For lack of current words

one year and three months old, still true.

My boring life

The one question that has haunted me throughout years of my life is this: How can most people be content with their lives?

Sleep, play, eat. Sleep, go to school, eat. Sleep, work, eat. Admittedly children are able to turn the most simple things into an adventure. Unfortunately this ability gets lost along the way. Show an adult 2 trees, one ant hill and hand him a stick. Watch what happens. See what I mean?

Ok, there are more or less adult people who still manage to lead a rather exciting looking life. In some cases you look closer and it is still sleep, do your job, eat. Duh.

Modern culture has handed us some means to pimp our adult life, some legal, some not quite so legal. Legal ones can be things like “extreme sports”, jump down a bridge, a tower, a mountain, out of an airplane. Moments of free fall rush past you, make your face look incredibly ridiculous, count, pull somewhere and pray the parachute opens, or there is no rip in the paraglider, or someone does not hate you enough to cut the bungee cord. Life still can be full of little excitements. I say little and I mean it. Seriously, spending loads of money for 5 seconds of near heart attack experience?

Ok, so maybe the not so legal ones. Drugs, obviously. Not quite as expensive as jumping down bridges, but, I can’t say it often enough, illegal. And while spending shitloads of money for one jump at a rubber cord down some bridge at least hints at some safety and quality measures, spending 50 euros on some white powder contains no quality certificates whatsoever. The small packs do not come with some CE logo, they do not follow well known ISO norms, they have not been through extensive quality assurance methods. At least we can hope so, the idea of sniffing white powder up your nose that has gone through 25 other noses before is somewhat disgusting.

So there, not as expensive, illegal, unsure quality. What most people won’t tell you when you start: it gets more expensive. You don’t find someone selling you 1g with the promise “oh, by the way, do this regularly and in about 6 months 1g will be nothing, you will be here again buying 5times the amount for the same time, but still, no worries”. Well, maybe you did find someone like this, but did not listen. It’s like reading the small print, who the hell does it?

Yes, I know, someone is bound to interrupt me, asking about the legal drugs. Well, they don’t quite count. Did you ever have an incredibly good time smoking two packs of cigarettes? Did it make you feel like embracing the whole world (with 2/3 of this whole world going “oh my god, get the hell out of my face, you stink”)? Did you drink 2 bottles of wine and suddenly everything felt better? Maybe you did, it never worked for me. I just fell asleep.

So, I tried the drugs, found them quite satisfying but not worth all the pain. I lack both the money and the expectation for jumping out of airplanes. So I am stuck with a quite average life. And for the life of it, I cannot work out how that is ever supposed to make me a happy or even long-term content person.

What do I ever do? Besides sleeping, working, eating, watching TV and occasionally wasting time? I don’t make the world a better place in any possible aspect, compared to the world population, only an extremely small amount of people even knows about my existences, and even fewer of them care about it, I will die someday and nothing will change.

A friend of mine once told me that I want my life to be like a movie. And I said something like “Of course not, I’m not stupid, I happen to know that life is nothing like a movie” And as much as I hate to say it, maybe he hit some truth. Skip the action scenes, forget about elaborate sex scenes, I’ll go for the rest. At least things happen to those people. In 80 minutes of an average movie, so many things happen to people, their lives get changed all the time. Putting even half of these 80 minutes in relation to my life, I am probably one of the extras who walked through the restaurant scene once, sneezed and went on to disappear for ever.

And yes, I do know that making my life more interesting is something I mostly have to do myself. I am not that stupid, thank you. Still, it can be a real bugger. Where do you start? It’s not that you can go out, start robbing banks or whatever it is that interesting characters in movies do. Maybe I cannot get a grip on my life because I see my problems which are on one hand huge, and at the same time laughably small compared to stuff like economic crisis, universal peace, etc.

And while I envy people with their small scale problems (where to have dinner tonight) and small scale lives (insurance sales person with detached house in the outskirts of some big town), I cannot understand them and somehow detest them. Although I cannot honestly say if I detested them before I envied them or the other way round.

Anyway, it seems I am stuck with an average life, and still very unable to cope with it. It is uneventful, unsatisfying, unmemorable, add as many un-words as you like. And then when you are done, tell me what to do about it.