I wrote this a few days ago, but then hesitated to post it.
Why would I keep moaning about my idiotic life?
Who cares?
What’s the point of such a post?
Today I decided to post it anyway, who knows, maybe it will help me to turn a page and to move on.
I am so low, something has got to give.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
This is how my days look like.
I get up at 5:30 to meditate for half an hour. At that time it is quiet. As an atheist I don’t believe in god or any other deities, nor in any other religion, buddhism may come closest. Still I consider it a good thing to just sit in silence for a while and face the emptiness, experience the nothingness that I am. At the end of the meditation I repeat a few times “May all beings be happy”. Note how I say “all”. That would theoretically include me even though I realize that I could never be happy. At the same time I am fully aware, that if I am not happy myself, wishing happiness for others won’t be of much use.
That concludes the semi-useful part of my day.
Around six my wifi starts up and I grab my iPad to check email, twitter and finally my RSS feeds to get my first news fix of the day. The interesting things that I find I post on various social media websites – delicious, twitter, facebook, tumblr, pinterest and mlkshk. I am a news junkie, no harm done to others in that. But I use an iPad and a Macbook Air for my news intake, fully aware that these machines were assembled in China under very questionable working conditions, then shipped halfway around the globe, some of the components that were used are toxic to the environment and Apple is a huge corporation that like all huge corporations should be boycotted. My huge online time contributes to worldwide server usage, which fast is growing into one of the major energy wasters. My daily allowance according to the 2000 watt society is probably covered by my internet, tv and other computer usage alone.
Around 6:30 I wake up my wonderful wife, which is the absolute highlight of my day. I love the sounds she makes and how beautiful and peaceful she looks when i wake her. We share a glass of Chi, which I justify because I think it’s good for my health. Chi is the closest to proper Kombucha I can find in Switzerland. But Chi is produced here in Switzerland by the cult community formed by the late Sri Chinmoy. So much for my atheism supporting a religious sect. While is not produced locally at least it does not get shipped half way around the globe. Really I should just make my own Kombucha, which is very easy to do. But I am too lazy to find a “mother”.
Next I go to my garden plot and dig around in the dirt for a few hours. I am a terrible gardener and really hate the work, but this gives me the illusion of doing something useful. Since I can’t seem to find a job or a career that interests me, I deceive myself in believing that this urban farming thing could be my “job” of sorts, my calling, and more gravely, that it could contribute to making the world a better place. But of course it does no such thing. Our plot with its 150 square meters is fairly big and should suffice to feed the two of us for nine or more months out of the year. But I fail miserably, we only eat homegrown food seven or eight months of the year. I still buy most of my seeds, despite being fully aware that worldwide seed production is controlled by just five huge international corporations, Mosanto et al. Some of the tools I use are produced in China and in other such countries. We are supposed to garden organically in these family gardens, but my direct neighbor secretly uses a ton of poison on his plot, fertilizers, pesticides and what have you, which means a. his vegetables grow twice as fast and are twice as big as mine, b. all the pests move from his to my plot and c. some of the poisons get onto my vegetables. According to knospe, the swiss organic food certification standards, the food I grow is not even organic, since it is produced in such close vicinity to non-organic farming.
Then I go home and make some tea with organic milk. Organic milk that gets shipped here across the country. Or not. I wouldn’t know. I can’t really buy local organic milk. To be brutally honest the only reason I still buy organic food is to calm down my bad conscience. It still costs much more to buy organic food, but the organic food market has turned into a joke since the major supermarkets have jumped on the organic food bandwagon. Recently I bought organic chickpeas “Produced in China”. Oh really… I keep buying organic because I think it healthier and because it gives me the illusion that this contributes in some absurd and esoteric way to make the world a better place. But I know better, it does not. You can’t shop to make a difference, there is no such thing as green shopping. It’s all the same mechanism, exploitative to the earth, and questionable on so many more levels. Supermarkets kill small businesses, the work conditions of people in the food industry, organic cucumbers from Spain all year long, and I could go on…
It is now time to take a bath and eat a banana. Yes, you guessed it, a fair trade and organic banana, see above. The bath uses more water than I should be allowed to use per day, considering that water scarcity is a reality. It does not matter that we have plenty of water in Switzerland, to really make a difference I would have to consider the global picture and take a bath only once or twice a week. Clean water will soon turn into such a rare resource that we won’t be allowed to waste any of it. As most others I keep wasting water as long as I am allowed to do so.
The rest of the morning I try to read my books, if the noise level allows it, checking and re-checking twitter, facebook and email, watching jon stewart and other videos stuck in my browser from my morning internet surfing. Yes, yes, wasting more energy, justifying nuclear power plants, see above.
At noon I fix a lunch. I am still vegetarian, again out of some sense of guilt or weird antiquated principle, and most probably just out of habit. But I am fully aware that eating vegetarian does not make the slightest bit of a difference. Some claim I would have to go vegan to make a difference, but I find that claim quite questionable, if only for all the soy that gets shipped half way around the globe. I believe the best I could do is eat only local, seasonal food, that either I produce myself, or that gets produced by people I know and trust. Eating some meat would make sense, for many reasons, just one reason here: you need manure to produce good vegetables. Usually my lunch consists of shop bought bread and cheese, yes yes, all organic, LOL, see above. Foods that I neither produce, nor know who does, and just blindly assume that it was produced in ethical and ecological ways, which knowing humans, it probably wasn’t. On the TV I watch the weather and the news, which is probably just a habit to try and make me feel superior, since I got all the news much earlier online on twitter and elsewhere.
In the afternoon I usually try to have a small project, fix stuff, in summer organize something for my urban farm, make jam, conserve food, what have you, currently I want to make preserved lemons, or sometimes I go shopping. Blah. The rest of the time or if I am depressed (most of the time) I just lay around, agonizing. Sometimes I watch a movie or play a game.
I try to read whenever I can, which is rare. It is usually too noisy, so I can’t concentrate. We live above a family with two small boys, both of them around two, just a year apart. Two boys in their terrible twos. Great. All day long they have a competition going who can cry the loudest. If they don’t cry they bang shit on the walls or floors, or run around in those clumsy, loud infant steps. If the kids are quiet you can usually hear their mum screaming around. Because of them, it is almost never quiet in our flat. When they go out to the playground, I know it would now be possible to concentrate enough to read my books. Sometimes I manage to find it in me to pick one up, but usually I just fall asleep enjoying the temporary quiet.
My wife and I, we don’t have kids. A while ago we decided not to have kids. We had tried to have one for some time, but it never worked out. We then started to see the advantages of not having kids. There are already way too many kids on this overpopulated planet, it is one of the biggest ecological contributions you can make, not to put any more kids on to this planet. Plus kids are noisy and obsessed with themselves. Me me me. Pure ego. So, no own kids, but live above two small boys who terrorize me all day long? Brilliant. I try not to hate the kids, but I’m afraid I hate these two more and more every day. And I really question their parents for being so egotistical to bring kids to this fucked up place. We don’t have kids, but most of our direct neighbors have two or more. On balance the positive ecological effect of us not having kids is instantly erased.
There are many more such things. If I move around the house I usually walk up and down the stairs, in order not to use the elevator and save some energy. I live in the fifth, the top floor. People in the floors bellow us, even people living in the second floor, use the elevator all the time. What I manage to save in energy by walking the stairs gets used up by them. I also don’t own a car. I really love to drive, but ecologically I can’t justify owning a car. Again, everybody else in our house owns a car. For my vacations I try to only visit locations I can reach by train, I try to fly as little as possible. Meanwhile my friends and family travel to thailand over christmas. Whatever I may save in energy and resources the people in my direct vicinity waste ten fold. And in these individualistic times I can’t even confront them with it…
In the evening my wife comes home and we fix an early dinner. We like to cook and eat well, creative, luscious vegetarian cuisine. We should feel so guilty that we choke on every bite, because we are so privileged, with all our fancy spices, ingredients and cooking gear. After dinner we hang out on the couch and watch mostly shit movies, that happen to be aired on our subscription cable channel. This is how time is killed best till bed time around 9:30.
Usually around 3 in the night I wake up with a start. It is then that I see clearly what a joke my life is. My pathetic attempts to be a responsible, ecologically conscious, considerate human on this planet are just so futile, that it is beyond ridiculous. Maybe I should rather start to do things that contribute to rid the planet of this cancer that we humans are… But I am too scared of the consequences.
Usually on saturday i join some protest or other, occupy, anti-nuclear, what have you. I pretend that we can make a difference. But I am not a reformist. I am convinced things would need to change on a much more fundamental level. What needs to happen, and I don’t even know if I can call it a revolution, would involve such a deep questioning of our ways by each and everyone of us, that it seems impossible that it could ever happen. Everyone has so many blind spots. Even I do, and I am one who honestly tries to look at things and to question my ways. Or so I delude myself…
Pressing the “Like” button for your post? Reminds me of:
http://failblog.org/2012/03/17/funny-facebook-fails-failbook-support-those-tears/
wait a minute. did you just “like” my sadness? ;p
(i know the dilemna…)
At the beginning you ask about the purpose of such a post: I think that one can get pleasure from venting, even though ‘pleasure’ might be the wrong word here. As said other-places, your post struck a nerve in me. Maybe it’s because I’ve had very close persons deal with clinical depression (not that I think this is what we’re talking about here), but mainly I think it’s because you raise some very valid points.
How should we go through life? What sense does it make if we take great care to not harm anyone and the world when the asshole next door doesn’t care at all and averts our effort ten times over in a whim? These are questions that – I guess – cannot be answered in globo or else someone would already have the answer. And I really don’t think there is an answer that works in all cases.
We are social beings and want or need to communicate with others. The current technology we have at our disposal makes it extremely easy to do so, but then again, we’re bound to this technology somehow. And for me personally, Ive figured out that I’m more happy with less technology. I don’t mean no technology at all, for this I’m much too hedonistic and love my gadgets, but I have found that I don’t miss them after a certain cold-turkey phase, e.g. don’t seem to miss any app I’ve deleted from my phone, computer or iPad, don’t feel bad about news or blogposts I miss. If something really important happens I’ll hear it, be it from friends online or offline or over the old fashioned media outlets. Again, this is for me personally and I’m no self-diagnosed news-junkie as you say about yourself. You justify your early morning news-fix with ‘no harm done to others’, but do you take some pleasure out of it? Or is it more like a chore, do you feel obliged to do this? It has been already a year, but since my digital purge I feel much less obliged to follow a new trend, open an account on this newfangled website that all the cool kids use or take part in this newest meme. And I think I’m still cool, at least in the eyes of the people where such a judgement matters for me.
You seem to get pleasure from gardening on your plot, but in the paragraph you also mention that – in your terms – you ‘fail miserably’, because your garden fails to provide you for nine or months and does so only for seven or eight months. In my terms this is far away from failing miserably. My puny ‘garden’ on our balcony does provide a big handful of tomato and some herbs to spice up our cooking, but I couldn’t live a single month off it. I’m trying to tell you that you should be proud that you manage to be somehow self-sufficient for a certain time of the year. And that you should piss on your neighbors lot, this should keep some pest away (don’t do this, it was meant to be some kind of joke).
The organic food problem you mention is also one that bothers me. I try to buy as much organic food as possible, but don’t manage to do it all the time, the chickpeas from china are a good example. I try to look at it more pragmatically (but also hedonistically): I try to buy as many food I desire organically, but sometimes I want chickpeas or worse, e.g. tropical fruit for a dessert or so. I know that I damage the climate with this, but still feel better than all those who buy meat, so I go out of the shops still feeling a tad superior to others.
The rest of you daily routine sounds like something one could get used to, even though – from what I seem to paraphrase – makes you feel guilty. Just two short things: If taking a bath each day makes you feel guilty, can’t you ramp down this habit, i.e. only take a bath every second day and alternate with showers? And the noisy neighbors: I know it only helps superficially, but can’t you go out in the woods or a quiet cafe to read your books? Then you don’t have to sit at home unable to concentrate and plot ways to get rid of those kids (again, don’t do this, it might be frowned upon :).
To summarize: as you yourself said well; we all have our blind spots. We all try to do our best (I really think), but some of us really, really suck at this. Some of us succeed much better, and go through life with a conscience, and even though they see that their efforts are futile in the grand scheme, it might make them feel more aware of their surroundings and give them an elated spirit. Not elated in a pretentious way, i.e. making them feel superior to others in a bad way, but making them feel that they do their chores for saving the world, even though it might only be a drop in the ocean. But oceans have been filled by drops, it just takes a very long time. I intend to keep going on, perfectly aware that I’m typing this on a nearly brand new MacBook Pro, using much more energy that I’m allowed to use on the world average while others don’t even have a roof over their head.
On a side note: It took me a long time to craft a minimally cohesive reply. One thing I really want to stress: If you still feel like this today I think you need to get professional help. It doesn’t make you happy, which is a condition no one deserves.
thanks habi, for your thought-out response, many inspiring thoughts in there, putting things in a different light and perspective. and then a somewhat surprising end – I didn’t see that one coming.
you might be right that professional help could be a nice thing. unfortunately in my past experiences with professional help I found myself to be mostly therapy-resistent – as, by the way, are many people with my professional background eg social work. I tend to see through the therapeutic setting, anticipate what is expected, deliver flat nonsense. it’s not helping, but even more fundamentally, therapy mostly does not go deep enough for me. I tend to think that most therapeutic approaches teach how to live with neurosis and depression. I am more interested to leave neurosis and depression behind.
and if you are speaking about chemical solutions, that is not an option for me either. way back I had a time of self-medication and it showed me that it sure is a possibility, but not something I can handle well, nor justify.
I still think if I just go deep enough into the darkness, there might be
a door there… there just might. this is not the reason
why I go in there, the reason for that would be that I can’t not do it.
I admit I was kinda fishing with the opening remarks. I do think that public purging and venting can in some instances kick off an epiphany. meh, big word. weird word too. and no, it didn’t here. but beyond that, I am just trying to have the most honest look at myself and to understand as much as possible about this predicament we humans are in.
the thing is, it is a critical time on this planet, constructive people are needed, strong people, fighters. can I be a part of the solution? who knows… and I am in no position to demand this and even hesitate to suggest it, but maybe just maybe more people should ask themselves these types of questions now.
ah yes, and that media purge sounds like the most lovely idea ever, and it has sounded like that for years. but a day job would really help to get this going.
I don’t specifically wanted to hint to chemical solutions, even though they might help under certain circumstances. But you dub yourself as therapy-resistent, so this route is one not to take anyways.And yes, venting is helpful, most of the times. But it’s necessary to take the inertia and direct it to something useful. Go for it!