by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com
Part 2 (If you haven’t read Part, 1 click link below):
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Back to things ‘New Zealand’. Of course there is a new different form of isolation – of small town New Zealand, being over thirty, and being unmarried, single and over forty. Yes, I admit the ‘peacefulness of New Zealand’ is written into the fabric of this place. But the added social isolation is a construction of the people here and that have been here since it became a colonial outpost circa eighteen thirty. My current favourite theory as to why isolation is so entrenched here is that we never got over the wild chaotic pioneering beginnings of things. When there was too much hard work ahead of us to build literally everthing; almost no ‘civilizing’ females here only en-roughened violent and bad tempered men; Law and order was patchy to non existent at best. In those conditions in colonial NZ, it was wise to not trust anyone, given anyone you randomly met was probably some rogue drunk and violent male, most probably a cast-off from eighteenth-century Dickensian London, quite ready to rob, beat or maybe even kill you. The entrenched isolation is perhaps proof it’s all too early in ‘cultural-time’ to expect otherwise.
The theory is surely half right – how could it not be? facts are facts. Sadly, I also think we as New Zealanders don’t know ourselves well enough to be able to fight the unnecessary ongoing culture of isolating patterns of behaviour. It’s almost as if after saying ‘no we are not British we are now New Zealanders’ we have embraced a void – we have something we are not (British) don’t have something we are. Of course anyone with brains knows it is folly to pretend we ex colonials are not still ethno-culturally British/European – even though the white liberals love to pretend they can.
In NZ People allow themselves to be too reticent, too co-dependant with their spouses, too suspicious of ‘others’, never backing themselves to get out of their rut, always worried what people will think of them of they dare put their head above the pulpit. That is why despite the ever-piling-up evidence (e.g. poor mental health) to the contrary, we still pretend ‘everything is ok’ and that we are just people who like to “chill out”. I believe ‘Chilling out’ to much gas killed more people than all the guns, at least in terms of a very real ‘mental death’.
I can only hope this self-deception in NZ can end one day (and everywhere else). I mean if it is true, why is our social society and economy so full of cavernous fractures? For a people who are happily ‘chilling out’ there seem to be hell of a lot of mental meltdowns, early deaths, murders, assaults, poverty, depression etc.
Sometimes I wonder whether I am really happy or really sad. But now with age and experience I realise that’s a ‘silly modern question’. No one asked that kind of question until about one hundred years ago. When the medico-psych industry realized if they could male everyone think they were sick because they weren’t ‘skip through the tulips happy’. A great scam – you could fleece everyone. So since true happiness is a fraud then the real question is one of contentedness.
Under that theory we should ask ‘are we content?’. To be reasonably content would mean we are conventionally ‘happy’. I guess I roughly have that to a degree nowadays. But I also have a nagging feeling that I’m supposed to actually be living some other life, in some other location, making people go ‘wow that’s cool what you just did – tell me more’. I wonder if thoughts like this are a ‘remnant hangover’ from the NZ brand of soco-cultural bad-programming I’ve been subjected to over my lifespan(?).
Perhaps it is Edward Bernays’s fault. Edward Bernays was marketing genius of around one hundred years ago. Bernays was the pioneering propaganda guru who realized you have to manufacture wants in peoples minds, not just wait for them to tell you they want something – and if you do that trick you can’t get ridiculously wealthy and influential. With Bernays era it is the programming of ‘you must be unhappy so buy this flash car you can’t afford’. That crap has immersed us thanks to modern tech where media is blaring at you everywhere, and it’s now in our pockets.
Or as Karl Pilkington said without knowing any of that theoretical stuff at all – “everyone has a ‘worry hole’ that has to be filled” (I paraphrase). It aligns with the manufactured wants Bernays thesis. For it doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are – the ‘worry hole’ is there & must always be filled by things you cant ever get to. The Pilkington ‘worry hole’ is proof the Bernays system has truly worked on everyone.
It has been proved that Multi-Millionaires and even Billionaires do worry a lot, despite their big material comforts. We do seem hardwired to worry. The evolutionists say that it made far more sense to jump first and think later, least a sabre tooth tiger eat you while you were thinking whether to jump or not. This is also very true. Darwin and later (his promoter) Herbert Spenser had a good point there.
Anyway, thoughts of wellbeing are interesting. Perhaps if my parents had not been divorced & I had grown up like ‘The Waltons’ (for those under 40 that was a cheesy 1950s falsely perfect American TV family) and not grown up in a recession ravaged small town in the nineteen nineties. I’m just talking out loud here, being less intellectual for a moment. Wondering about your own ‘Wellbeing’ is a bit like getting into Ufology – no matter how many Alien/UFO podcasts you watch – you’ll never know more than you started, you will never know if ‘they walk among us’ or if Roswell was true. Perhaps that’s why no one in the old days even thought too much of ‘Wellbeing, Self-Help & Happiness’. They just worked, and some were lucky enough to earn more than their neighbor who wore rags for clothes.
Anyway these are all nice musings. I don’t really have the answer. I guess it is best to worry about the day one day at a time. Someone with long hair and a robe said that a very long time ago, & it’s hard to argue that each day has enough worries of it’s own. On that measure, I had a good day today, and a good week. After all I did get a lot of real things done in the physical world (which is a bit of a hang out of mine these days). Maybe the best maxim is ‘if in doubt don’t overthink more than what is in front of you’. Maybe if you do that maybe not much will go really bad. Schopenhauer thought ‘happiness’ was stupid and contentedness was all you could have, and that came from the absence of bad outcomes, i.e. a negatively defined thing. He’s got a point I think too.
I must say I feel much better now for writing this – for expressing myself as a unique individual. Not being a copy-cat. Writing helps. Why? Because have expressed myself as an individual. My soul likes it. And now that I travel down this fork in the road instead of the copy-cat other fork, I do get to do that a lot. That is a very real form of wealth. Maybe I’m secretly content. But will I allow myself to admit that? I am not so sure – it might not be a profitable use of my time & resources – according to a Bernaysian propagandist at least.
Perhaps these are all just the idle ramblings of a lonely kiwi middle aged man. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Where would we be without ramblings? I’ll take a side of ramblings with my main of luke-warm discontent any day of the week, all washed down with a mighty ice cold beer of course.
‘Happy’ (content?) Saturday folks !
Anton M Smith
17 (& updated on the 18th) Jan 2026
Anton Martin Smith Writer 