Wine O’Clock

With minor variations, this dialogue gets performed in countless heads across countless lands every evening. What made the day one of those days may vary, and the nature of the treat it requires will differ according to personal taste, but as the sun (and the children) goes down, the world’s adults will decide they need a reward. There is a reason that time of day is coming to be known as “Wine O’clock”…

There is, to be clear, absolutely nothing wrong with this. You do you. But there is, perhaps, something faintly depressing. For many of the days which prompt this thought-process will not have been bad days. There may have been some inconveniences, sure, but nothing outside the norm. Just the mixture of slightly good and slightly less good events which make up a human life. Nothing which will still be in the mind next week.

But having survived them is still, somehow, an achievement, the sort of thing which deserves a reward. What does that say about the way we see our lives – that merely getting to the end of the day is some sort of feat? Does it not suggest that life is not something we enjoy, or even just experience, but actively have to endure? And if that is the case, is it not, perhaps time to do something about it? We only get one shot after all.

But radical change is hard and may well have consequences for others – hippies struggle to pay the school fees – so we fall back on treats which play a similar role to Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars films. He was meant to restore balance to the Force, they bring balance to our lives. For we are an averaging species. Bad events need to be offset by good. That is the way the world is meant to work. And if it doesn’t, we have been wronged. The pleasure of a bar of chocolate is required to offset the frustration of the traffic jam.

But Skywalker failed – the Emperor rose again. So too with treats. A new day starts, new inconveniences appear. Our respite can only be temporary, a glass of wine waiting for Sisyphus when he gets to the top of the hill. Nice at the time, but it doesn’t stop the rock rolling back down the slope.

“I am not yet harmed unless I judge this occurrence bad. And I can refuse to do so,” wrote Marcus Aurelius. Here might lie a way forward. For we know that when events happen, we have an instinctive reaction. Then a pause, a space in which we apply a judgement. Is this reaction reasonable given the stimulus which prompted it? If it is, we let it carry on. If not, it disappears and life moves on.

Maybe your train was late. Perhaps the printer got jammed again. Your child might not have been quite as tired at bedtime as you had hoped. Are these events really bad, though? Or are they just part of the flotsam and jetsam of life? Are they significant enough to merit the energy we expend on them?

Like all such approaches, however, what makes sense on the page may not be immediately obvious in the heat of the moment. Our processing seems “straight-through”. If we are adding a judgement, it is not obvious to us that we are doing so, particularly when we are doing it. As far as we know, an event happens and we react. That is all there is to it. And the reaction leaves its hangover to be medicated away at the end of the day.

And anyway, who is to say that our judgements are wrong? Annoyances annoy us because they interfere with what we want to do. A late train stops us getting to work on time. A jammed printer takes time we would rather prefer spending on other things. Messy hands too, more often than not. Why would we not judge these occurrences bad?

The Stoics believed that the mission of mankind was to pursue Virtue. At its most fundamental, this was a purely mental phenomenon and was, therefore, immune to the vicissitudes of fortune. None of the things which might seem bad truly was bad, because nothing could interfere with our core mission – you can be every bit as wise, just, courageous and temperate on a late train as you could on one which arrived on time, perhaps more so.

Most of us, however, are not Stoics. “Pursuing Virtue” sounds a bit airy-fairy when confronted with a traffic jam or a toddler who has consumed too much sugar. Indeed, the notion that humans have any sort of mission beyond that which they personally choose seems old-fashioned and just wrong to modern secular ears.

Instead, while we would not, perhaps, express it in such blunt terms we generally expect that the world will do what we want. It is there for us, we are not there for it. And we feel a sense of injustice when it does not.

Stated like this, the notion seems faintly silly. We know the world does not revolve around us. A late train will have some sort of reason for its delay beyond sheer devilment. We would, generally, prefer our children to be individuals not automata doing everything their parents want exactly when their parents want it. We know our actions sometimes inconvenience others, but forget about them when others’ inconvenience us.

“The nail that sticks up gets hammered down,” goes a Japanese proverb and it is because we think we stick up that life seems remorselessly to hammer us down. Things which don’t go our way annoy us because we think things should go our way. Random events become injuries because we think there should be no random events, just a continual stream of congenial happenings as the world bends to our will. If we thought of ourselves just as part of the world, not the fulcrum on which it turns, none of these annoyances would be quite so, well, annoying. They would just be things that happened. Events not inconveniencies. But we don’t.

If we did though, we might be able to enjoy that glass of wine as wine, not just as grape juice and sedative. And we could sleep well even if we knew the rock would be at the bottom of the hill again tomorrow.