“No man ever steps in the same river twice” Heraclitus

Meaning that everything changes, all the time. The river you stepped in that one time has changed now, it may be the same river nominally, but it is not made of the same material. The water and the fish are not the same, the banks have eroded or silted, the flora is ever changing, the only thing that doesn’t change is the name. There are other ways to relate what this 6th century BCE philosopher was trying to say, we could use the Ship of Theseus argument as written by Plutarch and later modified by Hobbes to say that you too are different to the person you once were, personally I like that one, and have used it many times as a method of casting doubt about the certainties we all have about ourselves.

Bottom line, given time things will change, and each of us may struggle with those changes depending on what stage we are in in life or on our burdens. I currently wish for a change, I am in a rut, a sort of groundhog day existence where most days look far to similar to the ones that came before them and the ones coming are a bit too predictable. I know this, yet I’m having some difficulty stepping into a river, the river of change, I once found really easy to cross. If you don’t mind I’d like to use this piece to think about why?

I have a restlessness whereby I want change, but a fear of change that inhibits doing anything meaningful toward that change. So I suppose I am doing the normal things that a person might do in such circumstances, I am spending money to buy things that then do not fill the hole created by the need. I often wonder if this quite normal happening is a cruel exploitation of people, rather than simple consumerism? Is our natural pull toward wanting the landscape of our life to be more varied than it usually ends up manipulated by the well used, and well understood among marketing executives, twin forces of fear and desire? What I am not doing is trying to find a way to be content, I do not value contentment as some do, I wish for progress.

Seneca said it was possible to decide how you feel about where your life happens to be, that you could conclude that you were happy regardless of what befell you, this is not easy to achieve though, and it is sort of a dissonance. Baudrillard said that, in the post modern world, reality has become a simulation of the real, and the simulation was more what we expect than the reality could live up to, that one is hard to understand but he is correct. Both these perspectives give me pause mainly because I don’t know the change that I want, it is a leap of faith, but isn’t every change just that?

I’m fifty and I’m not as sure as I thought I would be. Now that I am this age I realise that the people that were this age when I was half this age, were charlatans just like I am now. They were not anything like as wise as I thought they were then, or imagined I would be by now. Realising this is a bit worrisome because it means that I now see that life has a lack of stability at any age that I falsely assumed would fade as I aged. I was rather hoping to put the anxiety of youth behind me, now I know it is not just youths and early middle aged men that feel it, the fucker is here to stay.

Freud writes of illusions being dispelled or held onto as we grow, I wonder if he meant that a person was ever doing so, even at fifty years old. My pals have no answers, the ones that seem settled have merely filled their lives with busyness and family as a way to not consider the dread. Working jobs they falsely imagine actuate them in a Maslowian way, or concentrating on the needs of their children and their children. This is distraction though, if you love your job and you are your job, then I consider you more lost than I am. And if you’re standing in the supermarket, or at the chemist, talking yet again about your daughter’s A-Level results rather than anything you’ve done personally, then I’m afraid that’s just the same thing if my argument has merit.

Vicariously we can live lives we have not lived, and accumulate experiences we have not experienced, but it’s not the same thing if you happen to be feeling personal pride over something you have not done. That might seem harsh, and yes the circumstances where a person achieves anything is not a bubble, but they did it, not you. A good friend of mine is a great snooker player but his dad was shit, my dad is a sketch artist and I’m useless with a pencil, the previous monarch seemed like quite the intellectual yet her eldest son seems to be a moron; we do not inherit abilities as much as we might think.

Making a change, a major one, is not something that is new to me. 1993 I quit playing football, which I’d played competitively since age 9, because it became clear that I wasn’t going to ever be a professional. In 1996 I quit my factory job to get a better education as an mature student. In 2000 I joined the British Army on a whim after a chance encounter and a short conversation with a soldier in the street. In 2005 I abruptly left the forces, while doing a job I was considered to be rather good at, to go back to where I was from and try my hand at being a businessman (which didn’t go as planned). In 2009 I upped sticks and moved to Shropshire England with no job. In 2010 I married a lunatic I hardly knew who helped me get rid of any money, sanity, and dignity that I had had (within 7 years). In 2017 I got divorced and started over. In 2019 I left a job I loved to work a job I didn’t because it paid better.

Some of these were mistakes, but then you learn loads from errors, like not to repeat them. Some were the best move I could have made at the time. None of them I would change though because they got me here and I like here, I just am not thrilled by it. I’m a restless sort, I was a restless child, the only thing I was certain of was that I didn’t want to just get stuck where I was and live a mediocre life, everyone else’s life. Here I am at the end of 2024 wondering how I was able to be reckless in the past, how was it so easy to take chances then but not now, and how did I end up living everyone else’s life?

I have a theory….. you start out with nothing but yourself and family, and you accumulate things. Each one of these things, and they don’t have to be objects, places a weight on your psyche that we could describe as The Potential Impact Of It’s Loss. What I mean by that is that everything you build, buy, appreciate, participate in, or become committed to, creates a barrier to making life changes that may require detachment from them. Things you don’t have have very little impact on you in this way, you would not morn their absence nor feel their loss. It is only when you have something that it has both the positive effect of the reason why you desired and then gained it, and the negative effect I have given the above description to it. In many cases the positive outweighs the negative, and the item/object/person/pet etc continues to please, but for other things they lose their shine and become a duty or a responsibility only.

I used to put a lot of emphasis on being good at what I do for a living as being something that gave me satisfaction, but now I think that may be one of the biggest mistakes a person can make. I don’t think things like this matter at all, and your attitude should be one of ambivalence toward your employment. It really does not matter if you are the greatest binman in the county, it doesn’t get you anything to be a top employee unless you get paid more than the mediocre ones, and the reward for hard work is to be given more. If not you then somebody else, nobody is really appreciated by the firm they work for, no boss sees you as useful, you are a necessary burden to carry for them to get what they want and as soon as they can replace you with a robot you best be in no doubt that they will. Working for somebody else is not like making something like a chair and then sitting in it for the rest of your days, it’s more like making a hundred chair legs so that you might get just one chair to park your ass in for a while in front of the TV, Marx was right.

Like the Ship of Theseus argument says, I am a different person to the one that made those big decisions, but the common thread of my life means I am also the same person. The struggle is to set aside what doesn’t matter and what might matter but you can live without. For this I boil it down to those things that are material and not. My partner, my pets, and my friends are what matters, they are the richness in my life. My stuff, the things I own that do not live, I could do well without.

I’ve been actively avoiding giving anyone advice for quite a time now, the reason being that I know I can’t personally live up to the advice I’d give someone else. If this was a friend of mine I was talking about it would seem simpler, I would be tempted to say “go for it, quit your job and move to the highlands of Scotland”, and I might even throw a well known trope in too to harden the point “you only regret the things you do not do, not the ones you do”. Making decisions for other people is too easy, so is dishing out advice. I know everyone I talk to will encourage change rather than caution, but that’s because it’s me and not them.

I figure that I have been dented by the accumulated experiences that have happened to have happened to me, nothing too bad just attrition. My divorce was a hard hit, my therapy that followed opened up some old wounds while healing the newer ones, I have accumulated a lot of stuff that has to be managed, I’m at that age where it’s harder to hop jobs or career, the happiness I have now in my personal life gives me a greater long term fear of it’s loss than I care to think about, and I like where and how I live. My big gripe is that it’s all a bit lacking in forward momentum, a little too beige, a bit like living the same week, and the same conversations, over and over again…

A change is coming, I just don’t quite know what it is yet…

Paul S Wilson

In this essay I have mentioned…
Plutarch – Greek historian from the Roman period
Seneca – Stoic philosopher from the Roman period
Hobbes – English 17th century philosopher
Marx – German 19th Century social theorist
Freud – German 19th Century Psychoanalyst
Baudrillard – French 20th Century philosopher and social theorist