Mine has been a life of much certainty. I could argue that the script of most people’s lives can be predicted to a fair degree, owing to the fact that being unremarkable is common to them all, still, that is more so because of their inability to do otherwise and not intention. I on the other hand, go out of my way to ensure absolute control, which undoubtedly is accompanied by absolute monotony as well which I don’t mind at all.
What causes this “sickness” as someone else would call it?
My first thought is that of “control”, being able to predict the future and plan about it. Most days I can predict where I will be and what I would be doing at that time with a fair degree of certainty, the deviations from that prediction too can be accounted for to be withing some error margin of possibilities. Such a magical ability it would seem to be, were I to omit it’s emergence from monotony.
Each of my days are same, down to the minutes and I derive a great pleasure and comfort from them being so. Arrival of a new event, clouded by uncertainty around it brings tenfold as much anxiety than it would in an otherwise “normal” person ( if it even brings anything in them at all ). Most people would resonate to some degree but in me it’s a bit more aberrant.
Picture lunch time, as people seem excited to try out something new, I would stick to my tried and tested optimised food choice. I remember at work I ate nothing but bread and chicken for a year straight, after which I quit having lunch for a few days and that too became a habit. Why could I not choose anything else? There are always different justifications surrounding price or taste to price or taste or something else which are all lies except I don’t mind them much and accept them at face value since it’s just lunch. Maybe I should’ve questioned it, for it never was just lunch and has spilled over to my entire life.
The taste could never be that bad, and the price too was within reason. Something that required custom ordering was hindered by the fact that I needed to interact and could not be more clueless about how it would go and the preemptive embarrassment from it all. In my head I had ordered it three times over and was drowning in shame over my conduct in my own simulation. At the end of it all was just one reason, uncertainty.
Uncertainty over how the interaction to get the new dish would go, uncertainty over the taste of it, uncertainty over my fulfillment from the new dish, all of it. To someone else it’s not a “big deal”, but to me it’s a deviation from my ritual which destiny must force upon me while I try what I can do resist it. It did not have to be so, I know of my social anxiety but this is unexplainable. The same goes for paths I travel ( literally ), what time I go for lunch ( if I could not make it on time there’s a high chance I would skip lunch altogether ), going to new restaurant or place or travelling ( even if it’s with people I know which must reduce the social anxiety factor ). The common denominator is “uncertainty”. If I cannot predict it and predict the outcome along with the possible deviations in its entirety, then there is a very high mental cost of the action, one which I don’t try to bother with at all.
Is it all simply a “paradox of choice”? No, I cannot quite justify it by that, for most often there is no “choice overload” involved and thanks to online shopping, I can recognise when that is the case.
Why could my approach be wrong at all? It’s not like there is no rational basis for it. Why must I choose differently after all? One can argue that I might be missing out on something better but what even is that better? And once I settle for the better wouldn’t that become the new norm, should I still look for better then? When does the search stop? It shouldn’t be possible to keep on looking for perpetuity ( as capitalists would like you to believe ). What I’m doing is simply stopping once an optimal choice has been made and sticking with it, sure, it could be a local minima, but I save myself time and effort of a forever search for the illusive global minima.
From “The Book of Disquiet, page 122”
“Am I losing anything by freeing myself of the curse to change?” should instead be the question for I can only see my way as the rational way.
What I gain is control and freedom from anxiety ( as much as possible ) while the standing offer is uncertainty with a dash of anxiety and no guarantee of a better experience. A satisfaction with the current status quo shouldn’t be an error after all. Why then do I feel uneasiness sometimes? Why then others don’t see and accept this same way of life? The last question’s answer could simply be that the world is wrong and I would accept it. Perhaps the uneasiness simply stems from the defiance of social expectations, for after all, I’ve never found someone quite as myself, but that isn’t any cause for change as long as I can address the first question satisfactorily.
What is the cost of the unlived life? The only fear I have is the passage of time and the possible regret it may bring one day as “what could’ve been”. A certain vision, recurrent whenever I think about this problem, is me on my deathbed, old and fragile, wondering what tres leches taste like or if the stars and seas were truly as beautiful as everyone said. They don’t mean much, but what did I even forsake them for? That didn’t mean much either.
If right at this instant I were to make a choice to be different and reduce a part of that unlived life, I would make no choice at all, for it’ll be a present action, accompanied by anxieties of the present and all the other burdens as bells and whistles. But what about the past? It’s easy to look at my past as an independent observer for it’s just as if I were looking at someone else entirely.
As far as my past is concerned, I don’t think I regret this at all. Not going on any trip with so called “friends” or even family, missing out on a rafting adventure, not going to my convocation, not keeping in touch with friends, trying out more foods, even visiting more places within the city, none of those are a cause of regret to me. For I see them as worthless today, under the lens of no anxiety, as my past self would’ve seen it then.
Do I have no regrets? No, if I could, I would’ve definitely changed a lot but not for the reasons that the this essay partakes in. I wish I would’ve not wasted as much time as I did and even if I did, not on the things I wasted it on. I wish I had more discipline to work for things that mattered and more courage to refuse for things that didn’t. I wish I had treated human interactions as another system to be mastered instead of discarding it’s worth altogether. I wish I would’ve been more creative. I wish I had not neglected my health as much as I did and tried to eat healthier.
For so many regrets, none of them are concerned with the world and what it had to offer, rather more so with how I could’ve taken more from the world. In the end, I can close this question, once and for all and with certainty, that there truly are no beautiful sunsets, that the tres leches taste sour if unaccompanied by a well deserved break, that the stars are only as beautiful as what they make me feel, in which case no real stars can surpass the ones in my fantasy.