I've been feeling better. Or, as others might put it, I even feel good. We could chalk that up to meds or therapy or sunlight or simple fact of having a convertible car for the summer. But what I think it really comes down to is momentum, and not of the driving variety. I've been busy, I've been making progress, and perhaps more importantly, I've been under a bit of pressure.
There's a drive to finish up some self-directed projects. It might be my first meaningful addition to my portfolio in... too long. I'm also trying to get the mechanical side of a project car finished by the end of the season so that it can be safely tucked away before the snow starts intruding on my ideal daydreams of sunny, open roads. Truth be told, the car thing is starting to piss me off; I've been chasing a particular mechanical gremlin for months now. Today I might've made a soft breakthrough. Who would've guessed it a variable inertia charging system could cause (or exacerbate) a low-RPM stutter? But if it's as fixed as I think it is, it's more than enough to suit my purposes. That means I'm just left with a bunch of secondary, mainly cosmetic tasks. I can deal with that. Oh, and I can't forget to mention that my estate management gig is starting to heat up. It's slightly horrifying, but I have a team of lawyers that I don't need to pay out of pocket, so that helps me sleep at night. That whole shebang is keeping me on my toes and learning new things.
The main hurdle before me, though, is the fact that a week ago we discovered we had three weeks to move out of our current abode. To add some flavour to the situation, the permanent residence we'll be moving into won't be ready until near the end of the year. Cue the domestic chaos; our household has become a rhapsody of cardboard and tape guns, punctuated by an eclectic mix of plastic, air-filled packing materials. One set of belongings is being dutifully placed aside to see us through the next four months. A larger, more imposing set, is accumulating in our garage so that it can be picked up in a truck and put into storage until we're ready to take possession of the new, final destination. And somewhere in there we have to sign a lease for new tenants and prepare a basement suite in a relative's home. Chaos, true chaos. And I'm loving it. It reminds me of the last month of school in New York, when I found out I couldn't renew my lease and had to find a new place to live while preparing for the portfolio show.
Maybe things would've turned out differently had those circumstanced been a bit different, but that's a musing for another time.
The point is that under the gun of light existential threat I'm energized, productive, and happier for it. So let's open up our field of view here a bit and transition from the personal to observational.
My uncle told me about this young woman who was big in the DIY community some years ago. Her parents aren't well off, but she shone through as a young talent in the hobby world, and was offered a full-ride scholarship to an Australian university. Instead, she decided to turn that down in favour of finding herself and her identity. Obviously this second pursuit is important - I think it's great that mental health is more important now than ever and that it can be a full priority. But it's odd, in a way, that it takes precedence over practical opportunities to secure one's future.
And thus my uncle's theory: as a society, we've become too far removed from the challenges of being alive. If you want to bounce back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's almost as if the basic needs (physiological and safety) are such a given that the psychological and self-fulfillment tiers become more dominant. We don't need to worry about where our next meal comes from our becoming the next meal for some other creature, and we haven't for generations. So now we take those mental cycles and focus them on the individual and subjective experience. People get bent out of shape over the casting of Jeopardy's host and political discourse is akin to morally opposed blood feuds. The lack of physical pressure creates mental strife. Humans evolved as bald apes, and now we've been spending too much time staring into our collective (hairless) navel.
Rewind the clock even 100 years, and what do we have? Farmers who toil in the fields. If the crop doesn't turn out, we die. If our homestead burns down, we die. If we get a fever, we die. Average people were living much closer to the knife edge that separates life and its end, in a very fundamental way.
I've recounted my anecdotal story of moving stress, a relative's anecdotal story of someone he doesn't even know personally, and now it's time for an anecdotal musing on something society is currently grappling with. I'm pretty sure that three subjective anecdotes equals one peer reviewed study, so buckle up. Are you ready?
COVID.
There is no way that this should be up to interpretation. People are dying. Even more than that, people are dying and denying the very thing that's killing them. Impressive, isn't it? Huge swaths of North America's population seem to fit into a mixture of delusions that either vaccines don't work or that the pandemic itself is a hoax. Fascinating. Something tells me that this kind of debate didn't exist around measles or smallpox, back when we were closer to focusing on living for a living.
Social media could make an appearance here. It's like a fantastic macro lens that enables whole world to look into your navel along with you. Maybe we see lint, or skin, or who knows what. But you bet it's dramatic and exciting and comes along with a clickbait title and cringey thumbnail to rack up those views.
Eventually, though, it boils down to the fact that we're spending too much time finding drama and threats where there are none. I can't decide if that's because our lizard-brain is hard wired to look for and avoid these fundamental dangers, or if it's a mentally-masturbatory activity because it taps into some kind of adrenaline-like fight-or-flight response. Either way, we create problems where there (essentially) are none in order to stimulate ourselves.
The pandemic shouldn't be a debate in a rational world. Yet here we are, where it's a subjective and immovable truth based on one's political or sociological leanings. We're not fighting for our lives in any real sense, so we find other things to fight over. In this case, it's a fight over if the struggle even exists in the first place, despite any display of scientific evidence. Sure, many change their mind once they land in ER and are on oxygen for days on end, but up to that point COVID is an abstract matter that's up for debate. It's that physical, first-hand experience where one fights for their life that really changes minds.
What the whole COVID ordeal does for me, however, is grant solace in regards to what will happen with climate change. If we can't as a society get our collective survival instinct into gear over a direct threat to our well being in the shape of a pandemic... there is no way in hell we'll galvanize to prevent climate change. So rest easy, folks, in the knowledge that Earth is quite fucked. We're too splintered and petty to make any meaningful alterations to our course. Why save for our future when you can mortgage it today for those sweet, sweet likes and retweets?
And maybe once we cross that apocalyptic threshold we will again be aligned as a people and a race in an effort to survive. Maybe we'll all pull together and make it. Maybe we won't, and march in lock step towards oblivion just like all the other extinct species that have acted as a canary in our coal mine up until this point. The signs are there, but I guess we just have better things to do.
I've drifted around quite a bit here, so let me try and wrap this all back around with a thesis-like concluding paragraph. As a species, we've matured and strayed too far from the essential, every day pursuit of physical survival. This makes us kind of miserable and under-stimulated, so we seek out conflict in other areas of life like entertainment and politics. We're so good at finding (or inventing) that conflict that it's ultimately divorced from reality. That's why the concept of a pandemic is more polarizing than the reality of a pandemic. And as a real life threat is socially abstracted away from its physical manifestation, our resiliency as a species decays. Something has got to give, and I have doubts that we have the self-regulating threshold we need to recalibrate and save ourselves in time.
It's coming, one way or another. The oceans roll up the street to bathe us in our kitchens, dens, and dining rooms. Fields will turn to dust in an eternal autumn; Thanksgiving Day will have it's very last harvest, and then there will be nothing to give thanks to. The sun will beat us down with its heavy rays and make off with the glaciers and water tables that keep our lawns green and our thirsts quenched.
And all the while we'll be squabbling over if this is really just how the planet is supposed to work anyways. It'll have the same 'aw, shucks!' attitude as if it's just a TV we've long lost the manual for. But it's actually the manual for being alive.
-Cril
Reading Pornhub's terms of service, going for a drive
And obeying all the traffic laws in Grand Theft Auto V
Full agoraphobic, losing focus, cover blown
A book on getting better hand-delivered by a drone
Total disassociation, fully out your mind
Googling "derealization", hating what you find
That unapparent summer air in early fall
The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all
There it is again
That funny feeling
That funny feeling
There it is again
That funny feeling
That funny feeling
Hey, what can you say?
We were overdue
But it'll be over soon
You wait
Hey, what can you say?
We were overdue
But it'll be over soon
Just wait
Ba-da-da, ba-da-da, ba-da-da-da-da-da
Bo Burnham - That Funny Feeling
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