Today is Thanksgiving Day here in the US, where I'm currently living. Just as in Canada, Thanksgiving here is a day to gather with friends and family and remember all the things you have to be grateful for. And to watch a lot of football and plan out strategies for hitting all the Black Friday sales the next day. Because, you know, nothing says "I really am fortunate to have been blessed with all of this" like plotting how to get as much more "stuff" as you possibly can. It brings to mind the line from the Garfield Thanksgiving TV special - "Thanksgiving is the day when people celebrate having food to eat by eating as much of it as they possibly can".
I'm sure most blogs going up today fall into one of two camps. Most of them will probably be touchy-feely ruminations on all there is to be grateful for. The considerably smaller minority will no doubt be addressing the hypocrisy inherent in the holiday, the way it has been commercialized, turned into the launching pad for the season of getting, and examining its roots in the slaughter and mistreatment of the Native Americans. I'm not going to do either. As I just stated, you have plenty of other options if you want to read on those topics. Frankly, though, I'm too lazy, and perhaps too self absorbed, to write on the first topic, and I have no interest in writing on the second.
I spent this afternoon at a screening of Charlie Kaufman's (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) latest film, Synecdoche, New York. It's probably best described as a real life horror, or the horror of real life. It deals with a man grappling with the realities of growing old, having friends leave or die, having your body start to fail you, and your eventual, inescapable death. He becomes so obsessed with trying to find meaning in his life and understand the nature of living and dying that he ends up missing out on the life he has left. It's not the typical blood and guts torture porn that gets passed of as horror these days. It's not even the more psychological Hitchcockian horror. It's something far more real, and far more terrifying.
I've often said that I don't want to live past the age of 30. That isn't to say that I intend to kill myself on my 30th birthday, because that's certainly not the case. It's the fact that, at this point in my life, everything beyond 30 looks like nothing I want to experience. Decades of nothing but work, until you're too old to work anymore, but also to old to do much of anything else. Friends moving away, starting families, drifting apart. Being left behind, left alone. As my current situation changes, the future should look brighter, but from where I sit now, I'm not real eager to get there.
And that's exactly what the film tapped into. Each one of those fears, in their most extreme and terrible forms. And that's what makes the film so frightening. What's being shown to you isn't just scary, it's not reinforcing new fears that have been conjured up during the course of the narrative. It takes fears that were already present before you even entered the theatre and then plays them out in (metaphorically) gory detail. But there is something to take away form it as well. The film's message is that we shouldn't waste time trying to discern some meaning in our lives or worrying about or dwelling on the horror of what is to come. Doing so only saps the present of whatever meaning or joy it has. It essentially creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This leads into something else I've been thinking about lately - motivation. Everyone needs something to be living for or to be working towards. Whether that be trying to complete a degree or earn money to feed your family, there has to be that motivating factor, that reason for doing what you do. But what do you do when that element no longer exists for you? Up until recently, my motivation had always been about school. Finish this project. Finish this year. Make enough money to go back next year. Get high enough grades to get a good job. That's all over now. I finished school, got the grades, got the job. Now what? What is there to drive me now? I've slipped into a state of merely existing. It goes back to that rather bleak view of the future. Work to make money to do what? Motivation has degraded into small and meaningless things - the next movie, the next sporting event, the next concert, etc. It's enough to keep you going in the short term, but it can't stay that way forever. Eventually, I think you have to take a much broader view. Whether you believe in predestination with free will or think that everything is meaningless, I think the only way to keep moving forward is to do just that - move forward. "If nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do" (Angel)
Sleep well,
DTE
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Songs of the moment:
Metric - Help, I'm Alive, The Airborne Toxic Event - Sometime Around Midnight, Billy Joel - Piano Man
Music while I wrote:
Our Lady Peace - Clumsy
