Time Spent
A friend of mine was listening to Ester Perel recently, because everyone is apparently listening to Ester Perel now—Let me stop for a second and ask you something. Are you a podcast person? Where do you find the time? Let’s go beyond the fact that I can read anything three times more quickly than someone can say it; just on the level of hours in the day, how do you justify giving up any of it to podcasts? Like, I haven’t read Proust yet, I’m gonna push that back so I can lend an ear to an idiot who decided he was going to intrude on the worst moment in some stranger’s life because he has a microphone and a theory and an idea of exactly how long he can play a snatch of music without having to pay for the rights? Jessica Fletcher gets a Soundcloud account and suddenly there’s another hour of content I need to make time for? I don’t get it! I guess if you do it the way we do most things these days, i.e. not really paying attention but kidding ourselves that we are, it might be okay, but there are still songs I haven’t heard, why would I waste that time on the inane ramblings of some stranger who I would cross to the other side of the street to avoid if I heard him saying the same things outdoors?
Anyway, where was I? Oh, right, so everybody’s listening to Ester Perel now, probably because we all want to hear how fucked up other people’s sex lives are to feel better about our own. And I guess the thing she said that impressed my friend was this: “The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives.” Which, sure? I suppose? But hearing it made me think of the famous Annie Dillard line that is eventually trotted out in every essay when the writer suddenly realizes that, no matter how delicate and carefully curated his prose is, typing thousands of words about the things he did the summer that everything changed for him might be seen as a little self-indulgent unless he can get the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval from the patron saint of self-conscious scribblers, so he makes sure to justify it by reminding you that she said this:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Like most clear declarative statements this has the benefit of sounding correct, but falls apart the more you think about it. We all know people who wake up each day and do horrible things that they hate so that on the weekends, or two weeks each year, or once every couple of years, they can do something they love. And what, at the end of their lives, do you think they remember? It’s the trips and the meals, the sex and the shows. Life’s great con, the thing that after fear and guilt is the reason most of us keep going in spite of knowing how it’s going to turn out, is that we forget the bad parts (or, even worse, retrospectively recast the bad parts as something worth carrying nostalgia for) and only recall the good ones. Nobody ever dies wishing they put in more time at the office, says the bumper sticker, but that’s because nobody ever gives a lot of thought to the office on their deathbed. I mean, unless their job was working at a Percocet-tasting facility or whatever. Mostly they only remember the things that were good, and mostly all that they are allowed to recall are the good things.
To be sure, there are people who spend their days miserably and also spend their lives miserably. These are the people who can’t forget, whose memories are unaltered and inescapable and set to play at random on some sick jukebox in their brain that doesn’t care whether or not what you’re doing at the moment is important, because now is the perfect time to rebroadcast the episode from seventh grade where you said something stupid in class and the teacher made fun of you and you cried in front of everyone and it was so bad that they all actually looked away rather than joining in the mockery and the shame burns as brightly as it did at that exact second. For people like that—people who, for example, write newsletters that arrive sporadically and carry a chronicle of continuing desperation—days and lives are indeed inexorably intertwined, but they are thankfully few and far-between and they are to be avoided and their newsletters unsubscribed from.
In a larger sense this speaks to the inability to get to the meaning or purpose of life with any degree of simplicity. Obviously it’s a thing writers like to do to show how pithy and unsentimental they are about the business of living, and mostly they get away with it because we’re only partly paying attention and we like to feel as if stuff can be made sense of. But it can’t. Apart from sucking so bad, the main thing about life is its complexity defies description. The only true statement is that there are no statements that are totally true, except for my astoundingly genius assessment about the four kinds of people, which I will share at some later point once I figure out how much to charge for a premium tier. Anyway, don’t worry about what you do with your days. We spend our days living, but we spend our lives dying. When you total the score up at the end most of the quotidian stuff won’t be counted against you. Unless you listened to a lot of podcasts, in which case you really did waste your life.
Okay, thank you, that’s all I’ve got. This, by the way, is not the actual newsletter. That’s going to be a thing of genius and joy for which you would happily pay money, I swear. It’s gonna happen any day now. I appreciate your attention.