The what? Exactly. Pretentious? Moi?
Possibly. But why is it that we unconsciously select some things as being legitimately of interest to us, and reject others as “not us”? Some components of this great experience called life seem to self-select for our attention and enjoyment, others shy away or skulk in plain sight, confident that we’ll never flick them a second glance. Some aspects of our ambient environment become foreground from early on in life, much remains in the background; prominent and recessive soon shuffle into their natural habitats. That way we make sense of things and survive.
Operating this necessary gestalt inevitably generates casualties. I’m never going to be even remotely interested in anything to do with horses, economics, hip-hop, video games, or baseball, but I still convince myself that there’s time to acquire some elementary Russian vocabulary, to listen to more Elgar, to be able to distinguish cars by techniques more subtle than the identification of colour, to visit the Uffizi again (pandemic permitting), and to read the entire works of Charles Dickens. The truth is, I’m probably not going to get far with any of them; they’re not “really me”, yet they might be, and I feel that they should be. They’re not core, and I can do without them if I have to. My core interests will remain as they are, bubbling away with steadily ebbing energy and diminishing motivation in the glorious cauldron that pulls them all together, that disorderly melting pot otherwise known as my mind or - more briefly - as me. I will attend to the core, because I have to, because it’s instinctive, because it’s me. But how has that happened? Why this and not that, and why any house room at all for the potential ought to in-betweenies? Well, I’ll avoid addressing most of the specifics for now.
Spoiler alert: fish coming up.
The dilemma is between having a fixed personality with defined interests and tastes, as opposed to one much less rigid, but open to anything and everything. I imagine most of us lie between the two extremes of cognitive rigidity and cognitive flabbiness, but however hard we try, we can’t design or redesign our personalities. We can fiddle with the edges, we can adjust the rigidity- to-flab ratio a mite or two, but in truth we have little real say in the matter.
The twin perils accompanying this conundrum are of wasting time, money and energy on things we will never like, and excluding much that we might enjoy but for ignorance or fear - like a relative of mine who won’t eat Stilton because about 70 years ago his father told him it reeked of smelly socks (one of several successful paternal ploys for rendering him quiveringly larkined for life). Then again, I can’t talk; I’ll never enjoy intimacy with a haddock thanks to a childhood fear of the man in the Co-op fish department. However, if we are able to progress beyond such deep seated, life-impoverishing, debilitating quirks as Stilton-specific turophobia or chronic intractable generalised ichthyophobia then surely we can tentatively explore, we can probe gingerly into previously unknown territories.
Advertising, and the kind of “if you like this then you might like that” recommendations that the internet handles so well, are deliberate, commercially motivated attempts to nudge us towards other “likes”, entities in some way similar to those we already enjoy – or which our online activity to date has betrayed an interest in. Pushing the envelope is good for those seeking to profit from us, and may be good for us as consumers too, especially if it’s in unexpected directions that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred to us. Sometimes we resist, sometimes we’re happy to be nudged. Sometimes something registers at the back of the mind, festers for a while, and gets to us later. But we like our comfort; we like what we know and we know what we like and every conceivable quasi-Rumsfeldian permutation thereof. Comfort zones are comfortable and are to be enjoyed, preserved, and generally left alone, despite the holier-than-thou goadings of emotionally-stunted HR officers, sadistic gym teachers (is there any other sort?), empathy-deficient team-building training-day fascists, and other malignant species of professional bastard lowlife who think they know better. I know what I know and I like what I like. There’s no compulsion to extend.
For most of us, I imagine, under normal circumstances, we stagger unpredictably from one thing to another, from one transient taste or interest to another, from one must have or next big thing to another, as fads and fashions and accidental circumstances suggest, seduce, or demand. An advertisement here, a TV programme there, a visit to an historic site, an enthusiastic review, something that a friend said we might enjoy. Instinctively we’ll judge, select, reject; potential inputs that make us “us” – a deeper “us”, or a wider “us”, or both. Or not. Instinctive, automatic.
That’s fine in principle. If we had unlimited lifespans and bottomless pockets there would be less - or even no - need to select, for we would have infinite time and capacity to benefit from all that the world has to offer. Potentially we would in time all be omniscient, and identically blessed, leisurely perambulating through every treasure to which our minds and senses are capable of response. But life isn’t like that – fortunately. In the absence of an infinite capacity for flabbiness the question may gradually focus on whether we should spend time revisiting what we know we like, deepening our knowledge of and pleasure in those things, or whether we should devote more time to exploring what we don’t know, on the off-chance of reward and surprise. Experience tells us that the tyranny of choice usually reduces to the dictates of circumstance, time and money.
Coronavirus, thanks to enforced limitations and increased awareness of mortality, has encouraged focus. Arguably, that’s one of its few positives; warfare might act similarly. Under normal circumstances rarely is “personal design” deliberate or planned. Like stuff in general, it just happens – we are who and what we are.
When we’re younger, however, and we know we’ll live for ever, we may more self-consciously draw up life plans, agendas, to-do-lists. As energetic adolescents we may draw roadmaps of ambitions, critical flow diagrams for intended accomplishments and ambitions; we may scribble on wallcharts the goals we want to achieve, the milestones to reach, the attainments to attain. Earlier in life the more open-minded and less rigid strategy is surely the one to be recommended, the more daring, experimental one, the jumping out of aircraft or hopping across Antarctica one, that blissful phase of life where – if you’re lucky enough to have all the support mechanisms in place - you can shock yourself pleasantly with your catholicity of outrageousness and your eclecticism of taste for the existentially challenging. Time will never end, so you can give full rein to your declared fondness for Karlheinz Stockhausen at maximum volume, your self-impressing bedtime addiction to the works of Martin Heidegger, your smug infatuation with Georg Baselitz. You must! Go for it all while you’re young and life stretches endlessly ahead, even if occasionally discordant, incomprehensible or upside down. Sorry, I’ve had a bad week with the Germans, but you get the idea.
Much later on, when you reach that age when the sands of time are rapidly running out (the same sands we considered last time), deliberation may become more, er, deliberate. The question of what to spend one’s time on becomes more urgent but, I suspect, the answer not much easier to reach.
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