Miss Anthropy
‘You busy?’ someone asked me today. She was making a coffee at the time. Gave me a distant smile. Didn’t much listen for an answer. It was an innocent question. It struck me, though, that it was also a sign of the times. Everyone’s busy. ‘Oof. Busy? You’d better believe it. Haven’t had time to scratch meself! Busy? Woof. You have no idea!’
But what is this? This frenzied, striving state of never-reachability that skims and skitters us across the surface of global capitalism? It’s a boast wrapped in serfdom. A trick wrapped in an IOU.
It must be said that I am, particularly this week, a misanthrope. Full of fight but nothing left in the tank. I’ve been busy, you see. Too busy. And now I am not busy. Instead, I’m defensive, awaiting an attack that isn’t coming. What that makes me, as a rule, is very grumpy indeed. I’m in an in-betweeny bit, and it’s giving me nothing much.
Public Service Announcement: stop! Be nothing much! None of us needs to be anything much.
Instead of asking me today whether I was busy, what the person making my coffee could have asked instead was, ‘You doing some good enjoying lately?’ Because I am. In between bouts of feeling annoyed about various inconsequential things and falling asleep on couches I happen to walk past, I am enjoying several things. I’m enjoying my friends making fun of me. I’m enjoying phone conversations with my mother. I have enjoyed a few surprising music playlists and several very unsurprising YouTube highlights of TV shows I’ve seen a thousand times before.
But even the idea that we should be enjoying ourselves seems somehow unreasonable to me at the moment.
All I seem capable of, see, is a slight sense of ennui while looking out the window then back at my phone then out the window and then suddenly an hour has passed and it’s too late to go outside for that walk I was planning.
I am very good at not packing the dishwasher and not fixing several things around the house.
I ruminate for far too long about long-lost wrongdoers from years gone by. It is, I find, this week, necessary to dedicate time to thinking about this prior malfeasance in the way a barrister might obsessively plan a public trial; examine past wrongs, line up and implicate witnesses and accomplices who looked on and should have known better, and ensure they are not just served justice but suddenly regretful, even devastated, and changed forever.
There is, sometimes, in a post-busy-misanthropic-unproductive week such as this one, room for moments of unfocused joy. A bath, for instance, might be nice. Reading something that makes me want to cry can result in several moments of standing next to a bookshelf blinking. There’s nothing productive about it, though, see: nobody won, nobody lost, nothing amounts to much at all.
It’s not constructive or productive or busy or helpful. It gets me nowhere. It is, in fact, a giant waste of time and probably costly in a range of other ways.
But! But! It is precisely this moralising devaluation of the grumpy bits, the in-betweeny bits, the tired and wan, that I hereby protest. Why do our wellbeing posts and our instagram feeds and our lifestyle podcasts promote the most efficient work and the grooviest meals and the steepest improvement of the self, when most of life is nothing like any of that at all? And in fact sometimes what we need is to be grumpy and stupid and listless and weird and… nothing much… for a bit?
My brain is a field of long grass. My memory shifts, my intentions fade. I can’t remember the vital thing I absolutely must do but I can remember the person in year eight who told me my handwriting was ’incorrigible’ but who I didn’t correct and wish I had (’the word is illegible, Stephen’) and yes I’ve googled him and he’s a vet in a particularly remote part of Wales which doesn’t help either of us really.
Point is, not all of life needs to be meaningful or constructively spent. Our ancestors made shelters and found food and then preserved energy. I bet they thought about stupid stuff. I bet they left tasks unfinished. ’You preserving?’ they probably asked each other. The annoying ones probably went on about it. ‘Preserving? You’d better believe it. Been at it all day. It literally never stops.’
This was printed in Ed 747 of The Big Issue. Please support your local vendor.