It is late Sunday night (early Monday morning) and I find myself feeling annoyed. Granted, I often find myself annoyed these days and I wonder if I should just throw my hands up and ignore what happens in the world, like so many others seem to. It is just that I wonder if they are actually ignoring it, or they are trying to ignore it but still feel it weigh on them.
Is it better to repress than address?
I feel a bit like in that poem "First they came" but it is most of the world not speaking out against what is happening - and it has been happening for years already. We are in an escalation phase now, where the speed of disruption is advancing and the world is becoming far more volatile. This isn't a controlled explosion though, because so much is happening that unintended repercussions are going to ripple through humanity for decades to come.
It makes me worry about the future, because that is where my daughter will be, and at this point, I don't see how the world is going to be safer, healthier, or have more opportunity to create a good life. It seems more like the majority are just going to have to make do with less, and that creates a lot more inevitable issues that we have already faced previously.
We keep repeating the past.
And the way we are operating at the global scale, is going to exacerbate problems at the local levels, which is where we live our daily lives. We are already living in an environment where community has been decimated by technology and economy, but it is going to have even more increasing pressure as nationality, identity, background and ideology are fought on the streets, neighbour against neighbour. In some places, it is already there, isn't it?
Do you live in a suburb like that?
Would you want to?
I think a lot of privileged people have their head in the sand, not really recognising how fragile their daily way of life is and how quickly it can shift. Perhaps they have a decent job, live in a good suburb and their investments are doing well enough. But what most don't realise is that their stability is dependent on thousands of other factors that are outside of their control and often being delivered by people who are not financially or socially stable. Privilege makes us blind to the concessions we receive at the expense of others, and often to the supply chain that enables the privilege we enjoy.
Currently, I feel that a lot of people are putting their head in the sand in the hope that they can just get on with their lives and everything is going to be okay. Yet, while ideally it will be okay, I don't think it is going to be for a while at least. Instead, I think the world is going to get much more volatile and dangerous, and it is going to continue to spill out onto the local streets as various people take matters into their own hands, after snapping in frustration.
How long can you suffer before you snap?
We see in the movies agents getting tortured to extremes and keeping their mouths shut, but they are just movies. In reality, the majority of people are soft and unaccustomed to extreme pain and suffering, as well as conditioned to be more emotionally reactive to even minor negative stimulus. This means that as life challenge increases, more people move toward the extreme end, where people who were struggling get dropped off the edge into the snap categories.
What do they do?
When it is one or two, it is seen as an outlier issue, but when it is happening weekly or daily, it has to be addressed a a common problem, and something that should be addressed. For instance, here is a map of mass shootings in the US from 2025.
How many more red dots in a year before something is done?
There was a shooting in Austin a few hours ago, which they seem so far to suspect is an act of terrorism in response to what is happening in Iran. But, is it that clear cut, or it that some person just snapped? It is a question that can't be answered, because it is impossible to tell what truly goes on in another's mind. But I suspect that a lot of these events, whether based in religious ideology or some kid getting revenge on peers that teased them, are performed by people who for whatever reason, just can't control the responses to the way they feel. And the more people who are pushed toward that edge, the more who will fall over.
And I think that the events that are happening globally now, driven by the outrage porn of the media companies enraging viewers for profit, are pushing more and more to that edge. And not only pushing them to the edge, but also making life difficult away from the edge, so there is less to lose.
What would you do with nothing to lose?
Society is failing and I am unsure if we will ever come back from the brink.
Taraz
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