This
fellow with whom I'm developing a radio show has been looking for a way
to Haiti since it took the wrath of YHWH (or whomever). I get the
feeling that puts him in a distinct minority at this moment in history
when more people want
out of Haiti than ever before. But he's a
trained EMT with the apparent habit of darting off to troubled places —
most recently, Iraq — and doing what he can. Though no viable entrées
have presented themselves, he remains on the lookout, if cautiously so.
"I'll go where there's occasional explosions," he said, "but not
necessarily where there's no food or water."
Whether or not
you're into foreign disasters and/or combustion, statistics say you've
probably taken a moment to reflect on how, no matter what work
machination, obscure social struggle or pleasure search isn't working
out in your developed-nation life, at least you're not in Haiti, Where
They Have Real Problems. Some of you have no doubt seized the
opportunity to loathe yourselves for having food, water and a modicum
of material comfort yet not existing in a perpetual paroxysm of
ecstatic gratitude.
How dare I get worked up about my shower's low water pressure, you grumble.
Think of Haiti, man. Haiti!That
this doesn't work reflects, to my mind, one of the most interesting
conditions of humanity. David Foster Wallace wrote about this — more
eloquently, of course, than I ever will — in "A Supposedly Fun Thing
I'll Never Do Again", or, if you prefer, "that essay about the
despair-inducing cruise ship." Part of this despair was induced by the
elusiveness of satiety. No matter how desperately Celebrity Cruise
Lines tried to "pamper" its guests, and no matter how desperately those
guests tried to attain satisfaction via said pampering, it never quite
seemed to click, especially in Wallace's own case.
Maybe,
he speculated while growing dissatisfied with the cabin that initially
stunned him in its sheer advancedness and comfort-engineeredness,
there's just some infantile part of each and every human being that
simply
wants, like that's what it's
for. Acknowledging
this might, for some, be akin to gazing down the abyss. Wallace himself
seemed none too happy about it, though as we've now confirmed, he
wasn't exactly a happy camper; his was having a good day if he could
make out the shafts of light through the avalanche of meta-thoughts.
These
meta-thoughts didn't trouble most of Wallace's fellow cruisers. Many
were too busy conga-line-forming, skeet-shooting and
midnight-buffet-gorging to entertain meta-thoughts at all. While I
don't desire a mindset quite that unaware, I do regularly feel the
stifling inconvenience of the meta-thought morass, how they crowd out
regular thoughts and even actions. "Am I being tripped up by my
concerns about how this sentence I'm speaking now will be received?"
"How will my next planned actions be affected by my planning responses
to whether or not this action goes as envisioned?" "Is what I'm doing
now what I want to do, or what I
think, I want to do, and to what extent does the distinction matter?" Criminy.
But
meta-thoughts have given me a number of useful insights too, such as
the "Would I respect me?" choice test. They've also led me to
internalize the deeper realization that, indeed, the infant within us
never shuts up,
never
stops wanting. But I don't find this conclusion depressing, or even
disheartening; I simply draw from it that satisfaction is a product not
of where you are, but of where you're going. To get calculistic, it
ain't about your value, it's about your first derivative (and maybe
your second). In this light, statements like "When
x happens, I'll attain happiness" don't make sense, but ones like "While
x is happening, I'll be happy" make somewhat more.
And
here I've stumbled into using a forbidden word. Though it looks to have
hit a downhill slope, "happiness research" is in vogue right now, and
it's generated much hand-wringing: Are folk wisdom's guarantees about
what leads to happiness wrong? Is an individual's happiness fixed and
uninfluenced by events? Are folk wisdom's guarantees about what leads
to happiness
right? Is happiness even possible? I fight a
personal battle against my impulse to write off all happiness research
as dumb, though I
do believe — reasonably, I'd submit — that the field's practitioners tend to miss the point.
Is
getting "happiness" the goal of my life? Not unless you define
"happiness" as "the goal of a human's life," rendering the whole
inquiry worthless. I'd probably exchange away some amount of what's
commonly perceived as happiness for other things — madder interviewing
or writing skillz, for instance. And what
is the stuff, anyway?
Is it identical to pleasure? To aforementioned "satisfaction," which
even I can't explain with any clarity? To numbers on a scale checked by
survey respondents? These are foundational happiness research
questions, I suppose, though that only makes the unavailability of
answers all the more surprising.
The happiness research finding I
do
buy is the factoid, now tiresome due to ceaseless trottings-out — even
John Cleese riffed on it at the 2004 UCSB convocation — that, beyond
$20,000 per year, an additional dollar of annual income does not
reliably increase one's happiness. This no doubt varies from place to
place — different costs of living and whatnot — but I think the thrust
is this: once you've got the bare necessities, more money might mean
more happiness, but then again, it might not. (Let the "some do, some
don't" ridicule of social science begin. Or, rather, continue.) This
lines up with the notion of happiness as a by-product of positive
change in one's life. Show me a parched, hungry Haitian successfully
gaining food, shelter and running water, and I'll show you someone
experiencing a hell of a lot more happiness than a real estate
developer replacing one of his lesser BMWs with a finer BMW.
On a
recent episode
of his podcast, Adam Carolla talked about "rich white guy problems,"
that is to say, inconveniences that only pop up and seem major when you
get to the seven figures: a delay on the shipment of one of your
Lamborghini parts, for instance, or the party house's need for a new
set of jacuzzi pumps. This naturally segued into commentary about
entertainment industry talk on the Leno/Conan contretemps. "Only in
this business can a guy walk away from his job, get 40 million dollars,
and not have it be the best day of his life. People say, 'Sure, Conan's
gonna get the money, but he'll be off the show, he won't be on TV, he's
screwed.'
What?"
But
isn't he? At that level, I imagine it hasn't been about the money for a
long time. Any gratification — call it happiness, call it satisfaction,
call it whatever — thus comes from what you're doing, not how much you
happen to be financially compensated for it. Pay a guy $21 million
rather than $20 million to do a movie and he'll be, like,
whatever. Give him more creative freedom and you'll see some real excitement.
That said, I
personally
reside at the point on the curve where an extra few grand — or, say, a
double sawbuck left in the ATM — can greatly widen the smile on my
face. Maybe this is a bad sign for someone my age, but when I saw
sibilance link to a
WSJ article about how a 22-year-old girl managed to make it in NYC on $30,000 a year, my reaction was not "Woah, how'd she swing
that?" but a series of elaborate fantasies about all the things I could do with the impossible dream of $30,000. Hell, what
couldn't
I do? That's "thousand" with a T, people. (And yes, when I think about
how Ira Glass famously made "only" $60,000 a year for a long time while
working hard on the radio, my inner voice becomes Robin Leach's.)
The
piece's subject had to do a lot of tacky bullshit to survive: living
with three roommates in Brooklyn, smuggling wine into bars,
dumpster-diving for bread, boiling chicken bones into soup. I don't
even do that, but then again,
(a) I'm in Santa Barbara, not New York and
(b)
this is maybe why I'm always a lot worse at saving up money than I
expect to be. When Chris, a.k.a. The Livejournalist Formerly Known as
cobalt999, told me that he'd saved enough over nine months of work —
nine months — to engage in some extended "jetsetting," I was like,
what the hell.Never
have I amassed an amount of money that would allow me to do anything
remotely describable as "jetsetting." I realize, on some partially
inaccessible level of awareness, that I
could get that kind of
dough, since I meet plenty of people my age who do. I remember hearing
one guy a while back declare that one of his goals for the year was to
"make $100,000," and it was
plausible. Dude was born the same year as me, yet I stand a better chance of
finding
a hundred grand — even just in ATMs — than earning it. But I only know
of heinously unpalatable means to legitimately score that kind of
scratch. I imagine myself getting shouted at over the phone about how
something I implemented isn't e-commercing right, or maybe leveraging
some stuff in order to leverage some other stuff.
Either
way, I assume I'd be forced into a work situation that would crowd out
"recording interviews about whatever I want" or "never being in an
office before 9:00 or after 4:00" or "writing thousands of words about
my incomprehension at how those who make money can stand it" from my
life, which would fall into the nose-cut-off-to-spite-the-face category
of futility. If I really took this seriously, I suppose I could pull up
stakes and go somewhere cheap; while Santa Barbara isn't quite to NYC's
level of cost astronomicality, it's known at least-region wide as a
pricey place to live.
Worse, the city's cost-of-living premium
is inflated by demand for qualities I don't care about: sun, beaches,
smallness, quiet. And my thinking about cities has been strongly
influenced of late by a remark from the Berlin-based
imomus, who, in
pondering whether or not he could live in Osaka, offhandedly observed:
I've
never seriously thought about living in Osaka before. I love Tokyo best
of all. But increasingly, my outlook has Berlinified, by which I mean I
regard expensive cities like New York, London and Tokyo as unsuited to
subculture. They're essentially uncreative because creative people
living there have to put too much of their time and effort into the
meaningless hackwork which allows them to meet the city's high rents
and prices.
This strikes a loud, long chord with me. I've
bitched and moaned about how SB can't seem to sustain viable
subcultures, and the expensiveness itself might be a considerable part
of the problem. Those who want or need a bargain on housing go way out
into the sticks, where there is not only nothing interesting but
actually a
negative amount of interestingness. (The land saps
interesting nutrients from your bloodstream.) But as hard a time as I
give this place, beliefs reside in action, not in testimony; if I
didn't like it, I'd be gone, baby, gone. (Given, of course, the bucks
necessary to move.)
I will thus, for the foreseeable future, stick to what I call
COLIN MARSHALL'S $EVEN-POINT PLAN FOR FINANCIAL $UCCE$$
- Make more radio shows
- Write more essays
- Conduct more interviews
- Shoot more videos
- Record more field recordings
- Write up more experimental films
- Compose more plans for financial $ucce$$
I can't think of any worse paths to wealth, but then again, I can't think of any better ones!
I’ve never quite gotten over the fact that I pop into the studio, interview James Wood or Alain de Botton or Clive James or whomever, and then eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Not just a peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich, but perhaps my fifth peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich of the week. Of the many aspects of my life that don’t quite compute together, I tend to fixate on these two. Yet they stand in a sort of of non-causal alignment: I interview luminaries in order to build myself a career that somehow never materializes, and I eat PB&Js to build myself a savings that somehow never materializes.![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}