3.26.2008

Boiling Points

I've been spending an inordinate amount of time with this off-colored, culinary savant and yesterday, after whipping up a fresh pitcher of iced Green Tea, he said something that was very interesting. He said, "The happier you are, the more you want things to stay the same…but the less you change, the unhappier you become."

I looked at him for a moment and said, "that's a good point, my brother."

And it was a good point. But this kid's demented, so what should we believe?

The truth is, I like the point my demented chef friend made. It's digestible and almost universally pertinent. But something about points in general has me a little suspicious. They're just a little too easy to agree with as long as they're concise and delivered in an articulate way.

Maybe a disproportionate consumption of Camus and Vonnegut has darkened my prose to the nihilist point of no return, but lately I've been vacillating between the need to feel inspired and the existential philosophy that nothing really matters. And if nothing matters, perhaps empty points just propogate the triumph of the banal. Perhaps they're simply the literary equivalent of a kid that skips a grade.

But obviously I don't REALLY think nothing matters, and at the end of the day, the cliche must be grounded in some semblance of truth. So what does it mean to dread change while truly desiring it?

In the abstract, people romanticize the struggle as a rite of passage that can just be fast forwarded like dudes watching LOST on DVR. But happiness requires embracing change at a significant cost. I can't tell you what that means for you, because internal struggles vary in stakes and degree, and change for the sake of it seems worthless, but this demented bro has a point. Change, for the right reasons, is an important thing to accept. You can't be eating lotus your whole life.
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

you seem clearly to have read a lot of camus. teach me, bro. fucking teach me about him and his ideas.

4:18 PM
Michael Hoffman said...

You need to smoke more weed, bro. Or maybe less...

4:32 PM
Mobile said...

try beauvoir.

xx
mobile

4:49 PM

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