This comes after a conversation I had last night regarding an inability to get satisfaction from anything...
Emphasis on these excerpts.
O'Hagan writes:
In an era of extreme travel and desperately competitive bucket lists, it’s worth recognizing that ‘good’ is often good enough......
It exhausts me just thinking about it. We now live in a world of capitalized extremities: the Ultimate Experience now poses a threat to the kind of small revelations that can make us happy......
...but I would argue that exclusivity is no substitute for genuine connection. Going farther might be good, going higher can be exciting, but I can’t buy into the glitzy self-expansion that comes with going farthest, deepest, highest, as if size were the only thing that has any currency......
Not everything has to be great. Maybe it’s a thrill to watch things become great. Maybe it’s healthy to feel that a meal is reasonable, that a performance had its moments, that a trip was fun in parts, that a person is engaging and you look forward to finding out what they’re really like, that last night’s sex was nice. In my slow but persistent bid for the reader’s sanity, I hereby prescribe a period of allowing things to be adequate......
Personal satisfaction is a curious modern religion. It’s always been an instinct, of course, but it’s never been a religion before with such uniform psalms of praise. Good luck to those people who want the moon (literally), or who can’t stand for a second that something they’re enjoying isn’t utterly awesome and death-defyingly fabulous. Hurrah for those who wish to traverse the Gobi Desert on one foot. They will have the edge over the rest of us, who merely want a better cocktail and no traffic.I highly encourage you to read the whole piece. HERE
