Over the past few days, everything has been pointing me towards Schopenhauer. Naturally, I assumed this was because I hope to look like him one day. (Sadly, if my side hair grows out it is more Art Garfunkel than Cold Miser.) However, as this phenomenon persisted one of his quotes wormed into my head and has refused to leave: “A [person] can do what [they] want, but not want what [they] want.” It could take seventeen years to completely unpack this, so I will limit myself to what comes forward in my mind at this moment.

Memories flood my mind of my halcyon days, when everything was effortless and easy. Not necessarily good,.. the bad things were effortless as well,.. but it was all so easy. There was a beauty to how things just happened. Then, as I got older, I started to think more about what I wanted. A process that introduced an ever increasing amount of doubt and insecurity; complexity and confusion. So many variables that I simply never considered before. Were they all necessary? No way to know for sure except for experience. And the waffling back and forth about which, when, and what for compounded the pressure with toxic self-recrimination for the delays.

There is an image of an old friend who believes that the lottery is a tool to control the people. It does this by provoking them to build an imaginary wall to their own progress by encouraging them to day dream and fantasize about things they cannot have and, if considered more closely, things they would not even want. “The imagination is a powerful tool,” he would say, “and can do amazing things when it is kept focused on things we actually want and can achieve.“

With a queasy dizziness my mind shifts too quickly to the present, with a view from high above. The United States is a lost country. We have gotten older and nothing is as effortless and easy as it once had been. Our politicians and leaders are the expression of our doubt and insecurity. Media and social media are the toxic recriminations about our confusion. We clearly cannot cope with the complexity of our reality and we are all too willingly to prevent ourselves from building an understanding of what we truly want; what is truly achievable.

The United States, quite literally, is at a place where it can do what it wants, but not want what it wants.