It's OK to be OK
On accepting the good
‘A quarter of human misery is toothache.’ - Thomas de Quincey
As you move through your life, visiting places and talking and eating, seeing your friends and family, drinking and celebrating through the night but just occasionally catching a reminder of Congo, Sudan, Gaza – it’s important to remember that it’s OK to be OK.
Really! It’s permissible to, faced with the sober headlines of war and deaths in places where you don’t live and never will, react with ‘Well, I’m healthy, and my loved ones are safe, and these prawns which I’ve spread with garlic butter are really rather good and, for this hour or so, I’m perfectly content.’
Would the people in those places really want you to be sad on their behalf? I rather suspect they'd want you to make the most of their blessings and not ruin your happiness in their name.
What real purpose does upsetting yourself over bad things elsewhere serve? Not least because it potentially distracts you from bad things going on locally. Indeed, your disengagement from parochial concerns in favour of an emotional theatre of empathy from them may even make them worse. To paraphrase John Cooper Clarke, always keep an eye on the council.
It’s hard for some to accept but, if there’s a broken bollard near your house, that is more your business to sort out and protest about than the war in Gaza. What, really, does raising your voice about far-off conflicts tangibly achieve? It takes a while to accept, but almost all interventions, aside from the financial, around humanitarian catastrophes are about being seen to be ‘someone who cares’ rather than to make any positive impact on the situation. Even if you stick a little money in to an international emergency, I’d advise doing it on the down-low, unless you’re a celebrity using your platform to raise funds.
In fact, enjoying sensual pleasure is a perfectly valid justification for being in the world. My two favourite things in life are sex and music; if I could live a life filled with sex and music, I would consider it one well spent. And I have been listening to a lot of music of late. Likewise, good food, good conversation, pleasant aesthetics; these are reasons enough to value having made it to existence. You don’t need to construct a great narrative of existential unhappiness to superimpose above such things – here I speak from experience – and there is no shame in admitting that simple pleasures satisfy you. As my fellow Nottinghamer DH Lawrence wrote, ‘Be a good animal.’
Likewise, and this is particularly relevant in the general Substack atmosphere, it’s fine to enjoy writing. You don’t need to conceive of it as a tortured struggle; you can admit to yourself that you take intense pleasure in the use of language and trying to bend it into expression, that you feast on words and trying to get them right. No-one is forcing you or anybody else to write, and you can just admit that one of the reasons many of us spend so much time creating in language is because it’s fun, that it forms part of the good bit of life.
There seems so much pressure to present as agony and torture this process of creation in words. And tho a little suffering is indeed part of the process, and tho of course writing is work, ‘hammeri(ng) out headachy fancies with a bent back at an ink-stained table’, to quote Henry James, it’s fine to admit that the reason many of us long to be financially rewarded for it stems from a child-hearted longing for the spirit of play.
It’s OK to love deeply too. To tell the people in your life how much you care about them and do so often. It’s OK to tell your lover they’re beautiful, for they are, it’s OK to say your ex is one of the greatest people you met and the detail of breaking-up didn’t change that an inch. It’s OK to be affectionate and benign to children and animals. OK to be a romantic or a pervert, OK to enjoy being a woman or being a man. OK to reproduce; OK to not. If I still had Guardian Brain, I’d go round telling people that modern masculinity is in crisis, but as it is I just go round telling both my male and female friends I love them and having a right old laugh with my octogenarian father down the phone.
It’s OK to feel, in the final analysis that being clean, well-fed and adequately entertained at the start of the 21st century in the developed world is a pretty good place to survey life from. Particularly when you use it to look down on the past. There isn’t necessarily a crisis of meaning, that’s an episodic television, narrative junky view of life; it seems to me that the process of life is imbued with value in itself.
A pub garden is summer is meaningful; this day has been meaningful; last year was too. It’s meaningful to me that you’re reading my words.
Oh it’s still hard, still intrinsically a touch melancholic, this whole life business, you know the way you get old, the way your people leave you, the way your dreams fall short. The way time runs out. But still, when you compare our particular historical situation to other eras – The Black Death, say – it’s not too bad really, is it? And don’t forget that people were having a good time back then, that pretty much every period of human deprivation has been accompanied by intense revelry, that people fucked in stairwells during The Blitz, I entreat you all to enjoy yourselves. Abandon the attempt to find cloud in the silver linings. Try instead to make something out of our good fortune in being here now.
And even for the artists amongst us, with their anxiety around happiness, what a great challenge it is to convince people that being OK is in fact pretty great.
Beautiful writing. Thanks James