For many years I have asked myself, Why do you spend time with other people? but I never really attempted to come up with an answer. I always believed I was asking myself a rhetorical question, but recently I‘ve wanted to find an answer, because a question you ask yourself a thousand times eventually deserves to be answered.
I figure if I know why I go out, I might feel less suspicious of myself for going out. I might criticize myself less. I might be able to look around a party without thinking, What a fool – why did you come – you should have stayed at home.
The first thing I did in my search for an answer to Why go out? was write down a list of every single reason I could think of to go out – there were about twelve. Then I noticed, after staring at the paper, that those smaller reasons could be divided up into four basic, major reasons for leaving the house:
1. Desire (for sex, love, companionship, whatever).
2. Sociological curiosity / aesthetic appreciation.
3. To test myself.
4. Someone else wants to hang out.
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A couple of years ago I quit smoking, and to help myself along, I read a book called Alan Carr's Easyway to Quit Smoking. Now, Alan Carr’s basic premise is twofold:
First: you have to accept that smoking is not a habit, it is a drug addiction; and
Second: the only way to quit smoking is to never have a cigarette again.
He goes on to explain that every smoker has brainwashed themselves into believing that smoking helps them in some way – calms them down, allows them to focus, makes an event feel more celebratory – when the truth is, all smoking a cigarette does is temporarily satisfy the craving for a cigarette, while reintroducing into your body the very substance you will once again crave.
What the smoker needs to do to quit, is undo the brainwashing that cigarettes help them in any way, then suffer several weeks of physical withdrawal – a feeling he likens to a physical longing, but not unbearable – and then never have another cigarette again. Oh, and a positive frame of mind is essential. When you experience a craving, you’re to take this as a sign that your body is transforming into the body of a non-smoker, and you should cheer, Yippee! I’m free!
Well, I followed his advice and it worked.
The other day, I was sitting alone in a Mexican restaurant and wondering whether it is possible to quit people, and good old Alan Carr came to mind. It’s maybe because I recently ended a relationship, and have not been spending much time in my city, but my body has been experiencing very similar sensations as it did when I gave up cigarettes two years ago; it’s a physical ache that comes and goes, that’s almost painful, a sort of gaping emptiness, a void that needs to be filled. It often seems like the only way to cure myself of this craving is to give in – to return to him, to sleep with someone new. Not until you tear yourself from everyone you love does it appear that you are actually physically addicted to people. The longing for a person is almost identical to the longing for a smoke. It’s weird.
Anyway, I am not a stoic. My response to withdrawal – which has been to flee into semi-soothing rebound relationships – has prevented me from being able to declare with confidence that it is possible to renounce people, to bear the weeks of physical withdrawal symptoms, and thereafter attain the qualities that Alan Carr claims the non-smoker is in possession of: health, energy, wealth, peace of mind, confidence, courage, self-respect, happiness and freedom.
But though it wasn’t recent, I have spent time alone in the past, and in my memories of these times – the happiest times of my life – I really did seem possessed of substantially more courage, confidence, self-respect, freedom, energy, and peace of mind, than those times when I’ve surrounded myself with other people.
And if that’s the truth – and my memory’s not lying – why go out?
Alan Carr advises smokers who are considering quitting to put the following three questions to themselves, and I think we can look at them as we consider whether it is worthwhile to try and be cured of our addiction to people. As the smoker asks of smoking, we ask of socializing:
1. What is it doing for me?
2. Do I actually enjoy it?
3. Do I really need to go through life paying through the nose just to stick these things in my mouth and suffocate myself?
~
1. What is it doing for me?
As I suggested earlier, we get together with people to satisfy desires – the desire to love and be loved, the desire for sex, talk, companionship, good times, all those things. To which Alan Carr might retort: “We talk about smoking being relaxing or giving satisfaction. But how can you be satisfied unless you were dissatisfied in the first place?
And truly, who has ever been satisfied by people?
A few weeks ago, for example, I was deeply insulted by a conceptual poet who lives in New York, and who had come to my town to do a reading. I admire his work, so I went, knowing as I left my apartment that I was risking my admiration for him. “What if he is an asshole?” I asked myself, closing the door. “Never mind,” I replied, turning the key, for my curiosity surpassed my fear.
Arriving at the bar that night, I spotted a small man of nearly forty years old, wearing an ostentatious suit and hat, walking about the room like he had a cock the size of Kansas. “He must be the conceptual poet,” I said to myself, and I was right. I begged not to be introduced, but my friend introduced us anyway, calling me, as she did so, a “novelist.” I told him how much I admired a particular book of his, and when I was done, he sort of looked me over and said, “You’re a novelist? Really? What interest could you possibly have in my work?”
… … … In case you missed it, that was the terrible insult.
Of course, telling someone about an insult is like telling them about a dream; the specific emotional core of it cannot be communicated; all that comes across are disconnected and meaningless symbols. But let me assure you, this conceptual poet was digging his nails into my heart – he knew it, and, five minutes later, I suddenly felt it, too, like a kick in the stomach – which led to a week and a half of fuming in bed, unable to sleep, my declaring this man to be my enemy, the reconceiving of a magazine article I was writing in such a way as to include a subtextual layer that would annihilate conceptual poetics, a week and a half of going out every night and talking through the insult with each of my friends – what am I even saying? It took leaving the continent for the insult to finally recede into the background of my days, and for me to regain my equilibrium.
So, anyway, it’s pretty far-fetched to claim that people provide satisfaction and relaxation. Or at least, if they sometimes do, they as often do not.
~
2. Do I actually enjoy it?
Does anyone actually enjoy more than one party in six? Does sex lead to satisfaction, or merely make us want more sex, better sex, different sex, even as we’re having it? The same goes for conversation, companionship, everything.
No, other people don’t satisfy us, but rather, like cigarettes, they give us the temporary illusion of satisfaction, while prolonging our dependence. And if we weren’t dependent on other people? Alan Carr’s Easyway lists the following psychological gains from quitting:
1. The return of your confidence and courage;
2. Freedom from the slavery;
3. Not having to go through life suffering the awful black shadows at the back of your mind, knowing you are being despised by half of the population, and worst of all, despising yourself.
So, let us for the moment renounce people! Not in the doomed-to-failure way – renouncing while imagining we are depriving ourselves, forever plagued by doubts –
“how long will the craving last?”
“will I ever be happy again?
“will I ever enjoy a meal again?”
“will I ever want to get up in the morning?
“how will I cope with stress in the future?”
– but rather joyfully and willingly let us renounce people, and bring on self-confidence, wealth, courage, energy, peace of mind, and self-respect!
~
I have a friend who has made it a sort of art project to set up nights at which people amuse themselves in various ways. He has taught charades classes, he has invited the city into a bar to play board games, he has organized a roomful of people to play Torx – which is a child’s toy, a robot stick that issues instructions on how to bend it. He has been profiled in a local newspaper as someone who is providing fun alternatives to concerts and bars and house parties – which, of course, are old-fashioned and worn-out.
But I know him well enough to know that he doesn’t much care whether Nadia or Jim is getting enough fun in their lives. What my friend is up to, I believe, is something more sinister.
First, a few details to paint the scene:
1. He calls his games night “Room 101.” The event is held in a bar and people eat cheesies from bowls and play Scrabble and Pictionary at small tables, and every twenty minutes or so he gets up at the front of the room on a little stage and rings a bell and forces only those people who seem to be enjoying their game deeply to terminate the game and disperse and play something else. If he had peoples’ fun in mind, I contend that he would not force those who are having the most fun to abandon their game.