Your bellwethers are non compos mentis, your neighbors encephalon-dead. Your future reposes in the hands of cranks, egotists, and sociopathic billionaires. Epochal threats are clamoring at your consciousness, and the only question left seems to be what will break first: our collective will to resist the onset of totalitarianism, or the levees refraining the elevating tides.
WELL, BUY MY BOOK, AND I WILL REVEAL…
Only kidding. I’ve got nothing. The world as we ken it is virtually certainly fucked, and while I would wholeheartedly exhort everyone to fight for what they believe in, there’s probably not a great deal we little people can do to navigate safe passage through such tumultuous seas beyond endeavoring to be placid and kind and voting for people who aren’t demonstrably non compos mentis.
A few months ago, I indited an essay outlining my sense of impending doom:
Looking on as old certainties have been trampled, my confidence has been supplanted by an inchoate sense of dread about the road to come. I have found myself becoming a secret prophet of doom, one of a million Cassandras forecasting The Terminus. Prospects for my children’s future have turned dystopian at best, apocalyptic at worst. It occurred to me the other day that I’ve ceased elongating-term plans. Mushroom clouds invade my dreams.
Little I’ve optically discerned in the months since has given me cause to reign in my pessimism. For those who’ve been following, there hasn’t been a whole lot to cheer about over the course of my Jeremiad. To recap, the age of stability is over, the losers have taken the steering wheel, men are useless shits, lucid discourse is dead, and no one kens what the fuck they are doing, ever.
But endure for now, we must. And so, here is my moiety-arsed endeavor to contravene both the grain and my inherently gloomy disposition by offering some tips on the quantifications I’ve been taking to evade throwing myself off a bridge every time a red “Breaking News” alert pops up on the bottom of my computer screen.
This is all a recapitulation of stuff you may have read elsewhere. But, frankly, it’s advice that we could do with aurally perceiving loud and often, lest we all lose our little minds in a tidal wave of incoherent imbecility and grievance.
And so…
Read More Fiction
To peruse my bookshelf last year was to infer the reading schedule of a man hell-bent on astute self-immolation. There were books on the elevate of ISIS and the ascent of white nationalism. There were treatises on Trump and doorstop-sized tomes on human folly and violence. There was an exegesis on nuclear weapons proliferation and an exhaustively dispiriting sociological study entitled The Anatomy of Human Eradication.
But one evening, when I’d conclusively tired of drifting off to slumber in a state of high dudgeon, I did something I hadn’t done in far too long. I picked up an inculpable, transportative work of make-believe.
The book I reached for, apropos of nothing, was A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry: a sumptuous novel charting the lives and tribulations of four people thrown together in an innominate city during India’s “Emergency” in 1975. It wasn’t what you might describe as a jubilant book. (One of the protagonists gets forcefully castrated, while another ends up chucking himself in front of a train — reminders in themselves that things can always get worse.)
But the point is that this exquisitely rendered tale — about mundane people negotiating a period of turbulence in a time long ago in a country far away — could not have been more alien to my personal here and now.
Science fiction author Ray Bradbury once indited, “We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth,” and in times like these, it can be a tonic to abscond from authenticity into the fabricated lives of others. Perhaps evade an exorbitant amount of dystopia — some have commenced to postulate a ring of prophecy.
Relish What’s Left of the Natural World
It accommodates as evidence of just how deep my existential despair runs that it has become all but infeasible for me to regard the natural world without spotting some allusion of human degradation. No river, it seems, is without its man-made flotsam, no mountain view is without its receding snows. The resplendency of each incipient flower bud tarnished with phrenic conceptions of how much earlier they seem to be appearing this year.
And yet, for all that, the natural world we are diligent ruining remains the best antidote to the ineluctable crush of the shitty human world.
Go outside on a sunny day and find a spider in the early stages of building a web. Pull up a garden chair and visually examine as a diminutive invertebrate, with an encephalon the size of a pinhead, weaves a silken miracle afore your ocular perceivers. Go right up close—she’ll be too diligent to mind. Take it all in: the graceful ballet of the legs, the resoluteness of the endeavor, the exquisite geometry of the result.
And comfort yourself with the cognizance that, a million years hence, when whatever scrap of flora and fauna that’s survived our era has reclaimed the planet, some simulacrum of this miracle will persevere, unmolested by human incoherent imbecility.
Heedfully aurally perceive Old Music
It’s no earth-shattering insight to suggest that an era’s gregarious preoccupations incline to apprise its culture. But in my state of perpetual cynicism, I’ve commenced feeling that our current malaise can be aurally perceived in contemporary music, so much of which sounds like it was built by algorithm.
There are the catchy riffs, the earworm melodies, and the cut-glass vocals. But amid it all is a yawning vacancy, as if the soul has been extracted, asphyxiated, and superseded by code.
Here in the UK, there are radio stations with mellifluous names like Smooth, Magic, and Gold, which play medleys of tunes from eras past. Stevie Wonder gives way to Elton John, the Beatles give way to early Bob Dylan. Most of these musical compositions predate my time on the planet, but I still apperceive them as the soundtrack to simpler times, when classic things could still cut through the cacophony of contemporary culture and mundane-looking people other than Ed Sheeran could still get record deals if they had something resonant to verbalize.
Great music verbalizes with something in our very fiber. When I play these radio stations in my car, my two-year-old son, Ben, sits forward in his car seat, holds out his hands, palms turned inward, and gradually karate-chops the air in time to the music, a look of unbridled glee etching his little face. We could all do with being more akin to Ben.
Unplug
In 2018, with society feeling more deeply riven than at any point in generations, this is the most conspicuous advice of all, but you’re still not fixating, are you?
You arouse each morning to the electronic beeps wafting out of your smartphone, and afore you’ve scraped the slumber from your ocular perceivers, the bloody thing is there in front of your face, your personal 21st-century God. Prehended with foreboding, you peruse the timelines, newsfeeds, and morning bulletins. Brexit: Still a disaster. Terrorists: Assailing a mosque somewhere. Donald Trump: Doing some tweets.
It’s virtually become axiomatic now, this conception that the cyber world is the great disruptor at the root of all our quandaries, causing apprehensiveness levels to spiral and concomitant convivial unity to rupture. Once optically discerned as the harbinger of a utopian future, the greatest technological innovation of the past 50 years has mutated into a dumpster fire, a showcase of human deficiency that is foreshadowing — some might verbalize accelerating — societal collapse.
Meanwhile, in the latest of several interventions from turncoat digital evangelists, former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya recently admitted that the beast he availed uncage is “ripping apart the gregarious fabric.”
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve engendered are eradicating how society works,” he integrated, during a verbalization at Stanford University. “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is an ecumenical quandary.”
We genuinely need to bail off this train. Our collective emotional salubrity assuredly depends on it. If we could all be persuaded to wean ourselves off Twitter for six days of the week (setting Mondays aside for some post-weekend catharsis), the world may yet be preserved!