On Giving Up
It’s a well-known fact that watching The Apprentice or the X-Factor is more nauseating than chewing cotton wool. Such competitive vigour being lauded so highly is amusing, considering that this is probably put out by the same television companies who compile the list programmes which declare the 1980s so risible because of the emphasis on money and success. The conclusion I have come to: nothing has changed since 1980. Except the music has got worse. Why does everyone have to be powerful and frightening these days?
Well, the truth is, they don’t.
In Milan Kundera’s gargantuan-minded Immortality there is a section which devotes itself to a curious emotion in the main character Agnes’s father: ‘On a sinking ship, where it was necessary to fight in order to board a lifeboat, Father would have been condemned in advance.’ I am not sure if the posturing figures of dubious authority who bombard our television each evening would be able to comprehend this; that there exist a set of individuals who cannot think of anything worse than scrabbling through a set of meaningless and humiliating competitions just for the sake of it.
Why do they do it? I want to think that they are not doing it just so they can impress their friends. I want to think that successful and ambitious individuals don’t do it only because they want a detached house within commuting distance of London, with a modern kitchen for ‘entertaining’. (In truth, there is very little that is entertaining about watching you cook some food. If you want to entertain me as I sit abandoned and empty-plated in your kitchen, perhaps consider dancing, juggling, or performing an accomplished and innovative sex act.) Oh, and they’ve also got one of those metallic islands in the kitchen, too.
That’s not to say I don’t appreciate successful individuals. Some of them are splendid, shining, magnificent, life-affirming alchemists of the soul. Picasso, Dali, Serge Gainsbourg, Ian Dury, Bryan Ferry, Vladimir Nabokov, Leon Theremin, Lee Miller, Beatrice Dalle, Sophie Howard, the person who invented the Samosa. There is an endless list which I may publish one day for no-one to read. (Possibly just before the end of the world.) However, they have all created beauty, and they have all created something that sends a ripple of excitement through my skin. The grinning, self-satisfied death-heads of the aforementioned television programmes are merely facilitators. Ostensibly they purport to control the meagre talent which is broadcast, when in reality they barricade talent from the populace, creating a wall behind which the real, joyous, luminous talent of the world is kept invisible and undiscovered. Do the public really want another carbon copy pop singer with no visible defects? With no eccentricities? Cultural revolution is needed now more than ever before.
The by-product of this mass Machiavellianism is that the corollary is practically taboo. The direct opposite of achievement in life is failure. Even suicide is somehow more acceptable than an unemployed person sitting in a council flat without food or even the motivation to buy food. Imagine attending a dinner party somewhere in Kensington. The guests are aged 30-45. They are IT managers, design consultants, legal partners, and when asked the inevitable question by a blonde-haired beauty in a Vivienne Westwood dress:
“So what do you do, Hastie?”
The answer comes: “Madam, I have given up.”
Observe as her fair skin turns ashen, and the scallop trembles on her fork. She apologises to the table and excuses herself. Hastie, feeling dejected, as he watches her masterfully designed haunches fading into the distance, helps himself to the rest of the Valpolicella while he can, because he can’t afford this in his own home. And for this, he is universally despised.
In today’s climate when non-work is nigh on a criminal offence, is this even possible? When one gives up, must one necessarily die? Of course not. We should be mindful of Camus’s conclusions in The Myth of Sisyphus, that one must realise the absurdity of the situation to surmount it. ”At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks to the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate.” You do not have to give up on life, you can give up on the competition, or even better, find another way round. But for God’s sake, stand aside when the stampede comes, and watch the others (for they’re all doomed anyway) run for the lifeboats in their Vivienne Westwood dresses. We’re all going the same way. It is a noble gesture; perhaps the noblest.
