What do we make of a voice that can’t be heard? Already I start off, “if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?” But what is the hard and fast reality to our reaction to voices that aren’t heard? Or what if it’s one of your many voices that you didn’t even realized stopped talking?
I saw a heat map of schools and their performance on the SAT in New York City. The poor neighborhoods looked abysmal, the rich shiny and bright. A map like that isn’t really displaying performance though, is it? A map like that displays our cultural attitude. You already knew the poor, likely black, areas were going to underperform. You intuitively can exist anywhere in the world and infer correctly any number of things about the populations.
We pay so much lip service to being smarter, moral, or caring. We prefer the abstractions of hope and change as opposed to the work. I’m not putting down this computer to rush over to New York and figure out a way to move the money around. In fact, I have no control over that even were I to try. You’re watching the extent of capacity and impact. I can talk about it. I can tell you I don’t think it’s fair. If you gave me a petition I might sign it. If you marched on Washington, I’d try to make it. But you, and I, would have to be voices that were heard first.
We elected Hitler 2. We did it because people only know how to speak in the language of anger, fear, and distrust as the default. They knew their voices didn’t matter anymore than mine, so they optioned for burning everything to the ground. This also isn’t a joke. Climate change is burning or flooding somewhere in this moment, and our “leaders” pretend otherwise. There’s the feeling that if we can’t get what we’re due, no one should. What we’re due of course still predicated on our mythology regarding how smart, moral, caring, hopeful, and capable of change we are.
I know my best hope in life is to go down swinging. I don’t think “we” do anything nor will save ourselves. I think the handful of people with access to underground bunkers will do their best to populate space or keep the memory of this species alive until it can fully integrate with computers. I think our fundamental irrationality about our place and specialness will proudly work in service to our undoing. It’s the weirdest kind of crisis of identity to try and have a voice in such a noisy and disorienting mess.
I can always point to the superficial nature of my existence. Say I genuinely never figure out how to get back into another study. I’ve oriented my life so that 10 hours a week making what I did back in high school still pays my bills. Mind you, that’s my worst case scenario. As long as I’m still healthy I’ll keep referencing that. I haven’t been so motivated as to get cash advances or start selling my shit. One way or another I’m going to find 1 person in the 350 million in this country who will pay me to farm my land. Despite this, none of my presumed security and planning is really living yet.
What is the language of a friend group that only exists online? Who are we to each other in popping in and out a few times a year? I call it an old cliche, but it is a choice. It’s a statement about what’s more important than hanging out or banding together. For me, the sacrifice is to eventually put that ability at the forefront. I’m not working a dead end job so I can safely proclaim lack of funds and time over and over. I’m not traveling this year so I can afford the land that hopefully lets me travel indefinitely. I don’t talk about maps that speak to how we routinely don’t give a shit about the poor or minority groups unless I genuinely try to support the effort to better account for and help them.
Because again, what is a like and share? What other part of your nature gets silenced to the routine and box you’ve been put in? Are our anxieties even ours? I always say I’ve been driven to things like drug studies. Many of us got the degree first, I tried opening the business, I tried working for a number of start-ups, I tried working multiple jobs on top of each other, and while the experience is certainly indispensable, the reality is that many forces larger than me are making it extremely hard to thrive.
Thriving is the operative metric for humanity. To thrive suggests an underlying health and reassurance that simply doesn’t exist without planning and accountability. As long as business moguls wince and cringe at the idea of putting money into the system they endlessly exploit, neither can thrive. Superficially you’ll hear boasting of stock prices or lines around the block, but in the real world it’s a brain and spirit suck to a suicidal degree.
Am I the same person who can run up and down theater rows for an entire usher shift? Can I spend 6 months with one other person showing up every day to sell coffee and then almost every night to flip burgers? Will I cobble together thousands of sources into something actionable and coherent and not just an opaque mess of “data?” Will I ever find myself in a position that affords people license to dream and experiment in a way not unlike a compelling movie? As far as my conception of myself is concerned, that’s what it is to thrive. Byron adopts charges not to just power trip and tell them what to do. It’s the ability to wake them up to an instilled mindset about their capacity and worth that’s only handed down in a corrupted form from the wealthy and reinforced by the poor.
I can’t get over the idea that with better collaboration or group discussion, real or big things could have been moving already. Nobody wants to take risks. Better, nobody recognizes the true degree of the risks they’re taking already. I don’t want to see another market crash and half my friends end up jobless. I don’t want to see the health effects of demoralizing work and strained relationships. I don’t want to see every wildest dream and necessary struggle to get us to a place that’s safe and sustainable be subsumed by insecure nihilism masquerading as strength and maturity. And who cares about my voice that can’t be heard or that that’s all I believe is in store? Strike that, the smartest people in the room who track and speak on these things routinely can elaborate on why that’s in store.
I get so conflicted when I read entrepreneur forums that have some millionaire talk about what they managed to pull off in 2 years “with a few hundred to bootstrap myself initially.” No matter how pretty the post looks or details they fill in, success like that is contingent on so much more than working your ass off. Every trip you take across town is gas money. Every friend you nonchalantly asked for help someone else may not have. The “niche” you carved out wasn’t niche and you didn’t carve, you just had access. It’s not even enough for me “just have land” as I’ve been on the phone with every organization remotely related to farming trying to identify and stockpile people who’d know what to do in an instant. If things ever worked as straightforwardly as success stories proclaim, theirs wouldn’t be the 1 post in several hundred or thousand that gets so much attention. If I ever get to a point of lofty comfort and ignorant proclamations, see my writing history about how many shitty desperate and confused days my success really cost.
Sorry if this didn’t amount to much. I don’t really know what I should be doing. I’ve made the calls. I’ve got another screening lined up. I don’t have anywhere to be that isn’t going to just be a rather pointless waste of money. If I could escape this moment, I would.
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