I've Lost That Righteous Feeling

A life needs an underlying feeling or attitude to hold it together and make sense of it.

It might be a mid-90’s Morrissey miserabalism, or an upbeat Instagram life-is-fabulous-ism, or the ups-and-downs of the man who follows football, or a constant level of outrage driven by everything from the Today programme to Twitter, or perhaps deep invovlement with one’s work - but that only applies to a handful of artists, mathematicians and other creatives. SQL-bashing doesn’t cut it.

For the last few years, for me, that making-sense feeling has been that I’ve been living a righteous life. Work, exercise, sobriety, reading, keeping the act together against the forces of ageing, maintaining an interest in aspects of what’s happening, though that’s more about new restaurants than new bands.

Recently I realised have lost my sense of righteousness. It’s all become toned-down enough to make a ho-hum weekly routine.

A vicious two-week cold with a lingering recovery period doesn’t help either.

I used to feel righteous because I kept up with the arts and movies, but neither are now worth keeping up with. Read Art Monthly for a few issues and you’ll see what I mean: the art is so mediocre it can’t stand without being politicised.

I used to feel righteous because I trained regularly. I still do, colds permitting, but the intensity has gone. And training without intensity is just humping crates of Coca-Cola.

I used to feel righteous because I kept up with the movies, at least, with the art movies, but now I don’t give a hoot. Half of what I’ve streamed recently is playing catch-up with movie history. My utter lack of desire to look at the new galleries in the Tate Modern is because they are mostly full of sculpture, not an art I care for much, and modern sculptures are, uh, well, you know.

I used to feel righteous because I was holding down a job, at an age when a lot of my contemporaries are out of work.

And of course, because I had almost zero contact with junk culture and junk food.

I can live without feeling righteous, I would prefer to have a feeling that is immanent and pervasive and colours the rest of my life. At the moment that’s all a bit grey.

I’m not going to speculate about why, nor guess what I’m going to do about it. For the moment, it’s enough to recognise it.