Rick's September Tirade
Good Life, Bad Life, Better Life
I've always been inclined to bristle at that most smug and
self-justifying of socioeconomic catch-phrases, THE GOOD LIFE. It's
not the adjective "good" that rankles me, nor do I harbor
a grudge against "life" -- or even the two words
"good" and "life" neatly united in blissful
couplehood. I long for a good life, don't you? Doesn't everyone?
It's the insidious "the" that hoists the hair on my
swarthy Mediterranean shoulders -- that insolent, supercilious THE
-- as if only one way of life merits the distinction, and that the
proponents of the aforementioned life are certain beyond contention
that theirs is IT. It reeks of the same arrogance as "Must-See
TV" or, worse yet, "the beautiful people" uttered
without making little quotation marks in the air with your fingers.
Who decided for the rest of us what constitutes The Good Life?
Was it Aristotle -- or Aristotle Onassis? Frank Sinatra, maybe? Ed
McMahon? It matters not; the bottom line is that we've been left
with an impossible ideal for our earthly aspirations -- not only
impossible but generally tasteless and dumb.
In the most familiar version, The Good Life consists of excessive
money, leisure, food, drink and sex -- ideally consumed in proximity
to fellow-creatures who romp amid the same woolly excesses. Mind
you, not all pleasures are created equal: a life of leisure in
Malibu carries more weight than a similar life of inspired
dissipation in the environs of Wahoo, Nebraska. But the picture is
clear: The Good Life as defined by its practitioners is a life of
rampant, in-your-face, "so-sue-me-if-you-don't-like-it"
hedonism.
What's so objectionable about this picture? That it's shallow and
obnoxious and the surest path to everlasting damnation? Of course,
but that's the least of it. What makes The Good Life next to
impossible is that money and leisure have become almost mutually
exclusive in our time. If you're working hard enough to make a
fortune these days, chances are the concept of leisure will be as
alien to you as a lava lamp was to John Quincy Adams.
Aside from a few enlightened renegades who ditch the job
establishment when they've amassed enough loot, the archetypal Good
Lifer is someone you read about in the tabloids. Five weeks on
location in Morocco, four months to sweat glamorously with your
personal Ecuadorian trainer, three years of tumultuous marriage to
the sitcom star next door. But how exemplary are such lives? How
virtuous and substantive and truly GOOD are they? What lofty and
ethereal visions do their minds encompass? Have they read Lao-Tze
and Cicero and the Bhagavad Gita? Have they ever dreamed away a
summer evening listening to Mozart's serenades? Would Socrates find
a kindred spirit in Julia Roberts? Would the formidable Dr. Johnson
admit Bruce Willis to his table?
I say that once you let a business manager become an integral
part of your life, you're already hiking on the high road to
perdition. Enough, then, of The Good Life as defined by Hollywood
and its smarmy enthusiasts; let's try to uncover what makes a life
truly GOOD.
It won't be an easy task. What's good to some folks is lingering
death to others. For extreme sports fanatics, The Good Life consists
of dancing regularly on the precipice of doom; give them a chance to
ride a bicycle off the top of a Norwegian fjord and they're forever
in your debt. For my mother's family, on the other hand, true
happiness involved sitting in the back yard on a midsummer day, clad
in woolen hats and sweaters, comparing notes on their latest
digestive complaints. What makes us happy is subjective at best,
impossible to define at worst.
A thousand different paths lead toward The Good Life, making the
journey almost as bewildering as the Windows Explorer feature on our
computers. It might be easier to define The Good Life by what it's
NOT; in other words, let's first describe THE BAD LIFE.
An essential component of The Bad Life, most of us would agree,
is dwelling in a trailer park. Everything you hold dear is contained
in an oblong metallic crate that attracts funnel clouds from the
heavens with depressing regularity. Your neighbors tend to have more
children than teeth; they play commercial country music half the
night while habitually leaving garbage and dead pets below your
kitchen window. Your environment smells vaguely like the inside of a
dumpster, though you use a household deodorizer that makes it smell
like a banana-scented dumpster.
Despite having earned your doctorate in political science, you
work as a tool-and-die maker at the local plant. After three years
of grim and stultifying labor, you're still not sure what a
"die" is, and you have no desire to find out. Your
co-workers are surly and derisive; they refer to you as "the
gringo" and cast menacing glances in your direction as you eat
your lunch (a greasy salami sandwich on sliced white bread) alone.
You think the salami might have gone bad -- parts of it have turned
an ominous shade of olive-green -- but you eat it anyway.
Exhausted, you return to the solitude of your trailer; it seems
like only last month that your spouse, a beefy and emotionally
distant Bulgarian tattoo artist, ran off with a repeat customer and
took the kids. Now you're left with only your obese one-eyed cat for
companionship; he keeps growling for more food and missing the
litter box when you don't deliver.
You've tried to make new social contacts but you keep seeing the
same porcine faces at the local honky-tonk. If only they were
conversant in the theories of Locke and John Stuart Mill, you might
overlook the lip rings. But you won't find kindred spirits here or
anywhere else you search for them; you suspect they've been paid to
disappear as soon as you arrive on the premises, and they probably
have. Face it: your one reliable social contact outside of work is
your probation officer.
Unable to connect with the fellow-members of your species, you
bemoan the lack of love in your life. It's not quite the same thing
as lack of sex, which you also bemoan. But not to entertain a
fondness for any man, beast or houseplant -- such dire emotional
poverty makes the $437 in your bank account look fat by comparison.
Gazing into the mirror, you observe the visible ravages of The
Bad Life on your face: the spotty Spamlike complexion, the deepening
furrows, the rapidly graying hair and, under your left eye, that
flaky reddish patch in the shape of West Virginia. Your teeth are
slowly emerging from your gums like glaciers from the coast of
Greenland. You think you feel a small hamster gnawing somewhere
around the region of your spleen. Time to open a new bottle of Jack
Daniels and let the medicine go to work.
You turn inward, but where you once enjoyed the solace of a
fertile and well-stocked mind, you now retreat to a barren mental
landscape that resembles a Wal-Mart parking lot at 3 a.m. You've
found it easier to read self-help books than Plato, easier still to
watch the Home Shopping Channel than read self-help books. As you
sink slowly into the widening hole in your sofa, you regard those
books with contempt -- those wretched little tomes that promised you
a Good Life in exchange for a few hours' reading. Where IS that
life, anyway -- and why is it eluding you? You've paid for the
books. Let them deliver the goods!
Suddenly you feel a knot in your chest; your breath starts to
fail you; beads of sweat form on your forehead like dozens of little
blisters as you gasp out your final moments alone, in your
banana-scented trailer, with only an ungrateful cat and a glowing TV
for companionship. Your neighbors don't find your remains for six
days, by which time your trailer is no longer banana-scented. So
ends The Bad Life, and a pretty bad life it was -- even more
demoralizing than yours or mine.
How does our lesson in abject misery prepare you to find your way
through this tangled weed-thicket of earthly endeavor? It's never
simple, but here's a hint: When you subtract the wretched
deprivations of The Bad Life along with the gluttonous excesses of
The Good Life, what's left over is the foundation of A Better Life.
It might seem bland at first, this gentle life of moderation: no
overwork or idleness, no sensory starvation or overindulgence, no
probation officer or business manager breathing down your harried
neck. But it's a beginning. Just customize it with the details that
make it yours, and start living it.
Of course, you'll have to sift through about 38,000 customizing
options before you find exactly what you want. But that's a small
price to pay for A Better Life, isn't it?
Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure:
December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going
November 2002 — A Raving Moderate
August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?
July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed
June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
May 2002 — Speechophobia
April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade
March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament
February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard
January 2002 — Art for Slackers
December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card
November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes
October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers
August 2001 — Why Do We Bother?
June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet
May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names
April 2001 — Indecision
March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity
February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic
January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address
December 2000 — The 50th Tirade
November 2000 — Travel Advisory
October 2000 — Beyond Work
September 2000 — More Work
August 2000 — Work
July 2000 — The Doves' Nest
June 2000 — Great Affectations
May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village
April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course
March 2000 — A Living Heck
February 2000 — On the Treachery
of Time
January 2000 — A Letter to the
Future
December 99 — Rare Bird
November 99 — Not Just Another
Obscure Ethnic Group
October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered
September 99 — Good Life, Bad
Life, Better Life
August 99 — Household Relics:
An Elegy
July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity
June 99 — In Praise of Sloth
May 99 — A Bug's Death
April 99 — Obligations!
March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary
February 99 — A Grave Story
January 99 — What's Left for
Men?
December 98 — On the Uses of
Friends
November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving
October 98 — Grand Illusions
September 98 — Filth
August 98 — Will the Real God
Please Stand Up?
July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing
June 98 — Lady Longevity
May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely
Clueless
April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess
March 98 — Humbuggery
February 98 — Love and the Single
Cynic
January 98 — By the Sweat of
Your Brow
December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable?
November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping
October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation
Blues
September 97 — Down with Natural
Selection!
August 97 — Noise
July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures
June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land
May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable
Man
April 97 — The Cynic's Dream
March 97 — Inequalities
February 97 — Flesh and Mortality
January 97 — How to Be a Success
December 96 — Why I Can't Hate
Christmas
November 96 — How I Became a Cynic
