The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010)

by Michael Foley

  Another significant development is the huge and continuing growth in user-directed fantasy through computer games, which encourage the gamer to blow away legions of badasses, and websites where it is possible to enjoy sex in a new custom-built body and genitals. The aim of 1970s’ liberation was to become one’s self – but, since this has proved to be unexpectedly difficult, the new liberation is to become someone else.

  The enormous revenues from the games industry have guaranteed its respectability, with prestigious universities providing degrees in games programming, and serious newspapers reviewing new games as solemnly as art-house movies from European auteurs (the quality most prized seems to be ‘immersiveness’, which is the ability of a game to distract from real life). Apart from sport, children’s games and movie tie-ins, these games are mostly based on fantasies of power, violence and destruction, with the weapons of choice usually swords or machine pistols (though ‘innovative slaying’ is also admired and one Guardian reviewer was greatly impressed by a game hero with a chainsaw instead of a right arm).

  So there are sword fantasies (Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, Prince of Persia: Rival Swords, Dragon Swords), war fantasies (Warlords Battlecry, Warhammer, Dawn of War), omnipotence fantasies (Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Overlord, Demigod), revenge fantasies (Dark Vengeance, Command and Conquer 3- Kane’s Wrath, Assassin’s Creed) and, of course, end-of-civilization fantasies (Resistance.- Fall of Man, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon and Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem).

  But this is the age of collaboration so, for those requiring more authentic interaction, the next step is websites such as World of Warcraft where ‘in Azeroth the Horde and the Alliance are locked in a struggle for control’ and users join one of the races of the Horde (Ores, Tauren, Trolls, Undead, Blood Elves) or the Alliance (Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, Night Elves, Draenei) and set about whacking as many as possible of the enemy. Getting whacked oneself is of course never a problem. ‘Death has no lasting consequences. You will immediately be able to release your spirit as a ghost, at which point you will be transported to a nearby graveyard where you must run back to your corpse to revive yourself.’

  If fantasy sex is more exciting than violence, there is the passive option of pornography, now widely available and often free, or the interactive option of websites such as Second Life, where users can create a new existence with an open-plan beach house on a tropical island and, of course, a comic-book glamour body – youthful, slender, tall, narrow-waisted, broad-shouldered or basketball-breasted as appropriate – skimpily clad to display these assets, and adorned with exciting accessories such as tattoos and piercings for her, and, for him, perhaps a samurai sword and a couple of Uzi machine pistols. I have often wondered why fantasy so often combines the extremely primitive and the ultra-advanced, a weird pick ‘n’ mix of medieval and space age, but it must be because both offer escape from the contemporary world – they are pre- or post-civilization. So, no one in Second Life is over forty, short, fat, afflicted by skin or teeth problems, short-sighted, lame or bald. In this dream world there is only one real thing – the money needed to purchase the fakery. The default ‘avatars’ have no sexual equipment and the must-have accessory of a virtual penis costs $5. I would have undertaken fieldwork but for the constant need to apologise for having no genitals.

  But what is wrong with indulging in a little harmless fantasy now and then? For Kierkegaard the desire to become someone else was a symptom of the most extreme despair.196 And this extreme despair is a modern phenomenon. In traditional societies life was entirely determined by gender and class. There was no possibility of becoming someone else, so no one dreamed of it. But the continuing development of individual freedom has encouraged the notion that anyone can be anything. Even gender has become a matter of choice, and celebrity has now been decoupled from the tiresome prerequisites of talent and hard work. There appear to be no barriers to a more exciting and fulfilling life. And the images of such apparently fulfilling and exciting lives are everywhere. So the temptation to fantasize is overwhelming. But indulging in fantasy exacerbates the very despair it is meant to assuage. Reality and the self are so disappointing that they encourage escape – but the fantasy makes reality seem even more disappointing and intensifies the need to escape. This is why fantasy is so addictive. Millions of people now spend up to fourteen hours a day on games or fantasy websites.

  Second Life is certainly the only place where two heterosexual men can enjoy a lesbian affair – but the saddest aspect of the fantasy world is that it is coming to resemble the real world. Apparently, Second Life subscribers are becoming bored with fantasy sex on the ‘mature’ islands and increasingly turning instead to business – selling virtual land, homes, accessories and services. So the fake lesbians are increasingly outnumbered by the real capitalists fleecing the fantasists, just as they do in reality. As if anyone needed virtual estate agents! The only encouraging news is the appearance of a rival website called Get a First Life, which offers radical advice such as ‘Fornicate with your actual genitals’.

  Sometimes the virtual lovers attempt this. A woman meets a man in the new ballroom of romance, an internet dating site, and they fall in love and gambol for a time in the enchanted glades of cyberspace. Of course, these are two mature people with many failed relationships behind them so they are taking no chances. They have examined each other naked by webcam, with close-ups of both sets of genitals. And they have established that both sets are in working order. She has brought herself to climax with a vibrator on camera and he has jerked off to the performance. Finally, they agree that they are perfectly matched and agree to meet in real life. She chooses Waterloo station, not because it is convenient, but because it is the most romantic place for lovers to meet. He will, of course, arrive bearing sixteen white roses and she will be waiting in new lingerie from Agent Provocateur. Everything is perfect. No – there is one terrible omission. As the woman laments to a friend, ‘If only we had someone to film us meeting.’

  In the modern world, an event has not really happened unless it has been photographed or filmed. This failure of primary experience means that the photograph or the film becomes the reality instead. One of the earliest examples of this was after the first moon landing when the astronauts had returned safely to earth and, after the debriefing, emerged to learn of the media frenzy surrounding the event. Buzz Aldrin, who had just been one of the two men to walk on the moon, turned to his fellow moon-walker Neil Armstrong and wailed, ‘Neil, we missed the whole thing.’197

  The tyranny of screen life is becoming total. Screens are ever larger, with ever higher definition, and becoming ever more numerous and widespread, colonizing more and more public space, and constantly reinforcing the suspicion that life is elsewhere. The reality on screens is infinitely more real than the reality around them and the screen people more real than the viewers absorbed in them. There is something unassailable about images on a screen. And, as the screens become larger and brighter, their viewers become smaller and duller. Finally the viewers are like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave: shadowy creatures in a permanent gloom, with true perfection only in the bright world on screen.

  As well as growing larger, screens are also becoming smaller. The mobile, personal screen was an inevitable development. As well as personal phones and music players, people need personal screens – and the three will soon converge into a single gadget. Already there are screens embedded in eyeglasses and the techies predict that there will soon be screens embedded in nanobots on contact lenses, operated by eye movements. What hope for poor reality when Disney World is not only in your line of vision or even in your face but permanently camped on your eyeballs’?

  Screen images are vibrant, dynamic, bright, rapidly changing. Reality is moribund, static, dull and shuffles along on odorous, misshapen, sore feet. So, to be truly real, it is necessary to become an image. Only those who appear on screens truly exist.

  All screen behaviour is heightened. The crise
s in the soaps are more intense and dramatic, the laughter in the sitcoms more frequent and hysterical, the banter of the chat-show hosts more relentless and bright, the concern of the reporters in famine-stricken Africa more grave, the outrage of the interviewers at venality more righteous. Even the ordinariness of the ordinary people on screen becomes a heightened ordinariness – they are radiantly ordinary, attractively unattractive and eloquently banal.

  But the crucial difference is that screen life is faster than real life and, with ever more frenetic editing, is becoming faster all the time. Screen changes happen much more rapidly than in reality and each triggers the orientation response to a possibly dangerous new environment, interrupting attention to establish new bearings.198 The response is physiological and lasts from four to six seconds – but advertisements, music videos and action dramas trigger it every second so there is never time for the brain and body to recover equilibrium. The system is in a permanent state of red alert. This is why it is difficult to tear your eyes away from a screen and dauntingly difficult to switch off a television. The long-term consequences are that it becomes difficult to pay attention to anything static, slow moving or requiring prolonged concentration on a single topic or task. And, of course, reality becomes impossibly sluggish and dull.

  Experience is nothing other than what we decide to attend to, so the quality of experience depends on the quality of attention. But passive, stimulus-driven attention tends to notice only the most dramatic details – the bright colours and loud bangs – whereas active purposeful attention, the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, is more likely to register an entire scene. There is evidence that cultural conditioning has created Eastern and Western forms of attention. When Americans and Japanese were asked to study an underwater environment for twenty seconds and then describe what they had seen, the Americans said things like ‘big blue fish’, and the Japanese ‘flowing water, rocks, plants and fish’.199 The Eastern reality was wider, fuller and richer.

  TV news also diminishes reality. Back in the 1930s cultural critic Walter Benjamin observed that modern man was ‘increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around him by way of experience’.200 The novelty, brevity and unconnected nature of news items in the daily press made it impossible for them to enter tradition, and Benjamin described the consequence as ‘the atrophy of experience’. How quaint to be alarmed by newspapers! What would he have made of ubiquitous screens with rolling twenty-four-hour news?

  As Benjamin implied, the breakdown of traditional communities, with their rituals to give the year structure and meaning and their webs of close connections to provide rich human contact, has also greatly impoverished experience. It is easy to become nostalgic for communities, but necessary also to remember why people were so desperate to break out of them. When I was growing up in a traditional society I could hardly wait to escape the boredom, oppression and conformity. But there is no doubt that an independent life involves a significant loss of richness. There is always a price to pay. Freedom is thin.

  What communities once provided as the reward for conformity, the free individual now has to earn. So how to enrich thin experience and re-enchant the dull world?

  Walter Benjamin offered a contrast to ephemeral news items, ‘the story, which is one of the oldest forms of communication. It is not the object of the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening.’201 Benjamin was referring to traditional storytelling – but this tradition is alive and well in literature.

  Literary reading revitalizes personal experience by revealing that what appeared so drab and dreary was in fact mysterious and extraordinary – and it provides new experience by communicating life in a way that feels as though it has actually been lived. And not only does it renew past experience, its urgent command to pay attention, like the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, makes the present incomparably richer. And reading, though solitary, does not imply a rejection of others. Again, detachment, paradoxically, brings deeper engagement. Reading increases empathy, and therefore compassion and patience, by inspiring understanding for unsympathetic and even atrocious characters. And it creates a new network of intimate friends, the writers. Finally, last but by no means least, reading is itself a significant experience.

  In the last century the two great enrichers of experience were James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Joyce recreated the strange texture of everyday life and Proust revealed its equally strange psychology. One of Proust’s major themes was the psychology of expectation and disappointment. So the narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu lives an endless cycle of feverish desire and anticipation followed by disillusionment and despair.

  The society world of Proust is now as lost and remote to us as the civilization of the Incas but the narrator’s lifestyle is strikingly contemporary – networking, parties, infatuations, casual sex, capriciousness, impulse buying, celebrity worship and celebrity stalking. And the aristocrats, whose company the narrator craves, are the precise equivalent of the modern celebrity, special only by being thought special, living entirely in a bizarre, enclosed world designed to pander to their narcissism, violently glamorous from a distance and utterly tawdry at close range.

  Proust is also one of the funniest writers. Better still, he is funny not by exaggeration, by resorting to caricature and farce (the laziest and most common approach to comic writing), but by concentrating intensely on what people actually do and say. The satirical scenes in the society salons have the ferocious accuracy that causes winces and groans along with the laughs because the failings are so recognizable. This was Proust’s avowed aim: ‘In reality, each reader is reading his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which enables the reader to discern what, without this book, he would possibly never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.’202

  The beauty of lessons learned in this way is that they are absorbed more fully than by abstract instruction. After reading Proust you know, in the marrow of your bones, in your DNA, the craziness and absurdity of living perpetually in expectation.

  But the novel which does most to re-enchant everyday life is Joyce’s Ulysses. As Proust’s intention was to make every reader an interpreter of his own self, so Joyce’s intention was to transform every reader’s insignificant days into adventures as strange, rich, heroic and mythical as those in Homer – to turn every day into an Odyssey. Firstly, the stream-of-consciousness technique revealed the richness of the average ruminating mind with its endless flickering phantasmagoria of observation, perception, memory, imagination and desire. Then the inclusiveness of Joyce’s vision and the beauty of his style lifted up into literature much that had previously been rejected as too boring or sordid. Even now, almost a century after it was written, there are scenes in Ulysses which startle by the ordinariness of their everyday squalor. Even in the age when anything goes, few novelists would devote several pages of loving attention to a man reading Titbits on the toilet: ‘Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big to bring on piles again. No, just right.’203

  We all yearn for renewal but imagine that it may be found only in novelty – a new place, a new lover, a new job. More effective, and much cheaper, is to see the familiar with new eyes. And a few writers offer just such transfiguring eyes. They smash the crust of habit and permit us to see life anew. In the contemporary world, such crust-smashing is both more difficult and more necessary. Once there was no crust at all and most people were exposed to hunger, cold, disease and violence. Experience was unavoidably immediate and real. But now most are increasingly protected from the old dangers, and th
e new danger is that, as the crust becomes thicker and stronger, the life it shelters is more likely to wither and die in its shell.

  So seek out the crust-breakers and the eye-openers. Read authentic writers – and then begin a new job in your current post, enjoy a holiday where you actually live and, most thrillingly, plunge into a tumultuous affair with your own spouse.

  Of course, it is true that writers like Proust and Joyce are difficult – but it is also true that difficulty increases satisfaction. Reading is always assumed to be easy because the technique learned so long ago has been forgotten and we now do it unthinkingly all the time. So, if a book appears too difficult, it must be the fault of the book rather than the reader. But, like learning to play a musical instrument, reading is a skill with levels of difficulty. What makes Proust and Joyce seem hard work is the absence of plot, the device most novelists use to drive readers forwards through a book. Plots are effective – everyone wants to know what happens next – but the denouement of plot-driven novels is often implausible and disappointing. Is that all it was? This is because there are no plots in real life – only a complex web of continuum and connexity – so the reader has the unpleasant sensation of having been conned. And plots are instantly forgettable. Try explaining the plot of the thriller you read only last week. The pleasure of plot is all expectation and sensation, illusory and short-lived, so plot-driven novels leave no residue of beauty. Whereas a novel that reproduces the texture and feeling of life will be harder to read, but provide richer satisfactions and live longer in the memory. The bad news is that such novels are rare. Proust and Joyce showed how to succeed triumphantly without plot but this lesson has been forgotten by the age of potential. It is common now for reviewers to rate novels as ‘well plotted’ or ‘poorly plotted’, as though plot is an essential feature, and to express astonishment and consternation at the absence of plot.