misery business

don't think too hard about it

I used to have a vague idea that if a catastrophe happened to me it would solve my life. Usually, this fantasy took the form of getting hit by a bus. If I just got hit by a bus (I reasoned) I wouldn’t have any problems. That this is not exactly the reported experience of people who get hit by buses did not really change the way it played out in my head. I didn’t go around throwing myself into traffic or anything—I wasn’t that convinced. But it felt like some huge life-altering event would clarify “everything” for me (in some unclear sense of “everything”) and force me to “get serious” (whatever that meant).

Then I did get hit by a (figurative) bus. It turned out that catastrophe, like everything else in life, is what you make of it, and it will not really force you to “get serious” if you don’t want to. It also turned out that the reason I wasn’t “getting s…