Happy Discomfort

How often we choose to live in a happy discomfort with which we have become so intimately accustomed. Even the possibility of freedom from these suffering chains we bear (like precious golden prizes) becomes more frightening than to face the difference of something new or undefined. This is why we so often settle for an ongoing horror or tedium of serially terrible or traumatic experiences – the possible freedom of a peaceful dream is so different from that reality of drudgery and dispossession with which we are familiar that it threatens our experience of psychological continuity with a greater and profoundly discontinuous sense of loss than any perceived promise of emancipation might ever and conversely bring upon us. This is the way it always has been for human beings and for as long as we all believe in the ascendant truth of individuated, isolated, alienated selves (or nations) – we are bound to inhabit the hell that this separation and lived loneliness must always bring.