Kurt Vonnegut Buys An Envelope

I got pretty depressed a while back. I didn’t accept that I was actually depressed at the time, but Costco was hurting more than it was helping. And Kurt Vonnegut just helped me realize it. 

It’s a weird feeling to just understand, but the lightbulb is on, so let’s talk about it.  

Part of my depression included shrinking my surface area. The less of the world I interacted with, the less stress I had to feel. Costco, which is just a stand-in for buying anything in bulk or impersonally (hey Amazon, I see you too), was a great excuse to stay small.

Part of my path out of that serious life rut was going to the store more often. I’m not talking “retail therapy.” I’m talking just expanding my surface area. 

It turned into going to the grocery store to get food for dinner or whatever. Not for exactly practical reasons. But I needed to not sit and stare at a computer screen.

I needed to move some. I needed to run into some people. I need to feel part of something bigger than me. 

I needed to change.

It’s hard to change when you’re small and isolated. 

The loneliness epidemic is real. It’s culturally reinforced in ways we can only partially understand let alone explain. But leave it to Kurt Vonnegut to cut straight to a surefire way to help you feel connected: fart around. 

If I’m feeling depressed, it’s pretty much because I’m not giving myself a chance to fart around. 

Just read the way he puts it:

Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is - we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore. 

Try it. Fart around a little. Fart around a lot. Expand your surface area. Run a pointless errand and make a point of making a point with anything around the errand that you can find meaning in. 

We are still supposed to dance. 

h/t Luke Barnett