I think, as humans, we are not creatures of the glorious summer but denizens of the winter of discontent; yearning, restless, impatient and easily bored.
We rarely live in the now but rather in the then, in the there and with someone else; a better someone else, a more interesting someone else, a someone else altogether more suited to me in every way. This is the drive that took the species on the great voyages of discovery, my toddler on the great climb up the pantry cupboard to see if the there are better lollies on the top shelf, people to the highest mountains and into the almost endless reaches of space.
But it is also the instinct that drives the capitalist to build an ever larger and more destructive empire, earning ever greater profits at whatever expense to the world around them. It drives the emporers and kings to declare war to expand the territory under their control - just the Sudatenland and I'll be satisfied. It drives the obese, the alcoholic, the philanderer and the suicidally recklessly youthful as much as it drives the marathon runner, the evangelist and the scholar.
What makes us such denizens of discontent?
In a fit indulgence in preachy pop-psychology, I'll propose some possibilities.
We fear the passing of youth. The young person is forever growing, learning and becoming - constantly striving to be whatever they told people they were going to be when they grow up (I'll be sure to let you know when that happens). When we have grown up, do we fear the passing of this? Do we fear the sedation of middle age when our curiosity sags along with our waistlines and we start the slow, inevitable descent into dentures, arthritis and complaints about how unemployed minority groups have ruined the Utopia we've been striving for all these years? If we stay curious and restless, we will never senesce or sag.
Are we stupid enough to believe our own advertising? No one ever sold anything by allowing us to remain comfortable and satisfied. Your current state of dissatisfaction is a necessary pre-requisite to consumption; the replete don't eat. You have to be made to believe that someone with an otherwise perfectly clean home let their toilet get to a stage where even the bacteria were complaining to the Tenancy Board and that this is what your home looks like to strangers, right this minute. Then they can sell you contentment in the form of bleach in a bendy bottle. Of course, if this were true, we would only ever have bought one product in our lifetimes because that one thing would have made us socially admired and personally fulfilled. Advertising would no longer be necessary. Are we truly stupid enough to believe that fulfillment is just another dollar away?
Perhaps we fear irrelevance. That our lives will be nothing more than yet another hour, strutted and fretted upon the stage and heard of no more. We dread that we will be but a photo on Ancestry.com and a stone with two dates - the top end of a line that leads to our progeny. All that anyone will remember about us is that we managed to reproduce. Do we need to be more? To have a page in a book somewhere, a bridge named after us or our names in a hall of fame? If this is our measure of worth then the sad truth is that we will all fail. Relevance is subjective - subject to mattering to someone else. Once we are gone and those we affected are gone, most of us will not be of relevance to anyone. Of course, it's just possible that we will have our lives misrepresented in a gospel or our sayings quoted out of context in endless social media posts in the future. But probably not.
Or just maybe, I am too cynical. Maybe, for most of us, we need to be more so that we can give more. Becoming a parent, for example, forces you to become a bigger person; one whose boundary of protection and vision of the future must grow to encompass these wonderful little people. We must always grow and learn and develop to keep up with their needs and make sure they're set up to make their world a bigger and better place.
I hope I'm just too cynical.
In the meanwhile, does anyone have a spare Yorkshireman?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsGGjXZw1eQ
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
Richard III
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