I came home from a brilliant holiday in the United States feeling like a Celtic tigress. Then - caboom - reality hit. I met the Celtic hyenas. I'm sure you've met them too. First they came in the form of banks charging 20 per cent interest (more than double US rates) on my already maxed-out Visa bills.
As if that dose of reality wasn't bad enough, a Celtic hyena crashed into my car as it sat parked outside the house, then drove away, leaving me with a £1,500 repair bill and a cancelled no-claims bonus. And in case I was thinking of public transportation, Dublin's bus drivers are on unofficial strike on the south side. To think that when people used to ask me how I liked living in Ireland, I used to praise the quality of life . . .
Now I'm in the ironic position of going to the States to chill out and escape the American lifestyle that has taken over Ireland. We are all Americans now in our values and aspirations to earn and own as much as we possibly can. An American visitor told me recently how depressed he was to learn that all the Irish ever talked about was property prices. Everyone he met boasted about how much their house was worth. He had come here expecting a more spiritual, philosophical approach to life.
He'll have to go somewhere else, as Ireland has taken on a sort of hit-and-run, screw-you attitude which you expect to find in the US, but rarely do. You find it here instead. Look at the tribunals - every day this newspaper is telling tales of sleaze, corruption and an ethos of every hyena for him or herself. The result - or maybe the cause - is a culture in which very few people give a thought to anyone but themselves.
I'M NOT the only one - am I? - who feels like you can't cross the street without fear of being knocked down by a Shiny Seamus in a new suit and an even newer BMW. I don't recognise this place I've come home to.
All around me, there are gorgeous peroxide-blonde Celtic tigers and tigresses a good 10 years younger than me wearing Gucci and Prada driving big 00-reg luxury cars on their way to country houses and second homes in Spain.
Doesn't it make you mad? What have they done to earn all that money? It has something to do with computers; it's dot.com this and dot.com that. If you are undotted and uncommed you don't exist. So I shall comfort myself by bravely boasting my failure to be a Celtic tigress and instead aspiring to loser chic - the subject of Amy Heckerling's new film, Loser. Failure is to be worn as a badge of honour, according to cutting-edge business analysts. (So if you aren't enjoying reading this column and wonder what possessed the editor to let me write it, well whoopee! I've failed! Hurrah!)
Are you a Celtic winner or a Celtic loser? If your answer is "winner, without a doubt", stop reading. If you are wondering which category you are in, keep in mind that recently an Irish businessman stated that anyone earning less than £40,000 a year is a loser.
These "winners" for whom a £40,000 annual salary is inadequate are living in a completely different, totally money-oriented world to the one we knew in the 1980s. There's no longer a generation gap, it's a money gap. I'll spend the next year attempting to bridge the money gap in the hope that next summer I can go to the US to escape the American lifestyle.
In the meantime, I'll pretend I haven't seen the Visa bill, hide from the blinking light of the answering machine, try to ignore the e-mail and keep the lights off so nobody knows I'm home yet. It's all about trying to delay the onset of reality as long as possible. Yet isn't it absurd that we should feel tempted to hide? Life really shouldn't be so bad, should it - but we've grown to accept the stress unquestioningly, as though it is just too radical an idea that reality - when we're not on holiday - should be not only bearable but enjoyable.
We're in this dilemma because so-called "quality of life" has become a consumer item too expensive for most of us to afford on a regular basis. The possibility of spending "quality time" with children in a stress-free atmosphere has become something you book with a travel agent, since the only way you're likely to talk to your children is to get away.
Trapped in this lifestyle, we try to cram "quality of life" into a few weeks of annual holiday time, then we spend the rest of the year working for the money to pay for those few blissful days of utopia. Living under constant pressure with parents on double incomes trying to hold together relationships under the strain of rearing children and paying astronomical mortgages.
Something is not right about this. Life should be satisfying on a daily basis, not just during holiday time. Instead, day-today life has become dissatisfying, what with all the stress of working and looking after children with no help from anybody - least of all the State to which we pay taxes.
Most people I know are juggling so many balls in the air that they spend their days worrying about which one will drop and what will they do when it does. There must be a way to wake up every morning - or at least most mornings - to that holiday feeling of "this is the life". How do we make life what we want it to be?
It's got something to do with spirituality, I suppose, but I don't think the answer is religion. I don't know that the answer is in material things either, since the winners I know don't seem much happier than the losers. The answer is somewhere in this notion of being a satisfied loser. What does being a loser mean, exactly?
Not being rich and powerful is the obvious answer, but being a loser also implies a willingness to take risks. One of the biggest risks is to stop aspiring and be happy with what you have. If that's being a loser, then maybe that's OK.
kathryn.holmquist@weblink.ie