A couple of years ago my sister gave me an Onion Page-A-Day calendar. I kept a few of the funniest articles and taped them up in my cubicle at work. Today the IT guy was fooling around with my computer when he noticed one of the articles, headlined U.S. Populace Lurches Methodically Through The Motions For Yet Another Day. A short excerpt:

The wall-eyed, slack-jawed U.S. populace, beaten down into a state of near-catatonia by the relentlessly deadening banality of their joyless, insipid lives, dutifully trudged through the motions for yet another emotionally blank day Monday, sources reported.

Against all logic, the nation's citizenry, their insides withering away with each passing moment, somehow managed to continue filling out invoices, shopping for footwear, loading dishwashers, eating Whoppers, pressing buttons, watching reality-based TV programs, vacuuming floors, engaging in conversations about petty office politics, riding buses, sitting in traffic, mailing letters, and tending to the little rubber mats people wipe their feet on as they enter the lobby areas of vast, windowless industrial complexes. How they managed to do it, no one can say.

IT Guy smiled and tapped the article. "That's great," he laughed.

"It's so cruel," I said, smiling.

"It's so true," IT Guy answered, suddenly serious. He stared at the article. "Every day you get up and go to work and go home and get up to go to work again. It's just the same thing, over and over..."

It was a poignant moment, the kind of real human interaction that doesn't happen often enough, so of course I dismissed it with a feeble joke. "Existential angst, right here at [name of my company]," I said.

"Yeah," he said, and the moment passed. He took my computer away to scrape the viruses out with an SOS pad or whatever, and I thought a little about what had just happened.

As great thinkers from Solomon to Linkin Park have observed, life can be a meaningless void of numbing repetition occasionally punctuated by brief fits of happiness and/or orgasm. You've probably thought along these same lines from time to time, especially if you are a high school sophomore who gets picked on a lot.

So what is to be done? Solomon recommends that you "fear God and keep his commandments" (Ecc. 12:13b). But God doesn't exist, probably, and even if you talk yourself into believing that he does, fearing him and scrambling to keep his commandments will make you even more miserable than you were before -- trust me on this. Linkin Park recommends that you buy their latest album, Meteora, available at all music stores and on Amazon.com. But will piling up material goods make you any happier? Consider this: if you are an average American, you are wealthier than 99% of all the people who have ever lived. And your life is shit! Do you really think getting a promotion and raise at work to bump you to the 99.1 percentile will make things any better?

Here's my idea: Do something. Take that trip to Ireland. Learn to paint. Run a marathon. Create something that wasn't there before, even if it's just crappy poetry that doesn't rhyme. Eat something you swore you'd never eat. Get a tattoo. Build a doghouse. Take aikido classes. Volunteer to help the East Timorese, whoever they are. Write a mystery novel. Learn to play cricket or lacrosse or jai-alai or Go. Do something cool and important and a little scary, the kind of thing that would make you raise your eyebrows if someone else said she did it. Why not? What the hell else do you have going on? Are you afraid you're going to miss The Bachelor? The time remaining in your life is a dwindling resource, friend. Bad television is not.

Right now, you are laughing. "Thank you, Kilgore," you are saying. "Very Chicken Soup for the Blogger's Soul, that. But tell me: why should someone as obviously bitter and unhappy as you be telling the rest of us how to be escape the grinding, swirling abyss that is human life?"

Yes. But I am struggling toward happiness. What are you struggling toward?

+posted by Lawrence @ 12/11/2003 11:36:00 PM