To what extent have you chosen your life? To what extent are you choosing it now?
When the film ‘Trainspotting’ was released in 1996, I was a teenager in sixth-form. It was one of a clutch of films that opened my eyes to a much bigger world and lives and cultures that were radically different to mine.
It was a cult and mainstream sensation. It also stirred predictable controversy for its graphic depiction of drug use, poverty, crime and life on the fringes of society in Edinburgh. This was a million miles from the small market town in the Midlands of England that I grew up in.
Beyond this striking and sometimes shocking imagery, was a compelling story with a richer meaning, and, like much culture we are exposed to in our teen years, shaped a worldview - or provided some external recognition of a worldview that was already forming.
Choose life.
Choose a job.
Choose a career.
Choose a family,
Some commentators (including anti-drug campaigners) and politicians were outraged at the popularity of the film amongst young people. What they seemed to misunderstand was the reason why it resonated.
No one I knew watched Trainspotting and wanted to take drugs - quite the opposite. It turned us off the idea of ever injecting anything or experimenting with anything like heroin.
What did appeal was the renegade, outlaw life that these young people were living, their ‘fuck you’ ethos towards a society in which inequality was widening and opportunity was narrowing in post-Thatcher Britain.
If you were poor or struggling, you were treated as if you deserved it. Deprived of hope, opportunity and basic dignity, for many young people, drugs were (and are) a way to escape, ease their suffering and feel something good for a while.
Perhaps the commentators and politicians did understand this message. Perhaps that’s why they hated it, as such a vivid critique of the failure of their ideology.
The film has stayed with me. I watched the sequel in 2017 and felt waves of nostalgia for the characters and also a sense that not much had changed in our society. Some things felt worse.
Choose a fucking big television
Choose washing machines, cars,
Compact disc players, and electrical tin openers.
Choose good health, low cholesterol
Last week, I stumbled across the title track for the film, ‘Choose Life’ by PF Project, something I hadn’t heard for years. It is a stone-cold 90s classic. When I listened to it, I felt again those waves of nostalgia but also as if I was understanding the full meaning of the track and the film for the first time.
‘Choose Life’ lists all the modern attachments we form and possessions we acquire that are considered marks of a ‘good’ or ‘successful’ life, things like electronic appliances and a mortgage.
Ewan McGregor’s voiceover closes with his observation that ‘I chose not to choose life. I chose something else’ - that something else being heroin.
McGregor’s lead character, Renton, is an intelligent young man submerged in addiction. In the film, after a series of tragedies that shake him deeply, we see him eventually escape his addiction, move to London and take up a steady job as an estate agent.
Yet, he is clearly, utterly miserable, trapped in the same day over and over, earning money to buy things he doesn’t want - because that is what society says he’s supposed to do.
And dental insurance.
Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments.
Choose a starter home.
Choose your friends.
And this is the crux of the film, the subversive, nauseating paradox that is presented: His life as a drug addict living in squalor and degradation is appalling, trapped in his need for something external.
And his life as an estate agent, except for the squalor, is largely the same - he is still trapped in attachment, society now offering consumerism as a drug, even in the subtle form of sofas and televisions.
Whereas as a heroin addict his body and mind were dying, as a well-paid professional, his mind is still dying - along with his soul.
Is he choosing life any better now that he’s not addicted to smack? Is the hollow promise of modern life perhaps a contributor to the use of drugs? What explains the wealthy, higher-classes of society and their addictions to their drugs of choice like cocaine and wine?
This is the gut punch that the film and the track still hold for me now.
Those outraged pearl-clutching commentators need not have worried about the film’s impact on youth, at least not on me. I, like most of my peers, still followed the traditional path that society funnelled me towards and made the conventional choices: university, high-status job, money, mortgage, possessions.
Choose leisure wear and matching luggage.
Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase
In a range of fucking fabrics.
Choose DIY and wondering who you
Are on a Sunday morning.
Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing
Sprit-crushing game shows
Stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth.
As a teenager, my questioning of these ideas and a hankering after something different could have been written off as the naïveté of youth.
But as a man now in my mid-40s with some degree of traditional success under my belt, I’m challenging these choices more than ever - this time with the knowledge that those previous choices weren’t really mine and they didn’t make me happy.
What life am I choosing? Are my choices really mine? Am I expressing who I really might be?
These are the questions to be lived over and over again.
To what extent have you chosen your life so far?
To what extent are you choosing it now?
“Can you even be said to be alive if you are not even conscious of your own thoughts and reactions? The unaware life, it is said, is not worth living. It cannot even be called life; it is a mechanical, robot existence; a sleep, an unconsciousness, a death; and yet this is what people call human life!”
- Anthony De Mello
Tipping Point: sharing information on the climate crisis
Ocean currents influence weather and marine life - and therefore all life on earth.
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is “is a marine conveyer belt that carries heat, carbon and nutrients from the tropics towards the Arctic Circle, where it cools and sinks into the deep ocean”. It is heading towards a tipping point of collapse, much faster than anticipated.
About me.
I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.
Contact me to:
Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through our Human At Work group programme.
Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.
Have a real conversation.
At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.
You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.
Hi Jindy, interesting we had a really similar idea in our minds, I've written about "live to work" yesterday here. I wanted to congratulate you on being in an episode with Yannick, I appreciate both of you, great that you've been connected. Hope you're well and you're enjoying family life. Cheers to all three of you!