness needed to consider whether or not they enjoyed existing.

As we got better and better at making stuff we created enough surplus for ever larger numbers of us to be idle to consider our inner state. We went from a few Greek playwrights to, thousands of years later, entire movements of literary thinkers lounging around Paris essentially complaining that life was meaningless because they no longer had to scrounge for food, clothing and shelter. Only the well fed can afford to be depressed.

This brings us to today, where it is assumed that happiness is a birthright. It is no coincidence that unhappiness has increased as a result. As I have found through experience, thinking you must always be happy can itself become a source of unhappiness when you find it is impossible to attain, thus believing that it is some defect in yourself or unfairness of the world that is impeding your eternal inner peace.

When modern life, with all its complexities, is seen in these terms, we should be grateful even to have the opportunity to consider whether or not we think we are happy.

Before that Buddha stated it quite simply: All Life Is Suffering.

And in those days, it likely was.

Dear People,

I think this is the first entry I’ve ever written that is a direct response to someone else’s question. It is also something I’m sure others have considered. BC Rogers made me think about it again the other day in an email and I feel I owe him and some others an explanation.

If I have such an issue with the work/consume attitude, do not share the American obsession with productivity, think we’re often being scammed and told half truths by our government and find most people to be blindly unquestioning of the status of their lives….then why don’t I pack up and fucking leave??? I’ve done it before and obviously miss traveling. It is almost as if I am whining and lack the nerve to go. Everyone hates a whiner….even me. Why am I still here?

I have a gut feeling as to why I haven’t left, but I’m not sure if I understand it well enough to say it in words, but here goes:

Yes, my past does haunt me. Yes, I miss travel. But that does not mean I want to or should return to it.

When soldiers come home from war they have a hard time re-acclimating to regular life. This is not soley because they are scarred from killing foreigners. During war life is very intense. Everything is meaningful. Things happen in a flash and the stakes are high. You live forever wrapped in the moment because it is so important.

Regular life in the US pales in comparison. It is simply hard to get motivated to trudge through another day of work, or worry about dinner parties or office politics when you think back on what your life was once like….no matter that it was good or bad….just that it was once intense and meaningful. How can a daily routine ever compete with life at high volume??

I know I am not a soldier. I know the analogy is not completely valid, but it is real nonetheless. Reality TV stars complain about the letdown after the cameras stop rolling. Actors and performers speak of the rush of being on stage. After their careers end professional athletes can sink into depressions that last for years. All of them speak of missing the game. They miss that feeling.

Travel is like that. Nearly all travelers experience withdrawl after they go back home. Re-acclimation is extremely difficult. Depression is very common (something I have thankfully avoided). I know this not from any scientific studies, but from conversations with real people.

You see, travel is like a drug…actually, no. Travel is a drug. You become addicted to the next place even when the next place is no longer the source of pleasure it once was, but merely a way to alleviate the anxiety of sitting still. The estrangement from your former life can only be escaped by continually starting a new one.

Like a drug, travel resembles life, only more intense. It is the source of your pleasure and the absence of it is the root of your pain. The more you travel the less normal life offers you, which in turn further distances you from your previous life, which makes you more alienated, which can only be soothed by more travel.

Like a drug, it escalates. You must always do more of it, to more remote places, for longer periods of time, with ever higher stakes to experience the wonder you once felt just drinking a bottle of cheap red wine overlooking the Seine watching Paris at night.

Like a drug, you long for it. You tend to forget the lonliness and remember the endless string of new and interesting people. You forget the shitty beds and restless sleep in favor of waking to a croissant and expresso looking forward to discovering a new city. You tend to forget being lost and hungry wandering around the new city and remember when some local takes pity on you and shows you a great dive restaurant then takes you out for the evening at a club that used to be a castle dungeon. You forget getting robbed of everything you have and sitting misreably at a dirty police station trying to file a police report in Spanish and remember flying to Mallorca to ride scooters with an old friend. Like cocaine addicts, you remember the rush of the hit, but forget the 3 days without sleep.

And finally, like a drug there are withdrawls. I experience those withdrawls and long for it at times, but the cure is not to take more of the drug.

Although travel is a drug, that is not the only reason I choose not to leave. After all, drugs destory your life and wreck you body. Travel does neither of those. If I chose to remain an addict so to speak, life would go on. I don’t think I would require an intervention. After all, we all chase feelings. We are all addicts to something.

The decision to stay is about a choice: Seize the Day or Seize your Life. They are not one and the same.

Travel is so immediate. It is a lifestyle for the young and unattached. It is romantic and lonely. But life can’t always be about living in the moment. To forever seize the day is a false grail. Some goals necessarily take longer to achieve, a better commitment.

Is life just a series of unrelated experiences to be gobbled up or do you want your life to be about something, to tell a meaningful story??

Shall I die saying I ate life till I burst, sailed the seas and trekked the deserts, that I loved deeper and lost more on distant and foreign shores than others even imagine, or shall I say I helped my neighbors become better people, contributed what I could to the human condition through my work, loved my wife and family all I was able, and left my children with an opportunity to surpass what I was even able to dream??

That is the choice.

It is not a rhetorical question. It is not as if there is no reward for being the moth to life’s flame. There is certainly value in coveting all you can of life. But seize the day and you remain forever a student of life, never its master. Understanding why that is true is a very hard lesson.

I have largely lived the first option. The romaniticism it holds for most people is understandable, but the bullfighter dies alone. That is what they don’t see.

I choose the second option; not necessarily because it is better, though it may be, but because I have not yet tasted its secrets. I believe we can do better, but building something better for tomorrow isn’t a result of living life as if today is your last.

Of course I really want it all. I want both tomorrow and today. And in a sense that is what I am getting. I have eaten life for long enough. It is now time to grow something.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” 1 Corinthians 13.11

Not to say I will never travel again. I have never believed that one cannot eat their cake and have it too 😉

I’ve been sick the last few days with a head cold that I always get in December. I’ve often wondered if perhaps I’m allergic to Christmas trees or dust from the decorations in the attic. The only times in recent memory that I’ve escaped my Christmas time head cold were those when I came home from travelling.

Anyway, the best way to get rid of congestion is to exercise. It comes back afterwards, but for a few hours you feel all better.

Some folks I know asked me to play for their basketball team last night. I figure that in a not so distant future I will be tempted to talk about how good I used to be. You know that conversation when older people say they “used to” be able to do this or that? I never much liked it. I “used to” wet the bed. Am I supposed to give them a lollipop for what they can no longer do?

I am as good as I ever was, probably better. I didn’t “used to” be able to do anything I can do right now, though I suffer more aches and pains that I did at 18.

When is that desire to be better not a wish for improvement but an inability to let go of the past? After all, one cannot be always better at everything ad infinitum. One must reach a peak.

And I think I’ve reached mine. I’m happy to say it was very late for me. I am approaching 30 and I’m arguably in the best shape of my life.

The game went well. We won and I poured in 28 points in a short game. If it had been an NBA length game and I’d continued to score at the same pace (not likely), I’d have scored 50. It is fun.

That feeling, the one where we climb the beanstalk and rescue the princess, is one I wish we all felt more often. We forget about it as we get older and it makes us dull…unwilling to risk because we’ve forgotten the reward. Or maybe we don’t forget as we get older, but the forgetting makes us older.

I know I’ve given up a lot to live my life. I wake up everday to the trades I’ve made. I occasionally envy others for what they’ve been able to build and for their ability to be satisfied with it….an ability I fear I lack.

And so I often wonder what I’ve earned by prolonging this part of my life, the one where you are young and all the possibility in world still lies before you, where you are still as good as you’ll ever be at everything you’ve ever done.

With a smile I can say I feel it is its own reward.

I don’t believe we should delve too deeply into the subconscious. The inside of our head is a very slipperly slope…we may reach the bottom, but how then do we return?

Somewhere in the recesses of our head is the motivation for our actions. The serpent of our desires is always slithering around in there somewhere, lurking about, affecting our decisions.

We weigh pros and cons, mull about, converse with friends, dilligently research…and think we arrive at a “rational” decision.

But that snake in your head is making a mockery of you. It pushes you to weigh the pros as more important through the cons be more numerous, to mull about for the correct period of time, to converse with friends that reinforce what you want to believe, to research the idea that supports your subconscious desires.

I believe in free will mostly. I am free to write these words after all. They are not predetermined.

But if you put a rat in the middle of a tube with food at one end and nothing at the other, the rat will move towards the food. It assumes in its little rat head that it made a decision. (I am not a licensed rat psychologist.)

We see that the rat is simply responding to a food incentive, that it will always make the decision to go towards the food. In effect, it is not deciding, but responding to stimuli in the same way plants grow towards the light. The rat is not making a decision any more than the plant is……anymore than we are.

Rationality is what we use to justify the decisions we’ve already made…or have been made for us, depending on how you look at it.

Of course, this does have some bearing on my life otherwise I wouldn’t be thinking about it. The problem lies in the number of serpents. If there were just one, how easy then would it be to make a decision? The number of competing desires and the degree to which those desires disagree with each other can cause some serious dissonance.

It is truly a den of snakes in my head.

Tonight I packed to go to San Francisco. I’m ashamed of myself. I waited till the last minute and shoved a bunch of shit in several bags without thinking whether or not it was the right stuff.

I remember when I travelled; packing was a near religious experience. You selected just the right things, minimalized, streamlined, and then ended with a self-contained universe inside a tiny backpack, certain it would serve you well and indefinitely anywhere on the planet.

Oh how times have changed. I am surprised I had the initiative to pack a day early.

Several years ago I contacted EscapeArtist.com about writing an article about the business climate in Chile. I never wrote it of course, but I occasionally visit the site.

This week I’ve spent a lot of time imagining myself in some foreign locale, running a scam or buying a castle or brokering the insanely cheap beach real estate that still exists all over the planet. And Cuba….forget about it. Its a fucking gold mine!! There is so much out there…..

My dad basically owns two houses and has worked very hard for them. That being said, one can assume he is sitting on well over $200,000 of cheap money. Homes are not places to live. They are investment capital….a chance to make money work for you instead of always working for your money.

He never did anything with all that money. My dad is a safe man, both to his credit and detriment. He probably has insurance policies on his insurance….and a supplement on top of that. And now he is near retirement and will likely sit on that money for the rest of his life.

I know I have no family and nothing to lose…but….well there is a story in the bible about a man with three sons. The first squanders the money, the second buries the money under a tree and the third makes money with the money.

The man was not happy with son that buried the money.

Today I am taking my first hours off in over two weeks. I sit here writing as a free man.

Camp life is very fulfilling. I have all the makings of a truly satisfying life. There are good people, meaningful work, a supportive environment, constant positive feedback, music, exercise, spirituality and even a little romance.

Many people will live their whole lives and not experience something quite so perfect. I tried to make a conscious decision to stay away from this type of stuff for a while. This is the reason I have so much trouble wanting to find a “real job”. I have repeated a loop like this one probably a dozen times in my life, never finding a way to sustain it, but only to whet my appetite for more.

True change stems from despair, dissatisfaction, boredom, or some other similar emotion. True change does not come from having all the makings of a truly satisfying life. There needs to be some kind of bottoming out or moment of reckoning.

And yet I can find no fault in the decisions I have made. It has been a life full of once in a lifetime experiences.

I am mentally committed to change, to at least try to live a relatively normal life for a while. That is semi-positive motion I guess.

But it is strange. It is like I am breaking up with a girlfriend with whom I’ve had no falling out.

Woe is me.

There was a time I had a strict policy of closedness. This was to avoid being judged for what I believe or fail to believe. I changed this policy because I found it rather alienated me from people and I find a certain comfort in sharing myself with people.

I began the policy in the first place because I have always been different and people don’t understand that. They use what I say to put me in intellectual cubbyholes that were designed to classify people that think in normal ways. That isn’t me. If you take filters made to work for the majority and use them on those that fall outside the norm you will consistently make mistakes in judgment.

I got tired of being misunderstood so I kept my mouth shut about what I believe. I just let people judge me on my actions.

This worked extremely well but people complained that I never told anyone my thoughts and I naturally want to share myself with people. So it was a good policy in practice, but not very fulfilling personally.

Of course I always shared with my best friends, but I came to share almost nothing with good friends and acquaintances. It just wasn’t worth it. I was, and still am to a large extent, one of the most self-policed people I know. I have to be.

I also dislike having to clarify myself. It always digresses into semantics and arrives at something even more muddled than you began with.

Then there is this website. I often write private stuff or at least hint at the things that trouble me most. It has worked out well because only my closest friends read it and the others are mostly so far away that their judgments are tempered by the separation.

Then there is camp. It appears that some folks are reading my website. This puts them a little too close to the fire.

Additionally…and I know I’m gonna get flamed for this one, we are at a Christian camp. I truly love the community here, but any group of very like-minded individuals tends to get judgmental. They get doubly judgmental because they are religious. It becomes frighteningly easy to judge right and wrong when God is backing your moral code.

So far I think only two people have found the website and they are very good folk. However, as a preemptive move, I will have to starting pre-screening my comments on the religious aspect of camp. I won’t say anything untrue…it just won’t be as true as it could be.

I hate to do it, but I can’t risk one of these extremely nice people here at camp misjudging me because of comments meant for people that know me better.

Besides, many of them look up to me anyway and I take the responsibility of being a role model very seriously. Just don’t ask me to explain my motivations.

I was at a bar last night. Everyone was watching the TVs and they all said the same thing: War with Iraq has begun. And then they showed this live feed from Baghdad of an empty street. It didn’t much look like a war, just an empty street.

This girl we were with was really drunk. She started talking about politics….in a bar. I told the girl she was talking to that everyone knows you can’t talk about politics, religion or past romantic relationships at bars. It is a serious buzzkill.

This chick takes issue with everything I say. I think she likes me or something. Like in elementary school when you used to be mean to the cute girl with blond pigtails. But she did bring up an interesting point.

When is it proper to talk about politics and religion? Or more specifically, when do I talk about it? Honestly, almost never. She took that to mean that I have no opinions and don’t care in general. While it is true that I am often apathetic, I do have strong opinions. I just keep them to myself.

In my experience, people just like to hear themselves talk when it comes to stuff like that. It makes them feel good to express their opinion, but it does not make them feel good when your opinion is different than theirs.

People cannot keep from taking it personally. When your view differs from theirs, they always somehow associate that with an attack on themselves. They feel judged. And the discussion digresses into arguments of semantics and then things just get plain petty…then ugly.

I have opinions. I’ve expressed them in the past. It mostly got me judged and pigeonholed. You stand to gain the most when your opinion is the same as the majority or the side that will eventually win. I didn’t really like learning that and have trouble doing it. There is some strange attraction to telling everyone what you think, especially when you’re in the minority. Galileo did it, was proved correct and change the world forever. On the flip side he got put to death for it….alot of good it did him.

So….do I have an opinion about the war? Not really. What is done is done. Let it be speedy and decisive and let us move on with our lives.

I learned some stuff the other day about the unconditional acceptance of others.

I liken it to laissez-faire capitalism. It isn’t that laissez-faire is the best economic model. Markets do not always function perfectly and sometimes need our intervention. However, the questions then becomes: When do you intervene and when do you let the market work itself out? When do you do more harm by intervention than by simply letting the market function inefficiently for a while? History has not shown us wise enough to consistently make the right decision.

That brings us back to unconditional acceptance. It is not the best idea. Ideally one should accept what is acceptable and intervene in the unacceptable. However, am I wise enough to judge correctly what is acceptable and what is aberrant? Even if I judge correctly, do I create more problems than I potentially solve by the confrontation?

And so, it is often a good idea to practice unconditional acceptance of others because I am not smart enough to decide what is or isn’t acceptable nor can I predict the potential harm the intervention itself might cause.

There is one last point to make about this: Unconditional acceptance is a pretty good idea, probably under-utilized…but it is not a great idea. There are times when intervention is necessary and a judgement must be made. Unconditional anything, whether it be acceptance, love or laissez-faire is easily used as an excuse to do nothing when action is necessary.

So…when is action necessary? Well…it is necessary when you believe that it is. It comes down to your faith in right or wrong. A man with no convictions is truly capable of unconditional acceptance, because nothing will ever call him to act. A man with strong convictions will constantly be called to act.

It is surely possible for a man to have strong convictions and be very wrong about them. Nevertheless, he will be called to act. And there will be others with strong convictions that will also be called to act…all with varying degrees of rightness and wrongness. So who is right?

I can appeal to reality to settle this argument. History has shown that he who is winning is right. He who has the biggest stick and reproduces the most is the most correct.

This is always true, no matter how much we may wish it otherwise. You may point out that history books show that winners are sometimes wrong. But that is only because the current winners have a different viewpoint than previous winners. Although history may have judged a winner to be wrong, I assure you that they felt very right at the time, and since they are all dead now, our judgement of their wrongness has no real consequence.

The religious among you may point out that rightness is not just a matter of who is winning. I point out that religion itself is a consequence of the rightness of the winner. You believe that your religion is right because its previous believers had the biggest sticks and reproduced the most. Otherwise the religion would not have continued to exist to allow us to have this discussion. A religion’s rightness is determined by its number of believers and the strength of their convictions.

This little interplay with people of varying strengths of convictions being called to action has a name. It is called Life.

I now point out that this is a very uninspiring opinion. I started out by learning about unconditional accpetance and ended up with a Darwinian attack of religion and the advocacy of ethical relativity. That sucks, but I can find little fault with my arguments so I guess I’ll stick by it.

Hmm….so I suppose there isn’t really a point to be made here. Just that those were the contents of my head….a brief example of how my brain jumps from one thought to the next. I started with an opening sentence and just wrote whatever popped into my head.