Making Sense of the Lulls
SEARCHING FOR MEANING IN AN INCREASINGLY MEANINGLESS WORLD
Art by Alyssa Doust
Has the world always felt this lonely?
I’ll wake up early each morning. I’ll drive to work, leave work eight hours later, drive home, eat something probably not as nutritionally beneficial as I should, look at my phone for a few hours, and go to bed. Then I’ll do that again. And then again. And it was only until recently that it dawned on me: This is kind of what life is.
When I was younger, being an independent young adult seemed to come with so many more accommodations. If you lived near a city, you could go out every day after work. You could go to a bar, see a show, and maybe you could even go to the beach. At night. I don’t know why I thought this, but I always thought I’d be going to the beach at night a lot more in my adulthood than I actually have.
I am free to do whatever I want whenever I want. If I really wanted to, I could have this life. There is nothing stopping me. The amazing thing I’ve come around to in the last few months is that I’m naturally disinterested in it.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out the reason for this, and whenever I do, it usually looks like this: me standing there in a catatonic state, trying my best to travel as deep into the center of my brain as I can while searching for any kind of explanation. And looking inwardly has given me two possible answers.
The first and simplest answer is that my true life experience has failed to live up to the expectations and fantasies of my younger self. Obviously, when we’re younger, we think of all the things we’d like to do every moment of every day, and those fantasies never include what we need to do to execute those plans.
“We’re just working for the weekend.”
Most of the time, we’re doing what we can to prepare for the next great adventure. You need to spend a lot of time not having fun in order to do everything you’ve ever wanted over a long period of time. And there’s a great chance you’ll never even get to everything on that list. No one has ever done everything they’ve ever wanted in the span of one month. I’m never going to have a week where I see Elton John sell out Madison Square Garden, walk the Great Wall of China, and visit the Louvre in Paris within seven days.
People spend years – even decades – of their lives working and saving every penny to experience these things. They go through years of lulls just to have a few days of adventure and excitement. It’s easy to talk to your parents, to listen to them talk about all their adventures, and think they all happened so close to each other. But those stories are only about the days they remember, not the thousands of days that it took to get them there.
Living your fantasies as close to your vision requires a lot of money. Because on top of these desires you dream about, you also have bills, grocery lists, and a car you desperately need to keep in working order. You need to have some sort of buffer between yourself and the sinister claws of the late-stage American capitalist system. You don’t realize when you’re younger that so much of your time will be spent preventing yourself from falling into poverty. Because if you aren’t careful, it can easily happen to you. When I go to work each day, I’m not saving up for a new bicycle or a nice pair of sunglasses. I’m trying to survive. And those stakes can overwhelm you, and carry a toxicity into the ability to do anything you might enjoy. The most fucked-up part is that it’s all intentional—don’t let anyone make you think otherwise.
The second answer I’ve come up with is that I’m much less of a social person than I thought I’d be by this point. I always thought that being able to feel comfortable at parties and get-togethers would be something I’d get better at the more I did it. The truth is, I’ve only become more overwhelmed as I’ve gotten older, and less capable of connecting with others the way I wish I could.
“It’s hard to make new friends when you’re an adult.”
I really love people. The detachment I feel doesn’t come from a lack of interest or some kind of resentment—I think it comes from me wanting that connection so badly. When I’m in a crowded room or at a music venue, I want to know everybody there. It’s not that I just want to talk to them, I want to already know them. I want to know everything about their lives and I want to share everything I have with them. It’s from that impossibility that I get frustrated and overwhelmed. Whenever I go somewhere, I feel like everyone knows each other but me. Like I arrived too late at one monumental, life-changing event, and it’s past the point where I’ll ever be able to connect that way again. There’s nothing I’d love more than to have more people I could say I love you to. But the desire for something so intangible has left me afraid to even take the leap. I’m always the first to arrive at parties, because there’s less people. I’m also always one of the first people to leave parties, because there’s too many fucking people.
Your hopes and fantasies for the future never prepare you for how alienating being alive is. Many of us are raised to believe that whatever we want, we can have if we try hard enough for it. I’ve known this was blatantly false for a very long time, but it was only a recent realization that this untruth also applies to your personal and emotional existence. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to welcome others into your life and form a community. You can try as hard as you want, but that bond is never guaranteed to form just because you want it to. There are hundreds of people I’ve known who I wish I still saw on a frequent basis, or who I wish I got the chance to know better. And often, it’s through nobody’s fault that these relationships don’t form. They don’t form because of the reasons I’ve mentioned. These experiences I’ve had are not exclusive to me. We’re all battling the emptiness, the pining for another adventure, the lulls of existence. We’re all doing our best to be part of a family, and we all hope for the feeling that comes from being part of a community that loves you and knows you inside and out. Our individuality often burdens us and prevents us from connecting with others. And it’s an obstacle I hope to overcome as I begin to understand it better.