My Job, My Life, My Blog

After my birthday dinner in November, my friends remarked, though not to me directly, that they had never seen me so happy. That really is a most extraordinary thing. I have been many things to many people, but happy? Not often. Entertaining, exciting, supportive, intense – those might fit, but not “happy.” At my worst I am depressive, moody, snappy. For people to notice, and be so shocked as to mention it to my girlfriend, must mean it was a real surprise. Indeed, the whole thing has been quite a surprise to me too.

In September, I started full time work. With Marx and Marcuse at the ready, I was so prepared to be alienated and miserable that I was completely blindsided by what actually happened. The work was interesting, my colleagues were brilliant and good fun, the company paid me well and gave generously into my pension, while allowing me great flexibility about when and where I worked. I quickly made friends with a few people in my team, and with several people from the same graduate intake as mine. I had time to meet them in the afternoons at the office café for free hot chocolate, and even hang out after work. I travelled to our headquarters in Germany a few times, and visited a power plant in the UK, walking around in a hard hat and covering my ears with a gleeful expression on my face as I tried not to be utterly overwhelmed by all the loud exciting noises.

Normally, when I go into work, I use the bus. From my family’s home, it’s a fifteen minute walk through the fields to get to the bus stop. In the mornings, the grass is slick with dew and you can smell the changing of the seasons. On the bus I read, and usually on the walk back I’ll call my girlfriend, who is just finishing off her studies at Cambridge. At home I have little enough time to sense its value, but just about enough time to make use of that knowledge and spend it well. Bizarrely, after many months of day-to-day freedom, I found myself reading far more, and far better. I even found myself writing, completing two stories late last year by getting an evening routine going. In November, I started running in the mornings too. Though I cannot say I always enjoy this, I’m glad I’m doing it.

A night or two each week I still teach a few Ukrainian refugees in the UK online as part of the charity my girlfriend and I set up. At this point, if their English isn’t good, there’s no helping them. But I have fun and so do they. On weekends I can travel to London or further afield. All told, I am managing to maintain a decent social life, given I’m not in London full time. And given I’m not in London full time, I’m able to put away a nice amount of my salary into savings.

So that is it on paper. A job that pays well, where I have a positive impact and career growth, travel and freedom, a good pension and nice colleagues. I have regular exercise, a wonderful girlfriend, a much loved social circle, some active participation in making the world a better place, and time for reading and creativity. Life is, perhaps as it’s never been before, good.

So why do I find myself asking if this is all there is to it?

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We can approach the problem of our lives in at least two ways, psychologically and philosophically. I have been reading philosophical fiction, and now philosophy, for far longer than is perhaps healthy. But the main problem that we soon run into, clutching our copy of Crime and Punishment in the school medical centre while waiting for a checkup, is that Dostoevsky and his friends don’t actually have much to say to us, just yet. We may relate to questions of free will and meaning, but they are inevitably abstracted, airy – just like how we don’t really understand what it means when we read in introductions that Dostoevsky had gambling debts. All of these questions and answers about how to live our lives, even Rilke’s “live the questions for now” in his Letters to a Young Poet, require that one is actually living.

And living is an active thing. It is also a thing that requires, I think, certain life conditions. We cannot live at school, or even at university. We require a choice to live, and we require consequences. We may have to face our consequences all the time, but only rarely in the sense of consequences that last our entire lives. It was only when I was in an office with the odd fifty-year-old that I realised the impact of exercise and healthy eating can have as we age; and how undesirable the alternative is, as I watched the older colleagues shuffling around with the same kind of pace and face I’d expect at a retirement home. At school we make decisions about how we learn, in the holidays we establish good or bad habits, but it takes a great deal of wisdom to see through them all the way to their ultimate consequences. I certainly didn’t, and now I have plenty of regrets for my thousands of hours in Call of Duty matches.  

We have choices at university and school, but these are still fairly bounded. We can mess up our schoolwork and get kicked out, but this is like Sartre saying we always have a choice because we can always kill ourselves. It’s laughably irrelevant. Or rather, provided we make the decision to actually study, there’s only so much choice left. Just like, if we make the decision to fail, there’s only then a choice about how to fail. At the other end, in life, there are many more choices. Some of them rest on what’s come before – I cannot immediately become a doctor, for example. But most of them come to us with the freedom of a quest in Skyrim or any other role-playing game – we can choose whatever we want to do. Suddenly, a vastly increased weight of responsibility – for fitness of mind and body, for our social circles, for where and how we live and work and spend our time – is hurled upon us. Not everyone has to decide all of these things all at once, but the decisions come, and often sooner than we expect.

If the choices and the consequences were always there, as I now see they perhaps were, then what I mean is that once you are out of it all you can gain a wisdom you might have missed earlier. And some people miss it then too. But you’re on my blog, so probably haven’t. The wisdom is the knowledge that things you do matter. Now, at last, we can do philosophy.

It’s a bitter irony that the best times in our lives for reading philosophy, when our minds are most subtle (and supple) and our time most flexible, are inarguably the worst times for doing philosophy. Of course, I can kill a pawnbroker at any time, but as I age I am more interested in practical philosophies that will not send me to prison. I want to try Schopenhauerian ethics and annihilate my willing; I want to live the way Nietzsche’s works make us hope he does; I want to read Camus and Sartre and try it all out for myself; I want to be so religious my clothes stink of incense; I want to walk the world over with only Walt Whitman for company, looking like a tramp. Now I can start to put these things into practice.

Here is where that psychological element comes in. The problems of life that I face now are mine. If before, when I was depressed, I could often blame someone or something else directly, now I am in control. I could always say I’m not happy because I’m not doing meaningful work, or because I’m not seeing my friends enough and can’t, or because I’m not exercising. With all of those things sorted, any problem that remains – and there is one – is real. The easy solutions have been tried, now life is at hand. The diffuse problems of society and economics, these too are there in the background, but divided now from the mush of poor mental health that comes with living badly, as it were. I can see them, and I can allow myself whatever anguish they will cause – for example, when I decide to rent in London and have to deal with that mess.

So when I feel this this-is-it-ness, it’s deeper than just some unkind word taken to heart on the playground or a shut door at university where I expected an embrace. It is the world I have a problem with, and the world I must answer. The problem, it goes without saying, is that although I am doing everything I am supposed to, something is still missing. I have started thinking about death at night, and the repetition of days. “Days are where we live”, as Philip Larkin has it. And seeing my days not being right, still having some hole – that’s a problem, and one I am responsible for sorting out.

To resolve it, I can look at my life and begin tinkering with it. Should I do more writing? Maybe write to some literary magazines? Or is the running not enough? I feel disgusted with myself for eating meat still – can I finally give it up or properly cut it down? (Living at home, this is hard. When I move to Germany at the end of the month, then it will be all on me). Can I see my friends more? What about calling my brother? And so on. We approach life as if it is a PC we have built, and begin moving the wires around, occasionally adding some RAM or something else here and there, and see what works. It feels almost fun, like a game.

Then there are the stronger remedies, like the bizarre ones my Polish girlfriend gets recommended when she calls her grandparents with a slight sniffle (drinking onion syrup or placing a bulb of peeled garlic next to your pillow, to mention a few). These remedies are philosophical. Is my attitude right? Am I heeding the voice of my conscience? Or should I, on the contrary, just grab a pillow and suffocate the voice instead? Then there are wild lifestyle changes – why not try being properly Epicurean, or properly Stoic? Visit a monastery? Should I give all my money away? With these too, there’s an element of play involved. And a worth goal – our own happiness, or satisfaction, or soothed conscience, or peace. (After all, the goal is itself a question for the philosophers).

The general feeling is one of excitement. Life is real, and its problems are real, and the solutions are worth trying. Never have I felt so much joy from a cutting phrase in Weil or Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein or Weber. Like a child in a toyshop who can’t wait to get home and unbox the latest toy tractor, when I hear a cool idea I can’t wait to think it over properly, to live it, and to see whether it works. That is what explains my obsession with Wittgenstein these past few months – I am trying to live some of what he says. I’m not reading for essays anymore, not even for blog posts. (Apologies!) The sheer weightiness of my decisions, made day after day, suffocate me like a stone upon my chest. Yet at the same time, suffocation entails dizziness. And I am madly lightheaded!  

Life is so sweet when we know that this is it. Without excuses, with all responsibility heaped on, every joy is magnified. To look at a tree and run my hand over its rough bark is a pleasure I’ve never felt so richly before. I go through art galleries almost at a blind run, and then allow myself an hour before a painting that takes my breath away and reaches right through to my soul and makes it bleed. I live – more and more I am living. Even if the regrets are magnified too, because nothing now will ever replace the lost time, still I am living. Suddenly, I can say to myself “da capo” and mean it. I find myself growing strong enough to confront my regrets and my mistakes – not all of them, by any stretch – and tell them and myself that it was worthwhile. Life is good.

This insane post is an attempt to work out what I am feeling. The this-is-it-ness of life is frightening and I still do not have a solution to the thought of death. I am working on it. I am living and trying everything I can and not letting it get too much for me. Because this is the real problem and challenge of my days. One is rising and falling on a see-saw above the abyss. We can be elated, and find our excitement from the urgency and seriousness of the search, or we can be rendered miserable by the emptiness of all things as we confront the void. The latter is what happened to Tolstoy, but even he managed to get out of it. I know how he did it too – I’ve got his letters even, and I’m making notes, and maybe one day you’ll see a photo of me in one of my posts, my beard grown out and a roughhewn walking stick in hand. (Be careful though, that might be the Whitman phase!)

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These thoughts and reflections, if they deserve that title, are best, I realise anyway, to have when you are not too old. I am now twenty-six, and not old by any stretch, but there are times when I do feel a bit un-young. Leaving aside the body, my memory is ever-so-slightly weaker and my ability to work with complex ideas is decreasing a bit too, from the baseline of my manic teenage years. I am not sure I could work my way through the Critique of Pure Reason anymore, even if I wanted to. Luckily, I don’t think this will be a problem.

If I had come to the realisation that I needed to change my life too late, I might have found I lacked the strength of mind and will to actually do anything. Tolstoy latched onto religion and stopped thinking. But he did a heck of a lot of thinking before he got to that point, as even his mature religious writings show. I, anyhow, have time and energy to live. To take us back to the beginning, part of that is thanks to having been very lucky in ending up with the job I did. I know that my consultant friend at Bain, or was it BCG, who is much cleverer than me and knows her Russian literature as well as I do, doesn’t have the time to do any thinking any more. That, to me, is a real waste.

Anyway, against the this-is-it-ness of things, and the void in the far distance, I am trying to keep myself excited. I hope the drama of my mental life, which is as much a part of this blog as is the stuff I read, continues to provide some interest in the years to come. And do tune in again for the inevitable update, some years hence, when I say that I have finally had a child of my own, and owing to the stress I have decided to stop thinking after all! (From what I understand, this is fairly common, though hardly deserving of condemnation.)

I did not make a post about it last year, but this one marks five years of Mostly About Stories. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of the posts. I’ve even enjoyed writing some of them!