The unexamined life.

When I was at Reed College, there was a girl in my year named Eira. Eira was a very bright girl who finished her thesis on Nabokov weeks before the deadline and had already been accepted into her PhD program by graduation. For unknown reasons (I never knew her well) we are facebook friends.

I mention this becuase last week her status read: "Took one of my Reed profs to lunch. Geeked out about Lolita, Neuromancer, narratology. I feel sorry for people who don't know what they want to do in life."

After perusing facebook and reading my emails, it was time to go to the beach. I loaded my surfboard and got into the back of a pickup truck for the bumpy ride down to Playa Hermosa. It is still almost entirely undeveloped and was apparently where they filmed a season of Survivor. A mind-bendingly gorgeous spot.

After arriving at the beach we had an hour or so to kill while waiting for the tide to come in, so I hopped in a hammock and settled in with a book. But after a few minutes I could feel a physical surge of anxiety in my gut. I couldn't concentrate on my book, couldn't relax, couldn't sit still.
I don't know what I want to do in life. 

It probably didn't help that the characters in the Saul Bellow novel I'm reading are all impossibly intelligent, intense, quirky and far more interesting than I will ever be. And they all know what they want to do in life. So I was sitting in a hammock on a remote beach in Nicaragua, supposedly relaxing before an afternoon of surfing, but all I was doing was experiencing a kind of existential terror. What was I doing there? I wasn't accomplishing anything, I needed to go do something, something important and interesting to ward off the possibility that I will never know what I want to be when I grow up. 

This is what an existential crisis looks like.

But I think that perhaps, at least for right now, it is no sin to lead an unexamined life. To have no ambitions or plans or goals. I'm not here to learn anything. I'm certainly not here to "find myself" or anything so cliche as that. And if I'm going to figure anything out, it's not going to be while relaxing at the beach. Beach time is not Big Question time. Beaches are for playing and drinking beers and hedonism and tans. If I wanted an angsty soul-searching journey to discover my passion, I would have gone to Paris. It seems like the type of place that would be good for that. 


In conclusion, fuck you, Eira. And go find yourself a beach.