July 26th, 2009
I was at a wedding this weekend when I ran into a friend who has been away – he moved to Newfoundland last year, which is as far away from Vancouver as you can get and still stay in the country. He moved for two reasons: one, you can buy a house in St John’s for literally ten percent of a house in Vancouver (and the Vancouver house would be a crack shack in east Van, whereas the St John’s house would be a tidy little fixer-upper right in the city); and two, he and his wife are getting into urban homesteading. Their ultimate goal is total self sufficiency, involving small scale farming, keeping food animals, solar power, and other back to the land type stuff, minus the total renunciation of modern life that some back to the landers seem to go for.
We had a great conversation about what I call urban malaise, a sort of listless boredom that is nearly subconscious and that permeates modern city living. I used to be trapped in it quite a lot, as epitomized by my TV watching experience: I would find myself lying on the couch for hour after hour, not really interested, mildly bored, a little bit restless, yet so passive and sapped of energy that I would rather watch yet another hour of brain wasting garbage than get up and do anything. I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t even really entertained, but I was held captive by my own complacency and a lot of flashing colours and sounds. It wasn’t until I cut our satellite that I woke up, after a period of withdrawal, to the fact that I had been wasting all of my free time.
I think this is a very common experience in people who have most of their material needs met. We are a passively receptive society waiting to be entertained without too much thought required of our entertainment – or only thought of a certain repetitive, uncreative sort such as that required by video games or much of internet culture. It is easier to do the same thing over and over while being stimulated with periodic rewards and arresting graphics than to get up and do anything. I have been trapped right in there, and it is only from the outside that I see it.
My friend said something really interesting at the wedding: he told me he is never bored in Newfoundland. He is a busy man, with a wife and friends, a business, and a home that he is constantly at work on in one way or another, be it planning or implementing moves towards self sufficiency. And we agreed that work for yourself is not like work for some company that’s paying you an hourly wage: there is something much more rewarding about turning your own earth, setting up your own home, caring for your own needs with your own hands – and this is a joy that urban life denies us. We haven’t the space to do it, nor the funds (try buying land in this city!), and in many instances, we don’t have the inclination. If it isn’t easy and immediately rewarding, we don’t want to do it. We are an entitled society also.
But I am getting sidetracked – my friend reported that the last time he was bored was the day before the wedding, when he was in Vancouver with friends. And then he said something else: All my Vancouver friends are bored and they don’t even know it. Urban malaise!
So of course not everyone is bored and not all city dwellers are doomed to misery and unfulfillment. But I think this environment is well suited to a facilitation of complacency. And under it is disquiet, a sense of emptiness or “is-this-all-there-is” – but no, this is not all there is. The challenge is finding a way out.