Arresting the Fall
We do not see the world as it is. We see it as we are.
"Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says."
~ Freud
In an age of post-truth politics and artificially intelligent media representations of humanism, we have, in desperation emphasized our truth or our perception of the world and our experience of it as if we have the competency and capacity to see both within and beyond ourselves clearly.
The truth is that we do not see the world as it is, but as we are (Jung). The vibrating mania of life stands as an affront to the haunting calmness of death. Humanity has always clung to it’s stories, even before written and spoken words.
We tell stories of gods and magic hoping we’ve found a shred of light in an opaque eternity of questions. We invent theories of physics, thermodynamics, and relativity to remove mystery, quell doubt, and claim to be more objective than the story tellers.
Fiction has always been closer to the heart. Look around. It’s no secret that any mediocre artist, of any age, decade, or century is more honest than every politician of every era.
What is it that we’re really afraid of? Death? The feelings we associate with it — pain, loneliness, shame, regret? You don’t need me to tell you that fear kills more dreams than failure ever will. Yet, everything you ever wanted is on the other side of fear.
The antidote to shame (and perhaps fear as well) is a combination of acceptance of vulnerability and fallibility, competence and adequacy, dignity (that is control and worthiness), and an accurate, mutual, and connected sense of emotional closeness and compassion.
Why then does fear not only keep us from “dreaming” but even living? Restless in our anxiety and comforted by our delusions, the monsters in our mind are fueled by repulsion and repression alike. The things we deem non-negotiable in life — things we “just don’t believe” or “always / never are” or “aren’t who I am” — are certainly where we have the most room to grow and almost as certainly what is keeping us miserable.
So confident are we in our identities, our me-ness and we-nees, that we’ve become and stopped becoming. We’ve gone stale. We believe we’ve reached a point of stasis, mistaking a stagnant cesspool for equilibrium.
Who were you before the world to you who to be? Your parents? Your God? Your political party? The news / social media? Did you act and develop yourself in defiance of those things, still evermore subject to their influence?
We’re inundated with cheap dopamine amid endless fear mongering and outrage porn — there’s always another war, cow farts are boiling the oceans, the end times have always been neigh. Wall-E seems about as accurate a future dystopia as 1984 or A Brave New World.
YOLO (you only live once) is as nauseating of an expression as it was a decade ago. Scroll, swipe, double tap, take your pills, stay weak, stay sick, stay afraid — everything is okay, you only live once. Like, share, subscribe, everything delivered to your door in 2 days — plus or minus a side of diabetes and loneliness. You only live once.
What if we didn’t wait until the end — of the day, the season, the year, a lifetime? What if everything we meant to say by “goodbye” we exchanged shortly after “hello”? Novice chess players capture one piece at a time. Elites begin with the end game in mind.
Maybe once our bones return to the Earth and our blood to the oceans and our souls to stardust, we’ll understand ourselves and each other a little better. We’re all just waiting for a 50 year storm and none of us are making it back.
"You have to die a few times before you can really live."
~ Charles Bukowski