The Golden Life

Can someone tell me where the golden life is?

I think that I need it.
So I smile.

Personally I feel like I'm always running, trying to get to the end of some finish line. No one told me I was running a rat race, but I know that I am. My feet are always tired, my eyes peeled back wide, stressed and dark-rimmed, and my arms seizing from the stress of how I string them out. If my soul was a muscle, it's hemorrhaged. 

Yeah, I need help.

Doesn't it always feel like we're not as alive as we could be?

Don't the colors of our lives feel more subdued, like our real lives? 

Aren't our smiles less wide than they could be? 

Are we really as interesting as we'd like to be? 

Nightmares roam free in the dark, but the real terrors walk in the daytime.

And still I look for the golden life. 

Really, I just want to be as fulfilled as the others I see, the ones that seem so shiny they simply gleam - they are golden inside and out. They definitely found that elusive touch and clothed themselves with that lustrous cloak of gold. I don't know them, not really, but I know that they figured out some secret that I haven't, and I'm still looking, always looking.

Incidentally, it's that sort of life that leaves me eternally dissatisfied, always searching for this great lie (oh, it seems so true!). I fall into spirals, into pools of desperation and despondency, trying to make myself look better, feel better, be better, because I see that everyone else has made it.

What have they made?! 

I just, I don't know, but - do you understand me? - we just have to get there. 

Where is the golden life?

I see it on every screen, but feel demeaned.

Tell me how to get out and I would, but it's everywhere. It's like an infection in the air - how do you get away from something all around you? 

In Australia there's this idea: if the snake is colorful, get out - it's probably poisonous. 

Everything seems alright, but maybe the dazzle hides the death.

But still, maybe one more look.

I can find it, though it's all a lie. 

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We live in this comparative culture. An interesting article in Times titled, 'the Me Me Me Generation' highlighted the severe problems that we face. One fact that I found to be quite fascinating was that a family in the 1950s had, at most, three photos around their house (a wedding photo, a school photo, and a photo of family and house); the average family today walks amid 85 pictures of themselves and their pets. 

We're overstimulated. 

We are bombarded constantly by doctored photos, perfected smiles and selfies, the edited look of people's lives, or what they'd like their lives to be, and everything we watch: it all paints the picture of the golden life.

And it's always good, isn't it?

Never a bad picture, a distorted face; a sequin on a dress can't be out of place - it tends to end well.

It's a disturbingly perfect view of life, and it sets a devilish standard, a loathsome expectation that we cannot ever hope to meet. 

But it invites us to try; it sucks us into the matrix. 

Chase the golden life, but it's hardly golden. 

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I speak on this from personal experience: feeling each of those emotions; feeling the burden of comparison; trying to meet this bar that can't ever be met.

Its in the movies we watch,

         the media we post, 

         the advertising we see,

         the things we become. 

It's in everything, and it seeps into our understanding of many things. Like what's important, what relationships should look like, and what we're here for. 

It's hardly golden, but still.

Can someone tell me where the golden life is?
I think that I need it.
So I smile.