Maybe You Were Completely Wrong
And You’re Just Now Finding Out
The explanation, perhaps better to call it the excuse, is being borne of malcontents. My predecessors were all hugely wrong or at least totally discordant about something in relation to everyone around them and were either driven out or left their home country on their own because things, big critical irreconcilable getting-along things, weren’t working out.
I always wanted to be content but I didn’t realize anyone actually was until I taught English after immigrating to Europe in my 30s. My intermediate students were doing a speaking exercise using hypotheticals about how they would change their lifestyles if they won the lottery. Without really thinking about it I assumed a lot of people would say they wanted to live in houses on the beach or take nice vacations. One older man said he would continue living in the same apartment, with the same neighbors, in the same location. He would keep doing the same job. Other people had similar answers, they mostly seemed comfortable with the circumstances of their present lives and didn’t feel like big changes would somehow make their lives.
This isn’t a push for a gratitude reflection based on the wisdom of Europe’s first people or somesuch but about me being wrong about the universality of certain forms of want, I think. I’m not a huge materialist but I would like one more closet in my apartment, and while we’re at it a backyard studio/conservatory. I doubt it’s solely American to think your trappings could be somewhat more optimal but we’re likely vocal enough about it to make it seem so.
There is always something you came to believe through some unspecified cultural apprehension that turned out to be incorrect, sometimes leading to a simple surprise and sometimes destroying your whole life. I cannot recall the source of any of these things I turned out to be wrong about but I am pretty sure a lot of things would be substantially less crushing if I had paid attention instead.
I thought that having a lot of education in a specific subject meant that you should be broadly knowledgeable enough about anything related, that it would be embarrassing if you didn’t know something and you probably shouldn’t admit it. I think I was relieved of that belief fairly early on but the shame never went away.
I believed that with growing learning and effort that life would unfurl and offer friends and institutional support and meaningful work without years of apparent nothingness. For most people, progress or direction do not necessarily ever correlate with work, as it turns out. Ok yes no shit, but I didn’t internalize it until fairly recently.
I have been under the impression that periodically changing where I lived or what I did would bring about greater opportunities and more importantly would bring me Victory or satiation in some horizon-overlooking sense that I could feel and never define. I am a decade into where I live now so I have an ever more detailed fantasy about moving to Ireland to work in biotech and I should at this point realize it would not solve whatever I think it would.
I don’t think this is in any way a critique of ambition or a lecture about wanting what you have because hopefully you want some of what you have already and how could you get through the day without hoping for something else, but I and maybe you too would feel less bad if I had noticed the real nature of ambition.
