When Nothing is Quite 'Enough'

My Dutch friend and I are pondering a problem. It’s one of those you-wait-until-you-get-to-our-age problems, so I don’t expect you to understand it.

The problem is that we’ve lost our vim and vinegar and zest for living. We no longer get excited by whatever it is we used to get excited about. It’s getting too easy to let the few things we have to do slide, and let the day pass in activities that don’t add up to anything.

There are a lot of cliched answers to this, some of which are also true but nothing like the whole story. So we’ll skip the you’re-just-getting-old bit. And we’ll skip the movies-really-are-worse-now bit as well. I’m going to allow the 65-is-a-dangerous-age-cynthia argument, because it’s true. For my generation. Even though we know the Rules got changed. I reckon I’m just coming out of the post-significant-date phase now.

There’s nothing wrong with my friend’s life that couldn’t cured by: a) an income of around €3,000 a month after tax, b) being able to write one novel every nine months, and c) knowing that it will be accepted by the publishers and sell reasonably well. Which as any novelist will tell you is a pretty nice life. He would be a transformed man. He would be the writer he wanted to be. But there’s not a lot he can do about turning into that person now.

Which is enough to make it easy to leave some minor project, or even a trip to the movies, for another couple of days or even weeks.

My friend isn’t an alcoholic. I am and we alcoholics are, of course, stuck. What we want is not to be us, and we know that there is nothing out there that can do that trick. No matter how much money we make, no matter how many and sincere the friends we have, no matter how beautiful and charming our lovers, no matter the regard in which we are held by those whose regard we care for… at the end of each day, all those things will take their temporary leave and we will be left with the one person we don’t want to be left with. Under alcoholism and ACoA, everything gets a coating of emotional chilli pepper, so whatever it is, it’s also a distraction from ourselves. I think a lot of people in recovery get a glimpse of that, decide it feels a bit hollow, and stay at an earlier state of the process, where they can believe that their emotions are real, and not the hall-of-mirrors of addiction.

Which is enough to make it easy to leave some minor project, or even a trip to the movies, for another couple of days or even weeks.

There’s one thing nobody tells you about getting older: the sense of reward from doing something declines. It just does. Hormones, thicker skin, whatever. Back in the late 1970’s my friend and I used to go out Sunday afternoon. Simpler times when a pizza and movie at the Odeon was pretty close to living large. Part of that good time was each other’s company.

Other people's company is a valuable part of the whole thing. I heard a couple of twenty-somethings coming out of a Transformers movie in the West End: “that was by no means a good film” said one of them, but the fact it was twaddle didn’t ruin their evening. They could still go have a drink and talk nonsense afterwards. If I set off to see a movie on my own, I need to believe it’s going to be a good movie. If I set off for a walk, I need the sun to be out and the sky to be blue.

The trick is this: to recognise that the thing you decided you weren’t going to do because it wasn’t enough is still better than the default thing you will wind up doing instead. Which is often watching You Tube, or television. So do that anyway.

There’s one other thing, which I got from an episode of Fog and Crimes S2. But I’ll discuss that later