Death by contentment

I am grown stodgy and accepting. There is no great love. There is no great hate – how can there be where I barely speak to anyone outside my immediate family, or at a pinch, my colleagues.Yet I am, dare I say it, at peace.

Finally, after months of insomnia, I can sleep at night, mainly thanks to turmeric capsules and vitamin b12. Somehow, I get through featureless days bouyed on the idea that, when I get home, I’ll eat a mince pie and clotted cream (I refused to buy any at Christmas when treats are so abundant as to be obscene, but at 55p in M&S? Well anything that makes January more joyful!).

My smart watch says, on an average day, I walk more than 10,000 steps, but it’s not clever enough to know that some of that motion is cycling. But in any case, I’ve earned my joys and the extra pounds they bring. And so I drink my green tea with honey, and eat sweet potato fries and Kale chips. I’ve achieved something akin to balance, perhaps by spraining both my ankles this last year.

So it discomforts me. I am dying of complacency. Stout on stability and lazy on liquidity. I am fine. Everybody’s fine.  And yet…and yet… I can’t be bothered to complain (what, after all is there to complain about, save creative ennui?); or to question, or to strive. Wellbeing and relative wealth has got me in a vice of ‘why bother?’ But the voice in the back of my head says ‘that’s just where they want you to be’ – happy enough to keep plodding; busy and distracted, so you don’t have time to contemplate what’s wrong with the world, or upset the natural order of things.

Which is, if you do what you’re told, you’ll eventually be rewarded. Follow the path, and your needs will be met, even if only materially – (the spiritual; the creative; procreative; sexual or even the addictive can go to hell). Work hard, don’t step out of line, don’t whatever you do, rock the boat or go off piste; take the money and swallow your pride, and eventually you will accumulate enough material comfort not to want to take any risks at all – hence the all but shutting down of this public stream of consciousness.

You remember the pain of poverty; or of trying to be something other than your socioeconomic status will allow; of being contactless, network-less and unable to sustain yourself without regular paid work. So you submit to your fate. And finally, finally you realise, after the boot’s stamped hard on the human face of ambition, when you’re all paid up into the system of control and coersion, that perhaps it’s not really so bad.

So, like the dawning realisation that your mother may be right after all (for all my own never claimed to be), you submit. To early bedtimes, exercise regimes, green juices, corporate bullspeak, and tax avoidance legitimised by the companies that keep you body and soul, that are, to coin a phrase, too big to fail.

You realise the life that’s been planned out for you by your genes, circumstances and environment- and the powers that be – is actually rather benign, paternalistic, well thought through. You don’t have to work too hard; after all, you’ve reached a point where to work any harder is taxed into diminishing returns – is it worth the effort? You have ample time to relax, though not enough to get mired in self doubt, or creatively worked up, or politically frustrated. Certainly not enough to overprocreate in an already groaing planet, or to write longwinded books noone will ever read.

It may not be exciting – how can it be when one of the things that makes life so much more bearable is getting 8 hours’ sleep? But you have everything you need- and more- if you don’t count status or prestige. You’re better off than many- even accused of acting superior by some. But all you’ve really done is follow the rules, and the reward, it seems is to have enough to keep you going, with a couple of holidays thrown in for good measure.

So it seems, the rules are there for a purpose: to paternalistically guide us into lives that are good for the many; a sort of push-psychology, like auto enrolment or dark market tobacco marketing, that’s done for the good of us all to the detriment of individual freedoms, to avoid harm – or unnecessary gain. The rules both prop us up and hold us down. Tax the little guy into submission, whilst the super rich bank offshore.

A better connected, wealthier person can afford to bend them, but for the rest of us (and arguably, with my Premier bank card, and financial services salary and banker husband, I’m probably only just in the 99%,) it’s easier just to put up and shut up, do as one’s told and get on with it, as gracefully as sitting down most of the day will allow. Arguing the toss will only put you onto the mercy of the state  – that is to say, no mercy at all.

And so there I am; quieted, content with my lot, anger fading into middle-aged submission, peaceably dreaming of retirement; perhaps a cruise: ten years of 9-5s (or 7-5s for Tom, but then he is a scum of the earth financier who does nothing to earn his end of year bonio of which half, of course goes straight to the NHS, or the military, or, I don’t know, underprivileged children or foreign aid), and then we can escape to the country, secure in a living pension from our London property( for all prices may be falling, rents have not), where we can sit and wait out death and the inland revenue’s greedy clutches to claw back most of our life’s work so the next generation have to get out and keep the establishment machine oiled as well. Because one thing’s for sure, machines won’t ever free us. There’s too mach to lose, because people with time to think and do and create are dangerous, rebellious and threaten the status quo. Our children have nothing to worry about. They too will find contentment in the everyday, the humdrum, the 9-5. The powers that be will make sure of that.