What are You Doing and Where are You Going?
The title for this post is a quote from The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I’ve used it as a verbal cue to try and give readers an overview of the point I’m striving to convey. Because I want to talk about modern life in western civilization, specifically its complexity and increasing uncertainty. If you’re extremely wealthy you can mitigate these two points but I’m working on the premise that most of the people who read Contains Moderate Peril are not. The blogging community, of which I am a participant, is a diverse group but from what I’ve observed it’s not populated by millionaires. In fact most of the people I know, both online and in person, are just holding down a job, trying to keep a roof over their head and pay the bills. Often they’re doing the job they do in default of anything else and they’re at the very least ambivalent towards it. The pandemic has also brought home how fragile so-called “normality” is. Modern politics are also volatile and life in general just doesn’t seem as certain as it was twenty years ago.
We all approach life and deal with its respective slings and arrows in our own way. I am of an age where I was culturally indoctrinated to have a plan. They were very popular in the seventies and eighties. Everyone seemed to have one. Paul Simon, Leonid Brezhnev, Baldrick to name but a few. As a child, the plan that my parents had for me was pretty much the standard one from that era. Go to school and get an education and good qualifications. Find a suitable career. If you’re not sure about a career, then get a good intermediary job. Find a suitable partner and get married. Buy a home, have children and try to improve your lot in life. It was pretty much the white, middle class equivalent of the Xenomorph’s life cycle from Alien. By and large I broadly tried to follow this strategy but I found that reality constantly got in the way and tried to obstruct both me and everyone else who was trying to navigate life’s choppy waters.
So here I am at the age of 54. Life has changed for both my family and me a lot in the last eight years in ways that I never really imagined. This is documented in other posts so I won’t cover old ground here. Returning to the title of this piece, I find myself at a time in my life where I am considering “what am I doing and where and I going?”, so to speak. There are many reasons why we all get philosophically introspective at times. Society expects us to have an orderly trajectory to our lives, passing certain milestones along the way. However, many of these expectations are unrealistic and unattainable, so we then devote an excess of our time and energy examining our perceived failures. It is hardly a recipe for personal happiness and contentment. The information age has also opened our eyes to the reality of our relationship with the government. The various social contracts that are supposed to exist between citizens and state are all broken. Working hard does not necessarily pay off, neither does “doing the right thing”.
It is therefore not unusual to wish for a fairer and stable world. A world where opportunities exist for all, a job pays sufficient to keep a roof over your head and there is equality before the law. Sadly, that is not the case. Here in the UK the political system is broken and taken advantage of. It’s binary nature and tribal culture often means people vote for what they believe is the least worst of two “evils”. Hence people end up directly and indirectly voting at times against their own interests. At present we have a politically and intellectually weak government who are greedy, petty and dangerous. We are isolated internationally during the midst of the biggest geopolitical problem since World War II. The immediate future for the UK is not good politically, economically or socially. It is more upsetting knowing that some of these problems we inflicted upon ourselves.
So returning to the original question of “what are you doing and where are you going?” I have a major decision ahead of me this year. My caring commitments will be coming to an end in April and I have to determine whether I shall be returning to the job market, or whether my personal finances will allow me to officially retire. I suspect that the latter may not be possible and the prospect of the modern work environment doesn’t fill me with joy. My long term plan is to move out of London and attempt to keep the world’s problems at arms length. I just want to live out the remainder of my days in as much peace and quiet as possible. However, that seems more and more like an aspiration rather than a definitive plan, especially if I am reliant upon a job. It seems like no one can escape uncertainty these days. Being free from worry seems to be becoming a prerogative exclusive to the rich. It would be nice to end this post on a positive note but I cannot think of one.
