So What, It’s Just A Couch
A few thoughts on death, the futility of your days, why you should probably quit your job
In Being and Time, Heidegger said “If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life, and only then will I be free to become myself.” I’ve been thinking about death a little more than usual, or maybe just in a different way than usual. I’ve understood for a while now that one day death will summon me with a blind haste, that the world’s urgency to discard me in order to make room for others is a banal and normal process without emotion. There’s no point in denying the evening-shrouded skies when you made little use of the daylight. All of us know this, but we still carry on in the pettiest quarrels, assure of ourselves that the tedium of these nightmarish groundhog days will never end, of waking up and complaining about your job, of cussing at the Tesla who cut you off, of staring into the shimmering hole of your phone, the digitized cuneiforms of madness swirling into the infinite abyss, your mouth agape like a vegetable’s. When you’re with friends, all you get to talk about is the one friend that’s not there, you get to talk about that meme, that reel, that tv show, that movie, all gatekeepers of the horrordome swelling over you like a storm cloud. You continue to collect stuff, claustrophobia filled boxes of accruements and ephemera like Christmas ornaments, but instead they’re just heaping piles of shoes and headphones and dildos and coiled chargers and papers—so many godforsaken papers—and travel journals with five pages filled, and endless rotting thoughts of nostalgia.
You ask anyone over seventy and they’ll always tell you the same thing: it happens in the blink of an eye. You were twenty, getting laid by whoever you want, still deciding what you wanted your future to look like, and then suddenly you turn around to see the edge of the horizon within reach, the dull jolting thud at the end of the railroad tracks. And you look around you, and the kids who are twenty now are so arrogant, ignoring that you even exist because you’re old, and you’ve always been old, you’ve always been a staggering mishap in their eyes, a drooling freak who is bad at driving, with sagging sheets of skin fluttering in the wind.
Of course, hopefully you’re lucky enough to get old. Hopefully you make it through the gauntlet of virulent spells without much harm. We’re all bouncing through life with cancers gnawing at us from the inside, cannibalizing demons hiding in the caverns of your bowels. I’ve always imagined death to be something like those movie scenes of armies stampeding into battle. They are all racing towards death like they can’t arrive there quickly enough, but it’s completely random when one of you gets picked off early by a careening arrow that plunges into your heart from a distance. You can take a few precautions, not smoke cigarettes, eat leafy greens, go for the occasional run, listen to those Andrew Huberman podcasts, but death might just pluck you from the herd and cause you unbearable pain and suffering.
My dad died several months back, battling his last eight years with dementia and Parkinson’s. And it’s painful watching someone you love deeply deteriorating slowly in that way. Not painful because you managed to make his suffering about you, but painful because you see the mind of someone who was fiercely intelligent and patient and selfless and deeply loving slowly become locked in frozen agony. A plaque builds up in the brain, and what begins as the mild frustrations of not remembering family member’s names, deteriorates completely into losing all motor functions, wearing a diaper, staring wide-eyed and terrified up at the ceiling for years, your mouth jolted open and drooling like an evil orifice, the atrophied slaw of your brain only matched by the withered skeleton of your body. I am going to blow my head off with a shotgun before that happens to me, it is my greatest fear. I loved my dad so much, he was so resolute in his life for a while, in that narrow warm bright window centered in the eternal void all around it, the velveteen darkness caressing you from every direction, drawing you nearer. As a kid, he’d wake me up at four in the morning to go kayaking, taking me through caves where the leopard sharks nursed their young. He got me into long distance road cycling, and then after that competitive triathlons, and on hundred mile rides he’d tell me stories of his favorite childhood dog. Every summer he’d take us to see a dozen Shakespeare plays up in Ashland, Oregon, where he performed as a young man; he was able to recite long passages of Shakespearean dialogue by heart, just to impress us as kids around the breakfast table. He was a very religious man, and I became an atheist; he believed in only the spiritual, that the material realm was an illusion from the real; I became more of a materialist, believing in the opposite. But his religious practice was an unadulterated one, as close to a modern disciple of Jesus as one could be, living completely selflessly, living to serve and love others, to heal them in ways that he really believed in. Before that, my uncle died of colon cancer. Another uncle died soon after. A friend died the other day from stomach cancer. She was forty-two, beautiful, healthy, and happy. Just the other day a friend’s dad had a heart attack suddenly and died. Just like that. Another friend’s dad died on Maui right as the fires ripped through the island. Nothing out of the ordinary, people are dropping dead all the time. But every time it happens you take a few more moments than usual to reflect on what your own life has become. My brother is a firefighter and he can’t even begin to count the number of dead people he’s seen. He told me that not a single person who he’s revived from an overdose has thanked him; they usually just curse at him and tell him to get the fuck off of them. It seems like a strange reaction towards the person who just brought you back from the dead, the person who singlehandedly gave you the opportunity to have another shot at life, but instead you spit on them and call them names. I can’t really resolve that one, to cross over into the realm of complete absence, and then come back and not have even a remotely more clear-eyed perspective.
I work as a carpenter, I guess, or an unlicensed contractor, building decks, roofing houses, building tiny homes, scraping asbestos off ceilings, tiling showers and countertops, whatever you want. I’ve worked alone for the last few years, I set my own rates, accept or turn down any job I want or don’t want, take as much time off as I want and can afford for travel, my job has its advantages. But there is still a seething uselessness to how a majority of my days are spent. I usually work for somewhat wealthier clients who think they are designers, who order wood stains directly from Germany, who demand gallery style floor trim instead of baseboard, who think trimless shadow reveal is the only appropriate modern way to frame a door. They’ve stared deep into the pages of Architectural Design magazines, hypnotized like they were looking at centerfolds of Playboys instead, fantasized about being featured on the hippest interior design Instagram page for a momentary public acknowledgement about your tryhard snobbery, what good taste you have, accolades over mimosas with your girlfriends.1
I’ve convinced myself for this long that my job is just a temporary gig, that I’m actually going to be a novelist, that I’ll sell my plays and screenplays for lots of money, that once I’m done with these last couple jobs I’ll finally be able to paint huge canvases for twelve hours a day. That’s what I told myself when I was maybe twenty-two years old and have been repeating it to myself ever since. I just turned thirty-six. Fourteen years of this story. It reminds you that tomorrow you’ll be another fourteen years older and then another. Until you too are wearing a diaper and staring into the cosmic void like Mitch McConnell.
In David Graeber’s 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, he argues that more than half of societal work is made up and pointless, that it’s there to keep us busy and occupied, that politicians need to create pointless jobs simply to create them for jobs reports, that a busy population is less likely to revolt. Most of what we do is to occupy ourselves into oblivion, to dull the senses into meaningless fortune. In 1930, the British economist and philosopher, John Maynard Keynes, predicted that automation and technological innovations of productivity would eventually give us a 15-hour-work week. Graeber argues that because this has clearly not happened, that according to at least one study that he heavily relies on in his book, more people are reporting that their jobs are meaningless. But it’s more sinister than this. According to Graeber, it’s the pointlessness of so much societal work accompanied with what’s known as the Protestant work ethic—the attitude that your self-worth is based on your work ethic, that suffering is virtuous— is something he says creates a “profound psychological violence” in the greater society. Graeber was an anarchist, he helped organize the Occupy Wallstreet protests. I hold the pessimistic view that if his anarchist views of universal basic income and great swaths of free time were more popularized and adopted, the chronic toil of laziness would be so pervasive and poisonous that nothing creatively interesting or culturally substantive would derive from it. But at the same time I do agree with his overall thesis, and I think more people should walk out of their jobs today.
Just the other day I quit my last job. I was working on a home renovation for two months. The owners were treating me like an indentured servant, not caring if my original rates were being abused and whittled down into lunch money, as long as they got their wannabe influencer house of Venetian plaster walls and archway bathrooms. It doesn’t matter if my life slowly evaporates into pulp and resentment, as long as they get that Herringbone kitchen tile under a seamless countertop that looks more like a prison’s kitchen of paranoid sterility. I don’t yet know how I’ll keep making money—start selling some essays, sell the occasional painting. But I know I can’t keep doing it the way I have been thus far.
This essay you’re reading is more an exercise in self-reflection, to weigh our life’s futility with the meaninglessness of how we spend most of our waking hours in the domestic squalor of ennui and listlessness, that the few free hours a day you have you usually spend it staring into a digitized hole, watching videos of raccoons stacking plastic cups, or jacking off in the bathroom when your wife is getting ready for bed. This is not life, when you are dying but already dead.
When you mourn for the sudden death of a friend, you also exercise in self-reflection. If you were diagnosed with a terminal cancer tomorrow, would you think well, at least I lived a really good life for the time I was given. At least I’ve done everything I could to be the best that I can be. Because that’s all you’ll have at the end, hopefully the gasping laughter about what a good time you had, and it’ll ease the pain of a life cut short. It’ll ease the pain even of a long and healthy life coming to a close.
To call someone vacuous or vain or vapid is not to insult them passingly, and say, oh, look how materialistic this person is. Can you believe it? That’s not what I’m doing. I too want to live in a beautiful house. I do live in a beautiful house, but I want to build a bigger and more beautiful house one day. But to let those pursuits overwhelm everything else is the real tragedy. It’s like that scene in American Beauty, when Lester and his wife Carolyn are about to make passionate love for the first time probably in years: “Whatever happened to that girl who used to fake seizures at frat parties when she got bored, who used to run up to the rooftop of our first apartment building to flash traffic helicopters? Have you totally forgotten about her? Because I haven’t.” He then moves to kiss her on her neck, right under her ear, where miniature orgasms congregate and rally themselves. These two people who have resented themselves for years are about to make love. They could potentially resolve everything they have lost sight of, and rekindle the passions of life, the things that really matter. And then, as Carolyn turns her head to let her neck be kissed better, she sees Lester’s beer that he’s holding tilting horizontally onto the armrest of the couch. And she completely ruins the moment, because the stuff we have corralled around ourselves into nicely curated ornaments are more important than the moments and memories we makes with them.
Your writing and painting are one of a kind man. Your Dad sounds like an amazing man despite his lack of reconciling the spiritual with the material--i can relate 🧡