I was talking recently with my dad about jobs. More accurately, my lack of job prospects. More specifically, my lack of job prospects confounded by the fact that I don’t know what I want to do.
If you read my first entry of performative journaling, you may begin to see a throughline: these days, I don’t really know what I’m doing, or what I want to do.
He asked me what I enjoy, and it made me consider that maybe all the things I like to do aren’t moneymakers. And I’m content with that. I told him: talking to friends, playing music, reading, and drinking beer. Those, at least, are the categories most of my “fun” falls into.
But, truly, the best moments are when things are combined—say, I’m drinking a beer while listening to records on my buddy’s couch, while he and another friend and I shoot the shit about nothing and everything in between. Or, say, I’m hanging out after a successful gig at a Denny’s or something with loved ones who chose to come out (note: all my gigs are attended almost exclusively by loved ones these days, given my lack of quote unquote “fans” [yes, I just wrote out the phrase “quote unquote” because I wanted you to hear it in your head. Powerless man enacts power by putting sounds in your mind. More at eleven.]).
This is not unique. We like to be together. We’re a social species. Sartre said “hell is other people,” and I think that’s true, but I think heaven is too. We are the most beautiful barbaric thing the stars ever made.
Oh, look at him go, waxing poetic. He only made it four paragraphs.
Anyway, it is not unique that I enjoy music, getting intoxicated, and laughing with friends and my girlfriend. And it isn’t exactly unique, though I find it problematic, that these are seemingly the only times I can find joy. And if I’m just sitting on a sleepy late spring day at work, with nothing obliging me, I’ll often find myself doomscrolling twitter, or watching car crash compilations or jiu jitsu techniques on YouTube, or, in my wiser and more and more infrequent moments, reading a book.
(At the time of writing this, I’m currently reading Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. It’s funny and kind of boring so far in the sense that as a white guy I’ve already consumed a Herculean amount of World War II era art. But it comes after a read of Kafka’s The Trial so, that, combined with Catch 22, combined with my boring admin job, is giving me plenty of existential angst about the everyday horrors of bureaucracy recently. But at least I’m not a bombardier or on trial for some indiscretion I don’t remember committing.)
Anyway, I wonder if this inability to find joy in the mundane is an extension of how dopesick I and the rest of us are on dopamine from these stupid computers we hold in our hands.
Give them the world in their pocket. Then the real world out there will rarely feel real. And when it does, it’ll often feel inadequate. Or, we’ll feel inadequate to face it.
All of this does nothing to address my main current problem, which is that I need more money and better work.
How fucked up is that? Local man writes that he can’t find joy in basic daily activities, and then he says his main current problem is money and inadequate work.
It all ties in, somewhere. From recent conversations with friends, I’ve also gleaned that the things ailing me are not at all unique for anyone in their mid-twenties. With fortuitous exceptions here and there, we’re all broke. We’re all underemployed. We’re all doomscrolling and quivering for the next hit of the next thing to distract us. And I don’t intend to turn this into a manifesto, but I think most of those things are by design.
…Anyway.
It’s hard to break life up into eras while you’re living them, but it’s easy (and safe) to say that there’s before Covid and the After. In the before, in undergrad, I read one too many things by Samuel Beckett and got obsessed with the idea of secular purgatory, living in the in-between, waiting around for something to happen. That pretentious undergrad had no idea how lucky he had it, and how much better it is to feel between two things than at the end of one. Everything now is just After, colored by what came before. And perhaps that’s nothing new. Faulkner said something like “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Something like that.
But, we’re in the After of our time.
After covid: four beers with a friend after work on a Monday? Absolutely.
After covid: putting out a new song on YouTube haphazardly recorded in selfie mode on my iPhone in my bedroom? Why not.
After covid: quiet quitting to the extreme by using my downtime at work to bang out halfthoughts on a state computer? For legal reasons, no, I would never do that.
But really, there are plenty of things I’ll accept and do now, in pursuit of joy, that I would have considered irresponsible in the past. But after covid, after I got that silly pulmonary embolism in ’21 and almost shuffled off early, after the thousand small cuts of the past 4 years, I just don’t give a shit anymore.
If the world burns, you might as well use it to cook a hot dog or something.
And lo and behold, writing this has made me feel a bit better. Go figure—stop reading an endless barrage of bad news on a dumpster fire of a social media app owned by a South African robber baron diamond heir with the body of a shellless king crab and your mood will improve.
I do miss the times when the sentence above would make absolutely no sense to me, though. If it makes no sense to you, count yourself among the lucky.
So– my new and improved list of things I like to do is: talking to friends, playing music, reading, drinking beer and, apparently, sharing halfthoughts with the world.
Perhaps that means this will continue.
Until then.
matt nilsen 