Pulling A Chronographic

It's not them, it's you

Members of Alcoholics Anonymous have a term of art for a very common behaviour. Someone with problems (say, alcoholism) will say to themselves: “These problems are caused by my environment. What I need to do is change my environment and that will solve all my problems”. So they move to a different city or country. But the problems don’t go away. They often get worse.

They have “pulled a geographic”.

Now the theory behind changing your environment isn’t wholly wrong. If you are an alcoholic living in a pub then moving out the pub might be a good idea. Likewise, if you are hanging out with people who encourage the worst in you, then getting away from them may be a good idea.

Where the theory falls down is that it assumes that our problems only have external causes, not internal ones. And by changing out environment, we put off the hard work of changing ourselves. With the kicker that not only have we lost contact with the negative people in our network, we have lost contact with the positive, supportive ones. We are alone.

Any change to the external environment must be supported by changes to the interior.

I was reminded of this when Peter James posted the following:

Which prompted the following reply from myself:

There is always a cohort of people who yearn for a time 10-15 yrs previously when they convince themselves that they would be hotter and more popular and more successful. Mostly they fail to realize it is not about the time but them.. These people want to “pull a chronographic”.

As Radiohead sang:

I'm just lying in a bar with my drip feed on / Talking to my girlfriend waiting for something to happen / And I wish it was the sixties / I wish I could be happy / I wish, I wish / I wish that something would happen

In hindsight, the 90s were period as world historically important as the 60s in terms of politics (the fall of the Soviet empire, the emergence of China as a global power) and culture (electronic dance music went through a period of acceleration and flowering as astonishing as rock music did in the 60s).

The very impossibility of time travel means that this fantasy is never tested and can be nursed forever. The past provides a place of refuge and escape. This is, of course, a very conservative desire that takes on more and less harmful forms. And one that we shall be returning to in a future post.

There is also mirror belief - that in the future I will be happier. This is even more amorphous as the future doesn’t exist. The narrative here is of the “prophet.. not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.” The people rejecting our genius today will be rightly seen as blinkered idiots by the masses of tomorrow. And they may be. But statistically speaking, you are probably wrong.

It is sobering to think that if I am a doofus today, I would probably have been a doofus 100 years ago. We should hark the sage wisdom of Fatboy Slim.