Now What?

I managed to get a run in yesterday while my girl was in her gymnastics class.  There are some treadmills nearby at the community center, so I jumped on one and got about 3 miles in while she was busy wearing herself out and loving it.

While running, I listened to a podcast from Slate, a book review/book club on The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan.  I read this several months back and it stuck with me, so I figured I'd listen to what some other folks had to say about it.  I don't want to talk about the book itself, though; I want to talk about one of the reviewer's comments.  The Slate conversation proposed the idea that it was frivolous to spend so much time thinking about food.  A reviewer made a comment along the lines of how abundance and plenty can leads to enervation and depression.  Although the context in the Slate discussion was primarily food, it reminded me of something that happened several years ago.

When we lived in Houston, we had a good group of friends that we hung out with.  We met when we had all recently graduated college, were in an unfamiliar city, and were just getting started on our "grown up" lives.  A few folks knew each other from college, but most of us were strangers who became good friends over time.  About five years after we all ended up in Houston, our group had gotten together one night at someone's house to have dinner.  There were probably 8 or 10 of us there that night, and we were in the kitchen talking about how our lives were different from when we had met five years ago.  We were no longer the recent college grads scraping together dollars for dinner or worried about every cent we spent or how we did in in that tough class and whether we'd get that interview.  Nor were we really worried about where we were headed in life.  We were all in our mid to late 20s, had defined career paths, decent jobs, no kids at that point, and seemed to be well on our way to a 'successful life.' 

You would think that this would make all of us content and happy and relieved that at least some struggles were behind us, right?  But I remember one of the guys talking about the feeling of "now what?"  He made the point that if he wanted to go out to dinner, he did - and he could do that most nights, and it wasn't any big deal, it didn't require balancing the budget or being overly concerned about where he went.  He decided what and where he wanted to eat, and he went.  There was no planning on Monday to eat out on Friday and looking forward to it all week, as we had all done in college.  There was nothing about the eating out experience that made it special anymore, and that took a lot of the fun out of it.  I think everyone in that room was nodding as he talked about this feeling.  That applied to a lot of things in our lives at that point.  We had the things we needed, we had most of the things we wanted at that time, and we had come to the point of "now what?" 

I wonder if sometimes we (people in general) don't make crazy decisions, do crazy things, change things up when it's not really necessary, just to escape the "now what" feeling.  And I wonder if that's not a completely valid thing to do.  We all know people who have left fantastic jobs, made what we think are crazy decisions, done things that make us say "I could (or would) never do that."  People who seemingly had everything, but just weren't happy with what they had, so they changed things up.  Sometimes those decisions are called irrational, but I wonder if it isn't that person's way of avoiding the "now what" type feeling, the lethargy that comes with having things wrapped up in a neat little bow?  Of course, I'm making a lot of assumptions here, but I think the idea of enervation, discontent, depression going hand in hand with plenty, when "plenty" is what our society strives for, is interesting.