I want a normal life, not a flight to New York for 300 euros

PalmaI would like to have a dog. And to feel that my life is not that important. Having an animal makes everything a little more relative and turns time into a more democratic unit of measurement. I would like to have a normal enough life to discover that everything I do, at the end of the day, has the same importance as weighing the 50 grams of food that my dog has to eat for dinner. I would like to be able to afford the luxury of insignificant things.

Everything has become important, urgent, necessary. And because of that, I wake up with a knot in my stomach, full of the things I thought about last night before closing my eyes, and that makes me go to the bathroom before breakfast. Everything is so necessary that I work on my way to work. Nothing can wait to happen when it is supposed to happen. Everything has to happen a little bit all the time. I make a doctor's appointment, I make arrangements, I meet up for the weekend and I update my life to my friends with a voice message while walking down the street. I get things done. I live in advance. “This way I get it out of the way”: a work call, a delivery, a coffee with a friend, a lunch with my mother, a dinner with my father. My to do list (things to do) is getting stranger every time. And every day becomes one less formality for the next, the preamble to tomorrow's tasks.

They have been saying for a long time that “we want to have read, and not to read”. I believe we want to have lived, and not to live. And it is normal: living has become such a complex thing that we want to do it fast and diagonally. No one would want to consciously experience this rhythm that we are only able to endure “with a bit of anxiety” –what you answer to your friend when she asks how your week is going–, nor these mortal balances –really mortal, because we are about to snap once a day on average– that we have to perform so that everything keeps rolling. We have busy lives that make us feel like important people. And we miss our normal lives. Or at least I do.

“Fly to New York from Barcelona for 336 euros”, says the advertising banner that floods the article I am reading. What a time to be alive. All I want is to forget that I have a job starting at six in the evening, sign up for some absurd extracurricular activity, prepare a lunchbox for tomorrow and watch a quiet series. I don’t want to have to choose between doing laundry or having a social life on weekends. I want to have my hobbies clear and not confuse them with sources of income. I don’t want to assume that to earn a living I must have no life, nor that every day will be a titanic effort. I want to have a dog and walk it for an hour every day. My dream is to have a normal life without regrets. And not go to New York.

The prices of things have changed and we pretend that with our salaries anyone can afford an intercontinental flight in every holiday period. And we are so happy. As if this were a symptom that everything is fine. But ever since the dreams of yesteryear have become so cheap, the quality of life has become more inaccessible. We have disrupted the hierarchy of priorities and, with it, what determines a status, a class. Now that ‘everyone’ can afford Christmas in Manhattan and summer in Bali, luxury is something else: now no one can afford a normal life. We cannot have normal jobs that end after eight hours; nor normal homes with habitable conditions; nor normal relationships that don’t need an appointment; nor normal hobbies that are just that, hobbies; nor normal health that doesn't depend on benzodiazepines or supplements.

But one day we see an offer for a 10-hour direct flight for less than what the rent of a room in a shared house would cost us and we think our life would be more worthwhile with a bagel in hand. Because today, when we have to choose between sleeping eight hours and spending some time with our partner, everything seems really unsustainable. Our existence has become so complicated that we no longer demand a normal life: we demand a life of small luxuries to endure being normal people. Access to excesses has made us believe in a world of possibilities; it is the materialization of the deceptive advertising that was sold to our parents. And our day-to-day, the fine print.

I see every day everything I could afford, the little whims I could indulge in with a click. And yet, nothing that I might actually want can I afford: turning off my phone, spending the whole weekend on the couch, leaving emails pending for tomorrow, looking out the window on the way to work, committing to one day of exercise a week, going to sleep at eleven at night. How crazy, right?