Stealing Bliss

Less of an ode to joy, and more of a hand grenade in the face of doomerism. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is below...

Last Saturday I found myself reclining at the side of a swimming pool, staring out across sky-blue water at sunlit trees shimmering in a light breeze. Little and her cousin were playing on a crazy boat they’d built out of those foam floaty things, I’d just put in a respectable number of lengths and had earned a little breather, and I thought: blimey, it’s been a while since I’ve felt like this.

By “this” I meant pure, relaxed, bliss. Nothing pressing on my mind, reminding me I still had X, Y and Z to check off my list. No guilt nagging away about somewhere else I should be, or something else I ought to be doing instead. Just a feeling that I was right where I was meant to be, and everything was good.

Bliss.

Blue skies and fluffy white clouds, a harbour, empty benches in the sunshine, and the option of all manner of snacks a mere stroll away. Bliss country.

I’m not talking about a few fleeting moments of happiness, a brief feeling of taking joy in the little things, although that too can be rare enough these days. Nope, I mean true, bone-deep bliss, the feeling that just for this short space of time, the universe has slid into the correct alignment, and everything is just as it ought to be. You know what I’m talking about. It feels like sunshine rehydrating your soul. I sank down into it, luxuriated. Let it seep through me from my fingertips to my toes.

And then I thought: blimey. It’s been a really, really long while.

Six long years, in fact, I realized. The last time I remember feeling so blissful was at another pool, this one in Beijing, on another sunny afternoon where I was watching my kids play, relaxed in the knowledge that I deserved this time off from things, that it was perfectly ok for me to let my guard down and just enjoy the moment. That the moment was mine, and was intended to be. That the universe was a benign place that meant me, meant all of us, well.

So what went wrong?

You don’t need willows, water and Koi carp for bliss, but it helps.

Well, it would be dishonest of me to say that a lot of it isn’t personal, and I won’t bore you with the details. Nothing dramatic, you understand; I’m not waiting for the cops to break down my door on the back of a long gone but not forgotten bank-heist, or for some dark, devilish, half-buried pact from my misspent youth to come due (I think I’ve paid up on all of those. Me and most of the minor demonic pantheon are sympatico at the moment, or at least locked in a long-standing truce.) All just normal life crap; the kind that happens if you make it past a certain age and realise you’re neither as infallible nor as bulletproof as you thought. There’s some of that, for sure. But I think it goes wider and deeper. I think it’s a zeitgeist thing, and I think most of us are suffering.

Be honest. When was the last time you felt like the world was a good place? Like there was no reason to be looking over your shoulder, keeping your guard up for the next thing to come out of left field and knock the wind out of you?

We’ve had a rough trot. The high watermark for mistrusting the universe was probably back around late 2020, mid-pandemic, when it seemed like standing next to the wrong person in the supermarket could be a death sentence, but there have been so, so many other things since, and, when you really think about it, before as well. It started as a trickle. Maybe you didn’t even notice it at the time, but when you look back, you can see the signs.

Kuta Beach in Bali. If you’re wondering what dangerous beast made those sand circles rather than imagining floating in a warm sea under a golden sun, warning - they stole your bliss.

For me, it was January 2016, the month both David Bowie and Alan Rickman died. Add to that list, by the end of the year, Carrie Fisher, Harper Lee and Prince. And a whole lot of other bright stars who sparkled out in a single, dismal 12-month period. Even at the time some of us felt something shift—one of the more maverick department heads at the school where I taught had the kids make up a memorial collage board with photos of the departed, a host of poignant literary quotations about raging against dying light, and the equally poignant title “F*** You, 2016!” (It really did say that. I mean, with the asterisks obviously. We were a respectable establishment after all; but we also taught IB English Language, which meant there was a whole set of lessons on what makes language taboo, and this counted as a teaching aid.) Every time we lost another great talent that year, it felt like a little light left the universe.

So when the shift began, there was nobody to blame for it. It was just bad luck, an unlikely cluster of dots on a graph. Statistically anomalous, but not significant. It could all have meant nothing. We could’ve carried on cheerily in the face of it, found ourselves some new talents to rejoice in, kept the good world turning. But then global events kicked in, and it wasn’t just a general feeling of things not being quite right anymore. It was a growing dread.

I’m not going to list them—you can do that yourself, I’m sure. Just look back honestly over the last 10 years and remember how things used to be. Not perfect, of course. Downright miserable sometimes. But it was a win-some-lose-some world back then, a sometimes-you-eats-the-baar,-and-sometimes-the-baar-eats-you world. Now it feels a lot more like the universe is out to get us, the moment we let our guards down, doesn’t it?

Do I even need to spell out why?

In retrospect, I still feel the same…

Yes, there are bad men in power, but there have always been bad men in power. Maybe not here, maybe not in our own back yard. So blame geography. But while you do it, call in history as a witness for the defense. There have been many moments, long stretched-out years, when things, on the surface of it, looked just as grim, if not grimmer.

As a Gen Xer, I grew up under Thatcherism (read rife poverty and unemployment for normal working-class peeps, and you can shove your trickle-down economics where the sun don’t shine), and the constant threat of Nuclear Winter. Anyone else read “When the Wind Blows*” as a tweenager and have nightmares for years? When I was a kid, Gerry Adams, now a respected elder Irish statesman, was still a bad man so utterly terrifying that the BBC used to show him only in silhouette, with his voice dubbed by an actor.** We did bomb evacuations in schools, right alongside the fire drills.***

So the world has never been all sunshine and rainbows. But don’t you remember the good old days, when we knew there were monsters out there, but it didn’t necessarily feel like they were constantly closing in all around?

The Shropshire of my childhood - note balance of shadows and sunshine. Yes, that’s a metaphor. Or a symbol. Whatever. School’s almost out for summer!

Of course, you know what’s different. It’s our neverending access to bad news. 24/7, 365. It’s there from the moment we wake up and reach for our phones, to the bleary-eyed second we stop doomscrolling and call it a night. It snuck up on us. I remember when it started for me—when my alarm went off in the ‘Jing back in 2017 and the first thing I’d check was whether Trump had declared war on North Korea yet. (The second thing I’d check was the pollution index.) At least I knew what I was checking then. Nowadays, there’s a list of things so long I’m not sure anymore. Various humanitarian atrocities I can’t bear to really think about, The Climate Clock, the rise of AI, the rise of fascism, and tanking stock markets, for starters. Add your own to the list. Or rather don’t. We have to stop this. Because it’s this omnipresent fearmongering that’s stealing our bliss. And that’s intentional.

When I started writing this newsletter, I thought I was going to make it a rallying cry—that “stealing bliss” would mean stealing it back, moment by sneaky moment. But then I thought about it and got angry. Because we can’t steal it. It’s ours. It’s our bliss. They stole it. Them.

All the people who got elected and promoted and rich on the back of fear. All the people who want us to believe that we have to be hypervigilant every waking moment, and sleep with one eye open. The universe isn’t malevolent. They are.

They have stolen our bliss.

See. Even the AQI says things are better than you thought.

Now it is true that there is much to be done to win back our world from these people, and most of it comes down to hard action. We have to vote them out, where we can, and where we can’t, we have to find the courage to force them out. We have to man/woman/person the borders if it comes to it, alongside the bears and the wolves and the murder-geese. But at the heart of this, we must remember what it is we’re fighting to keep alive.

Our sense of bliss.

Our love of this world.

Our belief, endorsed by the warmth of the sun and the growing of green things, and the soft fall of rain and snow, and the laughter of children in a swimming pool, that this world, this life, are at their core benevolent and good, and that the universe tends toward expansion, not contraction.

They have stolen our bliss. Let’s take it back.

Your mission, this month, is to take back your bliss. It doesn’t matter how you do it: be like me and treat yourself to an afternoon at the local pool. Eat your favourite ice-cream in the sun. Lie on your bed and listen to the whole of your favourite playlist and don’t allow yourself to think even for a second about the things you could or should or might be doing instead. Look up at the sky, in the blue of midday or the dark of a starry night (tomorrow is the Strawberry Moon!) and remind yourself that space is infinite and the universe has everything in hand, and that the bad people with their twisted agendas and their greed and their cruelty are, in the grand scheme of things, just as paltry and puny as you feel when you stare at the heavens.

And above all, take back your bliss.

Sunlight through an embrasure filled with cherry blossom on the Great Wall of China at Mutianyu. I think that might even be snow in the cracks between the bricks. You can’t look at this and not think there’s good in the world.

This instalment’s rambling asides

(usually the Cap’n takes over and tidies all my asterisks up into proper footnotes, but she’s off sunbathing on the poop deck, so I’m letting the stars run wild.)

*In case you escaped that particular scarring rite of passage, it was a comic book about a sweet old couple who, at the onset of nuclear war, follow government safety instructions to the letter and die horribly as a result. You can still buy it, here. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

**This is absolutely true. I don’t know what they thought might happen if they showed his face and used his actual, real voice. Did they think he’d bewitch us all, like a possessed record played backwards? At any rate, once they lifted the ban, in around 1994, it was a bit of a revelation to realise that this bogeyman looked more like a geography teacher than Voldemort, and had that manner of speaking where your teeth occasionally whistle.

***This is also true. Bomb threats were so common and believable, kids used to occasionally call in “suspected explosive devices” from payphones— remember those?—to get an hour or so off school. On one memorable occasion, the teachers had us all lined up alongside my picturesque redbrick sixth-form college, on a sunny day so gorgeous that nobody was complaining, when an urgent whisper went around and we all had to move over to the sports field pronto. Turns out that time, not only was it a “credible threat” rather than an attempt to dodge a detention for overdue homework, but the suspected bomb was thought to be in the building we’d all been lined up so carefully outside. On another occasion, some lesser royal visited the city where I went to university, occasioning a security search with sniffer dogs beforehand, which turned up an explosive device in the bookstore the whole student and teaching body had visited countless times. Nobody could be sure how long it had been there, except that it was allegedly partially hidden by dust. I never did find out which shelf it was on, but it’s a salutary tale for those of us hoping to shift a few books this lifetime. I have a new personal goal—I want to be popular enough that my books are never discovered to have been concealing a bomb for decades… Moral of the story—yes there are bad things and people in the world, but we are lucky far oftener than un. Let’s remember how to live like we believe that.

Find your happy place. That’s an order.

Heave Ho

Right, it’s time for me to check for sharks and then leap over the side of the ship for a cool off in the crystal waters of Pirate Bay.

I reckon it’s the Quartermaster’s turn next, but what do I know? Whoever it is, it’ll be good. You’ll see. Things are better than you think, and the tide washes all shores clean, eventually. Now go dabble your toes.