Sometimes, you just gotta call it what it is, sometimes you just gotta say the truth, out loud, and then figure it out after. I think this is that time, and I think I feel like this:
Everything feels sharper now, every comment sounds crueler, everything feels more tense, more serious, more threatening. Everyone just feels meaner.
Basically, it just feels like everything sucks these days. Like kindness is losing, like anger, hate, prejudice, vitriol, and ignorance won. Like the fight is over, the battle’s lost, and while there may still be a war to wage against all this nonsense, we’re all just so tired that it feels like we can’t fight it. Doesn’t it?
I could write a dozen dozen essays about how this is true, how it feels like at every turn something worse happens, something terrible bubbles beneath the surface of even that terrible thing that threatens to be even more horrific than that. I could explain all the ways it feels like any resistance against it is futile, that hope is worthless, that there’s no room left for empathy or compassion, kindness or understanding. I could, you know I could, but the problem is, it’s just not fucking true.
I know, I’m probably in a very small minority here when I say this, but I can’t write all those essays, because in truth, I don’t believe it. I really don’t, and not in a toxic positivity way (you KNOW I hate toxic positivity and have written about it many times), but in an honest way, and there’s a reason behind it. I’ll share, if you’ll bear with me, if you’ll keep an open mind and lean in and breathe and listen to what I’ve got to say. If you disagree after, I’m 100% all ears and would love to hear your rationale too, I will listen as you listened, and maybe we can chat about it, maybe we can understand.
The way I see it is simple: Human beings are hard-wired to notice danger first. We’ve evolved to have unbelievably sensitive receptors to all that can go wrong, all that is wrong, and it’s always been that negative emotions trigger reactions, both internal and external, faster, stronger, and more lasting than positive ones. We’re basically built to be these grumpy little machines that process the world around us and instead of filtering out all the junk and sadness, the hatred and overt meanness, we highlight it bold. Plain and simple, the cold pricklies travel further and scream a hell of a lot louder than the warm fuzzies.
Now do not get confused here and think I’m telling you there are no cold pricklies. There are. More than there have been in any point I can remember, though I do understand that when I was in my formative years, my brain was not able to process the world as it does now so maybe the generation older than me can ring in here and inform me that things were scary and shitty and awful then too. It’s tough right now, more uncertainty, more inequality, more frustration and genuine terror at the state of things — from refusals to address the global climate crisis, to the deepening divide income inequality is causing, to the shocking number of bankruptcies driven by medical debt, to the astonishing human rights violations that occur on a weekly daily hourly secondly basis. This is true, this is honest, and it’s completely acceptable to feel bombaredly overwhelmed by it.
All I’m saying is, it’s not only this. It’s not forever this. It’s not all there is. There’s more, there’s so much more, we’re just being lied to that there isn’t.
Cruel comments get 500 replies, kind notes get a little “Like” heart. A bad headline spreads like wildfire and gets picked up from every regional station all the way up to the very top, making the Today show or the national nightly news. Social media is a petri dish of this entire thing, filled with a million posts a second that aim for reaction, for the perfect stirring of the ugliest pot. The news cycles we doomscroll through reward fear, not actual context. This is the way of things. This doesn’t mean the world is mostly bad, it just means that bad things demand our attention so aggressively that we’ve all been conditioned to pay closer attention.
Hell, how do you even pay attention when the positive news never gets reported at all? How do you even know all the good news is even occurring if it takes specifically searching out those rare unicorn places that actually highlight their stories?
“But what about in real life, sir?!?” you’re probably asking (though I can almost guarantee NONE of you called me Sir). Why do people in grocery stores feel colder, why do conversations seem to escalate faster? Why are holiday tables now half-empty from the people we no longer invite, the people who don’t share the beliefs we hold? What about patience, when did we miss its death rattle? I get it, I do, I see it, I do. I’m bummed out by it just as much as you are, I’m worried just like you are, only I don’t truly believe people are just crueler now, I don’t believe at the core of things, we’re all colder than we were.
I think we’re overwhelmed, really. I think we’ve been absolutely sandblasted for so long by a strange world that prizes virality over all things, that the part of our brain still wired for defending ourselves with clubs against sabertooth tigers or whatever, immediately activates and reacts to a world that keeps shouting at us that all things are an EMERGENCY.
Mostly, I don’t even think it’s our fault, not exclusively.
Sure, we contribute, sure, we buy in and pay for and scroll endlessly thereby giving exorbitant sums of money to nefarious billionaires that hide in compounds in Hawaii or San Francisco or that rent out entire Italian cities for parties or that think we’re really going to live on Mars or that have wasted billions that could feed a planet taking Katy Perry to space for 2 minutes or that pave roads with their ignorant fury, but it’s not all our fault. I think we’ve been brainwashed for a long damn time, I think we’re all part of some weird social experiment that went way off the rails some time ago and now we’re just in this scary rickety mining cart careening off a shoddily-built track deep underground like in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and we have no brakes or way to stop and so we’re just all screaming at the same time hoping that something way more superhero than us can come and stop it.
But it’s not our fault.
Here’s what I think, simple as I can make it:
The world contains cruelty. The world contains hatred. The world contains racism, prejudice, aggression, vitriol, spite, envy, greed (such greed), and possibly worst of all, it contains complete apathy and indifference. It contains them. But it is not, I repeat, it is NOT defined by them.
The world also contains kindness, it also carries unbelievable empathy, compassion, joy, mirth, selflessness, equality, passion, and understanding. These though, are quieter, they are slower, they are less visible because they whisper where the others shout. Calm doesn’t shout, empathy is so rarely trending, but dammit, that doesn’t mean they are rare, and it doesn’t, absolutely doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Breathe friends. Breathe. I know it’s cliche, I know it’s been said a million times better than I’ll say it here, but breathe and understand this: We DO, as Gandhi said, have to be the change we wish to see in this world. What’s strange, when we start Being it, we start Seeing it, and I think that’s maybe what Gandhi meant all those years ago. We see what we see because we are what we are, and I don’t think they tell you that. They don’t want you to know. If you know, you stop putting coins into their little vending machines that peddle misery.
Remember, they make money off our loneliness, our misery, our apathy. They make money off our needing them for the next hit, the next tiny brain sniff of dopamine, and they get that by feeding all we give them into a system that hot dog meats it all up, packages it in a shiny little intestinal casing, and feeds it back to us. We eat it up, Kobayashi in some Nathan’s contest, then wonder why we all feel so damn bloated all the time.
So let’s shift it, so let’s stop. Let’s focus more on what works, less on what’s broken. Let’s notice what Isn’t demanding our attention, let’s take old photos on old cameras that highlight simple beauty, let’s listen to good music that feels joyful, let’s rewatch Alysa Liu’s insane Gold Medal free skate and a knee slide spinning across ice that dripped of joy and good spiritedness, then watch her hug the girl who won Bronze like she forgot she won anything at all. Let’s pause before assuming malice in others, let’s not sweat the small shit, let’s actively choose to NOT amplify hate and cruelty with our voices, too.
Let’s have hope, above all. Let’s have it, and let’s share it, and let’s make it cool again to believe in something bigger than the next video we’ll share or product we’ll buy or hot take we’re gonna dish out. Let’s hope and let’s believe in the stunning beauty that is this human race, all spread out and seeking.
Let’s hope.
Let’s hope.
