Life Is Not a Stress Rehearsal: Bringing Yesterday's Sane Lifestyle into Today's Insane World

One Edgar Allan Poe and Cousin Ignatz On individuality and our culture of self-improvement I TOOK A TRIP RECENTLY to Los Angeles to give a corporate presentation, and the company I was speaking to put me up in one of the hip, trendy hotels in town. It's one of those places that is so hot, there's not even a sign outside to identify it. So if you're driving along Sunset Boulevard looking for it, you'd better know where you're going before you get there. I guess the idea is that if you're cool enough to stay there, you'll know where it is, and if not, it's the Days Inn for you. How's that for a warm welcoming attitude to start things off right? Despite that, it's actually quite a nice hotel and has a fantastic restaurant and the staff found me pretty funny and entertaining to have around. They all walked around acting as if they barely noticed when a Sophia Loren clone checked inbut I could tell that it was all an act. The staff's disaffected and elitist attitude was part of what the hotel was selling. But I wouldn't buy it. I tried desperately to make them see the scene as I did: as a Fellini rerun. I'd make funny bored faces at them and grab my head with mock dismay and say things like, "Oh, God, no! Not another sunny day," or look disdainfully at a magnificent plate of calamari fritti and say, "How dull to have to eat like this day in and day out." I think another reason they liked me is that just about every other guest I saw come and go in the lobby of that hotel looked and acted exactly the same. It was a little scary, as if I was watching a year 2000 version of The Stepford Wives. Everyone wore black t-shirts with black-framed narrow sunglasses and a white linen jacket and talked into a cell phone and carried a black leather shoulder bag out of which popped a bottle of mineral water. They all looked and acted as if this was the most boring place they'd ever been, and that they were totally unimpressed with the surroundings and the other people. Not a single eye looked around the room as if it were interested in what might be there, not a single voice said nice things to the staff, like "we're glad to be here!" Or "what a nice place you have here!" No, everyone was disinterested in everyone else and made it clear that they were so jaded that being in this lovely hotel meant nothing to them. I guess being bored to tears has become a status symbol. For me, the whole experience was stifling! The vitality, the energy, the joy, was totally missing. I was surrounded by people whose body language and temperament were like zombies, and the way they dressed was so incredibly dull that they might as well have been wearing a school uniform from 1957. No one looked eccentric, unusual, or interesting. Rather than standing out as individuals, they disappeared as if part of a huge ant farm. This phenomenon worries me, and I think it's something that can be seen across our entire culture. We're becoming a very bland, vanilla society in which "fitting in" is critically important to people. It makes sense, of course, given the mass media and constant marketing that is now such an inherent part of our society. After all, we are all constantly presented with the same models of perfection. We all look at photos of the same beautiful people in magazines, we all watch the same talking heads on television, we all go to see movies starring the same movie stars with the same disaffected personas. We all shop in malls that are so cookie-cutter that we can't tell if we're in our own town or in Outer Mongolia. We all listen to the same talk-show hosts and the same radio shows, so we're all constantly being given the same advice. So before you know it, everybody wants the same clothes and strives to look like a model for J. Crew or Banana Republic or The Gap. Everybody goes to the same exercise classes fighting for the sameLaRoche, Loretta is the author of 'Life Is Not a Stress Rehearsal: Bringing Yesterday's Sane Lifestyle into Today's Insane World' with ISBN 9780767906654 and ISBN 0767906659.