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Square peg, round hole manifesto!

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Looking back at what I've written over the past three years, I have to say I'm one of the fragile people. I'm not referring to my health, which lately has been quite good, or a proneness to injury, which I don't have. Indeed, some of my supporters will point out that as a cancer-surviving, hard-cycling, erection maintaining world traveler I'm anything but fragile. I appreciate the compliment, but this is not the type of fragility I'm talking about. Yes, my body has risen to extraordinary physical challenges, and yes, my mind has overcome (or sometimes simply walked away from) difficult intellectual problems. What I'm talking about is the ability to construct and maintain a sense of happiness and well being. In that sense, dear reader, I am extremely fragile.

At this point you may be wondering why therieb has typed an entire paragraph to replace the simple four word sentence: “I am clinically depressed.” Not so fast! I have no evidence to demonstrate that I'm depressed. Depressed people are incapable of being happy no matter how wonderful their environment is. That doesn't describe me. When conditions are right, I'm blissfully happy. If I'm sitting on the dock of a quiet lake in rural Latvia reading my book while resting my head between my girlfriend's wonderful breasts, I'm the happiest man in the world. If I were clinically depressed, I'd be miserable even in that ideal situation. People who suffer from depression or other neuroses may be chemically fragile. They lack or have to much of an ingredient in their brain chemistry. There is help for these people. Medicine and therapy have advanced to the point that we can offer many chemically fragile people normal lives, and it's easy to construct an argument that society at large has an obligation to help them, just as they should help the physically fragile.

No such argument exists for fragile people. Who would recommend aid aid for a group of people who have no physical or mental disabilities, but simply have difficulty finding happiness? Fragile people are personified by Herman Melville's Bartelby, a mysterious office worker who answers all of his flummoxed employer's requests with “I'd prefer not to.” More importantly, I don't think there's any help out there. There's no pill for fragile people. Is there medicine for someone who is vaguely dissatisfied with just about everything?

So what should you do if you are a “Fragile?” The first thing to realize is that it's all your fault. By being fragile you are choosing to be a member of the dissatisfied minority. You are announcing that what makes most of your sturdy friends and neighbors (Sturdies?) happy simply won't work for you. Most people in Europe and America can be relatively content working at their jobs, raising their families, and having the occasional vacation. For the most part, society has made an agreement that this is the path we will tread, and if that doesn't satisfy you, you are removing yourself from the agreement. That makes you the problem. Society at large won't work with a large population of Fragiles. We need folks to go to work, pay their taxes, have children, and defend our borders. The first responsibility of a Fragile is not to ask for too much help or sympathy from the Sturdies.. After all, they aren't asking us to do anything that they aren't doing themselves.

Fragile people often make the mistake of believing that because they're fragile, they're somehow more intelligent, more creative, or more emotionally complex than their peers. These people mistake their frailty for a sign of talent: “Proust was fragile too!” Terrific, perhaps he was. Many fragile people have created amazing things, but many more are simply regular people who can't cope with the way the world works. Fragility is a horrible predictor of genius, so don't expect anyone to cut you any slack while you start, pursue, and finish your masterpiece. The Sturdy world pays for performance, so unless you have the masterpiece in hand, you're probably out of luck.

Another mistake we Fragiles often make is to believe that we've arrived at our condition because we see the world more clearly than the Sturdies. If only they understood what their petty lives were really like, they would recognize that they were slaves and sympathize with us. I don't find this moral superiority argument any better than the higher intelligence argument. Even if the Sturdies are as blind to their suffering as the prisoners in Plato's cave, they seem like a happy lot. In addition to being happy, Sturdies actually get things done. They build roads, teach children, grow food, and provide us Fragiles with everything we need to live our temperamental little lives. No, thank the Sturdies for their efforts and leave them alone.

Should fragile people attempt to become sturdy? I'm not sure it's possible. In my personal experience, attempts to fortify a Fragile just end in a highly dissatisfied, if slightly more productive person. You see these people everywhere. The grumpy gas station attendant. The cynical columnist for a minor newspaper, your gym teacher. All these poor souls were told to grow up, shape up, be a man, and take responsibility for their lives, and so they did, and they ended up as hollow shells of people, condemned to live in a world they couldn't understand and didn't want. Perhaps a Fragile can be trained to be sturdy at a young age, but the fragility sets in at puberty, and by adulthood any attempt to change a Fragile will result in breakage.

So what should we Fragiles do, if we should ask for no help and expect no sympathy from the Sturdies? The most important duty of a Fragile is to ask the question: “what makes me happy?” Ask it as often as possible. Beat on this question with a hammer! What really makes me happy? In a Fragile's world, where so many things fail to satisfy, what is it? What's worth living for? What is really worth doing? It's a much more complicated question than meets the eye. Most of the ideas we get about what to like, what to do, and how to live are written by Sturdies for Sturdies. A lot of those ideas look really good at first: a better job, a new TV, or chili cheese fries, and indeed they can be very pleasurable for a short time. For many fragile people, however, these pleasures amount to little more than anesthesia, and when the drugs wear off, we are left in searing pain. But the news isn't all bad. Fragiles are often content with the simplest of things. A good book, a lazy summer, perhaps writing pointless blog entries... Sturdies like these activities too, but at some point they are seized by the need to DO something. By and large Fragiles do not share this will to produce something that Sturdies have. We tend to let experiences pass through us, and we don't leave many monuments behind.

When you've found what makes your fragile heart happy, embrace it and refuse to apologize for it. The Sturdies around you will be filled with skepticism and scorn. They will ask: “that's great, but what do you do?” That shouldn't matter; aim for tolerance, not understanding. Of course Fragiles need to learn how to be self-sufficient. It's one thing to announce your intention to become a full-time unpaid bird watcher, quite another to ask your parents or spouse to pay for it. Many Fragiles I know derive happiness from pursuits that make little or no money. What is to be done? One possibility involves a compromise in which the Fragile works in the Sturdy world, but as little as possible, leaving enough time for what makes them tick. This is the strategy I've been employing for the past three years during my travels in Europe. The results have been mixed. While I've been able to live in places that make me happy like Riga and Berlin, I've often had to do so much sturdy work that I can't enjoy my fragile life. Perhaps if I keep working on it I can bring things into balance, but teaching English is so disagreeable to me that more than 15 hours a week hurts my poor brain.

Another, however idealistic path is for Fragiles to help each other. It does no good to ask the Sturdies for assistance, they resent it and they have every right to. On the other hand, a group of Fragiles working together to share the load, with the shared goal of minimizing the pain in order to pursue what makes them happy, now that has some potential. Perhaps a Fragile colony! It wouldn't be easy. Most Fragiles I know are not good at sharing, but the rewards might be too good to pass up. The chance to pursue what makes each of us happy, for as much time as possible, with a minimum of exposure to the Sturdy world. If the Fragile colony is a bit much, how about Fragilelist.com, where we can trade tips on avoiding unpleasantness and making our fragile earnings go further? At the very least, we should learn to recognize and support our fellow Fragiles. We may not all like each other, but we should find a certain solidarity in our collective understanding that we all want out of the bargain that society at large has made. The help I'm talking about could be the simplest kind: a kind word, a nod of recognition, a reassurance that your fellow man isn't lazy, or crazy, or a disappointment, just fragile.

Fragiles of the world! The cards are stacked against us! We live in the age of the productivity miracle, and it will be a miracle indeed if we survive. Hold on to yourselves! Hold on to each other! Hold on to whatever makes you happy and doesn't give you a headache in this confusing and largely unsatisfactory world! You will be told you are shiftless and lazy. You will be told to get a job. I tell you: do what's necessary for your head to survive. We can make a home here. With our wits we can carve out a space to be fragile. Sacrifices must be made and compromises will be asked of those for whom compromise is no easy task, but we can prevail. Together we can awake to a dawn (or better, around 11:30) where we are free to live our quiet lives, free to potter about, get a little breakfast, and do the few errands that we need to do that day. We stand together! Alone we are inadequate, together we may just make a go of it. Fragile and proud! Fragile and proud!