I’ll Drink to That

This snippet of a Baudelaire poem has always struck me as a sound way to live: “You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it — it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what?  Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.”

I have, several times, considered getting a fragment of this permanently inscribed on the back of my neck. Not that I am a raging alcoholic. I just like the metaphor of drunkenness and think that, in finding ourselves on this planet as we do, we may as well be passionately inebriated on something. It is at the very least (especially for ranting atheists) a marvelous way of justifying one’s existence.

But on what exactly? Virtue, poetry or some other form of madness? Oh, decisions, decisions, and a hundred visions and revisions before our lives are measured out in spoons of coffee!  What will we do?

I was once working on a comparative study of transcendental ecstasy-of-choice. It involved an evangelical Christian church called Hillsong and a somewhat more obscure S&M sex club known as Hellfire. Although they were from completely different ends of the virtue spectrum, there was (imagined or real) a synchronicity between the two congregations.

Hillsong was sponsored by Harley Davidson and Gloria Jean’s, and parishioners seemed to like putting their hands in the air and fainting, much like a different kind of surrender in the den of hell. Of all the things to think, I imagined those leather-clad action figures coagulating on a Monday morning misery train of gray suits and briefcases. I concluded they were (Shock! Horror!) regular people who had found a temporary way out of the banality of existence – a little patch of Baudelairean bliss.

And so had my photographer friend Adnan, yet another extremist, who in a fit of uber post-modern perversion had had the word “Work” tattooed across his forearm in block letters.  He had just given up his high-paying job as an IT nerd to travel the world and take photographs; he loves coconut juice and tortured self-portraits, and has a tendency to walk up to random strangers and snap away, often only centimeters from their face.

After feeling slightly archaic about waiting to embody Baudelaire, I asked him about the significance of this seemingly antiestablishment tattoo (being a devoted capitalist or a housewife is sooo rebellious these days) because you literally have to drag him away from the camera. For Adnan, “work” is his biggest hindrance and battle, and the tattoo is a reminder of why he is constantly here and what he is doing with his life;  if he’s not working on himself, his life, his photography, his writing or his relationships, then he believes he is worthless.

It could sound like an arty overdose on existential angst, but it got me wondering at what point would we consider work to be meaningful? Maybe work is omnipresent, in which case I could need a scary amount of Xanax.

Such nightmares aside, though, is work just about enduring the nine-to-five office grind and finding happiness in whatever makes you feel like you can touch the stars once you’re outta there?

Could be – perhaps it is all Marxist-alienation-style misery until we can retire from being capitalist dummies, live by the sea, make pottery and no longer fret about the authenticity of our relationships.

But the longing to make work meaningful seems a stubborn part of our makeup, and as I don’t sense a collective proletarian uprising in the near distant future, the dilemma of finding fulfillment in our current working lives still exists.

The truth of the matter is that for the 98 percent of us who weren’t born into lives of luxury, work is at the end of the day about survival; so as long as you’re breathing, you’re probably going to have to deal with having the majority of your precious days consumed by labor.

I have observed that the happiest people I know are those who have just invented jobs for themselves, from their own dive companies, production houses, restaurants and studios, to small businesses and magazines. I used to think there was something wrong with people who loved their jobs, but I have come around to thinking that finding happiness in your job is a) possible and b) a subversion of the Marxist treadmill of oppression.  Either that, or feeling we have chosen our own form of slavery makes the illusion all the more convincing.

Apart from remembering our names and making menial decisions about how many spoons of coffee, our brain has a remarkable capacity to imagine different possible realities, and in this respect we really ought to take advantage of ourselves.

Dr. Denis Waitley, who among other overachieving things trained NASA astronauts, recently conducted studies on Olympic athletes. He hooked up sensors to their brains while they were running a marathon and while they were purely visualizing running one. In both cases, exactly the same muscles and parts of the brain were triggered. Essentially the brain could not tell the difference between the physical and the imagined.

There are countless other studies, such as MRI scans conducted on meditating monks, that suggest our mind really is a mini factory of its own – so good of modern science to get with the program and chart the power of our neurons to choose what hits the conveyor belt!

Mind over matter, people, the best job ever is only a scientifically proven thought away.

And while you,

“Lift and drop that question on your plate,” and “ask do I dare? and, do I dare? Disturb the Universe?”

Make the decision to enjoy your current job – there’s a strong chance your brain won’t know the difference anyway.  (And if all else fails, there’s always wine and Baudelaire.)

+ Kate Lamb

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