Why Write?
Part 5: What Are the Exact Parameters of the Golden Cage, and Isn’t It Really Made Out of Plastic?
I wish this wasn't the situation, but the rise of social media and the decline of reading for pleasure are just styes in the pinkeye-infected eyeball of the Information Age. I couldn’t think of a more perfect misnomer to describe it with. As far as our great scientific knowledge goes, I just want to reiterate that we caught the ocean on fire. Wait. Sorry. I have to retract that statement. Three lawyers in expensive hand-tailored suits just popped out of an air duct to inform me that it all depends on how you define “fire” and handed me a cease-and-desist. That’s the world we live in folks—where the even best of us are forced into complacency towards the cut-rate ethical standards we have in various areas of our lives to pay the bills. It’s also partially because being selfish and self-important consumers is all we were ever taught how to do, but that correlation is largely relegated to rapacious. And you know how that shit is. When they hoard all the wealth there can only be so many of the little shits. More often it’s a response to exploitation, and people are just doing what they can to survive and put food on their children’s plates. It’s so dope that we created a system where most people spend all their time doing things they’d rather not, and lie to themselves to emotionally get by.
Voluminous language has been devised to describe the types and severity of lies we tell in our society. It’s like how the Inuit have over 300 words for snow because that’s what makes up their entire environment. We get lied to by advertising, our friends, our families, our coworkers, and ourselves hundreds—no, probably thousands of times a day. Most of the communication we receive is deceptive in some way, but we stay glued to our devices essentially to take the edge off our craving and loneliness. There’s also the collective bummer that’s always broadcasting in the subconscious of Gaia that you've likely felt if you've ever ingested a fleck of psilocybin, or even just stopped to think about it. Turns out that unless you’re a sociopath, it’s not a great feeling to watch your species singlehandedly wreck the entire planet. Who would’ve thought it? Heroin used to be my answer for dealing with my constant awareness of this shared sorrow that started during Industrialization—which made it much older and more powerful than I was—but now I just take walks and shit. I learned that trick when I was first getting sober and sick as a dog from drug and alcohol withdrawal. In between bouts of wincing and vomiting I was able to glean a key piece of information from a Suboxone detox forum online which stated walking could help your brain normalize your opioid receptors, and I was understandably desperate. I gave it a shot and after a while, I discovered walking to ease your mind actually works when you aren’t shitfaced. Another great gift of my sobriety was the amount of writing I was able to produce, which eventually proved particularly useful as a coping mechanism. In my first year of recovery, it was so exhilarating after being stifled for over a decade to finally be able to freely deal with my feelings in a creative way. Honestly, it still is. That’s why I do it.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that in the last five years I’ve picked up a few other coping skills other than writing that keep me from slitting my wrists. They mostly revolve around my mindfulness practice and grounding myself in stillness. I’m doing the opposite of what I did when I was an active addict, which was to live a lifestyle centered around selling out my whole quality of life for a momentary hit. Now I’m putting a lot of upfront effort into things that don’t have an immediate payoff. After a few years of mindfulness practice, I started to seek out and enjoy ostensibly austere experiences like meditating on massive rocks in the middle of the desert or just sitting calmly and listening to rushing water under a bridge. Even if the water is polluted. Anything that teaches me a tiny fragment more knowledge in the art of being still. I also listen to Buddhist monks for tips on how to stop trying to run from my unprocessed trauma on a treadmill. Gonna be real, I’m still not very good at it. I also have to go much deeper into consciousness than I’m currently capable of to find compassion for all of history’s awful goblins killing and harming millions of innocents. Whether it’s Dick Cheney or Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan, I still wish they killed themselves when they were adolescents. It’s a bitter pill to swallow that inherently exploitative men have won all the made-up marbles for all of recorded history's pissing contests. Even if it eventually caught up to them, they always managed to cause massive amounts of unnecessary death and suffering in the process. Fuck a comeuppance—no one should have the runway to order an entire race of people to be killed for years on end before they make a suicide attempt. I get to around the six-month mark of the Holocaust in the history books and I’m saying to myself, “Why hasn’t Adolf blown his stupid head off yet?” Psychotic demagogues have egged on enough atrocities by now to fill a hundred thousand punishingly long and disheartening Russian novels. And people always fall for it because a whole society revolving around running from your problems doesn’t beget a whole lot of folks with a strong moral compass. People always love someone to blame, so violent mobs are super easy to create. Have you seen a TikTok comment section lately? I don’t know if humanity will ever make it to a place where—as a whole—it can say it ever has any intention of stopping.
Humans have been getting killed en masse over bullshit for so long that it’s become a permanent part of the ballpark description of our species’ general disposition and goings on. Meanwhile, Mother Earth doesn't give a fuck about our money, power, or corporate espionage. Oh, I can keep going if that’s not enough. She doesn’t care about our imaginary line drawing, stock market nonsense, foreign politics, or any other bullshit that drives humanity to disregard the destruction of our only place to live. As far as recessions go, the great rivers and forests of North America couldn't give two shits. It's all about the goddamn atmospheric carbon. This tangled web of mass delusions we all mentally inhabit wreaks havoc on every ecosystem on the planet, as well as our own—that's the problem. For me, it generates a lot of background anxiety about how ostensibly close at hand the climate-based apocalypse is.
You would think that the post-covid world would have made us closer. People even had the social lives they took for granted put on indefinite hold for months and still nothing. In the foamy wake of an unforgiving series of historical events so collectively difficult you would hope that we'd put our differences aside and rely on each other more than ever, but nope. No spike in the selection of the song “Lean on Me” in karaoke bars across the globe. The prevailing mode of thought that emerged from the corpse of postmodern philosophy like a grumble of maggots in the early 2000s brought so much more self-absorption and solipsism along with it than its predecessor ever imagined you could promote. I've heard loneliness is an epidemic, but I wouldn't know past what I’ve read online because I’m always alone. We’re told if anything feels wrong the fault is always our own. We're told that it's mostly fine that we live microplastic-choked lives that would be unrecognizable to our foremothers and fathers from not too long ago. But is it, though? A conglomerate of corporate suits with cornflower blue double Windsor knotted nooses wrapped around their wattles like an upside-down pastel execution says so. The conservatives who culturally control God’s Country claim we’re crushing it, but I retort that the “it” we’re fucking up is the entire globe which is the only place we have to go. It’s depressing that this even has to be explained, but take a page out of Tyler Durden’s book and at least wait until you leave the place to blow up your own condo. It’d be pretty psychotic to just be hanging out in there taking a shower or washing your clothes while it’s getting ready to blow. Especially when it’s the only one for countless miles, dildo. And yet here we all are. The Neanderthals in charge are burning the only bridge we’re standing on while mumbling some garbled nonsense about the logs being against their religion, then turning around and having the fucking nerve to tell me to recycle. What the fuck does my carbon footprint getting lighter ultimately do about the billions of bottles of water produced by Coca-Cola? Or Nestlé? Or how about all the ecological damage caused by Exxon? British Petroleum? I love how all these companies have just made their consumers the scapegoat. “Use paper straws or you’re a bad person,” say the motherfuckers churning out 15 million tons of plastic every 12 months or so. You know how much plastic I’ve created in my lifetime? Zip. Zilch. Zero. Goose egg. None. I’ve only moved the stuff that yall already made around some. I know science is hard, but maybe we can have the conservatives explain what seems chill about entire continents of ice melting into the ocean. In certain circles, if you blurt some shit like “It’s pretty much a constant bummer living in the decline of an evil empire…” out, they’ll just make some idiotic judgment like you need to switch your meds up or something. It’s such common practice for people to ignore what they can of the truth and cover up the rest with pills that most of the time they’re not even conscious of it.
Well, there’s only so much that taking meds and lying to myself can do for a mind like this. Without post-surgery-level narcotics to fade my spirit like an old, over-washed sweatshirt, it demands emotional expression. It demands expression through art. It demands that if I insist on walking so goddamn much, I walk a path with heart. It demands I become a comedy writer and author. It demands creative catharsis. It demands a literary offering before I can become light enough to rise above my suffering. That suffering includes anxiety via the climate crisis. It angrily rants that if I insist on living in this synthetic trashscape then I better write about it. Otherwise, fuck it.
Buddhism helps. It really helps me for sure. To get off “the treadmill” (love that)
Keep writing.