Wherever you go, there you are - starting from madame de bouvary

In Madame Bovary (1857), French novelist Flaubert narrates one of the most significant and arguably counterproductive conditions of the human mind: to seek escape from the mundanity of the “provincial” daily existence. Emma Bovary, the novel's main character, impatiently seeks refuge from her simple life in higher-status experiences and possessions.

Many years later, many of us find ourselves praising the same god as Madame Bovary. We seek mental and physical escape from daily life because most of it becomes repetitive and unexciting rather quickly for most of us. We ponder how much better we may feel if only we traveled to that magnificent beach location for one month, or if we bought a new faster means of transportation to commute to the work location each morning.

Some mimetic desires blur in the foreground with real desires. Desires appear and vanish rather quickly, possibly as a testament to their useless and gracile nature. We also may expose ourselves to the lives of hundreds or thousands of other humans living in contemporary society through some social media platforms prone to pushing ourselves to advertise the highlights of our lives covertly.

Will Madame Bovary find the soothing relief of feeling completely okay, with whatever she experiences and possesses in the moment? She commits suicide at the end of the novel, as a last act of extreme unsatisfactoriness caused by her thoughts and actions.

Wherever you go, no matter how desirable that location was for you at some point, there you are. With all the psychological baggage weighing on your shoulders, being dragged by you to cling to your sense of self. The only refuge is that there is no refuge, and your mind is all there is, wherever you are.