The Long Game
Or is it short?
I didn’t use to read the news. It wasn’t initially a conscious decision, but once I realised it was something I should probably do, and tried to do it, its vast and ever-changing nature overwhelmed me and I gave up – how could I possibly catch up on everything I had missed? The second I did, it would have changed again. I finally gave it another crack two years ago out of shame (and the wish to appear smarter to a particular person) and I’ve been vaguely up to date ever since.
But as a newbie to the news, if you will, late last year I asked a friend whether things were really bad right now, like I felt they were, or if this was what the news was like all the time and I had just been blissfully coasting over the top of it.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Things are really bad right now.’
I’m finding it increasingly difficult to know how to act in a world that feels like it’s going to end at any minute. And before you start thinking what you’re thinking, I know that things are not nearly as bad for people like me as they are for people elsewhere. I know that this is an incredibly privileged standpoint to be coming from. But since this newsletter has only ever been self-serving, and since it is possible to be empathetic and worried about other people while also worrying about yourself, I’m going to carry on. Okay? Thanks.
‘Life is short’ has come to seem to me, recently, as a deeply contradictory phrase. For example: is life too short to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t want the same things as you? Or is life too short to even bother planning for the future, so we should just have as much fun and be as happy as we possibly can in the present? Which is it? My ex and I broke up because of misaligned views on what our future looked like. But what if neither of us has a future? Should we have chosen to be unhappy in the short term because of this nebulous dream we each had of how our lives would go in the long term? Or should we have held on to each other in the moment? Is life too short to text the guy I’m interested in but who won’t be moving to my city for a few months, whereupon we may or may not go on a date, which may or may not be a good date, which may or may not lead to something? Should I just shoot my shot and find out now? Or am I just being impatient? Should I drunk DM him* and then think better of it ten minutes later and unsend it? Did I already do that? Potentially. Did it show up on his lock screen anyway? Unconfirmed.
* I’ve noticed that as soon as I put something as my One Good Thing it immediately ceases to be true: case in point, my four months with no drunk texting. It’s like a weird predictive curse. Since I put having a pitch accepted as my One Good Thing I haven’t had another one, which is a real shame as I’m sitting on a truly slamming long read on my specialist subject entitled ‘Why You’re a Fuckboy and How to Stop’. Although in retrospect GQ might not have been the right home for that particular piece. People don’t like being forced to look in a mirror.
It’s seeping into every area of my life. Should I be staying in this job, which I do love, yes, but which I also love because of its potential to lead to something even greater, or should I leave it and pursue writing full-time because that’s what I really want to do, and time may be running out? Should I be eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, to safeguard my future health, or should I be eating whatever the fuck I want because we could all die tomorrow? Should I quit smoking so I don’t die of lung cancer in forty years, or should I be smoking constantly because I adore cigarettes and they make me happy right now? Should I fake quit smoking because I’m hiking Machu Picchu in six weeks and then go right back to smoking again afterwards? Should I even be attempting to pursue a relationship, or should I just be dating everything that moves in order to imbibe as much of the human experience as possible, to never miss an opportunity? Should I even be working at all, or should I just sack the whole thing off and go travel to places I want to go to, because there might not be time later, or because those places might not even exist in a year? My ex and I considered and then discarded a trip to Yosemite last summer, because of the risk of deadly forest fires, and at the time he said, aptly, that this was still probably the best time to go if it was somewhere I wanted to go, because the situation would inevitably worsen with every passing year until eventually going there at all would become a death wish. I was thinking about the whole concept of work; how you work for the majority of your life in order to later have enough money so you can retire in comfort and have the means to do what you want when you’re older. But what if you don’t get that chance? What if, like my mum, you get hit by a terminal illness before you even have the opportunity to enjoy the life you had been planning for? Maybe we should all operate in a kind of reverse retirement, where you have all the fun now and work to pay it off later. At least that way if your life is cut short, the only thing you’re missing out on is forty years of hard labour. How are we meant to continue living our silly little lives, writing our silly little newsletters and drinking our silly little glasses of orange wine, in the face of constant impending doom?
When I was thinking about this topic I was reminded of a quote from The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, one of the great works of literature of our time.
‘Whenever you did something because “life is too short not to”, you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.’
Which is probably exactly what would happen if I decided to read that mantra in its most traditional sense. You hear about people who got married in wartime (or read about I guess? I don’t know, I heard it somewhere) because they thought they were going to die in a week, and then they ended up living for another fifty years; or people who are diagnosed with a terminal illness so blow all their money and then end up living for years afterwards, now terminally ill and broke. But wouldn’t that be a better way to live than angling your life towards a future you maybe aren’t even going to have?
One good thing:
This week I did NOT find a million pounds on the floor. (See what I’m trying to do here?)
I also got an advance proof copy of Elif Batuman’s Either/Or because I work in publishing and will never stop banging on about it, and in the first fifty pages I’ve taken about thirty pictures of paragraphs to put in here because it’s genius, but it says ‘not for quotation’ all over it. Even though I’m pretty sure no-one reading this is Elif Batuman, or knows her, it doesn’t seem worth a potential lawsuit.
And actually I do know someone who knows someone who knows her; someone I know’s ex is actually a successful writer and somehow managed to get an endorsement from Elif Batuman for the cover of her book. I find that whole situation too belittling to think about in much depth.
One bad thing:
Should I reverse this one as well? That seems like tempting fate, so, one bad thing was I had to go to Westfield, otherwise known as the gateway to hell, to get my phone fixed, and I saw a girl DJing in the MAC store which made me sad for her. Although maybe she always wanted to grow up and DJ in the MAC store. Shouldn’t be so judgemental.
No con-texts:
