Reasons to Live

I’m depressed. There I said it. I’m depressed because my paintings were ruined, and I’m depressed because I’m not sure I’ll have time to finish what I want to before the final show. I’m depressed about the possibility of moving home after summer travel. I’m depressed about making plans for summer travel (and future life) that don’t include Brian.

Sometimes, when I’m depressed, I do the most depressing thing, in hopes it will make me feel better. When I don’t feel like anyone has the answers, I bring my problems to the omnipotent, the all-knowing, all-seeing– Google. It is a strange sort of conversation. Basically, I input questions in the form of short phrases into the search field and I see what Google responds. One very common conversation starter when I’m feeling like this is “reasons to live.”

It’s responses have changed over the years. One answer I remember from early last year was Brian Eno, telling me why I should be optimistic about the global warming crisis. He told me people are becoming more empowered. This did not make me feel better. At the time, a slave to the New York rat race and a subordinate in a country that continues to do horrible things to people and the environment without my consent, I couldn’t really believe him.

This time, I got some woman’s blog that tracks her reasons to live, but despite some wonderful posts about octopus muppets, Vanna White’s legs and sock monkeys, it was not hard to read between the lines and see why she created this blog of happy thoughts in the first place: she is depressed. She is depressed because she wants a husband and a family– she cannot help but gripe about it in very short lines even though she immediately scolds herself for dragging this negative energy into the blog created for the sole purpose of excluding it. (Oh, Jesus, all roads lead to Lori Gottlieb. Double whammy depressing.)

I was text messaging with Alice and decided I’d ask her what her reasons for living were. She replied, “summer’s coming, Bush’s term is almost over, days off.” I told her that all of these points had depressing counterthoughts– summer is longer and hotter due to global warming, we’ll be dealing with the affects of Bush’s term for the rest of our lives, and days off mean that you’re needing them after so many days on. But this exchange gave me an idea, and I immediately texted practically everyone in my phone and asked them for their top three reasons for living, in hopes of collecting the happy thoughts of all of my loved ones– family, friends, and acquaintances– and making them my own.

I think I may have asked the wrong question. I think what I meant to ask had something to do with simple pleasures– I wanted to know about the little things. What I found out, however, was also valuable if not a little redundant. It seems we all live for the same exact things, all of us. This may not be news to anyone, but I’m posting my findings simply because I’ve done the experiment.

The responses tend to fall into eight categories:

1. Love- romantic, familial and platonic

2. Art- I expected the artists to almost uniformly say that it was art that made life worth living. What I did not expect was for so many other people, non-artists, to say the same thing. In fact, of all 50 plus people who responded, I’d say music was the most common “reason to live” behind love, for the musicians as well as everyone else. People want to live for the next great book or the next great movie or the next great band (unfortunately, no one wants to live for the next great painter, not even the painters themselves…). Either way, it was nice to hear that considering artists, I think, so often feel like they are not doing enough, like they should be activists or something more “useful.” If this isn’t proof that art is “useful,” I don’t know what is.

3. What I would call “evolutionary” or basic needs- food, sex, and reproduction. Funny thing– people who listed sex in their top three (both men and women), did not list love. Don’t know what to make of that.

4. The natural world- people like the ocean and sunshine. period.

5. Self-knowledge and enlightenment- truth, higher consciousness, inner peace (please try to read without cynicism, we’re talking about reasons to live here)

6. Change- It was nice to see some people out there actually embracing this as a reason to live, since it often makes me want to die, but it was listed quite a few times and I believe is related to the next category…

7. Curiosity (so far one of my favorites)- people want to know how things are going to play out. We are interested in the way things fit together. We love the coincidences, the serendipitous things that happen, we love looking back and musing at the way things turned out and looking forward with the same sense of amusement. I would include travel here, and also the anticipation of new experiences in general.

8. Wonder and Awe (my absolute favorite)- This one was harder to recognize in short text messages, but I believe that it was definitively there. It is the mystery of life, the way things come together, the constant and renewed sense of looking at the world as an unbelievable place. My brother used the word “divine” but was careful to divorce it from any religious context. I realize this is what I have been searching for, my reason to live. In a way, it explains all of my obsessions: the apocalypse, the paranormal, and aliens. Though they often torment me, they bring meaning to my life. They exemplify something awesome, beyond our understanding, and beautiful. I don’t mean to bring a negative connotation to it. I have felt the same wonderment when I first arrived in Spartanburg, waking up in the morning with the sunrise, light coming through my windows, and then returning to sleep, calm and happy. It is those intangibles that make life beautiful. I guess this last one is just kind of the love of life itself.

Here are some of my favorite answers (some in full, some in part, with my comments in italics):

Mike Alfano: God, pussy, R. Kelly, not in that order (R. Kelly on my list as well)

Robby: Sex, beer, Beatles

Jordan: the next good band, septuplets, aliens (Aliens also on my list)

Alan Papir: Publix subs

Berel: schlepping, schtupping, and schlugging

Zachary Thomas Coker-Dukowitz: gumballs, avocados, sour cream

Jasmine Tsou: Sex, drugs and money

William Alton: baseball, immediate family, and I really like food (actually, music tied with food)

Jacki: to practice having children in the hopes of not screwing one up

Ryan Tables: my 1982 Casio wristwatch troubleshooters guide

Ryan Reardon: music sex truth (I just like how authoritative it sounds, and how well these words seem to go together.)

Kane: love of self, love of others, music (you could swap music with love of creation, or you could put love as my one and only reason for living)

Erin: love, consciousness, free will

Rosanne: Love, happiness, and the ability to walk down the street and run into Ryan Fishoff and have lunch together on a Thursday afternoon (this last one is an example of the serendipity I maybe unwisely lumped in with curiosity…Ryan Fishoff is a guy that Rosanne and I have gone to camp with since we were young. For reasons I won’t get into, he is kind of a funny figure in our history. It turns out that he and four other people we went to camp with are all working within a few blocks of one another in New York City and constantly running into each other on lunch breaks.)

Rob Vida: 1. to keep society and humanity going 2. to accomplish goals I have set out to do 3. to prove to others that I am better than them

And from my family:

My dad: Arielle, David and Rachel (those are my siblings…typical dad answer)

My cousin Jessica: family and friends, husband and kids, and the Chanel bag that Mary Kate Olsen has that I have been eyeing

My cousin Daniel: Jeri, jeri and jeri (Jeri is my mother. This is a [good-natured] joke targeting her meglomania. His mother, my aunt, also listed “Jeri” in the same tone…)

My brother: He insisted on two lists, one for real and not. This is his joke list: Lost, being part of a craze, D Wade (of the Miami Heat). This was his real list: language (and subsequently, human interaction), music, and wonder/awe.

And finally, not really an answer to my question at all, but a reason for living in and of itself from someone who must really understand me:

Irina: Oh my goodness, you need a hug