On the Day that Your Mentality Catches Up with Your Biology

As far as I can tell, everyone else has got something each individual human wants, but has no idea how to get it and thus a part of them, in varying degrees depending on personality basics and the relative potency of antidepressants prescribed, is paralyzed and strangled with envy and longing and frustration, shame and failure. It isn't necessarily that the grass is always greener because I can guarantee you that the person with the greenest grass in the history of the visible spectrum will look over at his neighbor's lumpy stretch of gopher-eaten kindling thatch and die just a little because the gophers won't give him a second look.

This is related to the idea I've heard bandied about (and this is entirely anecdotal, one suspects, as scientists rarely bandy) that overall, people are certain they would be happy if only they made 20% more money. Twenty percent more of what? Exactly. Just 20% of whatever their particular number happens to be. So the man who makes $50,000/year would have all his troubles magically melt away if only he could find a way to make $60,000/year. Meanwhile, the lady up the street with the same house and the same mortgage and the same 2.4 kids who makes $60,000/year is half-dead from starvation because she can't figure out how to pull in $72,000/year. That's not sociology, that's shared psychosis.

I can't figure out, though, if it's a condition basic to humans (inherent) borne out of the lizard part of our brains, informed by the Darwinian impulses to procreate and leave robust offspring in a strong position to procreate in their turn and thus perpetuate the species. Or if it's specific to Americans (learned) who, as a nation, from our shared and checkered history, have come to collectively understand if you use Axe-brand body spray, women will want to fuck you.

The answer to that question is obvious: Axe-brand body spray only works on gay men. Joke's on you, frat-guy; you won't have any trouble in the unisex dorm, but it won't be the one you were hoping for. The answer to the larger question is also obvious: it doesn't really matter. Nature vs. nurture is pseudo-intellectual's version of sports talk radio. Lots of energy spent and emotion unnecessarily invested in something that is unanswerable and just as ultimately relevant as whether or not Lance Armstrong uses performance enhancing drugs.*

The point is, I think, that we are, hardly any of us, practicing Buddhists. If we were, we wouldn't buy into the circular complex of suffering and craving and recognize instead that such longing and self-imposed hardship--that extra 20%, the sprinkler guy who works with his shirt off in the summer, all the stuff they talk about in rap lyrics, etc.--is merely a doorway, a first step. The purpose should be to recognize the hardship for what it is--illusory--and seek to move beyond it to a space of spiritual transcendence rooted in truth and the utter eradication of want.

Every stupid hippie, New Age, self-help, Oprah-fucking slogan for living is pyrite Buddhism. "Love the one you're with." "It's not getting what you want, it's wanting what you've got." "Be the change you've been waiting for." Except those are typically used in commercials selling those shoes that exercise for you on the episode of Oprah where she gives everyone a car.

To put it another way, along your path to total enlightenment, if you have a BMW 3-series listed as a prerequisite, you may have missed something along the way. And no, the type of sound system doesn't count.

Or to have somebody else put it still another way: "The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not."

That's Viktor Frankl in what is close to my favorite all-time book (a very near-run second behind this one), "Man's Search for Meaning." But then again, he was only relaying stories from his experience as a Holocaust survivor. Nobody ever talks about what Hitler did to the Buddhist population of Vienna.

So here it is: I've got some girl troubles. Yes, I do. There's want and suffering and self-inflicted wounds (of the existential type, don't worry) and confusion and doubt and questioning and basically just me really really wanting something that I alone keep fucking up. Being a non-Buddhist and non-Holocausted makes it tough to grapple with sometimes, it really does.

But the bottom line, I realize, is that I am sick and sad and depressed and denied the company of someone well more than worthy because of my own tortured decision-making processes. It's dark and unsettled and lonely and I just feel kind of stupid all the time.

But none of it--not a whit--has anything to do with my ex-wife. That's progress, people. Bask in my example of emotional growth. How far away could nirvana be, really?



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* Answer: a man with one testicle should be allowed all the externally-procured testosterone he can shove into his system.