Where Did the Sky Go?

"Be a voice,

not an echo."

-Cornwell West-

(Artwork by Müge Olçum)

So here we are, the grand sum of however many years of being. All that rich tapestry to look out upon. Men and women who have overcome unimaginable hardships and displayed feats of bravery and heart. An entire animal kingdom to learn from. Authors, lyricists, and teachers. An open source world where our shortcomings are pointed out to us. Endless streaming of news events that highlight how deep psychological flaws manifest themselves in our society. Warning after warning after warning. Yet there still seems to be some question about how it might be some intellectual privilege to be able to look out at the world and see all of this. Somehow life is too burdensome to have the time to consider your own becoming. Somehow the average human brain can’t compute what is good for it. Is there so much chaos spanning the multiple dimensions of existence that we simply can’t find a good starting point? Have our pasts thrown so many twists and turns into our plots that we can’t make sense of what we have to do next, or at the very least, stop doing?

Fuck all of that. Of course, there are those more naturally inclined to try and make sense of things, but that doesn’t hand out free passes of obliviousness to the average joe. One of the biggest problems I’ve stumbled upon is the changing relationship we have with boredom. Boredom is a good teacher. It can be uncomfortable, and it’s good to be uncomfortable. Boredom will teach you when your life is lacking. It will highlight the absence of internal resources. An admission to boredom is an admission of not being very much, and at some point, we’re all not very much. Fortunately, boredom is unpleasant, so we learn to become a little more. We find things to do. These things could be anything. Hobbies, exercise, thought experiments, journalling, whatever. Those moments of unease become the free time we use to explore who we might be. But this is oh so very past tense. 

There is no urgency in boredom anymore. It doesn’t scream “wake up” at its sufferer. It doesn’t bring about feelings of restlessness and dissatisfaction. No! We have our gadgets. We can scroll through the lives of other people who don’t mean very much to us. Tiny 15-second snapshots into the existence of uninteresting people. People achieving nothing. Saying nothing. No waves being made. Just a steady trudge along the path of decline. And we scroll, emotionlessly as if there is some eureka moment in the end. But it is all endless, and even if it wasn’t… 

I don’t think the dopamine arguments for social media are so important. I don’t think that’s the crux of the matter. There are two fundamental poisons at play. The first is that it kills boredom. It kills boredom, and because boredom is no more, it can’t defend itself. We can label it as something that needed to be killed. No one thinks of it as a teacher anymore. They see it as something to be avoided at all costs. Because boredom does something to you… It makes you look inward, and that’s where a lot of the answers are.

The second poison is that we’re under the impression that not being very much is entertaining. The standards of excellence have become the standards of mediocrity, and the bar is drooping. It has removed craftmanship from the arts. It has taken the soul out of writing. It has made people with no notable talents something close to celebrities (at least in their own minds). It has made the world okay with the idea of not being very much. Not just okay. It has led people to celebrate not being very much. There are social awards for commonplaceness. As if somehow presenting auto-tuned cliches is an act of creativity! Or merging two similar-sounding songs of similar tempos with the help of song-matching software was the work of a disk jockey. Skinny kids are selling online coaching programs. Women, who under the disguise of filters and narcissism parade as models. All of a sudden it seems baseline okay to celebrate people who aren’t doing much. As if the very decision to pursue the idea of being a celebrity automatically creates fame. Most things are just things to take the time from us... as if we don’t need it.

Fuck. Listen to me. Listen to me nitpicking the human condition. The amount of sugar I’ve glazed this over with. What the fuck is wrong with everyone? Imagine getting to 50-60 and sending a message to a 22-year-old woman asking if she has any friends because you’re feeling a little ‘frustrated’. “Excuse me do you know anyone around your age I can fuck because I need to do that right now.” Imagine being okay with that. Not wincing once at how pathetic you might be. Well, I don’t have to imagine it, because I get to see it. I get to see people generalizing the characteristics of women by their geographical location. I get to watch 40+ yr old men backing small framed women into corners and laying their hands on them in any way that doesn’t quite constitute sexual assault. I watch people’s spare time vanish into news(less) feeds. I watch people drive to the gym just to sit around checking their phones. I listen to the loud howls of drunken shitrags. I watch the arrogance in the dance of becoming nothing. I observe malice, cunning, belligerence and boastfulness take the center stage in social interactions. I watch the mundane and trivial take the place of meaning. Let’s get high. Let’s get fucked up. Let’s fuck. Let’s celebrate this closeness and capture it for all to see. Let’s defend it. Let’s be nothing, and sing its praises. 

And breathe... Ever since the bike accident I’ve been less tolerant. The brain injury took me into my world. I needed to rebuild it and notice where the wiring was askew. I needed to rediscover connections. I needed to re-map. Only after my body had healed did I start to notice where my mind was not. A shortened temper, an inability to sleep, and a feeling of being yet further disconnected from the world around me. It made less and less sense, and the ability to forgive and empathize with it diminished. I sit and sometimes hate myself for it. What happened to the unconditional love for all who walk the earth? The willingness to reach out and try to help anyone that might need assistance. I still have it for the animal kingdom, but not those closest in likeness to me. The excuse-makers, the drunks, the arrogant, the morally debilitated. 

This list of things that, at some point, I have been. And to see it now, to know that I have lived what I see. Sickened is not the word. I am repentant. How a human being can draw on canvas with these colors? These people are people with families, some of them with wives and children. They have people watching them, occasionally looking for guidance. It should be at the forefront of everyone’s mind: If someone might be looking to me for some idea of what to do next, I should never show them that being a useless piece of shit is the answer. Yet, for that one has to recognize what constitutes being a useless piece of shit. So we loop back round to the beginning… Some 1000 words ago… Is there so much chaos spanning the multiple dimensions of human existence that it’s often impossible to find a good starting point?

I think perhaps we just all get caught up in our own idea of suffering. We paint self-pity all over our skin and it becomes a free pass to do whatever we need to do to escape our unrest. We are scared to sit with it. Scared of our boredom. The boredom that we allowed to encapsulate the very core of us when we were too busy having our fun. We are scared to challenge what we have already built, or what has been built for us. We are growing in laziness so much so that those who try and succeed appear to possess super-powers. We are just getting by, and we somehow defend it as peaceful, yet with it comes collapse and if you can’t see it yet it’s time to start asking yourself some uncomfortable questions about who you are and what you’re not.