The Box

I think we all remember a time when the world felt so impossibly large. As though we could spend our whole lives exploring it and still have more to see. There was a sense of infinite freedom accompanied by the enormity of the earth. While it may have made us as children feel small or insignificant, it also created wonder and hope. An intoxicating hope that felt like growing drunk on the intrigue of the world. 

 Now it feels as though we’re imprisoned in worlds of our own making. The problem with growing older is that all those seemingly small decisions have a weight that we never quite noticed before. Sure, the box lacks tangibility, and we could leave it at any moment, but nonetheless, this imprisonment still hangs and haunts our days. 

That feeling of waking and cursing the day of work that looms ahead. A job that fails to bring you satisfaction. A job that was a result of a course you picked at the naive age of 18. Supposedly, when you’re young, you are free to make mistakes and errors. But every error is silently tallied and observed by those around you. Every choice you make is a reflection of the future you’ll live. 

What people crave more than anything is freedom. The other day I was asked the question: “What is your dream?”. I stumbled and stuttered my way through a weak answer. I realised I hadn’t answered the question of what my dream was, but rather what my dream job was. At this moment, I knew I had been trapped. 

That childhood dream of being a great explorer had been murdered and replaced with the hollow hoax of a “dream job”. The perfect answer to tell your girlfriend’s parents. The problem being that it wasn’t true to me. Perhaps the dream had not been murdered but rather forgotten. Forgotten beneath a pile of half-arsed job applications and unanswered emails. Ridiculously or pathetically, this moment also confirmed my atheism. If God had truly made the earth, he’d want me to spend my life enjoying it. Appreciating it. He wouldn’t want me wasting away in workspaces or rotting in inboxes.

The world had lost its mystique. Instead, in its place stood the confinement of an office. Meeting rooms became the extent of my exploration, and small-talk by the coffee machine was my weekly socialisation. Those places I had dreamed of exploring as a child had become victims of commercial colonisation. Scrubbed clean of any culture and transformed. Even as it began to feel as though the walls were closing in, the spin of the world was still dizzying. 

The problem was that I had everything a man could want. The perfect home, the happy wife, the car, the watch, the ring, but most of the things I had that people looked at with envy and complimented me on were nothing more than objects. Beautiful, expensive, useless objects. Objects that failed to satiate my hunger. This hunger grew used to the weak sustenance of “more”. 

The more I ate, the deeper my boredom consumed me. Days melted together, blurring into a black and white tapestry. A tapestry that I could feel coming undone. Every thread that I sewed was weaker than the last. 

I needed a sign. No, I needed more than that. It was a saviour I craved. Someone to slap me and drag me out of this place. To laugh and tell me it was all a joke. That this wasn’t my only and last life. I needed more. I needed more time. I needed a startover. So I could live my dream. 

But now it’s too late. The ship has sailed. There’s nothing left to explore. Nothing left for me outside of this decorated box with holes poked in the ceiling.

I have air to breathe. Space to move. 

I am an animal trapped in the quiet comfort of the zoo that I built.