This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed. — Emil Cioran

This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.

Author: Emil Cioran

Insight: There's something darkly honest about this image. We're all sick in some way, Cioran suggests, and our sickness shows itself most clearly in our restlessness. We don't just want to feel better—we want to be somewhere else entirely. The guy stuck in traffic fantasizes about working from home. The person at a desk dreams of travel. The one traveling can't wait to return. We're always convinced the real comfort is one bed over. What makes this sting is that it captures something we experience but rarely name: the gap between our circumstances and our peace. We treat our dissatisfaction like a problem to solve with a new job, new relationship, new apartment. But Cioran's point is subtler and sadder. The problem isn't the bed. It's the restlessness itself, the part of us that believes happiness lives in the next location, the next chapter. We're not really sick from our situations—we're sick from the belief that a different situation would finally cure us. The strange comfort in admitting this is that it might free us to stop hospital-hopping and actually notice where we are. Not to accept misery, but to recognize that the restlessness will follow us anywhere until we address what's actually troubling us.

Source: The Trouble With Being Born, p. 21, 1973