This month, I was struggling with what to write. Life has become extremely busy and it has meant I haven't dedicated much time to thinking about my blog (something that this year I didn't want to happen). But I made myself a promise. Every month I would post a blog, so I began to think about what was on my mind.
House sales, money, my Grandad's funeral, a new house, time, stories (that i didn’t have time to write currently), death, my future, my sister's future, a career, etc, etc, etc. It's safe to say that the reason I hadn’t thought about writing this blog until 5 days before it was supposed to be finished (today is the 23rd and until now I forgot that February only has 28 days) is because I have a lot on my mind.
It was upon realising that I have a lot on my mind that the topic of this blog formed in my head.
To know what we want in life is a very difficult thing, the world in which we live is vast and contains a near infinite number of different things to do. Given such a number of choices it is nearly impossible to narrow these down into an achievable number! You want to go travelling so you have to work, but you want to have more free time to study your degree, but you need to sleep 8 hours a day while also cooking and eating, seeing friends, playing sport, going clubbing, writing emails, running errands, talking to family, the list goes on. We overload ourselves because we cannot pick what we want to do. Of course we do! The world is amazing, why should we only pursue two aspects? Seems boring.
So instead we dream of a world where we can achieve all our wishes, a world where we have more time, or didn’t have certain commitments, and in these worlds all is great. By doing this we define our wishes by their negatives, by which i mean we establish a time in which our dreams will be achieved due to some aspect of our life disappearing or being complete.
“When I finish my degree I’ll write more.”
“When all these problems are sorted then I’ll fix my sleeping pattern and eat better.”
“When I pay off my mortgage and the kids are all grown up, then I’ll go travelling.”
You get the picture.
We focus on what is stopping us or the things that need to stop in order for us to be able to do what we want to do. We blame these things for some of our dreams going unfulfilled.
It is a more realistic way of looking at our lives. We aren’t wasting time daydreaming about fantasies where several more hours in the day appear (but only for us), so we have enough time to get everything we want to do done, or one where a winning lottery ticket just drifts through our bedroom window, no we are much more realistic than that. We focus on the things that we can control so that it feels like some day we will be able to ‘fix’ the ‘problem’ and achieve all our dreams.
It is a sensible, clever way to look at things. Focus on what you can control, set a clear target and establish a specific reward.
But we sort of create a prison for ourselves. Well no we don’t but we allow ourselves to be caged by life. Wow, that seems a bit overdramatic! What I mean is; that life is busy, like I said earlier, the world in which we live is vast and contains a near infinite number of different things to do and many of them seem as if they are forced upon us by circumstances or unavoidable because of responsibilities or commitment. I agree some things must be addressed but this life is ours to live, each individual should be free to live their life the way they want to not a life forced upon them.
SIDENOTE- on the above point- my sentiment is not intending to say that anyone can do whatever they want because this raises some questionable situations. Am I saying that if someone wishes to be a murderer then that is justified because their life is their own and that is their way of living. No, hence this side note, what I am saying in my above point is that each and every individual should have the freedom to live their lives their way and therefore some limitations are necessary to insure that one individual does not impede on the freedom of another. I won’t go into these specifically because to me this is a casual blog, but I trust you to understand the sorts of things that I mean. (it’s likely that I will in the future do a blog about freedom and liberty of humans at some point but not yet so i will leave this as a side note).
Sidenote over
Yet, going back to my previous point, it is difficult for us to break out of the cage of life because new things keep coming along that require our attention, so we continue dreaming of our perfect life stuck behind the ever reforming bars of life. I’ve done this myself, especially recently with so much in my life I must focus on. These thoughts made me think of a very interesting writer that I briefly studied at university (and intend to look into further when I am out of my cage). Ernst Bloch.
Before I continue I would just like to preface my reader by saying that I have not actually read much of what I am about to refer to. Ernst Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung, or in the vulgar tongue, “The Principle of Hope '', is a hefty read of around 1500 pages split into three volumes. It is a book that I definitely wish to read in my lifetime but one that my university library did not have the English translation for. Instead I have read the parts that I was able to secure online as well as multiple different academic texts discussing and evaluating Bloch’s amazing thinking.
In The Principle of Hope, Bloch explores the concept of utopianism (an ideal world) very differently to how many other utopian writers tend to do. Bloch’s definition of utopia is far broader than most. Rather than limiting utopian thinking to the conventional form of the ideal state, Bloch also considers the inclusion of a wide array of things not usually considered to be essentially utopian. For Bloch, daydreams, myths, fairy-tales, and other-worldly promises of religion, should all be considered as a form of utopian thinking as they all display a form of dreaming of a better life.
These dreams of a better life can be ways for us to cope with the struggles of our daily lives, distracting ourselves from the inadequacies and negatives of our lives and replacing them with better worlds. Yet, for Bloch, these daydreams also serve another purpose, he believes that they have a transformative aspect due to the way in which they are hoped into existence by the daydreamer. They are not merely stories we tell ourselves to feel happy in the way that a novel or film may be, but instead they are something that the daydreamer wishes into existence in some future and better time.
Fundamental to Bloch’s argument of how these dreams of a better world lead to the achievement of utopian progress is his concept of the ‘not-yet’. ‘Noch nicht’, the original German phrase written by Bloch, translates to both ‘not yet’ and ‘still not’ emphasising that while it is ‘still’ something that does not exist in the present, that it is expected to occur in the future with the stressing of the ‘yet’ in this phrase. For Bloch, it is the ‘not-yet’ that guides human action, striving to bring the real possibility of the ‘not-yet’ into the reality of the future. It is this striving forward towards the imagined better worlds that is so important for Bloch’s concept of utopianism in its attempt to lead to progress. While these dreams of better worlds may be seen as wishful thinking, it is the hope and action of progress that make them utopian.
Understanding Bloch’s concept of dreaming about the ‘not-yet’ in the context that I put forward earlier allows us to move away from seeing life as a cage, to stop waiting until things are better or different to improve life, but instead to take small steps towards perfection. If you are busy, and therefore have so much to do, but make slight improvements, I believe it won’t be long before your life becomes ever closer to a utopia (according to my simplified version of Bloch anyway ;) ).
Comments