I had an interesting discussion with a therapist today about how bleakly I see the world currently and that the trajectory is on a steep decline. She was pretty appalled by my view, but I suspect that if things keep progressing as they are, in ten to twenty years from now, there will be more people in my camp than hers.
For a therapist, she is pretty idealistic in my opinion, and doesn't quite see the reality of the situation, but I think she is not the only one. She is a bit older and still has the opinion of "we have seen similar before" without really recognising that no we haven't. We have never had an economy that so values profit and power over people at the scale we have. We have never had such a level of open-faced corruption in the quest for more. We have never had the kinds of technology and tools we have to collect and scrape data, monitor activity, and influence behaviour. And we have never had such a low level of community mindset, as self-centeredness has skyrocketed in the last half a century. We might be in this together.
But there is no us.
Community has increasingly died in the last several years, but most of us will not notice it, because we have been able to supplement a lot of the previous activity with alternatives which give the feel of community, but not actually providing an equivalent experience or outcome. It is like shewing strawberry bubble gum and believing it is the same as eating a strawberry off the bush. But if you have never eaten a fresh strawberry, what is there to compare to?
But even older people who have some memory of "healthier" community experience are losing touch with the reality of the current situation, because we get accustomed to conditions incredibly fast. We acclimatise quickly to our surroundings, and the false alternatives are keeping our environment air-conditioned, even while it burns just outside our collective doors.
We are all in it together, because no matter how insulated you believe you or your family are, that in itself is a sign of the self-absorption that has led us down this path. It is saying that you and those close to you are not affected by the collective "us", which is ludicrous. Because when it comes to our lives, we are all downstream and the rivers are getting pissed in continuously. The pathways of pollution, both physical and social, affect us all. Unless we are living in a forest, totally self-sufficient for all we need, we are going to have to interact with others. And even if we are that way, our environment is continuously being affected by everyone else anyway. And then of course, if we are forced to live that way, we have been affected, haven't we?
I get that most people don't have as bleak outlook as I do and I hope that things will miraculously change and get significantly better, but I just don't see it at the moment. And it has to be very significant, because the trajectory is so severe that unless we make wholesale changes to the way we live our lives, the way we value each other, and what we spend our resources, on - we are doomed.
Perhaps not all of "us" will be immediately doomed, but most of us will be, and it isn't likely going to be a quiet, soft, comfortable drift into nothingness, because that is not how these things tend to be. This is where history does inform us, because massive disparity in outcomes across humans has always ended violently. And with the capabilities of the modern environment, it is not only likely to be more violent, it will also happen at a far more rapid pace. Even the changes to society that have happened in the last decade have happened extremely quickly if comparing to societal change in the past, and it has gone backwards. We are not increasing our improvement velocity, we are tumbling faster and faster into the abyss.
See you at the bottom?
Maybe I will get there amongst the first. Maybe not. But I think that is where we are all heading and if any do survive, they will look back at this period in humanity and say, what the fuck were they doing with their resources? We are pretty pathetic, where we put so much value on imaginary monetary gain at the expense of human reality. We spend on largely useless, while investing next to nothing into the systems, processes and tools that make our life better and help us thrive.
And the excuse is always the same, that because of this or that, we have to keep doing what we are doing. But we have forgotten that doing the same thing over and over is the definition of craziness, and none of what we have been doing has worked in the past. Quite the opposite, as it has led us to where we are today, hurtling downward. Yet we keep on believing that if we just keep on doing it, eventually it will work. Perhaps it will.
In a parallel universe.
But we are not in a different universe, we are here in this one. And what we are doing isn't working and unless we change what we are doing, things are going to get progressively worse at ever-faster speeds. It is like an infected sore and we are turning gangrenous. We can take the "all out for me" pathway, but it is just this that is driving us down this road and even when we think we are winning, we are not, because we will still be affected, still ultimately lose - and our children will lose even more.
We need to stop supporting profit at any cost.
And start working toward wellbeing at any price.
For us.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Be part of the Hive discussion.
And you may be rewarded.
