There's a disease I've become infected with since moving to London: The Never-Enough Syndrome. It seems to be transmitted through the air, and most people around me have it too.
This wretched mental disorder mostly involves an obsession with money. The most serious side-effect is an overwhelming feeling of misery which affects most areas of the sufferer's life, including relationships, appetite, sleep and energy levels. I seem to be unable to escape it. However hard I try to fight it with my sense of perspective, the syndrome is set off again and again in my brain during any lunch hour spent talking to my colleagues from work. Everywhere I go I hear people constantly moan about everything related to money: salaries, cost of petrol, cost of food, property prices, taxes, the banking bail-out, bankers' bonuses, the benefit system, the stock market, the recession ...
I end up feeling drained, hard done-by, unsuccessful, but worst of all, I seem to be losing sight of the things that should really matter to me. The anger pushes me to constantly look for jobs which might earn more money, even though, objectively speaking, I already earn more than the vast majority of people on this planet. That should be enough, shouldn’t it??? But this is The Never-Enough Syndrome, after all. I ignore the statistics about people who are worse off. Instead, I focus on the salaries of investment bankers, chief executives, politicians etc., which leads me to conclude that I need to feel poor in comparison. It makes me look at my apartment with hate. Too small, too small, too small.
It doesn't help that I'm surrounded by many workaholics and ambitious immigrants who came to London to prove themselves. Unfortunately, London just is one of those cities; New York and Mumbai suffer from the same mentality. People constantly make me feel guilty that I don't work enough, earn enough, or try hard enough. That I am wasting my opportunities, time and potential. Surrounded by this dog-eat-dog culture, I forget that I had a comfortable childhood and that I have no need to prove I can be Superwoman with a social Super-status. I don’t have any past psychological trauma to mend, yet I can’t stop behaving like I’m trying to show the whole world. Sometimes I take a deep breath and remember that I never really wanted all those things in the first place. That I don't care and don’t want to participate.
... that I'm really the happiest when I get to run around in the fields or splash in the river. That I love the smell of second-hand books and don’t need to (or want to) spend £145 on an e-Reader, which would bring me more convenience, while at the same time depriving me of that simple and beautiful sensation which I love: lying in bed under the covers, holding a paperback, turning the pages and smelling them. Underlining important thoughts with a pencil, adding my own important thoughts into the margin, then re-reading them three years later and laughing at my old self.
Every time I go somewhere on the Tube, people blind me by flashing their fancy new iPads (£478.99!), iPods (£174.00!), iPhones (£499.99!) or iMacs (£962.97!), and I try hard to remind myself that the excitement of receiving one of these gadgets in the post really lasts about ten minutes. It doesn’t compare to the happiness I feel when I’m looking out of the window of a train that is heading out of the city into the countryside. Or the simple pleasure of spending a quiet day outdoors with someone I love. The calmness I feel inside my body when I listen to my sister playing the piano. The fun I have when I'm allowed to just fool around in the park. The excitement and nervousness when I try out a new adventure sport. The pleasure of cooking a new recipe .... But marketing has screwed up my head and I want, want and want.
Never enough shiny new stuff. Over the last month or so I got a new phone, new laptop, new laptop bag, new camera lens, new urban bike ... magnesium-alloy this and magnesium-alloy that. At the same time, all these tech gadgets freak me out because I feel they’re designed at enslaving me deeper and further, gluing me to their screens for even more hours of the day. The more gadgets, the less time there will be for the things that really make me happy. My days are predominantly spent in front of computer screens already. Corporations like Apple, HP, Intel and Microsoft try to persuade us that we can never have enough Internet-enabled devices which would enable us to check the weather forecast. “We are opening up new usage scenarios for true on-the-go mobility,” the marketing people of these tech companies like to say. Really, it’s a way to sell more crap to people, to shift more boxes and make more money. One day soon, the weather forecast will become redundant because we’ll be too busy paying full attention to our integrated digital home. We just won’t spend any time outside any more.
I want to close the door, put earplugs in my ears, to find a way to block out the constantly complaining Londoners around me. Tell all the marketing people to piss off. Tell the journalists to piss off. I need to close my eyes and remember what I want and ignore what they want. Because it’s been Enough.
