so i have, finally, watched citizen kane, and now know the significance of why rosebud was his sled. one small candle. if you haven't watched it yet, i'm going to spoil the story for you here (sorry) because it's the whole point of this post. in brief: charles foster kane is abandoned by his parents, is reckless and controversial and bipolar, grows an yooge newspaper empire, is rich beyond his dreams, marries several times, builds xanadu, retreats into his pleasure dome, and dies uttering the single word 'rosebud'. which, as we have said, was the name of his sled when he was just a little boy, asking his mother 'what will i be?' what does a man profit if he gain the whole world but loses his life, etc.

because this really is an archetype for this kind of story, it started me thinking, and contrasting it with all the research that says that really, the moral of such tales is not true. rich people don't have any more existential crises than poor people; there's no necessary correlation between wealth and the sort of shylock misery that's portrayed in these stories. and the same thing goes for people who go chasing rainbows and waterfalls and breaking themselves apart for the things they call dreams -- they don't necessarily end up happy; sometimes you get right back, coehlo-style (ugh) to where you began, and find that what you were chasing wasn't what you really wanted.

yet the rainbow-pursuing life is painted as the ideal, and i think that's because it's such a dominant narrative, so readily accessible in people's minds. it's not that the other stories are not there -- think sally in forrest gump, or emile hirsch in the recent (and wonderful) into the wild*, in which, yes, it is your prerogative to give away all your money and go live as an eremite in alaska, but most of the time when you do that you waste away and poison yourself on inedible berries.

but that's not the story that sticks with people; the two dominant narratives are citizen kane, and jeff bridges in lebowski: be rich and lose your soul, or be picaresque, and paint with all the colors of the wind, and really be true to yourself, and live a glorious, irresponsible life. which brings me to the point, and the issue that minz and i were discussing a couple of days ago, which is that just because we're doing what we want to do doesn't mean that our lives aren't fricking hard. happiness, self-actualization, both of those are unrelated to the daily grind, and (i painfully admit), doing "meaningful" work does not give you a leg up to achieve either of them. and i apologize if i have to say this a hundred different times in a hundred different ways on this blog, but this really is one of the very central things to me, and it helps me if you ponder it, and understand, and remember.


* please do yourself a favor and go see this movie if you haven't. if for no other reason than to see that emile hirsch can actually act, and that the person who persuaded him to do speed racer is truly trying to screw up his career. also, if you went to see speed racer, i don't want to know about it