What Kind of Paradise

by Janelle Brown

Having a job. Your personal agency being sacrificed to the god of corporate profit. Your life being reduced to routine obedience and oppression. Does that ever bother you?

We are undone by the specificity of our dreams. Reality can never live up to the shining edifices we forge inside our fantasies: Life, in all its confusing complexity, is destined to be a disappointment in comparison. The lottery winner discovers that the riches don’t equal happiness; the longed-for baby is colicky and sour; losing fifty pounds still doesn’t bring you love; winning the election doesn’t trigger societal change. Life is a constant emotional calibration, then: the tiny adjustments we make every day as we come up against our discontents. We ride this seesaw, between hope and disenchantment, seeking some sort of equilibrium.

life isn’t always a series of binary choices. Sometimes it’s not about either/or but about learning how to manage the complexities of both/and.