Last year I went to one of these social club nights, not speed dating, just a mixer event. The friend I was going with never showed, so I was wandering around this bar in Piccadilly alone, beer bottle in hand, trying to gear myself up to talk to people. They all looked pretty cosy and settled though, like they all knew each other already.
Suddenly I realised the social was being held separately, in a room upstairs. I went cold. They all looked like they knew each, because they did know each other. They were regular groups of friends and colleagues, out for a Friday night drink after work, and I narrowly missed being the random nutter who tried to barge in on their conversation.
The horror! The social shame, my dears! (If you are reading this from elsewhere, you are no doubt baffled at this - I've heard tell that up north, for example, people do chat to strangers. Cannot emphasize enough that Londoners do not. They think it is a sign of psychosis, and striking up a conversation with a stranger tends to earn you deep distaste and opprobium. Social suicide - unless you happen to be a foreign.)
Does it ever seem to you that life gets narrower and your options start closing off as you get older? You make this choice, you make that choice, it all seems pretty random but eventually those choices have brought you to one place in particular, and you wonder 'how did I end up here?'
When I was younger I liked 'This Is The Sea' by the Waterboys, it always seemed apposite at any stage in life - the idea that everything was wide open before you, and that was frightening just because freedom is, but also exhilarating. Now it feels less & less that there are limitless choices open to you. Time was, every time you left the house you'd meet new people and have adventures. Now I only see the hardcore faithful few, and meet less and less people, and know what I'm going to be doing on any given day. It takes the relish out of things, I find.
(Ironically I *know* a lot more online people these days than RL people , but it's just not the same if you wouldn't even recognise each other if you passed in the street.) Everyone seems to have shaken down into these tight little crews, there's no movement or change anymore.
What am I trying to say with this post? I guess I'm just using meeting new people as an example of things getting narrower - maybe it could apply equally to what job you do, or even what clothes you choose to wear, or what food you choose to cook, or your systems of belief, or what kind of life you choose to lead.
With all the free will in the world, how does it get so routine?
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1 day ago
20 comments:
Most people are small minded dullards who want nothing more than to settle down into a comfortable little rut. Exercising free will takes too much effort.
If you don't want to be one of those people, all you have to do is push yourself out of your comfort zone and try doing new stuff occasionally. There are others like you out there, it just gets harder to find them as you get older.
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Hmm, know what you mean. I used to be fairly sociable in my twenties, then moved to London where people only seemed to be interested in acquiring possessions/material wealth and don't want you as a friend unless you're only interested in acquiring possessions/material wealth.
I've got more reclusive as I've got older. It gets more difficult to socialise even with long standing friends, because (a) it's difficult to get them to come out with you because they can't be separated from their bloody children for more than five minutes and (b) if you do manage to get a night out with them, all they do is talk about their bloody children.
Sorry. Not very positive, am I?
get out of London, Annie.
LC, right. Comfort zone, you say... Okay, next on the agenda is a swingers' party, after which I will eat a big steak. And smoke some crack. (I do in fact have plans for something so far out of my comfort zone it's like jumping out of a plane without a parachute, still it will keep the old circulation going.)
Quink, okey dokey. Just give me a moment to come up with 6 random facts that everyone hasn't heard before. (I might have to make them up.)
Betty, my friends with kids always have a mad gleam of enthusiasm in their eye whenever they are let out of the house, the problem is you have to book them a month or so in advance. (Hmm, this is probably a factor, the universe is telling me I should be at home bringing up the kids by now...)
Rosie, fair point - but then I am one of those hostile repressed unfriendly Londoners, would I manage better elsewhere?
yes?
(also; what's this skydiving you've planned?)
oh, and most people are not small minded dullards who want nothing more than to settle down into a comfortable little rut. though it can sometimes take a little effort to see that.
I think you should become a serial killer.
We all live in a little Village… Your village may be different from other people's villages but we are all prisoners.
LC has a point about the comfort zone thing. But I think it's more that as we go through life, we make more connections. And those connections become like a web. As comforting as they can be, they're also restricting. Your responsibilities heap up, you barely have time to keep up with the people you already know, let alone meet new ones.
"A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age–regardless of how they look on the outside–pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don’t want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cast members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It’s universal.
Do you want out? Do you often wish you could be somebody, anybody, other than who you are–the you who holds a job and feeds a family–the you who keeps a relatively okay place to live and who still tries to keep your friendships alive? In other words, the you who’s going to remain pretty much the same until the casket?"
Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief.
We're all free, we can do what we want. I guess you don't need to go to a swingers party, just try something different now and again. The fact that you're aware of it means you're already pushing against it. Keep on pushing.
when I'm feeling even more depressing than usual, I like to go through past experiences and choices and see which had a material impact and which didn't. Most of the nice stuff oddly enough doesn't - friends, holidays etc. It's only disastrous work choices or SOs that make fundamental differences to the path of my life.
I can't add anymore to this except to say it's a topic that is probably more common on a subconcious level to many people than perhaps we realise.
Well put, Annie and I second and understand Betty and Del's comments.
So did you actually make it to the socialising event thingy?
My cousin has been to a few of these things and has met loads of people simply trying to widen their social circle. She been to loads of new places and done lots of things she otherwise wouldn't have thought of. Even when she went speed dating, she found herself meeting up again with lots of the people there, both men and women, for socialising purposes. She's having great fun and has met many normal people!
I read in the Torygraph an item by some woman that really by your 40s you'd made all the friends you would ever want, which I found deeply dpressing as I take every opportunity to widen my social circle. True, it does get more difficult, but once the children could babysit themselves, I was off.
It's a mistake to say people want to settle down in a rut. Sure, most if not all of us do get stuck at some point, but there are ways of opening yourself up again. Sylvia makes the socialising event sound very enticing.
Re the Telegraph article: a friend of mine got rather down once after reading an article in which it was claimed that by the age of 21, the person you're going to marry is already in your mobile phone contacts. It's nonsense of course, there's no age at which you have to stop meeting people.
Also, somewhat related, you might enjoy this article.
Rosie, I'll tell you in 5 years' time (as my big sis infuriatingly used to say to me when we were kids.)
Tim, I can hear the movie voiceover now: 'They called her 'the Teacher' and she wanted to teach them all a lesson they'd never forget...'
Del, I love Douglas Coupland, he's a very wise man. I guess what I mean is that whereas once new things seemed to come up spontaneously without trying, as you get older it takes way more effort...
GSE, I want to say something hippy like it's all about the journey, but I don't think I really believe it myself.
Cheers, Istvanski.
Sylvia, I need to do some more. That one was a party, and it was hard work making polite smalltalk with 30 strangers in a row... some of the events stuff is fun.
Emordino, re: the Telegraph, who writes this stuff? Ah, Charlie Brooker. He should be worshipped as a god.
Annie, I'm new to Charlie Brooker and am quite deeply in love with him.
It's very interesting, what you write here. While I think what you describe is - sorry to be boring - largely to do with getting older (which we're doing very slowly, of course), I wonder if there is also a sign-of-the-times aspect to it too. The atomised thing. London obviously atomises better than, say, um, Crawley, but I don't think there's a great public-spirited Eastenders village left (is there?) where people are constantly popping into each other's houses and being one big social family.
I'm sure the new people is wholly us getting older (very slowly), though. Much more fussy (in a good way), I think, about who our friends are as we get on. Not that you want people who are the same as you, have the same politics etc. - I think that matters less as time goes on - but we just don't bother to pursue a friendship which we might have, say, at 21, for sheer love of whatever it was we loved at 21. The then-equivalent of linking to everyone on facebook.
I must say I think I mostly quite like being a miserable 37-year-old. I would die of exhaustion if I had to be 21. And you are lovely and perfect at 36.
I think what BiB says about, both about getting older and atomisation, is right.
On a (slightly) related note I read an interview with Adrian Edmondson in the Radio Times and had a rush of recognition:
"After I did Comic Relief Does Fame Academy [in 2005], I thought I was a groovy young thing because I was in with a lot of groovy young people and having a delightful time - but I realised once I left that they viewed me as a slightly benign, slightly stupid uncle.
It was around the same time that my own children started to think the same - I thought I'd almost invented youth culture and they thought I was a bit of a tit who didn't know anything about the modern world at all.
God, have I had that experience?! But BiB is right - imagine being 21 again.
Hmm. Maybe I am deluded about my age and station in life... But I don't want to stop experiencing new and different things and having new experiences. It doesn't make me value the things and people I know and love less, it just means I'm still curious... doesn't it?
Yes, I am repeating myself again. A bit hungover, soz.
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