tomorrow

 

All the links on my Instagram bio are about a consumption profile. My sense of self – to the extent I am willing to make it known – is expressed through a declaration of taste. It is something safe and easy to be proud of; people have really awful tastes. How does one fulfil personhood? A very European thing I have come to like is putting things on your calendar; you know what you will be doing quite a way into the future. An existential crisis or two can be averted by pulling your calendar up. You can pack it up to never leave room for an unwelcome thought. You can refer to it when someone tries make a spontaneous plan. A crutch, and a potent one. It remains difficult to describe a sense of self even to myself without informing it to some measure of consumption. If nothing under the Sun is new, then there is nothing novel to my particular brand of consumption. I think I grew up in a society as alienated from production as is physically possible. Almost everything that populated the country’s supermarkets came from abroad, and as far as we were concerned, produce grew in the produce aisle. I used to joke with my mother that I arrived as a ten-year-old and never put her through the ordeal of raising a baby, mostly because she has never stopped complaining about what an ordeal it was. It’s the same with consumption, there was no pausing to consider how something got made; it just appeared on the aisles. I still like going to places where things appear on the aisle. Mass production, intercontinental supply chains, whatever it takes to separate me from the productive process and allow me to exist as simply a consumer. And then I strive to make the consumption niche. The more esoteric my taste, the more evolved my sense of self. To speak a few more languages than others, have a wider palette of books and cinema, try and know everything about everything, my attempt to acquire personhood is not far off from that of a large language model.

I saw tweet once that said the emotion to really eschew is ennui because we are equipped to deal with everything else. Ennui is easy to descend into. I’ve tweeted before, and felt several times that they should invent something to look forward to. Someone replied once saying it exists and is called ‘tomorrow’. But there’s always tomorrow, even when it is tomorrow.

gifting

 

I think often about the crisis of creating. As a boy I used to tell people I want to be a writer. I would write away in random notebooks, entire worlds of my own creation that were rarely revisited for a second sitting. I did not particularly want anyone to read them. My way of guarding against being seen was to not be too protective of the notebooks; nobody snooped through the stuff that was deliberately made to look carelessly strewn around. I think this is why I lost them too; when I left the house, no one knew all those volumes meant something to me. I have adopted this into my life in more meaningful ways than I realise. I have been told I am a difficult person to buy gifts for. It makes  sense to me; I find it difficult to let what I hold dear be known. A friend who was trying to be cheeky once said that I liked moving all the time because I was comfortable loving people from afar. Not that the sentiment was without truth entirely, but I think it would be even more accurate to say I prefer being loved from afar. Last night, I found myself rooting for and disappointed by Argentina’s defeat more intensely than I expected. The realisation that I would never watch the greatest player of all time ever again felt a piece of my life ending forever. I don’t think I could express that to anyone without them expressing a measure of surprise. It is easier to be loved from afar; you let your loved ones create image of you that you have to live up to. You try to perform to that standard, and relieve yourself of the responsibility of a real relationship. Everyone likes you, and as my sister once told me accusatorily, you get everyone to think you are one of them. So I watch my football games with agendas no one hears about and I have engagements with art that no one is told about. When I look at other people I wonder how many storylines they live that will die with them. They can’t all be comfortable being known.

White Pele

 

Every time the World Cup rolls around, I look back at the last one to get a sense of how much life has changed. The last one was three and a half years ago; not the usual lngth of time. In football terms, not too much has changed. Messi is still incredible, Ronaldo is still standing in the way of a really talented team’s success, United are still a waste of time, Arsenal continue chasing a European trophy, and Haaland is still a robot. My life could not have had a more eventful three-and-a-half-year period. I watched every single game of the Qatar World Cup, partly because I was aware that it would almost certainly never be possible again, and partly because the world’s game really is one of the few things I just cannot get enough of. Ronaldo had just given an explosive crybaby interview to Piers Morgan that made his exceptionally poor run even more enjoyable than usual.

I watched the 2018 World Cup Final at auditorium on the first day of law school; I remember thinking at the time that the degree was going to be so long that I might even watch the next World Cup in that place (which I did). I watched the 2022 World Cup Final in a Shisha bar in Kuwait, with a number of my friends whom I had not seen for years. When this World Cup opened, I watched it with a group of strangers at a summer school on a Greek island. In the gap between these two World Cups, I finished my LLB, LLM, and have just started a PhD. I have moved house more than one a year in that period, and moved countries almost once a year. A move to Europe, a return, and another move. Enough time to fall out of football and begin falling back in again.  

The stock taking happens every World Cup. Football loses more of its soul in each edition. It feels like the sticky mess of a trying to eat a piece of chocolate that really should have been in the fridge first. It is sweet, tastes like you were promised, and you still wish you had not opened it. I can have a moderate expectation that I will still be here when 2030 rolls around, and that Germany will probably still be ass. In that way, it is similar to that auditorium where I watched Mbappe announce himself to the world; it feels like the start of something.

Leaping

 

Last week someone asked me where I wanted to go after I complete the PhD. They were asking where I would like to live, and I said I had no specific aspiration of that nature. Every place I have lived in feels like home some way, and hostile in another. Of course, not always in comparable degrees. Today I spoke to a colleague nearing the end of his PhD, who could not wait to pack up and leave to his home country. It makes me really curious, to imagine having such a sense of longing for any specific place. Later today, I will take a train to The Hague; it is one of the first places I truly felt like calling home. But even that visit would not have meant all that much to me if not for the fact that I have loved ones waiting to receive me there.

During the conversation last week, someone asked if I would be interested in going back to Kuwait. There are many reasons that does not interest me. One of them is the fact that the people that I think of when I think of Kuwait are scattered around the world now. My sense of home is not strictly geographic, and Kuwait is not the same country that I spent my childhood in. As a person who moves cities often (almost four times in the past year), I try to think about the kind of things that would motivate me to upend my life and start over. It has always been related to work or education. I am sure work will ask this of me on more occasions in the future as well. I know meaning has to be supplied by myself on occasion. One of the first philosophers I ever read was Kierkegaard. I was attracted to the idea of tweaking leaf of faith to leap to faith. Faith as not the scary gap between a secure past and a secured future, but the secure insecurity you jump into. He’s also the one who talked about how life can only be understood backwards even though it must be lived forwards. My life does appear to make a surprising amount of sense looked at backwards. Maybe there is something to be said for just taking things as they come. I feel good about my most recent leap to faith.