Lost In The Supermarket

How a trip to Ikea triggered my existential crisis

Apr 08, 2022

Hello everyone. How’s it going?

Last night I went up the football to see West Ham play in the quarter finals of the Europa League. Sorry if you’re not interested in football - but it was a really big deal for me. My son Lenny doesn’t usually come to evening matches (he is ten) but I made an exception coz it’s the easter holidays. We were so giddy with excitement when we got there that I agreed to his request that I bought him one of those massive mega-slurp things of Coca Cola. He wound up chugging the whole bastard thing in about 45 seconds. Next thing I know, he’s doubled over with stomach pains. He could barely manage to stand in order to sing ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ so I knew it was serious. I told him to burp it out but the pain just wouldn’t shift. We ended up having to leave the stadium fifteen minutes before full time, which is a deep source of shame for proper football fans like us. Still, kids and their gastric health are more important than West Ham, I guess. Nobody ever told me parenting would be easy.

Anyway, this week I’ve written about the perils of boredom and how I learned to embrace them. PLUS! A brand new episode of the Reset podcast with special guest Nick Hancock. Enjoy!

(And don’t forget to subscribe if you want to help keep this magnificent organ going - and receive extra exclusive content every month)

I was sitting around on a Tuesday morning feeling agitated because I had nothing to do. This scared me because open spaces of time spent alone always had the capacity to send me spiralling into a prolonged misery.

I was freelancing from home but going through a bit of a dry spell . My wife worked full time in town. The kids were off at school and playgroup. The house was silent but for the eerie hum of the fridge. The cat was staring at me judgmentally, as if to say ‘Are you just gonna sit around on your arse all day like a loser?’

I was tormented by stillness. It made me feel lazy, lonely and pathetic. It reminded me of long hot summer holidays as a kid, sat about the house eating biscuits and feeling like I was being left out of the action.

But I was an adult now. I had a driving license, a credit card and a two year old Nissan Qashqai parked outside. I didn’t have to sit around the house waiting for my inbox to ping with a big job offer. I could get out there and take life by the bollocks.

So I decided to go to Ikea in Wembley. We needed some lightbulbs, the kind they only sell there. And some scatter cushions. I thought it would be a great way of reminding myself of the benefits of freelance life - the opportunities it presented to live wild while the working stiffs were stuck in the office.

Clearly, I hadn’t thought things through properly. Visiting a dreary shrine to generic domesticity on a dull Tuesday is only ever going to accelerate your existential crisis. I should have realised that sooner. By the time I did, I was too deep into the guts of the store. Once you’re a few aisles into an Ikea, there’s no turning back. You have to complete the journey to the finish. It’s like trying to abandon the waterslide when you’re already half way up the staircase: humiliating and futile.

So I shuffled on through the sofas, the cabinets, the kitchenware and the bean bags until my melancholy started to overwhelm me. By the time I finally walked out into the greyish hellscape of the car park I was actually tearful. I’m not exaggerating here. Something about the experience had triggered a descent into dangerous sadness.

It wasn’t just about Ikea. It was the sense that, somewhere, there was something meaningful, exciting and important happening - and that I was about as far away from it as was possible. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself as a dishevelled, lonely, washed up drifter, hanging about car parks and furniture emporiums in the middle of the week just to eat up the hours.

It’s weird how quickly these critical voices could access my brain and take hold. And how relentless they could be. Once that sort of negative thinking got a foothold, it wouldn’t leave me for hours, days, weeks, sometimes months.

I know it was 2012 because it was one year since I’d first had ‘a bit of a crisis in my nut.’ In the summer of 2011, I had hit such a prolonged state of sadness and anxiety that I had gone to the doctor and been prescribed anti-depressants for the first time. They seemed to have worked and I had been okay for several months - but I was haunted by memories of just how bad my depression had got. I was fucking terrified of ever feeling that way again. And so I was hyper-vigilant about my moods. Even a normal dip would make me think that I was about to plummet back into that pit of despair. Really, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was just waiting for the Black Dog to reappear.

Sure enough, on that Tuesday afternoon in Wembley, it did. And it didn’t leave me again for months. Did I get depressed for months just because of an ill-advised shopping trip? No. It would have happened either way because I hadn’t ever really addressed the stuff that had caused me to be depressed in the first place. Medication worked but it just was a sticking plaster: I hadn’t done any therapy or proper reflection on why I was so anxious and self critical all the time. I’d just popped some pills, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

I eventually got better after the 2012 episode. You always get better in the end. But when you’re in the midst of those terrible feelings you are one hundred per cent certain that you’ll never feel happy again. At one stage, my mind got so consumed by bleak self-reflection that I really thought I was going mad. One day, I missed my stop on the train, got off at the next stop, got a train back the other way, missed my stop again - and then repeated the whole process once more! My nut was all over the place. It was horrible.

Within a year I was drinking way too much and doing recreational drugs like nobody’s business. This, I think, started out as a means of security against more bouts of depression. The prescription meds weren’t enough: any time I felt the blues were on their way, I went to the pub or called the dealer. I figured, at the time, that it was a safer option than a trip to Ikea. It wasn’t. But that’s another story.

Now, I still take prescription meds but drugs and alcohol are very much a thing of the past for me. I realised that I had to learn to live differently and to perceive myself in a more positive way. That doesn’t mean arrogance but gratitude and a bit of humility too. It was about accepting my small part in the universe, dropping my fixation with action and excitement and learning to appreciate simpler pleasures.

One of the biggest changes was my approach to boredom. I stopped being scared of having nothing to do and started to embrace it. When I am busy I am grateful for the work, sure. But when I’ve got nothing on I am even more grateful: for the opportunity to spend time looking after myself, looking after my family, spending time with the people I love and - of course - just sitting around doing fuck all. Sometimes that means a nap. Sometimes it means listening to a record and having a cup of tea. Sometimes it means just sitting there looking at the cat. He doesn’t call me a loser anymore. He just gives me an encouraging wink, as if to say ‘Crack on mate, the cat lifestyle is where it’s at!’

This week’s podcast with Nick Hancock

I used to play football with Nick in the nineties. He was a bit older than me and infinitely more gifted on the field of play. It was only years later that I discovered that he, like me, had struggled with addiction. I was chuffed he agreed to talk with me on this week’s podcast and I learnt a lot. A funny, smart and wise bloke. Hope you enjoy!