In the Time of Chimpanzees, I Was a Monkey

On belonging, freedom, and the art of living in-between

“In the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey.”

I’ve been thinking about that opening line from Beck’s “Loser”, a song that first came out in 1993, back when Generation X was busy being accused of having no ambition, no direction, and no particular interest in inheriting the world our parents had prepared for us.

We were slackers, apparently. Disaffected, cynical, unmotivated. Although looking back, I wonder whether some of us simply weren’t convinced that the things we were supposed to want were worth wanting.

I liked the song then. I like it even more now.

There’s something wonderfully absurd about the opening line. I picture everyone else as chimpanzees, with me still a monkey, apparently unaware that progress has occurred. It’s nonsense as evolutionary biology, but I recognise the feeling: everyone seems to have got somewhere you haven’t, and you’re not particularly bothered about catching up.

I’ve always felt a little out of step with the rest of the world. I wasn’t standing on street corners denouncing civilisation or wearing a sandwich board announcing the end of days. I’m no Diogenes. I simply had my own ideas about things, and those ideas didn’t always correspond with whatever everybody else seemed to be doing.

When I was younger, I often felt I’d been born in the wrong century.

I had romantic notions of a bygone age of adventure and exploration, when the maps still had blank spaces and a fellow could set off into the wilderness without first having to complete a risk assessment and submit an itinerary.

Never mind that the actual history of exploration was considerably more complicated, frequently brutal, and probably involved far more dysentery than my imagination cared to acknowledge.

What appealed to me was the possibility that there might be something beyond the next hill.

As a boy, I spent hours wandering through the woods pretending to be a great explorer. A narrow stream became a mighty river. A fallen tree was the remnant of an ancient civilisation. A trail disappearing into the undergrowth might lead to a lost kingdom, a forgotten temple, or some other place that existed only because I was willing to imagine it.

I don’t remember feeling lonely out there. The woods were populated by possibility.

Later, when I joined the Army, I carried that appetite for adventure with me. The uniform and the circumstances had changed, but I suspect the underlying impulse was much the same. I wanted to see what was out there, experience things, test myself, discover what lay beyond the familiar.

I wasn’t particularly interested in a life whose main attraction was knowing in advance how it would turn out.

I’ve since come to appreciate that adventure and freedom are not quite the same thing. An army, after all, is hardly an institution dedicated to maximising individual autonomy. There is a certain irony in joining one of the world’s most hierarchical organisations in pursuit of personal freedom.

But then, I’ve never claimed to be entirely consistent.

Walking among the tribes

High school was its own peculiar wilderness, with territories, customs, alliances, and occasionally hostile encounters.

There were the jocks, the nerds, the geeks, the cool kids. Each group had its own way of dressing, speaking, behaving, and identifying the people who belonged.

I moved among them all.

I was extremely athletic, so I got along with the jocks. I was academically inclined, so I could hold my own among the nerds. I loved comics, computer games, and Dungeons & Dragons, which gave me a natural affinity with the geeks.

I was also a fairly big kid, with what I suppose must have been a slightly mysterious air about me, so the cool kids tended to accept my presence without making too much trouble. Physical size can sometimes accomplish what social sophistication cannot.

I had friends across these different groups. I enjoyed their company. I understood their various customs and could participate in their worlds without much difficulty. But I never really belonged to any one of them.

I walked among them all without being one of them.

It’s only with hindsight that I’ve begun to appreciate what that meant. Nobody had banished me from the village. I wasn’t standing outside the gates longing to be admitted. I was already inside, and yet some part of me remained elsewhere.

Each group seemed to know a particular version of me. The athlete, the clever kid, the gamer, the fellow best left unprovoked. But those were fragments, individual territories on a map that nobody, perhaps not even me, had seen in its entirety.

There’s a particular kind of loneliness in that. You can be surrounded by people, accepted by them, even liked by them, and still feel that something essential about you remains untranslated.

I had company. I didn’t quite feel at home.

A conversation between Prufrock and Nietzsche

Years later, I encountered J. Alfred Prufrock.

Eliot’s anxious, self-conscious, endlessly questioning character spoke to something I’d never quite managed to articulate. Here was a man moving through a social world that seemed to operate according to rules everybody else understood instinctively.

Prufrock watched, hesitated, imagined, second-guessed. He could see the world unfolding around him but seemed unable to enter it without becoming painfully conscious of himself.

I wasn’t Prufrock. I had considerably more appetite for action and probably less patience for measuring out my life with coffee spoons. But I recognised something in him, especially towards the end of the poem, when he hears the mermaids singing to one another and quietly concludes:

“I do not think that they will sing to me.”

That line gets me every time.

Alongside the loneliness is the suspicion that somewhere, just beyond your reach, there’s a conversation taking place in a language you were never taught. Other people seem to hear the music. You hear it too, but from a distance.

Prufrock gave me words for the emotional experience of being out of step with the world. Nietzsche came along later and challenged the assumptions beneath it.

Why should I want to belong to a world whose values I haven’t examined? Why should the majority determine what constitutes a good life? Why should fitting in be regarded as evidence that a person is doing something right?

Nietzsche had little patience for the comfortable certainties of the herd. He questioned inherited morality, conventional wisdom, and the tendency to accept a ready-made identity rather than undertake the difficult work of becoming oneself.

I found that enormously liberating. I began to question the assumption that everyone ought to be moving in the same direction. The monkey didn’t have to be behind the chimpanzees. He could have somewhere else to go.

Still, Nietzsche didn’t make Prufrock disappear.

The intellect can challenge the need to belong, but it can’t always silence the emotional longing for connection. You can understand why you refuse to conform and still find yourself wishing, occasionally, that somebody else understood the world the way you do.

The two feelings have coexisted in me for years.

The price of an open road

Freedom has always mattered enormously to me. I feel it most in the everyday freedom to follow my curiosity, to change direction, to wander into unfamiliar territory, intellectually or geographically, simply because something there has caught my attention.

I’ve never particularly liked the idea of a life laid out in advance. There are people who find comfort in knowing where they’ll be in five years. I tend to find the prospect mildly alarming.

What if I discover something interesting in year two? What if the road bends?

A stranger in a café might tell me about a place I’ve never heard of. I might pick up a book that changes everything I thought I knew, or some peculiar idea might get lodged in my imagination and refuse to leave. I want to be free to follow it.

But that freedom has sometimes come with loneliness.

The more unwilling you are to be claimed by a particular tribe, the harder it can be to experience the uncomplicated belonging that tribes provide. There’s comfort in shared assumptions. You know what people believe, what they value, what they’re working towards. You have a common language, a familiar landscape, a place at the table.

I’ve enjoyed glimpses of that throughout my life. I’ve also found myself wanting to leave the table and see what’s happening outside.

I keep coming back to the same difficulty: I want to belong, but I don’t particularly want to be absorbed. I want companionship and I need solitude. I want people who understand me, but I don’t want understanding to become another set of expectations about who I ought to be.

Sometimes I’ve willingly paid the price of that independence. Other times I’ve felt the cost more keenly than I cared to admit.

That’s the part that gets lost when we romanticise the wanderer. We picture the solitary traveller setting off into the sunset, free of obligations, answering only to the horizon. We rarely picture him on a wet Wednesday evening, wondering whether anybody would notice if he didn’t come back.

And yet I wouldn’t trade away the freedom simply to eliminate the loneliness. Nor would I pretend that freedom makes loneliness irrelevant. Both are part of the same life.

A tribe of non-tribal people

For a long time, I’ve had this vague longing to find my tribe.

People who enjoy exploring ideas, questioning assumptions, wandering into strange intellectual territories, and having conversations that don’t necessarily arrive anywhere useful.

People who can discuss Nietzsche over coffee, speculate about the nature of consciousness, entertain an absurd possibility for the sheer pleasure of seeing where it leads, and then suggest going for a walk because the afternoon looks promising.

My sort of people.

But there’s an obvious problem. If independence is one of the qualities we’re drawn to, how exactly do we organise ourselves into a tribe? We’d probably spend the first meeting arguing about whether we needed meetings, then wander off in different directions before anybody appointed a committee.

That may be why I’ve always been attracted to the image of travellers gathering around a campfire.

Nobody asks which tribe you belong to. You arrive, share what you’ve brought, listen to a few stories, offer one of your own. Someone produces a bottle. Someone else has an improbable theory about something. An argument breaks out about the nature of reality. Eventually the fire burns low.

In the morning, people go their separate ways. Perhaps you’ll meet again. Perhaps you won’t. But for those few hours, there was companionship without ownership.

Of course, life isn’t quite that simple. Real friendship requires commitment, patience, and a willingness to remain present when things become inconvenient. A campfire is a lovely metaphor, but it doesn’t help a friend move house or sit beside someone in hospital.

I’ve come to think that freedom includes being able to choose the commitments that matter, rather than inheriting them unquestioningly. Those commitments still ask something of you.

And belonging needn’t mean finding people who are exactly like me. I’m looking for people among whom I don’t have to reduce myself to one acceptable version of who I am.

Living on the threshold

I used to imagine that the feeling of being out of step with the world was something I might eventually overcome. That at some point I’d discover the right community, the right place, the right way of living, and everything would settle into a comfortable sense of belonging.

But I’ve begun to suspect that I was asking the wrong question. What if the in-between isn’t a temporary condition? What if it’s where I naturally live?

There’s a word I like for this: liminal. It refers to the threshold, the space between one condition and another, the place where familiar categories become uncertain.

Usually, a threshold is somewhere you pass through on your way to somewhere else. You stand in the doorway before entering the room.

But what if you like the doorway? What if being able to see both inside and outside appeals to you more than committing yourself entirely to either?

I think that’s where I’ve spent much of my life: between the social and the solitary, the intellectual and the physical, the desire to belong and the refusal to be defined by belonging. I move between practical responsibilities and the imagined world where an unexplored trail might lead to something extraordinary.

It’s also where much of my writing comes from. I’ve always been drawn to standing slightly to one side of things, observing, questioning, connecting ideas that don’t obviously belong together.

A thought about a Beck lyric wanders into a memory of childhood. The memory leads to high school. High school leads to Prufrock. Prufrock runs into Nietzsche, and before long they’re both standing at the edge of a forest arguing about the meaning of freedom.

Meanwhile, the monkey has wandered off.

That seems about right.

There’s a creative advantage to never being entirely at home in a single way of seeing the world. You can move between perspectives, question the rules, notice what becomes invisible to people who have lived inside a particular set of assumptions for too long.

But I don’t want to turn this into another flattering mythology of the outsider, the misunderstood individual who sees what everybody else is too conventional to recognise.

Sometimes being out of step simply means being out of step. Sometimes the crowd knows something you don’t. Sometimes your independence is wisdom, and sometimes it’s stubbornness dressed in philosophical clothing.

I’ve been guilty of both. The interesting thing is learning to recognise the difference.

Somewhere between the firelight and the trees

So here I am, 58 years old, still thinking about a line from a song released more than three decades ago. I hear it differently now.

When I was younger, I might have understood it as a statement about being left behind, about not quite belonging to the world in which I found myself. These days, I’m less concerned about keeping up.

I’m not convinced that what we call social progress always takes us somewhere worth going. We’re continually being encouraged to become more productive, more efficient, more connected, more successful, more optimised.

But towards what? And according to whose map?

I think about the boy wandering through the woods, turning streams into rivers and fallen trees into ancient ruins. I think about the teenager moving between social groups without ever quite settling into one. I think about the young man who joined the Army in search of adventure.

And I think about the older man sitting here now, still following strange threads of thought, still curious about what’s beyond the next hill, still occasionally wondering where all the other monkeys have gone.

There is a continuity there that I find reassuring. I’ve changed, but some underlying appetite for exploration seems to have survived all the changes.

I no longer believe I was born in the wrong century. Every age has its limitations, its absurdities, its own peculiar ways of telling people who they ought to be. And I doubt I would have fitted neatly into any of them.

Perhaps the mistake was thinking I needed to.

I like people. I like conversation. I like the warmth of companionship and the unexpected intimacy that sometimes develops when two people find themselves exploring the same thought from different directions.

I like the campfire. But I also like knowing that beyond the circle of light, the forest is waiting.

There are paths I haven’t walked, questions I haven’t asked, books I haven’t read, places I haven’t been, versions of myself I haven’t yet encountered. And somewhere out there, perhaps, are a few other monkeys following their own peculiar trails.

We might meet at the next campfire. We might not.

Either way, I think I’ll keep walking.

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