Happiness isn’t Enough

At the beginning of the year you asked me: “Does everything have to mean something? Can you not just enjoy something?” This was in response to my mixed reception to a manga series you had fallen in love with. This isn’t the first time my lust for critical analysis has gotten me into trouble. My bedbound-bouts with depression often see me thrown into logical pits of despair: “Things are bad, many things, and the odds against them are stacked up so high there’s no way I could ever climb out,” and I ask myself that question: “So why bother?”

I did bother. 2020 has been a strange year for me, as it has been for everybody. To avoid the risk of turning this into a therapy session, I’ll boil it down to this: it’s been a big year of growth for me. My shortcomings were affecting other people, in ways I was no longer comfortable with, so I started addressing my problems, one at a time. Thinking about it all at once had been overwhelming me, so I started calmly walking, instead of carelessly running, like a toddler with their shoes untied. I didn’t realise I was doing it until it was already happening, but I started climbing myself out of the pit. For a few sweet weeks I was graced by what I can only describe as lucidity. It was golden and I felt happy. But happiness cannot bear the weight of the world alone.

We are suffering through late-capitalism; we call it that like a prayer. Under the strain of a global pandemic the cracks are showing, more and more. During this time, many of us have turned to our devices to consume media, hungrier than ever before. In my own turning to media, I have struggled to stick with it for long, before inevitably turning away. Doomscrolling through Twitter has left me with very little tolerance for the likes of The Boys, or whatever the latest thing on Netflix might be. Meanwhile, on the opposite end, I found myself bouncing off whatever given sanguine sitcom of the week I put on. Strangely I haven’t been looking for escapist burrows to nestle myself in (if only every show could be The Wire).

Your question shook me back then and it still does. “Does everything have to mean something?” “Of course everything means something,” I scream inside my own head. Every action has its consequences. I knew you knew this, and media takes no exception. I tend to engage with media with a philosophy of: “This should enrich me. I should come away from this with something.” I try not to use media as the easy way of disassociating from life that it can be (I’m not a total fun-hating-dork. I binge Buzzfeed: Unsolved just like everybody else). What I failed to consider is that maybe you needed this: something to unabashedly love, in these troubling times.

It’s possible that my expectation for media to be life changing is far too great of one. It’s certainly led to my dissatisfaction with any TV show that isn’t The Wire. In TV shows, filler episodes are infamous, but what if it all starts to feel like filler – entire shows feel like filler. Maybe for many folks that’s what they’re looking for, something to fill the time. I can’t blame them; it is bleak. Our lives have come to a standstill, and yet we’re expected to carry on with business as usual. During quarantine I’ve lost much of the autonomy in my life, and so I’ve turned towards media in a somewhat similar way. The support systems I had through people can’t be accessed in the same way and it’s difficult not to search for a surrogate (not everything can be Edward Yang’s Yi Yi).

As well as consuming more media, we’ve also been VOIP-ing much more frequently. With a collective of diasporic colleagues this was hardly new to me. Last year I relocated from London to The North. Having lived in busy and bustling London my whole life, moving to a small town in the valley was initially a huge shock. I knew it would be. I set myself a strict rule: I wasn’t allowed to return to The South, until I had first created a fistful of memories up here first. We invited more friends than I could count on my fingers, and over the months, a couple of handfuls came to visit (for non-Brits, a four hour journey is a pretty big ask here). Then, at the end of the year, you had come to visit. I had collected my pockets full of memories, so we headed down to London for Christmas. I decided that this year, if money would allow it, I’d make the trip down more often. We all know what happened instead.

Here I am now, the same as most of us, catching up with my loved ones through the weathered screen of my laptop. It is good – it’s the best we have, because I don’t want to put those I love, and the strangers I pass on my journey, at risk. There’s a kind of uncanny valley in our calls; we all notice it. In the silences that wouldn’t usually feel quite so cavernous. In the latency that causes us to speak over each other, multiple times in a row. In the lack of tactility. Funny that I would manage to fall in love and develop a long distance relationship, with someone who I have never met, this way.

This year, the more things I find to love in life, the more I find myself wanting and missing. It would be all too easy for me to fall arse backwards into one of my logic holes, especially given how our government has been handling this mess. “What if it never ends?” I might think to myself. This year I started to feel happier with myself, but the happiness isn’t enough. I am fatigued and need to rest, but who among us can afford to rest? I’ve spent the last few months desperately trying to change my financial dependency, and I’m now in a more fortunate place. I can say, without diminishing my own work, that a tremendous amount of luck and privilege got me here.

It’s business as usual, but it shouldn’t be. We are exhausted. We check Twitter and the trending topics each hour, carry on with work, and in the evening we watch some alternative apocalyptic hellscape on TV, and I no longer have an appetite for it. In our isolation, it can be easy to lose ourselves and lose our tether to others. It is completely expected that we would be doing bad and we shouldn’t give ourselves a rough time for it. It has been and all always will be important that we regard our own suffering and the suffering of others. I don’t think we’ve stopped caring, as those who must fight continue to – they cannot afford not to. It is far too often the people with the most privilege, who choose to turn away. We must look after ourselves, we cannot do it all, or do it alone, but we must also not turn away from others.