The most crotchety opinion I have formed with age is that the most comfortable path is not the path you should pretty much ever take. Unless you are convalescing from an emotional crisis (breakup, bereavement, job loss) or an actual medical ailment (surgery, sickness), too much lolling in comfort is bad for you. Lolling in comfort does not lead to happiness. Thus spake the old crotchet, much to the annoyance of her children. There is a vast difference between comfort and joy.
I’m a bit prone to sloth, not so much for sloth’s sake or because I’m naturally lazy but because I’m an introvert and, socially phobic to some degree, tend to get walloped by the slings and arrows, the jostlings and sharp elbows of a given day and then — reverberating from the buffeting of the workaday fray — feel the need to retreat to the no-brain zone. The no-brain zone is where, as a kid, I dealt with anxiety by watching endless hours of “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island” while eating Keebler Fudge Stripe cookies; nowadays, the no-brain zone is where I watch “Say Yes to the Dress” (which I can recommend as the most brainless of no-brain shows, producing a state of Xanax-like contentment with an absolute flat line of cerebral activity) and “The Bachelor,” whilst snacking on Petit Basque cheese upon toasted slices of wine sesamo bread from Citarella. Time does not pass in the no-brain zone. You do not mature there. The dress code is pajamas or athleisure.
One of my favorite books is “Akenfield” by Ronald Blythe, a portrait of an English village in Suffolk, East Anglia, in which the author uses the voices and reminiscences of the inhabitants to create a crystalline picture of just how much backbreaking labor was normal — the normal experience of the average man or woman — 100 years ago. “Akenfield” was written in the 1960s and many of those interviewed by Blythe were aged, and their descriptions of the farming life before mechanization and modernization are awe-inspiring. Blythe took oral histories from a field hand who started work as a farm apprentice at 14, a saddler, a thatcher, a gravedigger, a blacksmith. . . . Our idea of effort has changed over the last 100 years. Most of us in the wealthy nations have no idea what hard work is. We think we do, because we clock eight or 10 hours a day in front of the computer, but we do not. You read “Akenfield” and you understand why the life expectancy in the late-19th century was 48 for women and 44 for men.
Is it possible the pendulum has swung too hard in the other direction, toward time-saving devices, the no-brain zone, and ultraconvenience?
I think so. I mean, I realize this is a ridiculous position to take. Obviously, there is nothing ethically wrong with availing yourself of modern conveniences (DoorDash, dating apps, dishwashers). Obviously, I wouldn’t want to be a dairy maid chapping my hands raw before dawn as I tugged away at the udders of a dozen Guernseys before my workday began in earnest. But the older I get, the more I am thrown into a panic by the truth that what is comfortable and easy also tends to be tepid. Who wants to live a tepid life? There is a vast gulf between what’s comfortable and easy and what’s rewarding or worth doing. Obviously.
So I’ve been attempting to pull a midlife trick on my own psyche and belatedly become more of — as the kids say — a try-hard. A “try-hard,” properly defined by adolescents circa 2023, means someone who makes too obvious an effort to please or succeed. Making an effort is the opposite of cool. Making an effort is warm, pink, and sweaty. Making an effort is the inverse of cool, blue, and unconcerned. I shouldn’t say it, but I’ve always been too cool for my own good. I’ve been pale-azure blue.
Blue Apron meal-delivery service is easy and tasty enough, and it saves the bacon of many a harried parent, but it is not more delicious (or various) than a home-cooked stew or vindaloo. Lululemon yoga pants are stretchy and you can sleep in them or twist yourself into a pretzel in them. We all needed Lululemon yoga pants — or our cheap dupes from Amazon — when we retreated to our extended residency in the no-brain zone during the trauma of the pandemic, but Lululemon yoga pants are not more beautiful or sexy than the layers of camisole, corset, chemise, shirtwaist, and skirt that a harried mother went through the effort to don some 120 years ago. For every comfort and convenience, something is lost in beauty and variety.
Thus spake the old crotchet.
Also, I’d like to take this opportunity to say — and I’m indulging in some major pontificating this week, but I guess that’s my prerogative — that our modern streaming forms of entertainment are a kind of consumption, too. We have reached a state of total entertainment forever (to quote from a fantastic folk-pop song on this topic, “Total Entertainment Forever” by Father John Misty, which I recommend you Google if you haven’t heard it). Our lives are becoming all passive consumption, all the time.
What I mean is that streaming is a one-way street. It flows in one direction, like a stream. You relax and let “Cocaine Bear” or “Succession” flow into your head and occupy your cranium, so you don’t have to think. That’s why we call television “mindless.” Mindlessness is very relaxing and, indeed, probably necessary when we are overwhelmed by life and need to give our blood pressure a break, but, but . . . I just feel like we’d enjoy our time on Earth so much more if we didn’t dwell in mindlessness always.
We play fewer group games, as American adults, than our grandparents did. They toiled harder than most of us ever will in fields and factories, but when they had a couple of hours to relax, they went bowling or played canasta, bridge, or slow-pitch softball — games that allow space for conversation, beer breaks, elaborate riddles, and shaggy-dog jokes. That sort of game isn’t mindless in the same way that the passive reception of streaming entertainment is mindless.
As “Akenfield” tells us, humans need silence in order to think. You actually, literally, cannot think with a television talking head monologuing in your direction, or a podcast playing in your earphones, or an HBO miniseries unspooling. In order to form thoughts — in order to actually engage a second or third level of brain depth — you need those moments of reflection when you raise your head from the written page, or pause in your conversation beside your companion at the corner bar. Reflect on the very word “reflection”: It requires a back-and-forth, a to-and-from.
Regular readers will be aware that I’ve been working part time on a farm this past year, as a field hand. I started a year ago, in April. It’s only 15 or 20 hours a week, and in no way an “Akenfield” situation, hard labor-wise, but it is on the farm that I am experiencing the pleasure and satisfaction of re-entering a more natural flow of time. Moving from the mindlessness of the modern consciousness back into an, ahem, more mind and body-inhabiting state of being, as lived by all previous generations of human beings on Mother Earth. I like the slow work and slow unfolding, from seed to seedling, from germination in a hot house to greenhouse to a hardening table to the field. The muddy socks and ankles, the broken fingernails. The four seasons, the mockingbirds, the killdeer plovers, the fox who lives in a den by the farm stand. The tool that was shiny a year ago but rusted now. The silence. There is a vast difference between comfort and joy. Go for the joy.