Love, Joy and Other Such Frivolous Things
This complexity, the deeply rooted culture of obligation which has burned the emotional nerve endings of Iranian men, is one that I've been on a personal journey of unraveling...
The journalist H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy." 'Hold my beer' is what the Middle-east would have to say about that. That is, if they drank beer.
We have fun, sure. Sober dancing with your aunts and uncles before an 11pm dinner spread catered by the local Persian joint is totally fun. I swear. But underneath it all, there is this sense of 'ok have your fun now because we have to get back to real life tomorrow.' Work is real life. Real life is serious stuff. Fun is this thing you get out of the way in your youth. It’s a very reserved and very conservative Fat Tuesday. The rest of the week is six straight days of Ash Wednesday.
When I playfully jab fellow Middle-easterners on topics such as this, I'm almost sure to be met with a good old West Asian argumentative response. Instead of laughing at the silliness of this insulation, I'm often met with defensiveness. Let me just say this: as much as I'd like to believe that I have a God-like vantage point of all that is, I'm fully aware I do not and that this is all simply the perspective of one node in the great matrix of human perception. That said, I think it's hard to argue that 'fun' is simply not a value which is held in the highest regard throughout Middle-eastern consciousness. It's there, sure, but it's lower on the scale of importance. Fun is a side thing we get to when we have time for it. Fun is what we do when we have leftovers.
Obligation, however, is baked into our culture(s). It's in our blood. For folks from our side of the globe, simply wanting a thing - simply because one wants said thing - is simply not an acceptable reason to do things. It needs to be a need. In order to be a good person, one's hands must be tied at all times. I often giggle at the memory of a fellow Brown and I bonding over the shared glee of being able say to our parents that we were, in fact, working over the weekend. We had plans for a campout when both our dads inquired about our availability for some non-essential chore. "I have plans with friends because fun" is a ridiculous response to these old men. Lucky for us, the event we were excited to attend overlapped with some paid work as a part of our weekend, so we were able to respond with total confidence and honesty that we were unavailable due to an obligation. I asked my friend if he got as excited as I did when I got to honestly say the phrase "I'm working" to my parents. "Oh absolutely," he responded. "It's like Christmas in July!"
My nephew, with all his decade and a half-ish years of wisdom, dropped the most astute observation of his father. He opined that my older brother—13 years my senior—seems to believe that something is only worth caring about if it is tangled up in obligations and some level of suffering. This is not a critique of my brother's character. Everyone who knows my brother celebrates him to be a truly exemplary man. A kind father, a thoughtful diplomat and a visionary leader, my brother is universally revered. I jump on any opportunity to brag that I hit the big brother lottery jackpot. The debt of gratitude I owe him is a karmic credit line which I'll be paying off for at least another two or three lifetimes. What we are sharing, his son and I, is a desire to see him have just a just a little bit more fun.
This complexity, the deeply rooted culture of obligation which has burned the emotional nerve endings of Iranian men, is one that I've been on a personal journey of unraveling through this most recent chapter of my journey. It is a mental virus that has left entire generations of Iranian men unable to derive joy or pleasure from life. They all - we all - get stuck in some multiverse hell dimension that is both the future and the past simultaneously. In a hurry to get Old and living in a time which the rest of the world has already passed by. Wherever we are, it's not right here and right now. This disassociation from being here now births an archetype which I've labeled 'Old Iranian Men.' It has nothing to do with age, as it is something I witness in us of all ages. My father doesn't get excited often, but I remember him damn near doing backflips when he hit the age where he could start using his Senior Discount at Burger King. I see it in my brother, whom I've reminded that while we can't do much about aging, getting 'Old' is a choice. I've seen hints of it in my teen nephew, eager to walk around hunched over and with his hands behind him, just like his grandpas. I used to do the same thing until I caught myself taking on Old Iranian Man body language and made the intentional decision to right my posture. It is an archetype that is not necessarily confined to Iranians or even Middle-esterners. "Old Iranian Man sounds just like Old Korean Man," a friend said when I shared this with him.
My nephew's wise observation of his dad hit incredibly close to home for me because it is what I saw in myself; my own participation in Obligation Culture. This epiphany, which kicked off this life chapter of healing from Old Iranian Man energy, came first from my own coming out as an Artist. It was through a desire to make better Art that I learned how to even know what I want and don’t want.
In university, I'd chosen to major in Multimedia and Graphic Design as a compromise. I saw it as a way to kinda sorta meet my own unquenchable need to create, while simultaneously appeasing my family by doing so in an office environment and with a tie. I didn't know how to simply want to do thing. A buddy of mine in those years expressed to me that he was feeling used by me. He said that I never dropped by 'just to hang out.' Whenever I went to his place, it had to be framed as a need for something: to review school notes, to borrow something, to drop something off, etc. The idea of simply hanging out for fun was alien to me.
Upon graduation, I dove immediately into the professional world as a marketing intern and then as a graphic designer, both fields where all creativity has to be justified with charts and graphs. What you creatively want doesn't matter; it's what you can argue and justify. It's about the product. What followed a multi-year process of dismantling that belief system, in order to create more sincere, vulnerable, and powerful Art. Creating from a place of emotion rather than for Capitalism. Art moves mountains when the Artist has clarity on what they want. While I don't foresee an end to this journey, there was an important point where I recognized that I hadn't even been on the road yet. Becoming aware of desire, of both wanting and believing, was an initial step I recon I hadn't even taken till I was well in my 30s.
And then came Burning Man.
A common process through which Burners discover our people involves attending a Burn, having fun, and then getting more involved with volunteerism. My first Burning Man, however, wouldn't have even happened had I not been asked to serve. Due to some personal complications, the co-lead of San Diego's regional Burning Man art project was unable to attend and asked me to go in her place. Though I'd discovered and fallen in love with the Burner community almost a year earlier, I believed going to actual Burning Man was not a thing I'd earned yet. Simply going in order to go didn't compute in my brain. But being asked to go in order to serve the community somehow made it ok. You see, the reason my nephew’s analysis of his dad hit me right in the feels is that he could’ve easily been psychoanalyzing me, or at least me from this recent past. Go to Burning Man just for fun? Because it's something I wanted to do? Don’t be silly. I can't do that. Obligations I understood. Duty was something I could justify out loud.
My brother said to me once that desiring "happiness" is a sign of immaturity. That becoming an adult is about purpose and duty. An obligation to build a family and a legacy. I think he was trying to say that life is more about ‘satisfaction’ rather than ‘happiness.’ I don’t want to get too hung up on words. My mental block is that I just don't understand why it has to be one or the other. This may simply be the ramblings of a Peter Pan, but where is it written that we must choose? I, for one, feel a deep and profound sense of purpose. I have a place in this world and will have left some small mark. I work everyday, answering a calling to leave this place having nudged, even if ever-so-slightly, the direction of this grand conversation that which is our shared realty. Much more qualified people than I should be left to do the things for which they feel the most passion. They'll do it better and we'll use up less resources in the process. And I believe that includes having children. Though I'm reminded (at noisome) that my mind may change some day, till then I'm feeling pretty driven to continue creating on my own terms. In addition to my ambitions and sense of purpose, I am having a ton of fun. A line of thinking which does lead me to 'Survivor Guilt,' a topic which I'll explore in a future chapter.
This is all interesting to me because I can see a direct through-line of generations learning to process love, joy and other such frivolous things like ‘fun.’ My brother is leaps and bounds past my father on enjoying life; he receives his pleasure from the love that he feels for his sons and family. More so, to my thinking, than my father ever did. Leading me to ponder where my father’s father was on this joy spectrum (he died when I was about my nephew’s age), my theory being that the sadness of Old Iranian Men runs deep in our lineage. Then there is me, the next generation after my brother, still deep in harmonizing my balance of work and joy. I suppose I leaped a bit too far to the puritan end (how many other 17 year olds were working three jobs??), experienced a violent mental health snapback which I’ve been healing in therapy, and now righting the ship in my late 30s and early 40s. My nephew, I predict, will grow to be the most well balanced of us all. He has loving and supportive parents who are in a position to have built for him a strong foundation from which he can leap and play from, far away from the oppressive shackles of a post Islamic Revolution Iran. And he also has this ridiculous Artist uncle he can observe from a safe distance, who has just barely enough ground to stand on to question that inherited Obligation Culture garbage from previous generations.
Even those sober catered dance parties with the aunts and uncles - you know, the ‘fun’ - had historically been an obligation as well. Perhaps because fun was in such short supply, when there were family gatherings, it was always presented to me by my parents as a thing I had to attend, in order to show face not bring shame upon the family. It was, to my memory, never pitched as "hey you should come because it's gonna be fun!" These days, I am happy to report that I do have fun at those gatherings. Mostly because I've become exponentially more assertive about meeting my own needs in all other aspects of my life. I live a life of getting to practice wanting and not wanting on a daily basis through my own Art-making process. If I don't want to go, I don't and I often do because I do. I'm happy I've evolved past that Old Iranian Man way of thinking about social events, even if my parents haven't. Old dogs and new tricks; what can you do.
The inspiration to write what you just read came from a desire to share the back story of why I started this Permanent Vacation thing. The writing process took me deep in another direction, as it often does, and ended up becoming a piece that will probably end up in my book. But since I ended up not writing at all about the original thing I sat down to write about 😂 I did a little video explaining what the heck Permanent Vacation is, all of which you will find linked to at permanentvacation.directory.