There’s a feeling I get.
When I’m driving on a warm, beautiful, sunny day. Holding hands with my wife. My kids sitting in the backseat, quiet, half asleep from a day of fun and exhaustion. The windows are cracked, and a warm breeze blows through. I put on loud sentimental rock and roll, and I get a feeling like my eyes want to cry and my chest wants to explode in joy.
I put in a lot of work chasing those moments. A lot of time, and a lot of money. This period may only last for 8-10 more years, but if I can get 2-3 times like that every summer I’ve got it made. I’m sure the next stage in life will be awesome as well, but for now I’m planning road trips, reserving campsites, looking for hills to climb and beaver ponds to explore.
I have Parkinson’s Disease. One of the things it crimps is the brain’s ability to feel happy. I do the NY Times crossword every day, and I’m up to about a 150 day streak on those. I suppose a normal person would get a thrill of victory every day out of that, but I don’t. I take 3 kinds of antidepressants, and they keep me from feeling awful all the time. I can fake some excitement when my favorite ball team wins, but I don’t really feel it.
I was never much for adrenalin. And now that I have much worse recovery times from just about anything, I have gotten really excitement-averse, for some meanings of excitement.
But many things make me happy. Riding my horse through the forest, I often find I have a stupid grin on my face. In a couple days, I’m getting two dozen baby chicks in the mail. BABY CHICKS! They will grow up in the cellar until they have feathers sufficient to live outdoors, and I am pleasurably anticipating them twittering away – I can hear them through the floorboards.
I am up, writing in my journal or writing letters, before dawn every day – I’m a bad sleeper – and my desk faces due east. I see every sunrise and I am grateful for every one. I live on a very beautiful piece of land, and I have not gotten jaded about it.
I’ll tell you what’s exciting me right now. On Thursday, it’ll be 2 weeks since my 2nd vaccination. I can do whatever the fuck I want on Thursday!!! Woo-hoo!! I think I’ll go to the record store, for starters. Then on Friday, I’m getting a haircut, first one in 14 months.
There was a time when I did not need to go thrill-seeking in order to find excitement. It came and found me: in the form of danger, stress, and serious disturbances that impacted my home life and my sanity. When I finally escaped that situation, I was excited by normality and sunny days. No, it wasn’t a violent partner. More like the neighbor from hell… for 8 years… and that was only one of the many things that went wrong with my old building.
From a place of relative safety now: Excitement starts with a lack of something that I desperately need, or think that I need. It starts with desire. When I was younger and I had more self-esteem issues, plus hormones, this excitement stirred me to pursue martial arts, theater, unattainable boyfriends, and ritual magic. My day job was technical so it was a double life. Those things still excite me, but not all the time. I have to be emotionally worked up first.
Oh… recently I had a cancer scare. That made the world really bright for a while, too. Now I’m doing better but the gratitude is still there.
I don’t know that having a mild life is a sign of depression or unhealthiness. A lot of Zen masters might say “Good job! You finally got it!” or some such thing.
I get that we’re all different, but travelling in my own country doesn’t get me excited either. It’s the travel overseas which really gets me excited. I’m currently planning a trip to Scotland which I’m really struggling to build enthusiasm for. But if I was planning a trip to Italy, or Greece, or France, I would be getting really excited. It’s the thrill of the unknown and the relatively exotic, I think.
It’s the anticipation too - travel takes a lot of planning, and waiting, so as it gets nearer, the excitement really builds. Like Christmas when you’re a kid. I don’t think it’s easy to get excited about something that happens too often.
Agreed. I don’t need endless excitement to be satisfied with my life. There’s nothing wrong with just existing. Yes, just existing can look like depression, but it doesn’t have to be. And you are right, that’s pretty Zen.
It reminds me of my FIL who is problematic in a number of ways, but he is always pushing us to do things. He wants to constantly travel, meet new people and continuously seek out novelty and that life is not for us. All he cares about is chasing that next exciting thing. He cares about it more than he cares about his own relationships. It all seems very empty to me.
On a related note, I recently decided to stop improving myself. No more productivity and self - help books, no more restricted eating, no more campaigns to be a different person. (It never worked anyway.) Life got a whole lot more enjoyable. Now I only do things because I want to do them, not because I “should.” If that means spending hours on the internet because I feel like it, then whatever. I have depression moments but overall I’m pretty happy.
I really like the IDEA of travel, but the experience, not so much.
Like I said, I’m not sure there is much I dislike more than going through airports. Just me.
The planning I dislike, because I feel I’m making decisions to spend a boatload of $ w/ insufficient info. Searching hotels and such on-line is NO fun for me, and you still don’t know if it will live up to expectations.
I always have this romantic idea of just living somewhere for an extended period, and experiencing what life is like there. I have NO desire to be herded around on a bus. But trying to plan schedules and attractions on my own is not the sort of effort I enjoy. When I’ve travelled in the past, I’ve often returned thinking that if I made the trip AGAIN, I’d do it differently, and spend my money differently. That impresses me as pretty expensive experience.
And I have the crazy push/pull of wanting to get out of my comfort zone and experience different, vs my comfort in knowing my legal rights, access to health care, and just overall comfort.
At times, I almost feel guilty about not wanting to travel more. I’m glad my wife is able to go on this trip w/ her friend. I’ll happily stay home w/ the dog!
To contradict my last post… I used to be very driven to do, grow, learn, improve. Acquiring new skills was a thrill, although the actual acquisition was a huge drag. So tedious! But then I’d be able to play some new instrument or piece of music, do a new type of dance, or do some athletic thing that formerly was totally beyond me. A lot of it was physical, because I was not a natural athlete and felt compromised in a lot of ways by this limitation.
It was like the entire world was a learning lab and every breath I took that I wasn’t doing something, wasn’t making art, building something, helping other people do art… I was missing out on the mystery.
The thrill of achieving different levels of skill was very rewarding. As a very amateur musician, the first time I could jam around a campfire with the teaching staff at Middle East Camp was an unforgettable milestone. That took 2 years of me playing drills, by myself, alone at night, feeling like a weirdo. I had some milestones in martial arts, too that made all the hardships worthwhile.
Sometimes excitement came from sheer survival. At my last building I led a tenant fight to keep our places, never did any activism before. I had to show “leadership” which is a lot less glamorous than I had imagined. We won some important victories, and then eventually other things took over.
Motorcycling is a thing for me. Not merely riding, but riding well. Doing it right. Knowing where to put your body on the bike, where to put the bike on the road, where to point your eyes, what control inputs to deliver in order to achieve the result you want. Every limb has two or three jobs, your view is unimpeded by windshield pillars or much of anything else, and you float over the road like you’re flying a plane at extremely low altitude. Cruising on a flat straight road with little traffic is a pleasant relaxing thing, but a sporting ride down twisty roads is fun. Upshift, downshift, add power, brake, lean your body, lean the bike, look through the turn, watch for gravel and traffic, lather, rinse, repeat.
Local day rides are fun, but touring adds a whole new dimension. It’s a cool feeling to throw a leg over in the morning and know that at the end of the day you’ll be sleeping somewhere far away.
I feel this way about writing. The highest highs and the lowest lows. But I absolutely love hitting that brick wall, that state of “What was I thinking, how could I ever believe I was capable of doing this?” and then… doing it. Finishing my first novel was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. It took six years. (And I might revisit it, but not until I have more practice with other works.) People who know me say I just light up when I’m talking about a project, that I’m a different, happier person when I’m writing, and it’s true. The creative process is somehow critical to my functioning, and that’s why I keep doing it even when it hits me with the lowest lows.
I’ve always had trouble anticipating pleasure. NOT trouble feeling pleasure, but rather the run up to events I know give me pleasure do NOT trigger excitement for me. As a result I’ve learned to push myself to do those things, knowing I will enjoy them, even if I feel rather ‘meh’ about them ahead of time.
On the subject matter: at 44, I still get surprisingly excited about my personal projects, mostly concerning exotic weaponry and hunting. Other sources of excitement have ceased to work.
Yeah, not so much. Much like the OP describes, I’m having trouble these days getting “excited” about much. FYI, that would be “depression”.
I’m currently not working and don’t really know what I want to do for a living. Which means I’ll probably just eventually fall back into the same crap I’ve always done for a living.
I find family life tedious, with the constant bickering and arguing and trying to get the kids to do shit they don’t want to do (which is basically everything).
Don’t really have any hobbies. I can draw and sketch I suppose. But I don’t really have a passion for it like I did when I was younger. I wish I did. But mostly it just feels like “why would I just sit around drawing shit for no reason like an asshole when I should be looking for a job or dealing with my wife and kids?”
Most of our friends have moved out of the area.
Most my family either lives 10 hours away or sucks.
My wife’s family sucks. I mean unless you like watching FoxNews 24/7 or hearing about how grandma saw Bigfoot. Fortunately my wife makes us go see them every two weeks.
What excites me is maybe tomorrow I’ll conjure up the courage to hop on a boxcar, start smoking crack, and live the rest of my days as a hobo.
One issue I have is that suggesting such a state signifies “depression” suggests that the NORMAL state of being is something different/better. I’m not sure of that. Kind of like telling people to “Smile more.” I think “contentment” and “comfort” are pretty damned good for most people. A lot of living is just boring (cleaning house, paying bills, work…) I think suggesting that folk should be dissatisfied with or unfulfilled by a comfortable predictable life causes considerable mental unease.
For years, I thought the lyric was"He killed her then he raped her then he took her home." Now THAT would be an excitable boy!