everything becomes meh

by Engelbert Lap

The clock or the fridge is ticking, and the dishwasher is drying. These are the only sounds interrupting silence on this chilly autumn night. The room is dimly lit by table lamps hiding behind the couch; they are now the only source of light, now in these ever-shorter days.

We go for walks almost every day now, and the minute we get out we smell something in the air. We smell something that reminds us of winter, of all these winters spent in the city, where people heat using anything they can find. I joke that it’s surprising nuclear waste can be used for heating and that it follows us every winter, no matter the location. You say that you’re glad you have remained optimistic after marrying such a grumpy man.

I make all of these promises to myself: promises that I’ll become better, promises that I’ll stop complaining, promises that I won’t judge other people. But they rarely last longer than a day. These are all noble goals, but then the dogs start barking, and the 150-decibel engine vehicles start parking and unparking. This all forces me to mute myself on Zoom calls. It forces me to realize that I am complaining too much, and who am I to complain, when I haven’t worked an office job in my life, and the only exposure to physical work was during my college days.

All of this makes me realize that I’m going deeper into the well of complaint, where many have been lost because they couldn’t escape the ever-growing need to complain. If we don’t course-correct, we tend to increase our complaints with the passage of time, little by little, until we realize, when it’s too late, that we are too far gone to be rescued.

When I was younger I made myself a secret promise never to become the stereotypical old man who always finds the inspiration to complain, after seeing so many old people full of frustration, full of angst, full of contempt towards everything and anything. This passion for being frustrated is especially pronounced in the Balkans, where tolerance for anything less than the highest quality is very low. Everything is either the best in the world and then we can live with it somehow, or total garbage. I now realize I am slowly walking towards becoming the stereotypical old man.

It’s funny how we get used to everything. What’s interesting to me is how I always return to complaining. When we moved into this new place we were so happy, since we moved away from all the noise, all the bad neighbors, all the anonymous dents from the parking lot. For a couple of months we were truly happy. This place was the best. This street was so nice and quiet. The neighbors were so nice.

But then a couple of months pass and suddenly we live in the wildest street in town and can’t figure out why everyone has at least one dog that barks at any time of day or night. Suddenly every walk is terrible because of poor air quality in the winter and unbearable swelter in the summer. Suddenly there’s all this construction work around us and the neighbors are having karaoke birthdays in their yards until 3 am and we wonder where the quiet has gone.

Perhaps our biggest strength as species — adaptability — is also our Achilles heel. We adapt not only to the worst and make settlements in the harshest of environments, north of the Arctic circle, but also to everything else, including the most high-end luxuries we can imagine. Given enough time, everything becomes meh. Maybe we become adults when we look with embarrassment at our most cherished childhood delusions, like believing that a sports car will make us permanently happy and realize that this happiness rarely lasts more than a couple of weeks or months.

Don’t get me wrong, I like high-quality products. But I also know that chasing quality after a certain price point doesn’t make sense not only because of the law of diminishing returns but also because of this damned adaptation that makes me unable to enjoy anything that is of slightly lower quality. One example of this is higher-end coffee which now makes the regular store-bought one much worse than it was.

I think the world is like a mirror which reflects back what you’re looking for. If you focus your attention on finding things to be annoyed at, that well will never dry up. But I am slowly learning that I can choose where I focus that attention. I can choose not to become the grumpy old man and that is the beauty of it all. The fact that we can choose, at every moment, as long as we live. Swearing at dogs or being grateful for not having to commute to work every day. The choice is ours.