how to be miserable

the adjective not the noun

i had another draft with a more refined flow but i’m scratching all of it to say straight up that things are looking pretty bleak for me right now. i hadn’t even thought of that word to describe my current circumstances until i happened to be talking to a friend who lives in a city with all her friends and she described her own circumstances as bleak. on that scale then my days would happily rank in the negative. i am starting to get a little annoyed (and dazed) by the indefatigable routine of my days and my equally futile protests against it, and with this second draft i am making a resolute attempt to break free. every day i do about the same thing that i did the day prior, and when every now and then i pause to reflect on the state that i am in, i am filled with contempt – not the easy going contempt that is directed inwards but an uglier, unsociable, crime and punishment-esque contempt towards whatever that is orchestrating all of this. then once again as a man of incredible agency i make the decision to break free from this sadist orchestrator’s schemes and start doing things my way (another healthy habit?) to make things a little jollier for myself. it is a scene nearly out of a goya painting when you realize that your attempts to break free from routine has also, crushingly, become a routine.

there is regret, quite a bit of it, maybe even all of the contempt i speak of is only a thin film over the bottomless regret, and this is probably worth getting out of the way in the name of transparency. what saying something like this out loud could contribute towards making things better for anyone at all, really, is up for debate, but putting it out there lifts a few weights off of one’s chest, and, that’s good enough for now. a big portion of my internal dialogue sounds like some variation of “had i done this or that last year, or the year before that, things would have been different today”. in a way, i’ve developed an obsession with the past that i am not very fond of. a normal person, i assume, would be more occupied with the fullness of the present moment or their teeming future, but instead, i find myself thinking a lot about what has already been, and these thoughts seep into my conversations more often than i’d like. all the sentences that start with “this one time…” or “when i was in…” automatically excludes the person listening to you speak, and doing it too much doesn’t bring you any closer to them and certainly not any closer to the past. you can only talk about the past as much as you distance yourself from the present, and everyone in it.

the other thing i’ve grown to obsess over is computers, and i’m not too happy with this development either. everything is computer. maybe i’m trying to make up for the interest in computers i definitely should’ve harbored back then, and then things would’ve been different today. i posted on reddit asking if i should email my computer science professors an apology for not conducting myself with due discipline in class when it was time for it, and that i’ve changed now, and i care so much about computers now, and i wish i could go back to their classrooms, but people in the comments called me crazy and said i should see a therapist if it’s really that bad. the other day i was explaining to someone the difference between threads and processes and how threads share a memory space and processes don’t, so too many threads could yield poor cpu performance, and i, sickeningly, enjoyed it. they would’ve known this if they’d taken operating systems in fall 2022. i hate what i have become, because it makes me look like i care so much about computers and i hate that it is true. sometimes when i talk to my friends on the phone i think i am deceiving them by playing a part, because i am not who they once befriended, and when i talk to my coworkers in the office i don’t think they really know me because they haven’t seen who i used to be, and i think that version is worth knowing more.

i should make it clear that all of this combined is making me pretty miserable. i have so far been in denial, that this is just some sort of a bad episode, and i should grit my teeth and get through it. but this just makes me plain Miserable. being a miserable person, miserable being the adjective here, is one thing, and being Miserable, the noun, is another, and by my estimate, the latter is far worse. when you’re a miserable person, the adjective speaks only of your condition, but you’re still a whole person, with all the passions and whims and vivacity that characterizes personhood. the misery is still there, but it is only an ailment, nothing permanent to or inextricable from your being, and there’s a hoard of other things waiting to replace it in due time. on the other hand, being Miserable is reminiscent of soviet era destitution, it is all consuming, all of you being all of your misery. it is an umbrella, the root of everything, like how everything in russia between 1922 and 1991 can be explained by communist rule. “why was the child starving?”, “they were from the soviet era”, “oh, makes sense”. i liked it so much when i was so much more, and i miss the space where i could be as such, where i could buy cheap nail polish on purpose so that it’d chip in a few days, and no one would care. when i look back, i think fondly of when i could take a walk alone or do something on my own and on my way see something worth telling my friends about later. unfortunately, there are just too many eyes where i am currently, and even praise is uncomfortable now. i’d rather nobody sees me, or even thinks about me. i would be less miserable if i were invisible.

having embraced my misery, i’m just not sure how i would transition from being Miserable to being a miserable person, and i’m paying extra attention to not propose some new solution that will fall apart in a few days. this just takes up so much of my headspace, all the time, and i can’t even talk about it because what is there to even say? and then i can’t talk about anything, really, because this is all i’m thinking about, and again, i’m not allowed to talk about it. what is the way out? maybe this, maybe that. maybe i need to stop whining about Misery for a while and just be. would quitting my job help? i don’t even know. is it worth trying to find out? maybe not. if i quit, what’s the path to being who i used to be, path to what i’m missing? maybe if i had that figured out, i’d take a shot at it. but a gap on my resume right now will probably decide how comfortable my parents are in their retirement years or which school my children go to. i don’t have the means to take a shot at anything – there’s a glass ceiling just grazing my scalp and i guess all that’s left for me to say is we move. i don’t worry about running out of time, and i don’t believe in any of the lies that start with “your 20s are for…”. i think you can do anything in your 30s or 40s or 50s even that you could do in your 20s, except maybe for hiking and skydiving, and i don’t really care that much about activities like that. if i was 80 and i could go to a city where nobody knew who i was and i could take a walk and go completely unnoticed, i would say that i’m doing good.

i got myself a copy of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. it was the assigned reading for a class i took in freshman fall, but i didn’t read it then, because it was a sociology class, and i thought my professor had assigned it just for gags. but now, all of twitter seems to be talking about it, and it’s the good side of twitter that i trust, so i thought i’ll give it a shot again. maybe if i like it, i’ll email my professor and tell him that i finally did the reading, albeit five years late, and that i liked it. maybe it will be another one of my attempts to cling to a past long gone. or maybe it’ll just be the first book i’ve read this year, and if i like it, it’ll make me want to think less about computers and more about things i do want to think about, things i like thinking about. i hope it’s the latter.