Contentment?

Depression? Never....Never....give an inch. You'll like yourself in the morning.

have I had to compromise my values over the years? Whooooo, hell yes! I always wanted to maintain some kind of hermetic purity, sealed off within myself where I could remain pure and unsullied. I tried, I really tried but the problem with that as a position is that what you need to do is cut off all contact with the outside world, which in itself isn't a particularly pleasant position to be in. Avoiding getting your hands dirty and making compromises means that you also avoid actually being part of anything. I had to make a decision to jump back into life and get embroiled in what seems from the outside to be a horrid, squalid life of hypocrasy, compromise and messiness. In doing so, I had to trust that it was possible to do good and do things of meaning. Trusting that also meant that I had to accept that everything would be shades of grey rather than black and white. It's interesting that you quote Hesse, because that was at least one sign post on the journey. He's a big shadow over Colin Wilson's 'The Outsider', a book about literature and outsiders. The books basic arguement is that the figure of the outsider runs through literature. A big feature of the outsider is the tension between what feels 'true to yourself' versus the outside world that seems to be a huge mass of compromise and falseness. The outsider always feel that they have seen through the petty promises and comforts of society that seem to keep everyone else happy, and have arrived at a position where they have seen the 'true' face of things and can no longer accept the easy preconceptions and reasoning that seems to keep everyone else going. It's a basic existential dilemma. If you can see that convention is full of untruths, and that what keeps convention, and by extension society, going is the fact that everyone else seems to believe these untruths, how do you continue to operate in a position of truthfullness when participation seems to be based on believing something you know to be untrue? What Wilson kindof concludes is that what makes all the difference is meaning. The outsider, as in Steppenwolf, can't accept the things that others use to make their life mean something, family, religion, wealth, material comfort etc. This can lead to a negation or withdrawl, where they remove themselves from the world of other people retreating into their own private world inside them where they will never have to compromise. Or, more positively, they attempt to find a meaning. Work may be full of compromise and falseness but it means that you get paid. This can be meaningless unless you can see that the money you get has meaning because it allows you to do things, or be comfortable, or see that your kids have things that they want or need etc. The same is true of everything. You have the control of what things mean to you. It's that that is most often the outsiders quest. That's the real struggle if you can't just accept things, the struggle to find what's meaningful for you and finding a useful meaning for the things that seem pointless. As you can probably guess, I know feeling you're describing very well Emma, it jumps up and bites me on the bum about twice a year without fail.

Ah yes...I loathed the "carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity." It gets us all once in a while. Interestingly David Weeks a Psychiatrist has carried out research which suggest us British make the best eccentrics because our class system is (and certainly used to be) more rigid than that found in many other European countries. Because it was once almost impossible and now still hard to escape the class or perhaps now nameless system we are more inclined to be horizontally mobile because we are unable to be vertically mobile. It still holds true, many who cannot bear the medocrity bale out; join religious orders or wacky cults, move abroad or engage in otherwise unconventional lives... Most of us are forced by circumstance to conform but still have some outlet to escape even if just for a few moments periodically.