CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Life is Hard to Get Used To, Prisoners Remind Me

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The concept of “getting used to” anything in life is an interesting one. Where I’ve encountered it, the implication is that, over time, one becomes more accustomed. The idea that anything can be gotten used to, in my opinion, is a kind of gut-reaction understanding of life that is not borne out by the experience of most people, no matter how long they live.

If you have a job you don’t like, then surely you know the feeling. And surely, you know it better the longer you’ve had the job. But, more ominously, maybe you even have a job you do like, and still, after a while, the days start to go by slower and slower, and somehow, despite the commonly held belief that people can “get used to things,” you’re enjoying your job a lot less — and the days are going by a lot slower — in your fifth year on the job than your first. How can this be explained, if time helps us get used to things?

Perhaps because of my relative privilege (despite which I’m broke for a significant portion of every month), I also notice a gut-reaction in myself, which assumes people in the worst conditions for the longest must have an even better knack for “getting used to” things than the rest of us. It’s an understandable assumption: How else could people survive in the worst of circumstances for so long, especially when even circumstances that are not the worst in life become hard to get used to, or grow boring? When even a good life is pretty hard and slow going? How else do people in prisons or war zones or homelessness survive, if there’s no getting used to it?

Indeed, we hear it all the time, especially in our empire, as we ravage the planet and build up our nuclear arsenals: Any of us who has expressed fear about such things to people in our lives has had someone meet us with the response that, “Human beings have a unique ability to adapt.”

I’m still skeptical. I think sometimes life is harder and harder to get used to every day.

You know the feeling, the one you get on those extra long days at work?

Even though we all have cell phones now, for some reason, there are still clocks in many of our offices. I’m sure you know the days I’m talking about, where you have to monitor how often you’re looking at the clock even though you have a phone, and you have to try to avoid looking at the time on your phone if someone texts you, because you don’t want to know how early it still is.

Sometimes you look at the clock on the wall at work, get a sense of the time, then do a bunch of tasks to try to burn more time, then you look back at the clock, and a lot less time has passed than you thought might’ve, and you get that sinking feeling.

There have been times where I looked at the clock, did 10 to 15 tasks just to keep myself going, returned to my desk, and I swear, when I looked back up at the clock, it was actually earlier than it was the last time I looked at it.

And I’m someone who likes my job. I’m not a huge fan of needing a job, and having to do it full-time, and getting paid an insultingly low amount. But, as jobs go, I really like my day job.

I’m just saying: Life is hard to get used to, and the days often go by slow and crushingly, even if you like your life. Maybe it’s just that getting used to things is not linear, or something like that.

And there are always the curveballs of sudden tragedy, health issues, family needs, whatever else you’re dealing with. We all deal with those experiences, and there’s no getting used to them. We learn to deal with those experiences by doing it, because we have to.

Some of our lives are filled with the pain of other people constantly, along with our own pain, and that’s hard to get used to as well.

And on top of everything else, we’re all going to die some day, and everyone we know and love is also going to die some day, and we have to live with the knowledge we will die some day. It’s dishearteningly the only thing we don’t have to figure out for ourselves. Something is going to get you, and you don’t know when or how. And no matter how long that’s been the case, it’s not any........

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