We went, we saw, we departed
and more thoughts on happiness
Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who’s currently traveling around the world. If you love it, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
It’s possible, I’ve discovered, to see too many amazing places around the world.
I realized this at Teotihuacan last week. An ancient Mesoamerican city located about an hour’s drive from Mexico City, Teotihuacan boasts impressive pyramids, super-old murals, skeletons of humans sacrificed to various gods (though these you don’t get to see), and a lot of mystery. No one knows for sure, for example, which ethnic groups lived here — or why they all suddenly abandoned the place during the first century.
Despite all that interestingness, I found myself during the tour getting a bit — bored? All the must-see ruins I’d seen in the last few months — Machu Picchu, Iximche, Chichen Itza, and now Teotihuacan — started blending together in my head. Then I felt guilty for getting bored. Not everyone gets to visit UNESCO World Heritage sites and wonders of the world every other week! Pay attention! Be grateful!
But as someone without a particularly strong interest in or knowledge of ancient history and cultures, I think I’ve had enough of wonders and heritage sites for the time being. More specifically I’m talking about ruins of ancient civilizations — and perhaps even more specifically, about ruins of ancient civilizations in Latin America — though really, this isn’t a ruin or Latin America specific issue. If I’d seen too many pagodas in Asia, I’d probably feel the same way about them.
Part of the reason I went to see Teotihuacan is because I felt I should. It is, after all, the most visited archeological site in Mexico. Surely there was a reason for that? Maybe if I went there, I’d have some amazing magical experience. Or maybe, even if there were no amazing experience, I’d still regret passing on the place later if I didn’t go visit it now —
Well, as with all tours of ruins I’ve taken, nothing magical happened at this one. We went, we saw the promised pyramids, we departed — then we ate lunch because we were hungry.
The whole experience reminded me of what I read in The Happiness Project, a self-helpish book by Gretchen Rubin, who tries on various experiments to see if they make her happier. One of her discoveries is that the things that we actually enjoy are often not the things that we think we should enjoy. For example: We might think we should enjoy and appreciate classical music — but we might actually be happier listening to gangsta rap. We might feel it would be cool to read all of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in French, but maybe we’d be happier spending that time watching Squid Game. To be happy, you need to just do you — the you you really are, not the you you think you should be.
What to make of all this? For now I’ve set a rule for myself: No more ancient ruins in Latin America! Do you know of other must-see ancient cities in Mexico? Please don’t tell me about them! I think I’ll be happier if I spend that time going dancing more often — or reading contemporary novels set in Latin America.
Once a month, I share book recommendations. Shape it by recommending a read!
Love,
Siel
The Long Night of the White Chickens by Francisco Goldman (Grove Press, 2013)
A Guatemalan-Jewish family in a tiny town in Massachusetts kind of accidentally adopts an orphan girl from Guatemala. The girl and fam’s son grow up like siblings — until the girl graduates from college, moves back to Guate, becomes the head of an orphanage, then gets murdered! Post-death, newspapers report she’d been selling Guatemalan babies to western couples for profit! Could it be true, or was she the victim of a bigger coverup? The son tries to find out, in the process uncovering family secrets, scandalous affairs, political corruption, and crooked journalists.
But this novel’s also about memory, going back and forth in time, conducting an exhaustive investigation of the past in hopes of finding answers about the present. It’s sad, and poignant, funny, and depressing from a political perspective. “Guate no existe” is a running refrain throughout the novel, which could also be called a very long love letter to said place, a country with its long long history of political turmoil, widespread poverty, and many, many unsolved murders. Read it if you love gripping mysteries that never quite get resolved, but keep you guessing with your heart in your mouth.
Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis (Catapult, 2019)
There seems to be a universal impulse among teenagers to run away from home — for fun, love, adventure, or simply the unknown. If you’ve never acted on this impulse yourself, you can experience it by proxy via Luisa, a 17-year-old from a loving home in Mexico City who meets a mysterious guy in a weird abandoned house — and decides willy nilly to run off with him to Zipolite, a beach town in Oaxaca.
Funny thing about running away with a mysterious man: He turns a lot less mysterious and attractive at the new destination. Or so that’s how Luisa feels — which is why she sets her sights on a different mysterious guy, who shows up at the local bar every night but never speaks. In the back of her mind she wonders vaguely about what she’s putting her parents through with her disappearance, though the dreamy, hypnotic, somewhat soporific life on this strange beach lulls her into a comfortable passivity. Pick up this slim novel if you still sometimes feel like a listless teenage girl, full of melodramatic feeling yet in reality strangely malleable to the circumstances, mostly carried along aimlessly in this impassive and mercurial current called life.
Three links you might love — the “I quit my job again” edition:
I quit, you quit, we all quit because I quit. “There’s a little bit of a ‘take this job and shove it’ feeling…. If you’re in a company where people all start leaving, you’re like, ‘Why am I the last one sitting here?’”
How and why the Big Quit is happening. Mother Jones takes a close look at the numbers and reasons.
Sometimes it’s healthy to quit your parents. Anne Helen Peterson collected stories from people who chose to estrange themselves from family members. “I know what it is like to have that person in my life and find that their absence is much more beneficial to me than their presence was or could be.”
Always great to read your newsletter. I totally get the dancing vs the ruin tours. Bailamos!!💃🏼