Oh god I'm really going to be/seem an arrogant cunt when I say all this but none of us can see it from another point of view - I don't like it when my fellow old people go on about how different things are now from how they used to be and therefore the way things are now is wrong - "oh when we were children we were playing football in the street and running off all day in gangs to make camps in the forest and turn fern stems into spears to kill each other with ...." - and now they're all alone in their rooms playing with their phones ..... I really really wish there had been the net and clever phones when I was a child. My parents and my siblings and my teachers and most of my friends were really boring and conventional and there were a million times every day when it'd've been better for me to've had a screen to stare at instead of having to listen to my dad drearing on about nothing at all.
So maybe things today aren't so bad. I think they're pretty bad - but mainly for other people. For me, life's still okay. And it's obviously impossible to prove this, but I do always get the feeling that I am more than averagely happy. By quite a lot. And here's the me-sounding-like-a-cunt bit, because of course I sound like I should be on Youtube bouncing around and talking about my fab fab fab lifestyle, me living the influencer lifestyle, aren't you jealous of me blah blah ..... except of course I influence no one and have no fans and no following. And that is part of why I am so happy.
I can't prove I'm happier than most - maybe I'm just pretending - maybe everyone else is just pretending too - maybe society has made misery so cool that everyone's afraid to admit how happy they really are - the way we at school used to pretend we'd done really badly in our exams and never did the homework.
But I don't think so. I'm quite guileless and I'm going to maybe-naively take myself and everyone else at face value. Sometimes I think that my life probably isn't so great and that I really ought to be doing more/bigger/better/faster/louder and then I think of my friends and the others I know and wonder which ones live life more like the way I want my own to be - I can't think of anyone. Truly - everyone else's life just sounds utterly awful to me. And sorry, I'm going to come out with all the cliches, and of course they are cliches because a trillion people have already discovered these things for themselves and said these things and I am just the trillion-and-one(th)(?) person to say these cliches, and here they are = television - dear god.
How can anyone expect to be anything other than suicidal if they watch loads of TV ? Being so passive, sitting down, not moving - it's a prison cell. The hamster-wheel of screen time on the phone - 6 hours per person per day. I do have a smart phone and I used it when I was homeless to keep in touch with friends and what they were doing. But now, I prefer the days when I don't know what anyone else is doing. News - I've stopped following it.
Yes I played football in the street and built camps out of ferns and small unaccountable dips in the forest - last week out in the forest with an ex I caught scent of the New Forest ferns again and immediately was sent back to my Famous Five childhood minus Uncle Quentin. And it is true that thanks to rainy Sundays we got near to boredom and so discovered books and reading them for hours and hours without stopping.
That is maybe the thing that's kept me happiest - the fact that I can still go all day just lying on my sofa reading books and not need to check a screen or fuss about an appointment. Every change in our life upsets our body/mind a fraction. I am one of those nearly extinct people who can sit quietly in a room. Today I nearly went off on a long walk again - it would've been 9 hours of almost no one.
But I have easy sloppy happy paintings to finish and I'm not good in this heat really - but the secret of happiness was never a secret for millions of years - though poverty kept people from it then, and abundance keeps people from it today. When I was young and consequently afraid of upsetting anyone I'd never've said anything like the next thing, but now I'm old enough almost to be honest, but for most people misery is their choice, like being fat, like being bored, like being afraid to do a few big things and get wonderfully lost in those rather than millions and millions of little things and getting horribly lost in those.
...................
recorded yesterday, photo Dean Hill, Hants, last week - yes it's just a tree - except it isn't - like every photo it means a lot to me - this is a very dear tree to me, always makes me happy to walk past it, it's under this tree years ago that my favourite ex and I had our first picnic together, neither of us had phones or any connection with anyone except each other and the leaves above us and the soil under our backs, we are probably the last generation on this planet that will know that kind of happiness and just take it for granted.
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