You can pick your favorite issue, or just care about “everything;” either way you’re inviting yourself to take a moral high ground on an issue you spend little time putting a stake into. The inaccurate statement being “I don’t care.” The more accurate statement “I’m constrained to bitching.” Like all patterns, to some degree I just get bored and stop caring. And the more you learn, the harder it is to justify imposing the stress or anger that classically is used to motivate change.
But this is all terribly non-specific. Let’s take something easy, like whores. How one can live the life of a genuine “seek-and-destroy” whore confuses me. It’s hopelessly boring. You learn the lines, the body language, you get into the drab and calculated conversations, and then you conceivably go back to some level of sleazy fuck nest and inevitably never see each other again after awkwardly stumbling over your words and out the door. It’s quite boring. No challenge, no build up, no investment, no fantasy, no real consequence or learning experience were you to fail. Not that I’m arguing against one night stands, I just don’t know how you can make that your mission.
Let’s take an activist group. Each day is spent trying to deliberately spike a conversation with your hatred of some evil corporation or force in the world. You attend protests and make signs. You scour the internet for pictures and arguments to show just how righteous your cause is and how much the rest of the world needs to change. Less you think I’m over selling this, I encourage you to camp outside of few hipster hot spots around town for a few hours. Ultimately they create a feedback loop where as long as they keep voicing how much they care, they’re doing their part and their hands are clean. Again, this a boring pattern.
My current pattern problem involves caring and trying. I do it with my small perspective, which, I understand the potential consequences, but it’s hard to let them weigh too heavily before you try or care. I genuinely want to change the world. I mean, of course I do. Who the hell talks like I do for so long without having either a mental impairment or an actual mission? But I keep getting reminded the same lessons, like:
The world is BIG. Many people don’t care, if not most, and that’s not necessarily even their fault. While you may get things done very quickly, the rest of the world is convinced “things take time.” You’re always a year too young and a year too late as far as “they” are concerned. There is an extreme amount of luck to even get what is arguably a meager reward. The chase is often better than getting what you want. The one piece of missing information, that you could never have known, can bring it all crashing down around you. Someone, well before you even sniffed at the thought, has had it before you, was in a place to do/say something about it, and things still turned out like you see today.
There’s a more exhaustive list of course, but these are free flow blogs right? Why bore you with too many details? I mean, what I want more than anything is for things to make sense. I want this with the full knowledge that people don’t make sense and they create situations and institutions every day that amplify just how little sense they can make. Knowing this, I start to get a shift of priority. Less and less I’m motivated to get specialized knowledge; at least, any more than the subconscious philosophy of my dreams, and the more I want to destroy. If I dramatically analogize something to cancer, the answer is to remove the cancer.
The world that makes sense to me has free health care because we decided to abandon “survival of the fittest.” From this naturally follows that these healthy people got that way from eating and drinking things that don’t poison them. Of course we’re talking about “people” not specifically “blacks”, or “gays”, or “women”, which means if we’re going to invent a word like “right” every person should be able to do the same things as anyone else. Splintering off seems to undermine the message. All these people live on the only planet we can currently survive on, so when working out priorities, keeping it healthy and habitable aren’t a debate. We like to reproduce and pass on our knowledge, which to me, it only follows that you want that knowledge to be correct and useful, so a scientific metric to judge it on would be paramount. You get the point…you better get the point…
If I’m as much a part of this world as anything or anyone else, how do I win? I can’t integrate ideas that kill. I can’t go through the motions of how things currently operate unless I want to wait in line for hundreds or thousands of years. And I can’t ever really give up or I volunteer myself into stoic slavery.
It occurs to me I’m not in ongoing talks about these things with most people because, apparently, they think I’m trying to argue with them. I ask that this be a moment where you pause and think if your perception is lost to the reality. I can’t remember the last time I was arguing with someone, if only because I’m so very hazy on facts and sources which is the only way I feel comfortable arguing. Or I've managed to alienate myself from conversation with all but a handful of people and never managed to realize it. That'd be freaky, but I digress…
History is my biggest issue. There were plenty of smart, motivated, and informed people with lasting ideas or behaviors…that ultimately lost out to time or idiots. We need the drama, we need the change, and that means we never have everything we need no matter how big the “I” in irony gets. I suppose that speaks to why I think we’re ultimately fucked. Why I might need to ride it out and take everything I “accomplish” as an “accident” of my circumstances. My will be damned, at least as far as you’re concerned. Rest assured my ego finds this an extremely hard sell. I only flirt with stuff like that in self-sabotaging the small things. Ironic?
