Lifestyle

Today on Facebook(via Jennifer Ouellette) , I came across this brutally frank piece from 1999 by Meghan Daum (whose financial woes thankfully seem to be behind her, thanks to a successful book). I shared the link on Facebook as usual, and a comment on it by my friend Jill Smith made me think about what my personal lifestyle fantasy would be similar to what Meghan described in her piece.

My comment elaborating on this came out well enough that I wanted to make a blog post of it, because its tone matched the tone with which I try to write on this blog, and it was blog post length comment too.

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I don't have the Manhattan itch per se, nor an itch for big houses, but I do have the itch for a small place (preferably an apartment) in a walkable University campus neighborhood where I can get by without a car. I do have the itch for some of the kinds of artsy things she talks about, but it's more about enjoying them than collecting them. For example, living in the vicinity of museums, theatres, coffeehouses, alternative film screening theatres, jazz clubs etc. would be good enough to satisfy that itch. I do not care for these things being in a big city either. In fact, I prefer them in a small town setting. Much less pollution and much cheaper all around.

The part that most strongly resonated with me was the impulse to not want money for its own sake, and the desire to not want to have to think about money at all in everyday life. I want to work at a day job just enough that I can get the amount of money that would make me not have to think about money too much. I don't care to work any harder. I have too many other interesting things to spend my time on.

There was a time when I bought into the American idea that your profession ought to be what you life should be around, and you should keep looking until you find the thing that you love to do so much that you wake up every morning wanting to go to work. I spent many years wondering what such a thing would be for me. But luckily for me, the South Asian risk-averse impulse that I grew up with was strong enough that I didn't go down any path in the name of pursuing my dreams that would result in such chronic financial difficulties as she described in this piece. Today, I feel like my decision was the right one, because I can always pursue the things I love on my own time. Plus, there is nothing that could kill your love for something quite like having to do it for a living.

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Philosophy

I've started reading Bertrand Russell's "The History of Western Philosophy", and the Introduction (where I'm still currently at) has some brutally frank and hilarious parts that had the atheist in me laughing out loud with delight. So I thought I'd share a few snippets:

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Is there a way of living that is noble and another that is base, or are all ways of living merely futile?

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Why, then, you may ask, waste time on such insoluble problems? To this one may answer as a historian, or as an individual facing the terror of cosmic loneliness.

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Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe.

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Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.

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