“Your late twenties are all about coming to terms with your own mediocrity.” So said my minutely older friend a few months ago, before resigning his body to the lulling heat of the green-tea bath, sliding out of sight beneath the water’s shimmering, yellow-green surface. I wanted to object, to muster a bold retort. I wanted to marshal an argument based on the conceptual fruits of perseverance, discipline, and hard work. I wanted to wrestle a smidgen of realistic truth out from a tired, idealistic cliche, like “all your dreams are within your reach,” or something like that.
There are few good pictures of Korean Jjimjilbangs. This is the best I could find.
But of course, I didn’t (as my grammar makes abundantly clear). I watched as my friend’s hair spread itself flat along the surface, as it danced cautiously, like seaweed, in the agitated waters of a Korean bathhouse (jjimjilbang). I watched from my perch on the other end of the small pool; my arms spread wide, crucified to the tiled edge. My lower torso bobbing weightlessly to the shooting time of two underwater jets. My stomach exposed, naked. The steam rising slowly through my sodden mass of chest hair.
I knew that any counter-argument would only amount to hot air and, in this case, quite literally. Our education systems (both in the West and here in Korea) are structured so as to give off the plausibility of your being anything you want to be: combine hard work and perseverance with good grades and innate abilities and, presto (or is it abracadabra?), you’re halfway up the corporate ladder to a management position, or combing the ocean floor for new marine life, or blasting off to space, or what-have-you. It’s not that this never happens. Indeed, many of the people we idealize, whose biographies we keep repeating, seemed on-track for success at a very early age. Lance Armstrong, for instance, was cycling far out to neighbouring towns at ten years of age and then calling home to be picked up, so of course he went on to win the Tour de France seven consecutive times. Or a nineteen year old Steven Spielberg, who skipped out of a tour of Universal Studies, retrofitted a closet into his “office”, and worked away on his first film, unnoticed, for some time before being found out (and subsequently hired on for his tenacity). Since teaching in Korea, I’ve felt this strategy of hero-making a bit more acutely. The textbooks I teach from are full of short bios on famous people, designed to inspire young students– and depress their aging teachers.
With no such immediately obvious trajectory to famous success, I’ve been developing a bit of a neurosis. There is, here, an anxiousness to aging that I have not hitherto recognized. There is an acute, looming sense of coming-up-short, of having underachieved and, hence, squandered what “could have been.” This neurosis is relatively minor (or, at least not maniacal– rest assured dear family, friends, and concerned readers). It mostly consists of constantly, and almost unconsciously, comparing myself to whomever wrote what I am reading, directed what I am seeing, or spoke what I am hearing. And it’s not an outright comparison either; it is simply noting each person’s date of birth and recognizing that they were a member of parliament at 32, or a published author at 27, or a first round draft pick at 18…etcetera, ad infinitum.
Bathing for hours is hard work, so you might consider falling asleep for a few more in the communal hot rooms. Photo by Jasonunbound
It was at this jjimjilbang and to my wizened and minutely older friend that I admitted to such unfair self-comparisons. Incredibly, I found an ally (for misery loves company), someone with the same penchant for feelings of inadequacy before the cultural productions of the young and the brilliant. It is fitting that our ensuing conversation occurred within numerous hot pools, saunas, and cold waterfalls, all of varying degrees of temperature; a body simply cannot help but feel old in a Korean jjimjilbang. Perhaps it’s the rapidly pruning fingers and the absorption of so much water that makes one feel closer to death; or it’s the way in which six hours of bathing seems to call for a thousand years of sleep; or, at the very least, it’s the horrific amount of dead skin peeled off by scrubbing brushes at the sit-down shower stalls.
Whatever the case, it is the prospect of death, I think, which drives these ludicrous comparisons, which makes me horrified at the thought of ‘wasted time’. I rarely read a book twice; I almost never see a movie a second time. And it was nice to share a genuine laugh at our ridiculous notion of gazing out over the vast expanse of human artistic production and comparing ourselves to any one and all. It was like an AA meeting for the washed up and old (yep, we’re almost 26 and 27 respectively)! I know, intuitively, that such behaviour is destructively selfish. For, what else is it but pure selfishness when you cannot see past the tip of your own nose to genuinely admire the accomplishments of another person? Admittedly though, we did share a triumphant high-five, in the sea-salt sauna, I think, upon realizing that the quirky and brilliant Cohen Brothers, though youthful, are in fact in their early-fifties!
"Hey Geoffrey, come on! We need you!"
Anyway, I think this habit goes back a long way. In elementary school, I used to envision the Ninja Turtles breaking through the cinderblock wall of my classroom and calling me away to an all-important battle against Shredder. My dream never did pass beyond the gaping jaws of my classmates, who were clearly jealous that I was on the “in” with Donatello, for that was all I wanted anyway, to be different and recognized and, well, cool. Perhaps not much has changed. I hope this all sounds rather more melodramatic than melancholic; it’s not that I’m an unhappy, dissatisfied person– much the opposite in fact. It’s simply that in the face of others’ successes, I feel I must not waste anytime. And this ticking clock (call it my biological clock) produces a measure of anxiety from time to time. That’s all. Besides, the comparisons are not all bad. Two weeks ago, the Globe and Mail ran the headline “At 70, A Novelist Is Born, about Alan Bradley, a crime writer from Kelowna, B.C.; though I will never be a crime writer, such stories do give me hope. And maybe, too, I should stop reading Nietzsche (who, incidentally, was chair of philology at Basle University at twenty-four years of age).
This struck a chord with me, having experienced many of the same sentiments myself. With the benefit of a few additional years of wisdom (I am, at 32, pretty well on par with Methuselah), I feel that my measure of success is shifting. It’s not so much that I’ve lowered my standards — I still have dreams of writing such a novel that would have made Steinbeck gasp with delight — but that success now presents a different face to me.
Rather than comparing myself to those select few, among billions, who have risen to the peaks of corporate or academic or literary or medical success, I look at myself as I relate to those closest to me. Not in terms of comparative success, but in terms of what my limited success means to them. What am I doing as a husband that makes my wife’s life better; what am I doing as a son to make my parents proud; what am I doing as a brother (-in-law) or uncle that brings value, happiness, joy, humour, what-have-you, to the lives of these people?
I would still love to be brilliant, famous, and accomplished, and to have my loved ones be able to introduce me as their brilliant, famous, and accomplished husband/son/brother/uncle. But I’m also realizing that there the adulation of the masses is never going to match the honour of having my 3-year-old niece urge me to come visit as soon as possible because she misses me.
It was nice to see your blog.Just Keep Writing!
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Don’t pay for your electricity any longer…
Instead, the power company will pay YOU!
Amber, thanks for the encouragement.
Siege, thanks for your words on the matter. I’ve been getting a few e-mails related to this post, so evidently we’re not alone! Your Methuselahian wisdom is a good turn from my Nietzschian ending. ; )
I like your ethical approach to success. It seems to me a much healthier approach to not only your life, but to those most affected by your pursuits.
I think my anxiousness partly comes as a reaction to my three years post-graduation. Coming out of university (especially with a Humanities degree), your future is a kind of blank slate, but as each year passes, you start to notice the closing “slam” of an inordinate amount of doors. In response to a more limited range of possibilities, it’s easy to focus on what “can no longer be” instead of on what “can still be.” Your comments were a good reminder to keep it all in perspective.
I know what you mean about the dwindling set of opportunities. After graduating with a business degree during the dot-com bust of 2001, I found myself casting about looking for employment — and I, too, hiked over to South Korea to teach kids who ranged from the passively disinterested to downright hellions.
The goods news is that, in my opinion, the doors start opening up again when you take a few steps in one direction. It may not be the same sets of doors you’d initially looked to, but doors are still there and there is excitement behind them.
Sometimes it helps to just take a step back and look at what you *have* done, framing it against the backdrop of an empty life. Graduating university, moving across the globe to live in a new country, meeting little Korean kids head-on and shoving learning into their brains — it’s encouraging, I find, to imagine your life as a headline and let yourself reflect on what you’ve accomplished. Chances are, when you look at it from objective eyes, it’s quite a lot.
Good post Nerl.
As we’ve talked about many times, we are very similar in our perpetual awarness our impending mortality. I, too, feel that terrible, guilty sensation when I have wasted an evening. That part about never seeing a movie twice resonated with me. I read an interesting quote recently that went something like “it is better to climb the same mountain a thousand times than to climb a thousand different mountains”. This idea speaks to me as well, oddly enough. Maybe there really isnt a such thing as “wasted time”, or maybe our understanding of what is wasted time is completely wrong.
In one of my blog posts a while ago I commented on how the author I was reading at the time believes our poverty is our lack of attentiveness rather than our lack of varied experiences. Maybe it is in fact better to read the same book 10 times and each time step deeper into the nuances and layers of meaning rather than reading 10 books superficially in order to feel like we have accomplished more somehow.
Lately I have been in this no-man’s-land of doing nothing while attending to nothing. When I have time off it’s as if I am overwhelmed by the possible activities, but can’t bring myself to do any of them because it would mean missing out on everything else I could be doing. In the end I just “waste” the time, not attending to any one thing, my mind fleeting between many things.
Anyhow, hope to hear from you soon. Ave and I are moving again in a few weeks so we won’t be having any cigars on the rooftop patio (but rather on our deck in the back yard).
I’ll leave you with a quotation I found on a japanese hotel sign: “The wash during washing and dryness becomes the supervision of visitor himself. Be careful of the burglery and the loss sufficiently. When the trouble occurs, we understand absolutely because responsibility cannot be born”
Cheers,
Zak
Siege and Zak,
Thanks for your comments. In terms of the ‘dwindling set of opportunities,’ it’s really just an awareness that certain job fields are not particularly accessible to me any longer. And for the most part, I’m okay with that. I think it’s actually a maturing of sorts, as I come to terms with my own experiences, my particular brand of knowledge, my specific skill sets. The result is a more focused assessment of viable opportunities, as opposed to wild imaginings and impotent dreams of Renaissance Man-type variability.
I’m incredibly thankful for who I am and the life I’ve been granted to live. I think, Zak, your thoughts on attentiveness help underline the importance of a certain self-awareness, a recognition of your own limitations as well as your own important capabilities; this can only be healthy!
On a similar note, I just finished a re-read (a rare thing for me): I dove back into Robertson Davies’ “Fifth Business” for the first time since high school. Zak, have you ever returned to it? Siege, have you read it? Have you read the whole Deptford trilogy? What a masterful novel. I think that now, with the benefit of hindsight, “Fifth Business” has proven to be fairly influential since I first read it. Reading it again was like a return to my earliest philosophical and religious uncertainties, but with a heightened sense of the daily workings of myth and metaphor within our lives. I already think I’m due for a third re-read.
Oh, and I think I’ll be breaking my own film rule in the next week: I need another run through “Synecdoche, New York” (like Robert Ebert, I’m proud to say).
And one more thing: Zak, it might be “better to climb the same mountain a thousand times than to climb a thousand different mountains,” but according to one of my students last month, “A mountain is troublesome but do air refreshingness.” Now, which one is the wiser aphorism, h’m?
Geoff, I have had the pleasure of reading “Fifth Business”, and thoroughly enjoyed it the first time around. Your comments on the benefits of a re-read have got me thinking that it may be time to take it down from our bookshelves and go through it once again. The first time, I mostly identified with the concept of a character whose role in life seem to be identified simply by the effects his actions had on other, more important people; I’m excited to see what comes out of it on the second pass.
In terms of mountains – might I recommend picking 500 really good mountains, and climbing them all twice?
[...] six months, the last few have creeped by so slowly! The result is a greater general fidgitiness (that ticking sound of wasted time adding to our anxiety) and an ample amount of escapist travel planning to keep our minds off [...]