Excess Will be the Death of Us

Well slap me in the face with a baguette and call me bread, it must be Monday. To be honest I am not feeling life at all this morning. We’re out here on the struggle bus, Billy. My brain feels broken and simple tasks are proving difficult. Fascinating, I know.

Nonetheless, I’m here. I made it to the café, which is step one to not sucking at life today. It’s easy to get here on the days I feel well. On the days I don’t, routine turns into an accomplishment. Sometimes the words simply spill out of me and nothing can get in the way. Other times I can’t seem to put two letters together without second-guessing every thought I have, chunkily fumbling through another broken sentence.

Even though it’s a chunky day, it doesn’t mean I can’t break through. I’ve seen these days many times before, and even though it feels like I’m sinking in sludge I know that if I keep moving I’ll eventually break out of it. Sometimes out perception of what constitutes quality work is marred by our current mood anyway.

I’ve written things on days where it’s flowing and thought “wow, everything I write is gold right now,” and looked back at it all later and realized it really wasn’t as good as I thought it was. I’ve struggled through days where everything I put on the page feels like utter garbage and stumbled upon it later and thought, “hey, that’s actually pretty good.”

I guess I should heed my own advice and not think about it so much. I definitely psyche myself out of doing comedy sometimes, probably more than writing. It’s easy to draw on the miserable experiences of the past and say “I don’t feel well enough to do comedy tonight. I remember getting on stage when I felt like this and only feeling worse about myself after.” But truthfully, I’ve had plenty of experiences where I felt like ass in a cup of balls and gotten on stage and felt much better afterwards. It’s easy to make excuses, and I’d be lying if I said don’t do it a fair amount myself.

It’s easy to overcomplicate and overthink things. I know that when it comes down to it, the more I engage in creative activities, the more present I become and the better I feel about myself and life in general. Sometimes I lose sight of that, because things happen. Romances fall apart, sickness strikes, the weather gets iffy, you bomb on stage in front of a hundred people.

These things happen, and nobody’s impenetrable. As much as I’d like to power through and feel fantastic all the time, I can’t avoid the inevitable struggle that life presents. I can only do my best and try to stay present.

Returning to the present moment has been a huge focus for me lately. It’s at the center of many practices such as yoga, meditation, and stoicism that I’ve always been drawn to. When I’m anxious, it’s hardly ever about anything that’s happening currently because I’m too focused on that to actually be anxious about it. It’s almost always in anticipation of something happening or in remembering the past.

Anxiety has a lot of utility when it comes to surviving on a basic level. If you’re not anxious about getting eaten by the bear you’re probably going to get eaten by the bear. The anxiety is telling you something: hey idiot, you might wanna protect yourself from bears. So you listen, and you set up the necessary protections around your shelter and put yourself on high alert for bears.

I guess that’s more of an intuitive anxiety. I think what a lot of us deal with in the modern world is a symptomatic dysfunctional anxiety where we are anxious about things that aren’t actually a threat to our lives. “What is this person going to think about me if I go through with this later…” That type of nonsense.

I say it’s symptomatic because it’s fed to us through the fear-driven media which constantly convinces us that we should be afraid at all times. Our accomplishment-driven culture hammers this idea into our brains from a young age that we have to produce or we will perish. (And maybe it’s not just societal, it may also be latent in our being given that resources have been so scarce in the past) And this is not to say we shouldn’t produce, because we should. I suppose I just think our need to produce is overvalued and excessive.

We should produce enough to sustain ourselves so we can pursue higher-order goals like finding meaning and purpose in the world. It’s such a weird time to be alive. I worry that everything around us is moving faster than our ability to adapt. Here we are, stuck in our limited little ape bodies having to wrestle with an environment constantly throwing information at us that we’re not yet equipped to handle.

We keep trying to make everything around us faster and bigger and better, but what’s the point? What’s the end goal? We know that when it comes to income, for instance, once you’re able to be comfortable enough to pay for all of your basic needs, an increase in your income doesn’t have any effect on your overall happiness or well-being.

I think we’re getting to a point of diminishing returns. We’re at a place where we are producing more than is necessary for us to survive. It’s not evenly distributed, obviously. A lot of people in the world don’t have enough to sustain themselves and a lot of people have more than they need.

People don’t want to hear this but one of biggest health concerns in the United States right now is obesity. Clouded by the mirage of body positivity, we’re losing sight of the fact that our excess is killing us. It’s okay to accept that somebody is overweight and treat them with respect. We should be kind to everyone, but being overweight is not a sign of good health as an individual or a society at large.

Our collective weight issue is a sign of self-inflicted disease. That’s what we do when we lose sight of what’s important. We harm ourselves. And if we keep promoting this idea that more is always better then we’re going to do more than harm ourselves. We’ll destroy ourselves entirely.

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