the most brilliant thing i've ever read.
"People talk about their fixations with things- a new house they're looking to buy, or a job they're desperate for, or a relationship-as though these things have genuinely transformative powers, powers to heal and save and change their lives. Searching, searching: the need cuts across all backgrounds, all socioeconomic lines, all ages and sexes and races.
Part of this, of course, is culturally determined or, at least, culturally reinforced. The search for a fix, for a ready solution to what ails, has become uniquely American undertaking, an ingrained part of consumer culture, as prevalent as the nearest diet workshop or plastic surgeon. In some ways alcoholism is the perfect late twentieth-century expression of that particular brand of searching, an extreme expression of the way so many of us are taught to confront deep yearnings. Fill it up, fill it up, fill it up. Fill up the emptiness; fill up what feels like a pit of loneliness and terror and rage; please, just take it away, now. Our society has become marvelously adept at presenting easy- or seeminly easy- solutions to that impulse; all you have to do is watch enough TV and the answers come, one by one: the right body weight will do the trick. The right house. A couple of beers. In the end I suppose it I don't suppose it matters. You get your comfort where you can." - Caroline Knapp.
Part of this, of course, is culturally determined or, at least, culturally reinforced. The search for a fix, for a ready solution to what ails, has become uniquely American undertaking, an ingrained part of consumer culture, as prevalent as the nearest diet workshop or plastic surgeon. In some ways alcoholism is the perfect late twentieth-century expression of that particular brand of searching, an extreme expression of the way so many of us are taught to confront deep yearnings. Fill it up, fill it up, fill it up. Fill up the emptiness; fill up what feels like a pit of loneliness and terror and rage; please, just take it away, now. Our society has become marvelously adept at presenting easy- or seeminly easy- solutions to that impulse; all you have to do is watch enough TV and the answers come, one by one: the right body weight will do the trick. The right house. A couple of beers. In the end I suppose it I don't suppose it matters. You get your comfort where you can." - Caroline Knapp.