by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com
So it is a summer Saturday in small town New Zealand. As usual nothing is happening. In NZ nothing much happens, especially if you are over thirty. While being under thirty their are low hanging fruit frivolities of student parties and easy drunkeness. But then after that era is over all social life is destroyed. The over thirties want to sit in their burrows with the co-dependent other and slowly mentally die. This to me just seems a fact. Of course the moneyed will always have their ‘dinner parties’ etc – I’m not talking about them. I guess in a way this is a reason for me to hate them less – they know socializing is important. I shouldn’t hate the ‘moneyed’ – it’s probably a bad habit I can’t break. I know most of them work hard – it’s just I can’t stand how they all sound like the exact same tape recording. That’s usually how they got their money – copying each other. I can see why they do it. I mean they don’t need to worry about being under a bridge catching fat moths to eat.
But I think they minimize the down side to being so very much a copy-cat. I believe deep down in every human there is a creative soul wanting to be heard. I think the middle-class-copy-cat types know something’s wrong, but they dare not listen to their muffled souls voice crying out from the bowels of their hearts to them – for they fear if the listen the risk losing all their wealth, or half it or perhaps three quarters of it. And of course they are right. It takes courage to listen to that what speaks to you from the core of your ancient humanity – your caveman self?
more than a decade ago I used to work in the ‘Corporate world’ (it’s all in the name – they admit it’s not actually the ‘real world’ its a constructed one, a virtual one, with its own customs and laws). I was around these ‘middle class copy cat culture’ types. I was about thirty when I realized I was facing a fork in the road: destroy my life as I know it or become like them, or at least a half-pie version of them. I chose to destroy my life as I knew it. Though it wasn’t really the executive functioning side of my brain making the choice. The decision came from my soul. I think it used its ‘veto power’. It issued a clandestine order:
You will self sabotage this life, you will torpedo it from afar.
That is what happened. It was a slow exit over perhaps two years. In the middle of my separation from my ‘rehashed middle class copy-cat life’ was a six month long international trip to four countries. At the time I thought that was happening to ‘revitalize’ me, whereby I would return to some kind of ‘copy-cat utopia’. Of course my soul new that it was just stretching out the divorce from my former self. So it could be palatable.
That was more than a decade ago. My life is no longer a copy-cat thing. It’s quite original (even if I do say so myself). It’s not perfect by any stretch. But I get by, & I no longer am strapped to a cubicle climbing the corporate ladder, dealing with passive aggressiveness, putting up with office politics, getting wildly underpaid. After the fork in the road opened up to the new highway, I taught myself to ‘fish for my food’. I now source my own jobs out there that people need done in the physical world.
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. My current favourite theory as to why is that we never got over the wild beginnings of things when there was almost no ‘civilizing’ females, and law and order was patchy at best. It was wise to not trust anyone, and anyone was probably some rogue drunk and violent male, most probably a cast-off from eighteenth-century Dickensian London.
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. People allow themselves to be too reticent, too co-dependant with their spouses, too suspicious of ‘others’. That is why despite the ever-piling-up evidence (e.g. poor mental health) to the contrary we pretend everything is ok and that we are just people who like to “chill out”.
I can only hope this self-deception can end one day. 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.
Sometimes I wonder whether I am really happy or really sad. But then 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’. So the real question is 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. 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 societal bad-programming I’ve been subjected to over my lifespan(?). It is it from out of the medico-pharma-psych industry, and of course in conjunction with mass media indoctrination.
Perhaps it is Edward Bernays’s fault. Edward Bernays was marketing genius of 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). Or as Karl Pilkington said without knowing that stuff at all – everyone has a ‘worry hole’ that has to be filled (I paraphrase). 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. It has been proved that Multi-Millionaires and even Billionaires do worry a lot, despite their big material comforts. We 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 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. 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. Schoepenhauer 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 better now. Writing helps. Why? Because have expressed myself as an individual. 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. 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).
‘Happy’ (content?) Saturday folks !
Anton M Smith
17 Jan 2026
Anton Martin Smith Writer 