I’m writing this sitting somewhere else. The fact that I can say “somewhere else” and it has a clear meaning to me is telling; it points to the fact that “in the office” has been “where dad sits” for the entirety of my kids lives and since well before that.
The model is that there is a room, in which there is a desk, on and around which there is a large computer system with multiple monitors, and that is where I sit. Forever. I wake up, roll out of bed, and roll into the chair in front of said computer. I may leave for moments at a time for errands (school pickup, bio-breaks, a bit of shopping, whatever) but as soon as said errands are complete, I return to the desk.
I live at the desk. Unless there is a concrete, urgent reason to be away from the desk, I am at the desk.
I don’t want to say that I hate the desk, but it’s worth saying that my relationship with it is souring after twenty plus years.
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Funny thing about living in material stasis like this: it conditions how you think. And what you’re able to think. I increasingly find that my habits of mind dominate over any other aspect of cognition. I think the same things over and over again. I say the same things over and over again.
It’s hard to think or say something new when you don’t ever do anything new. When you’ve been doing exactly the same thing all day long every day in the same place staring at the same screen for decades on end.
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There is a looming event down the road in front of me. One that I spent a lot of time trying not to see, but I see it.
My kids are getting older. I have one that will be starting high school before too long. We’re talking about cars and colleges and life decisions down the road like where to live. The other child isn’t far behind.
Thing is, I’m divorced. And like most people in the west, but especially most men, my life has been a constant process of losing people, rather than adding them. Friends gradually peel away as you just drift apart. Sometimes this is accidental, sometimes they blow it up, sometimes you just can’t stand to be around them any longer while they repeatedly try to blow it up.
We’re a society that doesn’t like relationships. Relationships, we think, are bad for you. Friendships, bad. Partnerships, bad. Parenthood, bad. Sisterhood, brotherhood, marriage, all bad. If you connect with people at all, that’s bad. It marks you out as backward, naive, pitiable, maybe even just a little bit morally suspect.
Good people, after all, do not “catch” the feels for new people and do not “keep” the feels for people they’re genetically related to, because to continue to care about someone you’re genetically related to for any longer than you absolutely have to of course reveals that you, too, are Hitler.
But I digress.
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Soon enough, I will be an “empty nester.”
And, in fact, I have nobody. Real talk. There is nobody in my life that is a regular, other than my kids. There is nobody I’m particularly inclined to turn to or socialize with. There is nobody on the horizon.
Every now and then over the last few years I have tried to reconnect with people that I used to be close to. But people are, let’s face it, insufferable these days. Everyone’s edgy, everyone’s an activist planting a flag and trying to save the world by peering into your soul to see if you’re a sinner. If they’re not busy telling you off-color jokes about sex and corpses and abortions that make you queasy to your stomach, they’re busy providing you angrily with the conditions of friendship, either explicitly or over the course of a few interactions.
Where is the world in which I can like stuff about you and you can like stuff about me and we can chuckle about the stuff that we don’t agree with rather than accusing people? Gone, that’s all I know. And if there’s one thing that really pisses me off, especially as I get older, it’s being accused. It makes me want to punch people.
So experience says that I don’t like these people anyway.
On the day my second child leaves the house, my life will end. Oh, I’ll be here puttering around in solitude until I have a coronary or someone finds me in my own filth, wondering who I was when I was younger, and carts me off to an underfunded public facility of some kind, but I won’t be here, really. I won’t be alive.
I can’t travel the world. I can’t retire. I won’t have any money at all; student loans taken out long, long ago ensure that I’ll remain in penury until the day I die.
So—no money to distract myself with, nobody to talk to, and no reason to wake up in the morning, from about 54 onwards.
The only thing I can think of is that maybe I can join a monastery of some kind. That’s the one marginally attractive thing that I keep coming back to. Maybe there’s an order I can join somewhere…
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I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t write stuff like this, but I feel like I’m rarely honest on this blog any longer anyway, and it’s really become insufferable in its own right as a result.
So there’s some honesty.
I’m not scared of it, though in some sense I do “dread” it. But it’s much more that I’m just sort of sad, underneath the surface. Or maybe it’s not sad, maybe it’s wistful.
I really thought there would be more to life, that there would be more for me when I was older.
But that’s not the country, or the civilization, that we live in, nor is it—apparently—the set of choices I have made over the years.