Here’s something that people don’t tell you when you’re a kid: life is hard. And the older you get, the harder it gets. I don’t mean to sound like a total downer, but being in your teens and early twenties seems relatively easy compared to what comes after that: the daily grind of a job, the burden of mortgage payments and other debt, the pressures & responsibilities of family life.
Anyone who’s in their teens and twenties right now and reading this would probably argue vociferously with what I’ve just said, and they wouldn’t be wrong. Whatever stage in life you may be in, if you’ve been hit with something difficult, it’s hard. I don’t mean to discount that. And I’m not trying to ignore the fact that there are lots of people out there who would be overjoyed to even have a job, no matter if they didn’t love it, or people who would be happy to have a mortgage because that meant they could afford to buy a house in the first place. There’s a part of the population for whom neither of these things are a possibility at the moment.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with people lately about the concept of personal happiness. I don’t know what it was like for my parents’ generation, or my grandparents’, but it seems nowadays that there’s this expectation that you should feel happy and personally fulfilled all the time. D’you know what I mean? It’s like people can’t cope with feeling down or unhappy or blue. This is problematic if you’re someone who’s prone to anxiety or depression — not only do you experience those feelings, but on top of that you feel like there’s something wrong with you for feeling them. Right?
If you’re tired of worrying, tired of trying to manage everything so that things turn out “right”, tired of trying to live up to expectations of what your life should look like rather than how it actually is, then here is a song for you. I’m a fan of the whole album, Baby I’m Bored, and I think this song in particular has a nice little message in it about just inhabiting the space where you are, in the moment, and not being afraid that the world around you is always changing.
Seems like a simple concept, doesn’t it? So why’s it so hard to put into practice? Good thing we have Evan Dando here to remind us ; )
Let Them Eat Vinyl 
November 7th, 2011 at 8:05 pm
yeah, I guess it makes sense, in some of lyrics lines for everybody in general…
November 11th, 2011 at 5:03 pm
yeah, it’s got kind of an ‘everyman’ feel to it, doesn’t it? 🙂
November 9th, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Sure we should strive for happiness everyday but we can’t expect everyday to be all laughs and giggles. The sad times and the bad days make us enjoy the good times all the more. There is nothing like being out in a good storm to make one feel more alive.
Ted
November 11th, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Yeah, that’s a good point, and I think that’s kind of what this song is about. It’s not about trying to be better or happier, it’s more about ‘this is where I am now’ and ‘this is what I’m doing now’. I myself find it a real struggle to just *be* in the moment but nothing good ever comes from trying to force good times to happen. Right?