I’ve been dipping into Charles Bukowski again. He was a few years younger than I am now when he began to achieve a certain degree of literary success with his column “Notes of a Dirty Old Man.” Unconventional, violent, below the belt, sometimes taking a roundabout route to make a point – his stories were never easy reading! Sometimes they would meander through several subjects in a single sentence. I read him as a disillusioned humanist.
Which reminds me: isn’t it strange how we’re constantly trying to see ourselves through other people’s eyes, or through their particular lens? Being at peace with yourself, simply not giving a shit about what other people think every now and then, doing your own thing – that was never MY THING.
I mean, seriously, these days I have to make less of an effort to acknowledge bullshit with a shrug and a “Yeah, if you say so…”, intended to convey my at least partially benevolent indifference. The less close I am to someone, the easier it is to shrug it off. And then there are those moments when complete strangers manage to trigger me. For fuck’s sake…
Presumably, there’s a particular breed of people who simply never get too old for a bit of good old-fashioned troublemaking. I think one aspect of this is having convictions. Incidentally, the difference between a conviction and a dogma, as I see it (mind you, I’m not claiming this to be universally applicable!), is that a conviction is based on insight and understanding, whereas a dogma is based on emotion. Another difference is that a conviction remains open to change in the light of new or different insights, while a dogma becomes increasingly impervious to facts.
There is, therefore, a distinction between defending a well-founded conviction – even vehemently and with considerable verbal force – and the largely empty rhetoric of dogmatism. And unfortunately, I can’t deny it: dogmatists trigger me time and again because they’re incapable of thinking beyond the limits of their own horizons. Even if you stood them on top of the Kalmit, instead of seeing the Upper Rhine Plain stretching out before them, all they’d see would be trees…
Another characteristic of the respectable old troublemaker (and troublemaking sisters are, of course, equally welcome!) is a restless mind. When you’re interested in too many things and spread your attention too widely, you sometimes inevitably end up in a state of unsatisfied arousal (speaking in purely platonic terms!), simply because a single human lifetime is far too short for so many interests. At least if you’re equipped with an average intellect.
What’s more, a restless mind makes you susceptible to all sorts of stupid shit, such as depression, because you simply experience things more intensely. I can’t really explain it, but it feels a bit like looking up into the sky on a dazzlingly bright summer’s day without sunglasses. There’s too much light! Like trying to listen to a bird in a crowded square. There’s too much noise! Like trying to focus on a single emotion while a demonstration is raging all around you. There are too many (negative) emotions. Sometimes, there’s simply too much of everything…
I’ve learned to live with it. And most of the time, it works out OK. Not always, but at least most of the time.
Sometimes, though, life is like reading Bukowski – there’s simply too much life crammed into life. And you can’t escape it, either, because the train keeps rolling, the machine demands to be fed, and everyone is waiting for you to do your fucking job. After all, you only have one job – to function, so that everything else can function too, because we all have to function together.
Is that what life is? Being reduced to a function? Doesn’t exactly sound like freedom.
I mean, objectively speaking, we live in one of the wealthiest, freest, safest, and best-organized countries on Earth. Sure, we have our problems too: social and economic inequality, structural racism, a lack of commitment to environmental protection, selfishness, narcissism, and a few other -isms – BUT, on average, we’re a damn sight better off than a very large percentage of the world’s population. (People always seem conveniently to forget just how well democracy can work whenever it suits the enemies of democracy.)
So what is it, then, that makes so many people so unhappy and dissatisfied?
On the one hand, there’s certainly that one major problem: inequality. Our system disproportionately favors guys like me. On the other hand, a kind of existential anxiety has spread throughout society. The increasing individualization and fragmentation of our society have placed more responsibility on the individual: “YOU have to figure out how to get YOUR life together all by yourself! Oh, and by the way – from now on, YOU have to do it even faster!”
The pressure is wearing people down.
To simply sit down at a typewriter with a beer, as Bukowski did back in ’68, and give the good Lord the middle finger, at least in literary terms, is a luxury hardly anyone can afford these days. Instead, we have to achieve more and more just to be able to afford the things we’re supposed to be able to afford.
The treadmill of turbo-capitalism.
That’s what’s fucking me harder and harder (pardon my French)!
I love my work as a school principal, as a lecturer, as a project developer, as a mentor – but even here, there’s this constant pressure to produce results. And the measurability of what I do simply cannot be assessed in monthly financial statements; it can only REALLY be judged over the course of several years. For the people from the distant realm of Fiscalia (the controllers), that’s a nightmare!
And yet, much to my own surprise, I’m becoming more and more of a businessman myself.
Nevertheless, I’m still searching, almost desperately, for a way to reconcile the creative dreamer within me with the workhorse bound to the demands of reality.
Anyone got any advice for me…?