On Love, In Sadness

Let me tell you about this world we live in. We live in a world so unabashedly complex that it dillutes our concept of what is important. It infects us with a mental sickness so pervasive and so potent that we become lost in the spectrum of our own emotions to the point that we are somehow completely unable to identify what makes us happy. We become fooled, tricked into believing that there are things more important than happiness and forget completely the simple notion that feeling happy in any given moment makes the moment a bright one. We overcomplicate the emotion, overthinking what it really is without realizing that happiness is far and away one of the easiest sensations to identify. It is easy to be happy in the short-term, and most people haven’t forgotten that, but the moment someone began to purport the unrealistic assertion that such a thing could be perpetuated forever—or for any extended length of time, really—the once-simple emotion took on two very different definitions and the human psyche has never recovered.

This is because the world is populated by cowards. People who are afraid to take a chance. People who don’t know what is good for them because they’re confused about what happiness is. They get so lost trying to “figure out” life as though it’s possible and would rather waste their years in the familiarity of their own solitary emotional disarray than take a chance, intimidated by the fact that it just might work. I know what it’s like to live that way, and you can do it, but you’ll end up learning the same simple lesson I did in a needlessly difficult way: happiness feeds off of happiness.

If you, as an unhappy person, find yourself surrounded by other unhappy people all the time, you will be fighting a losing battle and getting more and more confused about what it takes to be happy every single day. It is a miserable climb full of rose-coloured deception and trickery—peaks and valleys like you wouldn’t believe. Like nobody would believe, until it happens to you. This isn’t the fault of the people you hang around with, mind you—they are your friends and they are your friends for a reason. If they all happened to be unhappy, it’s not your fault, but it won’t do you any good either. Which is generally why people make new friends, I guess.

You have to take responsibility for what makes you happy and recognize what an important role the other people in your life play in understanding that. You have to recognize that you make friends with people because they make you happy and you make them happy—that’s the unwritten rule that all friends understand. Most importantly, though, you have to recognize that when the friends that you care about are hurt, you must remember that you have the power to make them happier and that in doing so, you too will feel better and your lives as friends will carry on.

Love is the simplest form of happiness because you are free to exchange any obligations or responsibilities for a sincere conversation. It provides you with an emotional safety cushion unlike any other and is priceless in value because it does not waver in the torrential winds of the rest of your life. Always, you have someone who will hold you when you’re broken down and tired. Always, you have someone who wants to be with you when it seems like nobody else is. Always, you have someone who actually cares about you, will hold your hand, not be afraid to touch your face and will tell you that everything is going to be okay, even when it’s not. The only people who seem to understand how much that’s worth never have anything to say about it. I guess that’s because you don’t realize it until you really are broken down and you really are hurt, but when you reach out for the hand you need to hold, it’s not there.

In conversation, it’s easy to explain how important “the little things” in life are. All you have to do is make a vague reference to something everyone enjoys, like popping bubble wrap, and then follow it up with a question like, “are these and other little quirks about life important to you?” No doubt, when you frame it that way, they sound pretty important and most people are likely to agree. Rarely though do we really consider what life would be like when some of those things are actually gone until they finally disappear. A cliché that has been beaten to death by its sheer durability—its absolute unwillingness to die. A cliché about appreciating what you have whose lesson we never learn despite widespread acknowledgment of it as truth.

In love, a million clichés all come true at once and require no explanation. Out of love, a million different clichés all come true at once, but we reject them because we believe our own circumstance to be unique and somehow exempt from universal rationale. Well, you’re not special. Don’t think you can justify your actions based on your circumstance. You can’t fool me, happy couple—you can tell me that you’ve found your true love all you want, but I’ll know it’s bullshit. I’ll know that it’s not your “true” love because no such thing exists—I’ll know that what you found was love and good for you, but I know that love exists everywhere for those brave enough to grab it. So, you’re not special—you’re just wildly disconnected from the millions of embittered single cowards in the real world where love is a scavenger hunt and not a lifestyle. And I envy you.

I envy you, but I’m not fooled by you and for that reason, I wish that you would see cause to envy me and what I’ve learned. Then maybe you, happy couple, would understand what you have and how hard some people will fight to get it. Then maybe you’ll stop and think before making a big problem out of a trivial one. Maybe you’d think a little harder and remember why you love them when you look into their eyes. And maybe every time that you’d hold them, you’d do it as though you may never hold them again. As everyone should.

Finding love should radically change your life expectations. It should be a trump card that feeds the other forces in your life, not a byproduct thereof. Obviously, it doesn’t change your life instantly, but it definitely changes your plans and goals and inspires you to fulfill them at any cost. Because you know it will be worth it. If you do not understand this about love, you do not know what it is. If you reject the chance to find love, you are a fool.
However, if you lived lonely, confused and unhappy, but then found love, understood it, understood what it means to be happy, lived happily for so long that it becomes natural, then have it taken away suddenly, without explanation, spent years mortified as to what and why this happened, finally getting the chance to resolve it, coming to terms with what happened, then finding out that the “resolution” was really just another unexplained “fuck you”, dwindling into a pathetic lifestyle of perpetual loneliness, finding no one to blame including oneself, but punishing oneself anyway for lack of any other reasonable conclusion, then walking around every day for years feeling so alone that every step is a heavy, sluggish waste of time, nobody wants to hang out with you, not a girl in the world will so much as bat an eye at you, nobody wants to hear your story and by then, you’ve told it so many times that it’s meaningless, and then suddenly, a glimmer of hope appears and you meet someone who enjoys spending time with you, actually phones you to make social calls after years of virtually nothing like it, then the friendship grows and the taste of love dances across the tip of your tongue, but it’s not love, it’s actually a demon in disguise that represents not love, but deception, and so you become bitterly familiar with the game as the players have chosen to play it, fucking around with heavy emotions and pleading ignorance to get away with it while you sit on the roller coaster and get driven to the top just to be thrown back down without a seatbelt, the ups and downs leave you exhausted, frustrated that the world could be so cruelly unpredictable, then you descend into the familiar state of solitary loneliness, joining all the other cowards, becoming resigned to the fact that the world is full of cowards and coming to terms with how much pain such cowardice causes, idly drawing your attention away from the insurmountable mountain that love has become in your mind, subtly dividing your efforts between an increasingly fruitless quest and the responsibilities of everyday life until love seems almost meaningless, a dream that I once had perhaps, long-forgotten, but then hurriedly brought back into focus by meeting someone that not only wanted to spent time with you, but even shares your frustration with love and the ridiculous and immature way the people in the world handle it, bypassing the social hurdles that put road blocks in the way of love for countless people, defying every bitter truth you’ve come to believe throughout the journey, clearing up the confusion that clouded your thoughts for so long, challenging you to open up, and finally you don’t have to worry about what happened in the past and you don’t have to worry about the hopelessness of the future, because finally everything seems to make sense, and finally you’ve found love, it has found you, and in doing so, it has made the most confusing and challenging thing in the world shockingly simple and hugely rewarding, and you settle down, and its effect on how you plan to live your life begins to set in, then you too are a fool. All the sincerity in the world won’t prevent it from collapsing on you. All the trust, all the times you’ve had—even those great specific moments that seemed so amazing at the time—will not matter and you will be fucked over for doing nothing wrong. It will not make sense to you, it cannot be explained to you, but it will happen and you will be helpless and confused and once again, a fool. A fool for not seeing it sooner, a fool for believing “I love you” when you hear it, a fool for saying it and meaning it, a fool for trusting anyone at all and a fool for thinking that your story is special and that this time it wouldn’t be like all the others.

You won’t fool me again, world. Not by your watery eyes, not by your cheeky promises and not by the artificial lights shining brightly along the corridor of this endless black tunnel.

wars in vanity, sweet or sour

It seems like the “post-modern” world, such that it is, spends a great deal of time trying to define things that are well beyond the scope of definition. In fact, the post-modernist movement in its purist form is nothing more than bureaucracy from a philosophical point of view, as it is founded on the principle of studying the effects of an intellectual movement while simultaneously purporting to be one. I’m all for the pursuit of knowledge and clarity, but like many deconstructivist architects, I don’t really understand why you can’t build a weird-looking building without being labeled a deconstructivist by some pompous scholar of postmodern thought. Similarly, you should be able to have your opinions heard by others as your opinions and not the opinions of a postmodernist movement or some other body of nameless speakers; or to put it simply: just because you’re a grain of sand doesn’t mean you came from the beach.

As a realist, I have a hard time seeing any advantages or disadvantages to picking apart the human brain for the purposes of being able to explain it to someone else on paper down the road. This is because I’m about people and the effect that our work has on people. There’s no reason to invest more effort into something than you will gain in the end, but quite often, the end objective is either ambiguously defined or abstract in nature. You see this a lot in community services and public opinion when a large group of people will band together with some absurd goal in mind like “cleaning up the streets” or “cracking down on homelessness.” With goals that cover such a broad spectrum of variables, you inevitably require more people to administer them and the more people that get involved with any one project, the more you end up losing sight of the original goal. Of course, if the goal is unattainable from the git-go, losing sight of it isn’t really the issue and we’ve engaged in the ultimate futile exercise of keeping masses of people extremely busy for little to no gain except the satisfaction and pride they get from their own work. This applies to the study of philosophical movements quite readily too, but it is rarely studied (probably to avoid perpetuating the bureaucracy; the last thing we need is some guy writing an analysis of the effects of the effects of a movement on another movement).

Like I said, I’m a realist, so with everything in life, I like to see how it affects people on a personal level. I’m not about to sit back and write about how “people” behave and how they change as a group because I know very well that we are all individuals and although there are noticeable behavioural trends to be seen in numbers, announcing them and discussing them doesn’t really have any bearing on how we behave as individuals. I could draw up a pretty little line graph illustrating the decline in religious participation around the world over the last hundred years, but that doesn’t mean that a religious individual is any less faithful than he would have been otherwise.

For instance, there are legions of people devoted to studying postmodernism and debating its cultural applications, definitions and related concepts. When any one of those people wakes up in the morning, odds are they still brush their teeth, still tie their shoelaces, still lock their doors when they leave home and have generic introspective thoughts about all of these activities that all the postmodernist study in the world can’t get rid of. In fact, to refer back to the bureaucratic process, it may very well slow down tangible productivity in your day by spending a lot of time and energy on virtually nothing, overthinking the behaviour of others in a postmodern context and making decisions based on vague trends in thought process that other parties are not even privy to and quite frankly, don’t want to be.

The problem is that I am also an altruist, and to be altruistic and realistic at the same time is thankless work; whoever said that you only get what you give probably ended up getting a lot more than they actually deserved and didn’t realize how lucky they really were. Worse yet, I’m an altruist and a realist who works within the framework of a bureaucracy every day and it forces me to de-value nearly all of my work-related input and ride above the job, focusing instead on how the end result benefits me in my personal life. Don’t get me wrong, I do get a certain sense of job satisfaction out of completing the occasional project but it’s my nature as a realist that makes me feel a little bit deflated every time because I know for certain that there is little to no effect on individual people despite all the time I’ve put into it. Those that I work with seem to have been a little washed out by the red tape and they’ll see the completion of the project as the goal, whereas I’m stuck thinking that the “goal” is really to improve something for people—to make something better in the lives of those I work with, ya know.

So sure, you can draft a huge blueprint to renovate your kitchen and the presentation will be on beautiful new reams of paper with bulletproof organizational plans and reference material galore; but until you get to make a sandwich on your new countertop space some summer afternoon, I don’t believe the project is done. For me, my portion of the work is finished long before you even slice the bread and without actually seeing an end result (or more often than not having good reason to believe that there is no end result), the effect is erosive—it does something to you and I can’t exactly explain what it is, but this nameless sensation is really the feature subject of this article.

I was talking to my grandmother a little while back and she explained the same sensation to me in a different context, but I understood right away. She explained that while she was still in the work force, she paid into the federal unemployment insurance fund for 35 years, had a lot of hard times, moved to a province that had considerably fewer jobs available with the intent of collecting unemployment for some time, but was told that she was not eligible. There are reasons for this on paper and rules in place governing who can and cannot collect unemployment based on where you live, but whether what she was doing was right or wrong is not the issue; it’s the principle of the thing, and she said exactly what I said: “It does something to you.” When you’re so honest for so long and spend 35 years paying into an unemployment fund, never ever collecting from it and then being told that you’re not allowed because you moved to a have-not province, it just leaves you with a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. Meanwhile, there are people who are self-employed or who have “arrangements” with their paying authority who will work for 10 months and then collect unemployment for the other 2 every single year. So who’s the real winner here?

She also cited another experience from a welfare office several decades ago after her husband had transformed into an alcoholic of home-breaking proportions but she didn’t nearly have the means to leave him with four kids in tow. One day, presumably when she realized she had no other choice, my grandmother walked her four kids down to a welfare office and stood in line armed with a resolve to be completely honest about the situation. She basically told the person behind the counter: “Look I’m sorry, we have no food, no money, my husband’s not working and if this doesn’t work, I don’t even know what I’m going to do.” They gave her nothing and she walked her four kids back home, but that’s not the part that is debilitating in the same thankless way that I’ve been describing. The thing is, the very next day, she went back to that very same welfare office, talked to a different clerk and lied: “My husband left me…four kids to take care of…no income…” And they gave her some money.

It just does something to you.

It shattered my grandmother’s reality, I think. When everything that you have been brought up to believe is right and ethically sound just gets mercilessly pissed on in a very real situation, I don’t believe you ever recover completely. She described her stunned and bemused disbelief at getting money for telling a direct lie and being turned away with four kids for telling the truth with a kind of resignation that makes me sad that she has, and maybe never will, live the life that such an incredible person deserves.

I guess this is why I’m an altruist but as the world becomes much more self-involved and independent, it gets harder and harder to convince people of this. Everyone is so suspicious of everyone else’s intentions that it seems like there’s not a soul around who would possibly do something that only benefits someone other than themselves. Is it really so hard to believe that you can gain some personal satisfaction out of helping other people? Is that not selfish enough to be true? What do I have to do to convince the average person that my intentions are sincere?

It’s an uphill climb that my grandmother has been trekking all her life, and I’m right on her heels wearing rollerskates without the foggiest idea of how to make it easier.

walking in very saggy old shoes

What am I doing?

I've always described myself as someone who lives "in the moment" and readily proclaim myself as such without hesitation. I think it carries good logic because most of the people that I meet who are significantly older than I am seem to have a lot of regrets from their youth and a thinly-veiled yearning to be young again whenever I talk to them. By living in the moment, I don't anticipate having this problem. Countless people frown on the notion of "living in the past," but it clearly happens as the future you look forward to steadily shrinks away with time; you simply have less to look at in that direction. For this reason, and others, I support neither living in the past, nor living in the future (oft-considered good and bad advice, respectively), but living in the present.

I don't have a whole lot of experience living in the past so it makes me uneasy to be envied by older people for no reason other than my age. Nevertheless, it happens all the time and I really don't know what to say to them. What I want to say is, "Deal with it, it's the passage of time--it's not my fault I was born on the cusp of Generation Y--it's not my fault that you don't know how to program your cell phone and I do."

But I don't say that because they're not listening. It's easy for me to fall under the false impression that "envy" is the same as "respect" in this situation when they are really two completely different animals. Envy is a self-absorbed niche and when older people who seem to have some underlying issues about being old, their envy of me or people my age seems to blind them to the fact that we are people who have developed individual personalities. Instead, we are overcome by repeat exclamations as to how beautiful we are and glassy-eyed stares that make you feel like the centre of attention, when really, their own memories and their own distant life in the past is the true focus.

Sometimes, I am able to say other things that break this trance. Sometimes, people are listening just enough that they actually process what I'm saying and when that happens, I find I'm much better off at establishing some sort of working relationship with them. I operate much better with words than making impressions and my physical strengths are largely overshadowed by my mental ones. To have that recognized by a total stranger who spent the bulk of the conversation mesmerized by my age rather than my input shows a strength in their character--an ability to read between the lines a little and see that although there is beauty in youth, it doesn't mean that beautiful young people get that beauty from their age alone.

Lately though, I've been questioning my approach. Or rather, I'm questioning the angle at which I am approaching things. This applies to both the traits I consider valuable in others (i.e. that ability to read between the lines) and my mantra of living in the moment. I have to make a run at both of these daily philosophical challenges because they define my conduct but I've hit an interesting road block in my life. Before now (at least in adulthood, for what that's worth), I was pretty convinced that my values were the right ones, my ethical framework was respectable and I was sufficiently kind, caring and generous enough to be considered a great person in the eyes of others. I believed this and stuck to it in spite of the fact that my own personal life seemed to ultimately collapse around me and I was destroying myself from the inside out. When that collapse happened, I retained the values and state of mind that I had established as a happy person because I was so convinced that it was the right approach. It's easy to draw a dotted line between these two items now and say, "Well duh, Randall, you gotta change your approach--look what's happening to you," but even now, I'm not sure they are related.

I first established this confidence in my conduct while overcoming great hardship in the interest of reaping an even greater reward. The effect of actually accomplishing that, defeating the odds and claiming the prize was so potent that the idea of changing my "approach" seemed completely insane. It took a lot of years of frustration to drum up some sort of personal mode of thought that actually works--why waste that when it has proven potential to be so right?

Then again, it hasn't yielded a great deal of good times for many years now, so I begin to question why I'm attached to my approach and whether or not it is indeed the right one after all. It's hard to go from being so very certain of something to having your sense of reality questioned by your own mind. Like discovering that there's no Santa Claus by accident when you're five years old--it's just unsettling. In any case, I have yet to hit this extreme anyway and am only feeling slightly detached from my own behaviour, meticulously picking it apart as an overhead observer. Looking for faults. Finding a few, even.

But what keeps those happy people going? That's what I wonder. Am I doing something wrong by just fluctuating between indifference and malcontent all the time? I thought I had this shit figured out! So, I'm forced to question what it is exactly that I need to change to be happy, without sacrificing what it is that already makes me a good person (...or what I...think? makes me a good person??).

Once again, I tend to live a life of casual spontaneity, cherishing the moment and spending less of my time working to build a brighter future, especially if it makes for a darker present. Like I always say, the present is all you'll ever get to experience; why not make the most of it?

Even so, I've been weighing the pros and cons of living in the future, a concept I readily abandoned without much consideration after having been so thoroughly convinced of the practicality of living in the moment. One might reason that if the present in which you live becomes too dark to live in, you can achieve a happier outlook by dreaming of a better future and spending all of your time and effort trying to build it. Whereas my point of view dictates that most of your time and effort should be spent on building the best out of what you have, with respect to building for the future well enough that you can maintain that routine until death, I guess. Maybe I just never considered it worthwhile to spend 5 or 10 years in complete misery just to achieve a wonderful 40 years afterwards. It seems like it's ridiculous that you can't be happy every year and that somehow there's no way of achieving that. In fact, I know it's ridiculous. I've gone entire years where I was happy every day. If you can do it for consecutive years, I don't see why a whole lifetime is out of the question--you know, scatter in a few bad days every third Autumn or something just to make it real and voila! Bury me a happy man.

Knowing that it's possible makes it harder to achieve happiness by default. It sets the bar. I'm not sure how high I can jump anymore--maybe not high enough. I think maybe instead of leaping for the bar, I'll do some training instead--build some leg strength, some agility--think about the future.

Who wants to live in this moment anyway?