Tilbage i gymnasietiden læste jeg Douglas Couplands – ‘Life After God’, og da jeg – dengang som nu – var en værre emo, så blev jeg især bidt af dette citat:1
“When you’re young, you always feel that life hasn’t yet begun—that “life” is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you’re old and the scheduled life didn’t arrive. You find yourself asking, ‘Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?”
Her mere end tyve år senere er jeg ikke sikker på, at jeg har lært eller forstået Couplands budskab2. Jeg efterlever det i hvert fald ikke. For jeg er fortsat på præcis samme måde. Kan stadig ikke leve i øjeblikket og spekulerer altid frem i tiden. Livet begynder om lidt, vi skal bare lige have overstået X, Y eller Z. Og pludselig er livet gået. Mon du kender mekanismen?
Jeg kom til at tænke på Coupland, da jeg stødte på blogindlægget ‘and then?’:
My question about all this is: And then? You rush through the writing, the researching, the watching, the listening, you’re done with it, you get it behind you — and what is in front of you? Well, death, for one thing. For the main thing.
But in the more immediate future: you’re zipping through all these experiences in order to do what, exactly? Listen to another song at double-speed? Produce a bullet-point outline of another post that AI can finish for you?
The whole attitude seems to be: Let me get through this thing I don’t especially enjoy so I can do another thing just like it, which I won’t enjoy either. This is precisely what Paul Virilio means when he talks about living at a “frenetic standstill” and what Hartmut Rosa means when he talks about “social acceleration.”
I say: If you’re trying to get through your work as quickly as you can, then maybe you should see if you can find a different line of work. And if you’re trying to get through your leisure-time reading and watching and listening as quickly as you can, then you definitely do not understand the meaning of leisure and should do a thorough rethink.
Jeg er ikke typen, der lytter til podcast på 2x hastighed, forsøger at optimere alting og generelt fjerne friktion. Men jeg lider i den grad under, at jeg ikke altid kan svare på ‘og hvad så bagefter?’ spørgsmålet. Jeg ved faktisk ikke, hvorfor jeg har så travlt med de fleste ting i min tilværelse. Eller hvorfor jeg gerne vil have dem så hurtigt overstået, og derfor jager rundt med mig selv og mine omgivelser.
Kunne godt tænke mig at jeg blev bedre til at være mere … tilstede i det enkelte øjeblik. Så livet ikke blot bliver et interlude.
- Jeg vil generelt anbefale alle at besøge Goodreads’ righoldige samling af Coupland-citater. Han er et sandt overflødighedshorn af Gen X ironi og pludselig, uventet melankoli og inderlighed [↩]
- Det irriterer mig frygteligt at Coupland har været på en litterær deroute siden begyndelsen af 00’erne. For i sin prime i 1990’erne skrev han de her inderligt melankolske ting, som jeg intuitivt kunne (og kan) relatere til. Fra samme bog som ovenfor, ‘Life After God’:
“And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened.” [↩]