Columnists

THE TRIUMPH OF APATHY

By Dave Loftus ⋅ April 11, 2008 ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Last Monday my bank account was blessed with this semester’s portion of my loan and maintenance grant. Normally that’s reason enough to cheer and storm a nearby drinking-hole but somehow this time felt different. Then I realised it was because this is the final payment I will receive from the Student Loans Company. That was it now. ‘No more for you’ Mother Loan was saying as she weaned me off her teat and since my part-time job doesn’t pay enough to come close to survive on, the only direction for my bank balance to plunge now is downwards, the direction usually taken by things that plunge. After comprehending the full-scale awfulness of this, I was soon gripped by fear, horrible galling fear, the same fear that has haunted the shadowy recesses of my brain for quite some time, like a little goblin lurking at the back of my mind whispering cruelly into my ear that I have absolutely no ideas for jobs, no career plan, no future schemes, not even the foggiest clue of a scrap of an inkling. I’m a real-world-phobe. I’ve been simply moseying along through life, surrendering wilfully to the dark forces of apathy, putting off the inevitable, delaying reality. And now my time is up. Soon the real world will come for me like the rancid hillbillies came for Burt Reynolds in Deliverance.

It’s my own fault. That’s the only thing I’m certain of. I probably put as much effort into my future as the world’s oldest man does every day. If I live through a day without dying it’s been good. I can’t even think of a possible path to take that wouldn’t result in me running screaming. Since my timetable for the last few years has only been a few hours a week, being thrown into a nine-to-five job now would certainly melt my brain. At half past ten in the morning I’d be leaving before being told the day had barely started. Then I’d laugh, thinking it was all a big prank. ‘We’re not joking’ they’d say. I’d laugh even louder and for too long until being dragged back to my cubicle by security. Usually when I whinge like this to people their first answer is ‘You could be an English teacher’ and I have to painfully re-awaken my long-dormant willpower in an effort not to claw their vocal chords out. I don’t want to teach. Kids can smell fear like sharks can taste blood. I’d be the walking stereotype of a pushover teacher with my crackling voice, premature baldness and messy staff room hara-kiri. You know the kind. In other words I lack the roaring confidence and willingness to succeed to even get on the bottom rung of any career path that currently exists.

I wasn’t always this pessimistic. All through my time in university I have basked in the warming glow of the phrase ‘something is bound to come along‘. After all, how could journeying right through three solid, valuable years of top quality education not end in a nice employment path at your feet? It was bound to happen. Something was bound to come up.
Fast-forward three years and my optimism has been blasted away like a sand castle in a hurricane. What used to be a hefty chunk of time between the present and university’s end time is now little more than a few weekends. I can’t remember the last time I knew so little about my future. I’m scared to think five minutes past graduation day in case I see some catastrophic void stampeding my way, trumpeting and bellowing angrily while I flounder in its path like the petrified manboy I am.
Years ago I was being told that my life was full of limitless possibilities. Anything was possible with the mildly impressive grades I had scraped together. Gleaming, smiling opportunities danced and sang gleefully on the road to success. I was a shoe-in. And maybe I was. The only thing that let me down was myself. I lacked any motivation or ambition at all meaning that the road to success was soon bricked up, leaving me its only diversion through some godawful wilderness with only a nervous breakdown and a mid-life crisis somewhere on the distant horizon to look forward to.

Now for people with some direction in life, you’ll probably not really understand the heart-clenching horror that simply thinking about the real world brings. You’ll probably just snort and chuckle something along the lines of “You can do anything if you put your mind to it, you stupid coward” but for us real-world-phobes it’s like being a tadpole in a rapidly evaporating puddle, while a hungry crow stands watch. Real-world-phobes are easy to spot. Just look out for the shoulders exhausted from shrugging, the fingernails gnawed to the bone and the petulant refusal to memorise future dates in case that somehow makes them real. We live in a moronically blinkered world where job interviews, CVs, pensions, taxes and mortgages circle the campfire like unseen wolves.
I’m pouring out all this paranoia not to depress but to comfort. If you feel the same then you’re not alone. If only there was a cave somewhere we could all go and hide in, (occasionally creeping out to gaze tentatively up into the sky like Chicken Little) then all would be well. Except it wouldn’t be. The real world would still find you.

I’m being deliberately panicky while I write this for another reason. Hopefully in the future when I’m sitting at a broad mahogany desk in some luxurious penthouse office overlooking the Copacabana I’ll accidentally come across this website, read this and guffaw loudly and smugly at how irrationally jittery I was back in 2008. I pray to every available god that that day comes although the more likely scenario sees me never reading this again because in a few years time I’m not making enough money on scratchcards to get my bedsit fitted with electricity.

Watch this space