Yes, the title of this post has been overused but it remains the most succinct way of stating a particular
phenomenological fact, and that is that despite having lived in Shanghai for seven years and knowing this place perhaps better than I have known most other places (Irvine and Princeton Jct. would be the only other contenders), I am helpless against the infiltration of this strand of thought. It’s a pernicious little fucker, insinuating that there is something better. It is a maximizer’s first article of faith. There is no perfection, but there is a best and ideal solution. Like partial differential equations: there are boundary conditions, there are initial conditions, and given those there is some kind of “unique” solution to the problem.
When there are annoying and loud Shanghainese people playing drinking games in what would be an otherwise lively but not loud bar, you think that you belong elsewhere. When there is a beautiful woman at the bar that would never lay eyes on you (and you’re too much of a fatalist coward to test the hypothesis), you feel like you ought to be somewhere else. And when your friends are somewhere else and you don’t have the will go to over there and join them and participate in whatever they’re doing, you feel detached. You missed out. You’ve got a ticket but they locked the doors when the show started and if you’re lucky you’ll get in during intermission.
I will always believe that there is somewhere where the work I have to do is not alienating, and where the warmth of friends is omnipresent, and where the love of a woman restores me to what I am or should have been all along. When you read philosophy (e.g. the book I’m in the midst of, on Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard and their respective thoughts on, inter alia, philosophy and religion and the relationship thereof). There will be no crude people. There will be people who are both educated and full of life. There will be quiet squares where light drizzle subtly mixes with a cup of a good espresso. There will be stone walls that don’t know where they are going. There will be cliffs. There will be a sea that is warm and inviting yet keeps us aware, through constant (though hopefully not disastrous admonishment) to check human hubris, both individual and collective, at the door. There will be meaningful types of fun. We will curtail the desires that lead to dissipation. We will not waste our intellects on the frivolous, on useless objects and inquiries. This will be a happy life, not because it’s purely material or intellectual — but because it partakes in both. This life is fulsome because it’s authentic.
This is, in other words, yet another vision of something that cannot exist: because the bars of the iron cage cannot be bent. One must not stake one’s personal happiness on something that nothing less than a perfect revolution could stage and pull off. Everyday, I keep dreaming. I used to like working and earning money because I could buy stuff like clothes, shoes, computers, quiche lorraine: and now I just dream about saving enough money to get away. Now the luster of the clothes and computers is gone. I see them for what they are, a temporary way of allaying the anxiety, a little carrot to offer a mind that has not yet realized its improbably plans for a great escape.
All I can think about, at times, is getting out of here. I still believe, based on no evidence whatsoever (and plenty of counter-evidence is out there) that things will get better when I make a new start — somewhere else. Something will begin anew. Something will be revived. Something long lost in abeyance will come back. Lazarus and a second wind, a modest and invisible redemption that the world doesn’t see but which matters the world to me. I will have become something new. That which I really am, that which I always should have been.
