To quote Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller’s version, not the original), “I have that Benjamin Buttons [sic] thing”, but instead of getting younger, I’m only capable of enjoying moments once they’ve already passed.
When I was flying back into London for my second year of university, as I was watching the fields of the English countryside rise up in blocky squares and morph into the squat buildings of the Greater London Metropolitan Area, I said out loud to myself, “ah shit here we go again”. And you know what? Looking back, I don’t understand what my problem was.
At the time, I was thinking about that past summer spent at home, where all I did was work out, fight, and live like a monk. First year at university had been an incredible experience and there was so much waiting for me ahead. None of this was lost on me. I was just trying to be contrarian, and play it cooler than cool by being actively disdainful instead of merely indifferent.
And now, looking back at that, I keep thinking about what a jackass I was, and the irony still fails to dawn on me. I am still that guy staring out the airplane window, trying to feign reluctance. I am still incapable of looking away from the past. I am still living in history.
Worse to Come
In my tenderest moments, I often think about how I have always failed to live ‘it’ to the appropriate degree of ‘up-ness’.
My foremost concern all throughout university was about having a good time. I went into it knowing that the real world was going to be a miserable and unending suck-fest, because the best thing about the Army — besides the lifelong injuries and shit pay — is the fact that you’re shown straight out of high school how profoundly unpleasant the real world is.
You become an adult overnight. You are expected to put into your hands the lives of your fellow soldiers, just as they are expected to take into theirs yours. You become intimately familiar with the heaviest burdens a person can be asked to shoulder.
The military is a microcosm of regular society. I think Terminal Lance once called it an ‘adult daycare center’. I’d also say that it is the single best illustration that adult life is really shitty.
Here’s how I’ve always rationalised it: as miserable as the military is, at least it’s got a few redeeming qualities. You get to hang out with your best buds all day, shoot stuff, see places, and you get plenty of time outdoors. You learn unique skills that vary in usefulness in the civilian sector, but you definitely can’t say that the experiences you get in the service can be easily replicated elsewhere (unless you did an admin job in a shitty little office somewhere, in which case it’s basically a worse version of modern day corporate slavery). It is, in a word, fun.
The military provides all the stuff the average 18 year-old male brain has been hardwired to consider awesome. Regular working life is however, by all accounts, exceedingly boring. Through extrapolation, I arrived at the conclusion that if the military sucked, then the civilian working world would be much worse.
And I turned out to be half-right. The civilian working world is worse, but looking back, the military wasn’t half-bad. Maybe it’s the nostalgia talking, because I certainly wouldn’t want to join back up now, but I think we had good moments too. The way I’ve learned to reconcile this is that I think of my service years as a special bubble in time, wherein we did what we had to do and we had some good times while doing it, but we can never go back or repeat it.
We will never be that young again. Our bodies have slowed and bear scars now. Our bones are weary. Our lives, careers, relationships have all developed and we’ve moved on. None of us would want, or should want, to go backwards. The Army had its moment, but the moment’s passed.
Another moment from the window of an airplane: I took this in September 2016 on my first flight to London. There I was, 2 months just out of the Army, flying over Pulau Tekong where I’d done basic training. You can see the white buildings nestled in the jungle where my old life really began. I spent most of that flight looking back, feeling like I should have enjoyed myself more, and wistful about the adventures I’d let slip by unappreciated.
“One eye perpetually fixed on the past”
I vowed not to be the guy who says stuff like “I never knew how good I had it”. I intended to make full use of my time at university and have the best experience possible.
It was a good time. I fell in love, made friends, saw sights, and had entirely new adventures. But I was always acutely aware of my time running out. From day one, I was counting down the days until graduation. I never once forgot the ticking clock that was with each movement leaching away, second-by-second, this new perfect bubble of time that I had been gifted, and that I would never get to experience again once it ended.
Because that’s what university is, right? To me, it was just like the Army in the sense that it was an experience with an expiry date — you’ll only ever get to ‘be’in college once. When it ends, it ends, and you can’t ever get it back. You can try to keep the party going (for example with a panic master’s degree), but it’ll never be the same — all you’ll get are just really expensive facsimiles.
As each day passed, I felt the squeeze of time a little bit more. Each moment was more precious than the last, because I knew I only had a dwindling supply of moments left. It was suffocating in that I was always wondering whether I was making the most of my time, whether I should be doing more. Was I having enough fun to rebuff the recriminations of future me?
I never stopped trying to plug the leaking hourglass, and not once did I succeed in stemming the bleeding. The days passed despite my desperate attempts to claw them back. Weeks, months. A year, then two. And then university was over. It ended just like I knew it would. Yet, I mourned its passing, yearning for the clock to wind back. I had foreseen this loss, and nothing cushioned its blow. With the benefit of hindsight, I think it’s safe to say that nothing could have.
It is a great and terrible irony to realise that you’ve squandered your time worrying about squandering your time. I have now gathered a collection of memories to be enjoyed only in retrospect, because at the time whatever joy I experienced was poisoned by the unspoken fear that my time was running out.
With both the Army and university, I was incapable of enjoying myself contemporaneously. I seem to only be capable of taking photos with the camera of my mind’s eye, to be saved and not savoured. It makes me wonder whether I do things because I want to, or because I merely want to reminisce about them later. I hate the idea of leaving money on the table. My questions to myself are always whether I enjoyed myself as much as possible. My answers are never satisfactory.
This is where my problem comes from. If my frame of reference for happiness is based only on my own inputs, how can I truly know if I am happy? I can set minimum thresholds for quality of life, achieving contentment, but how can I know that I am extracting as much value from my experiences as possible? How do I verify that I am ‘100%-ing it’? Is it as simple as a matter of telling myself that I am, or is it the far simpler solution of telling myself that it’s impossible?
I’ve got a pretty good memory, but nothing’s perfect. I know many of my memories are distorted, touched up to be more perfect than reality ever was. I must know that somewhere, at least once, I had in fact been all I could be — there had to have been at least one instance in which I was able to avoid hamstringing myself and drink fully from the Pierian Spring. But I don’t believe this, not really. In my mind, the memory is always more wonderful in retrospect.
I am therefore condemned to a perpetual cycle of worrying about my present running out before I can attain maximum enjoyment, only for me to later regret my failure of enjoyment as a result of my worrying. I am left to fixate on the past, to contemplate what ifs that are all fundamentally centred on the same thing — me getting out of my own way.
Home, James
I don’t have a big lesson or a moral at the end of this. I’m not even sure what I should do next. Even today, as I write this, I am letting this glitch in my programming run the show. My fears came true of course. The adult world I re-entered was less welcoming than the bubble I had left three years prior. I don’t know if I’ll look back at this time and find myself feeling fondly.
I have 4 dogs who are all getting old. One of them has cancer now. I know my time left with them is short. The ticking clock rears its heinous head again. I end every day questioning whether I have made enough of it, whether I have shown them each enough love, or spent enough of my time on them. I am never happy. Each day I say I will try harder tomorrow. At the end of every tomorrow, I feel like I have failed.
The current leg of my journey, of being a founder and a space lawyer, someone who presents at conferences and speaks at the UN, is also rife with worry. This leg has no concrete end date besides death. But the question remains whether I will come to regret not enjoying this more. I cannot answer that. By the time I can, it will be too late.
So what is left for me to do? Can I free myself from this cycle of worry begetting regret begetting further worry and so on? What is the relationship between time, memory, and the concept of an experience? I suspect no easy answers exist here, but school has taught me that every successful essay must contain a synthesis so here is my attempt:
I think that we are fundamentally cursed as a species to be too aware of our own mortality. We are silly, romantic creatures. We tell stories. We fall in love, frolic beneath blankets of stars, and then we die. We’re following the well-worn path set out by forebears, and beneath our collective feet, we are trodding the dirt of eternity into a rut that will guide those who follow in our footsteps. We will not live forever. Our experiences, save those truly remarkable and extraordinary enough to warrant documentation, will not matter to anyone but ourselves, and will cease to matter completely once we are dead. Our memories are as temporary as the moments they catalogue. No happiness matters so much as that which we ourselves subjectively experience.
We are therefore our own greatest obstacles — I know I am mine. That same spirit of endeavour that spurs us to run faster, jump higher, reach farther, is the same spirit that will have us running, jumping, and reaching forever. Its hands are behind our shifting goalposts.
So if we can pass the high watermark of satisfying our own capricious ideas of what constitutes happiness, then maybe it will cease to matter that our memories will be lost to time. We could stop worrying about whether we are as happy as we can be, and simply just be happy.