Saturday, April 04, 2009
Stuck Between the Vice and the Advice
I find myself vacillating wildly between the poetic and the nihilistic, between the hopeful and the hateful, and between determination and desperation. It feels like I am simultaneously on the verge of hitting my stride and on the verge of finally giving up and allowing myself to be consumed by pettiness, superficial concerns, and a hopeless life.
I'm 33 years old - should I not know who I am and what I want in my life by this point? I know that many people don't, and that such a condition doesn't necessarily keep one from living a good life, but I expect myself to know these things and understand.
I was watching Hotel Rwanda last night and, per this post that I wrote afterwords, I started looking around my apartment and wondering, "What the fuck is with all this stuff?" Really, when you get down to it, I spent a lot of my money on sprucing up my apartment for the sake of encouraging women to be interested in a romantic relationship with me. It's the nesting instinct. Not only that, but it's the Ikea nesting instinct. straight out of Fight Club. Fight Club is one of my favorite movies of all time; I saw it in the theatre when I was living in NYC, fresh out of college. I was energized by it, charged by its take on the world of thirty-something men. I felt that, by watching the movie and getting it and liking it, I was somehow innoculating myself against making those mistakes.
And yet here I am, doing exactly what this powerful film was satirizing: falling victim to the Ikea nesting instinct, allowing my material posessions to control me, to dictate what I do with my life by virtue of perpetuating the cycle of getting in debt and then working a soul-sucking job as a way of paying off that debt (and then being so miserable in the job that I buy even more material posessions to distract myself).
Maybe one of the reasons why I have such a hard time connecting with women is that I know on some level that I don' t want to live this kind of life, the 40-45 hour work week, the performance reviews, the accumlation of material goods... maybe I'm just rejecting the way that I've chosen to live my life, and I'll continue to be miserable and suffering from wild swings in emotion and perspective until I'm doing something else with my life.
I'm 33 years old - should I not know who I am and what I want in my life by this point? I know that many people don't, and that such a condition doesn't necessarily keep one from living a good life, but I expect myself to know these things and understand.
I was watching Hotel Rwanda last night and, per this post that I wrote afterwords, I started looking around my apartment and wondering, "What the fuck is with all this stuff?" Really, when you get down to it, I spent a lot of my money on sprucing up my apartment for the sake of encouraging women to be interested in a romantic relationship with me. It's the nesting instinct. Not only that, but it's the Ikea nesting instinct. straight out of Fight Club. Fight Club is one of my favorite movies of all time; I saw it in the theatre when I was living in NYC, fresh out of college. I was energized by it, charged by its take on the world of thirty-something men. I felt that, by watching the movie and getting it and liking it, I was somehow innoculating myself against making those mistakes.
And yet here I am, doing exactly what this powerful film was satirizing: falling victim to the Ikea nesting instinct, allowing my material posessions to control me, to dictate what I do with my life by virtue of perpetuating the cycle of getting in debt and then working a soul-sucking job as a way of paying off that debt (and then being so miserable in the job that I buy even more material posessions to distract myself).
Maybe one of the reasons why I have such a hard time connecting with women is that I know on some level that I don' t want to live this kind of life, the 40-45 hour work week, the performance reviews, the accumlation of material goods... maybe I'm just rejecting the way that I've chosen to live my life, and I'll continue to be miserable and suffering from wild swings in emotion and perspective until I'm doing something else with my life.
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