To Vent or Not to Vent

I’ve been venting a lot today – and honestly a lot in general.  I’m annoyed at the moment about my work, school, and personal life imbalance.  I’m doing too good of a job at the things I don’t really care about and not good enough at the things that are really important to me.

What’s a gal to do?  Complain.  Bitch and moan.  Commiserate with friends and sympathetic ears. 

Tom Wolfe would likely admonish me and call it hemorrhoids, a symptom of being a part of an extended Me Generation.  No, I do realize it's not the 70’s.  But in the era of You Tube whose tagline is “broadcast yourself” and Facebook status updates from individuals who think buying toilet paper is a PSA, it is perhaps worse than what Tom Wolfe was talking about because of the decades of perfecting self-absorption.  He might also confront me about my tendency to indulge in delusional fantasies of utopian socialism, which leave me bitter. 

So how does one realize her/his potential as a human being in the midst of daily struggles, annoyances and the intense pressures that often define success...and resist the cultural call to self-definition, self-improvement, and individualism that ultimately leave us alone and isolated?

For the moment I’m turning to read more of Alexis de Tocqueville's work…who believed that democracy continually turns people back into themselves “and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.”  Yikes.