Wednesday, February 04, 2015

The opportunity to experience life's simple pleasures

I blogged before about how if I'd lived in a different time and place, I'd never have had the opportunity to be good at anything.

Today in the shower, it occurred to me that if I'd lived in a different time and place, I may never have experience any of the things that destress me or make me happy.

The first of which is the shower!  It relaxes me, makes me feel human, makes me look civilized, and is where I get all my best ideas.  And it wouldn't have been available even 100 years ago.  Or even 50 years ago in poorer areas where housing hasn't been upgraded to include modern conveniences.  Or even in the present in some parts of the world.

As I blogged about in my resilience braindump, the things that destress me are very externally dependent, and many of them are very 21st century.  Fandom is a huge destresser, and it's entirely dependent on the constant creation of new stories involving beloved characters.  For nearly all of human history, this simply wasn't possible.  There was no media, and new stories were few and far between.  And, apart from fandom, most of my pleasures and destressers are on my computer, which is why sending it out to be repaired is so upsetting to me.  But personal computers didn't exist before my lifetime, and the internet as we know it didn't exist even during the first half of my lifetime!

Even my other simple pleasures and necessary destressers - comfort food, privacy, curling up safe in my cozy bed as a storm rages outside - would have been impossible for all but the very wealthiest for the vast majority of human history, and still aren't available to the general population in many parts of the world.

So in another time or place, would I have found pleasure and destressing in other things in life?  Or would I simply live my whole life on edge, never completely at peace?

However, it also occurs to me that if I'd been born in a different time and place, I wouldn't be alive anyway.  Even if I'd survived being born, I probably wouldn't have survived my annual bouts of strep throat (which, the internet tells me, is the same infection as scarlet fever), and even if I'd survived that, I probably would have died on a fainting couch from my reflux incident where I just couldn't swallow food.

Things They Should Study: how does people's likelihood of having survived in more difficult times and places correlate with their likelihood of thriving in those times and places?  Would a disproportionate number of the people who are fragile and sensitive like me have died at birth anyway?

1 comment:

laura k said...

If we had born in a different time and place, and we survived past childhood, we might be completely different people, in terms of personality, strengths, weaknesses.

Our childhoods would have been so radically different. I'm thinking that so much of our (all of our) current sensitivies and issues are products of our environment. If we had childhoods of deprivation, hardship, forced work - pleasures and stress defined so differently than what we do now - who knows who would be?