I think a foundational thing you must keep in mind if you think you want/need to “solve a problem,” is that it’s always and forever the same existential one. It gets framed as many ways as you choose to add words to it, but the floor and heart remain.
Take the series of questions, “Who, what, where, when, why?” You could view them as a winnowing down, paradoxically as they broaden, to that floor.
“Who” begins with a presumption of individual person-hood, intention, and identity. You name who it is, or at least who you think it is, and in our short-hand heuristics, many people know all that they have to. Hyperbolic political figures are simultaneous caricatures.
“What” usually doesn’t happen without “happened.” As though we immediately intuit that, regardless of the person or people involved, life is happening to us. There’s and existential circumstance that we’re embedded in, so even if you have highly judgmental opinions about the characters involved, you want to know if it’s exactly as you already thought or some new monstrosity or curiosity.
“Where” is the next broader redundancy to continue shoring up your prejudices and assumptions or contextualize an area where something might probabilistically be more likely. You mention gun violence, The United States is invoked, automatically, if you will.
“When” is deceptive, because it invokes our experience of time. Things, “in the past” get weighed differently than plans for the future. Depending on how far in the past is going to speak to varying degrees of emotional weight or insistence of consequences. There’s going to be a visceral experience of the murder or death of someone yesterday that, while it might echo with discreet acuteness, 30 years later will morph. Whether we should allow ourselves to accept discreet actions situated in methodical time helps us bleed into the infinitely unsolvable “why.”
You can make hundreds or thousands of subjective declarations as to “why.” You can adopt any religious mythology that suits you. You can offer every colloquial truism that’s ever been afforded. But neither you, nor I, know why. We presume our curiosity has an answer, and we’re no more equipped to accept it than my cats. My cats who every day do not understand nor politely accept my answers for not feeding them, letting them outside, or allowing them to sleep on me when they demand.
I spend an inordinate amount of time observing my experience. I notice the deepest contrast in the morning. There’s a very small window where upon I wake up, and I have “no problems.” Stated differently, I don’t feel obligated. I’m not hearing/listening to the dozens of things calling for my attention. I just lay there and feel like the only thing that matters is getting up to pee or slightly adjusting my position in order to keep laying or fall back asleep.
After that exceedingly small window, it starts to build. The cat wants to go outside. The water dish is filmy. The cat box needs cleaning. There’s a dish or two in the sink. I need to prepare to install a window (which is the plan for today.) The show I fell asleep to needs to be completed. I need to make coffee, and/or eat. An itch needs scratched, a pimple popped, and laundry piled up quicker than I noticed. My quick fix for some food storage is asking to be rearranged. My dinner tray is cluttered. There’s cat food crumbs scattered in a way that’s begging the ants to come back. I wonder if I can recapture the flow of my guitar practice yesterday….
And that just goes on and on and on and on until I fall asleep. Is any one of those things a “problem?” To my mind, they only thing they are unified by is my perception of them. My perception that’s informed by an endless list of things. At the top of that list I can find an answer to “why” upon engaging the things calling to me. I don’t know of any other place that I can satiate the “why.”
Who? Me. I “feel better” when there’s a consistency and logic to my space.
What? Anything that calls for my attention. I noticed, I either feel some kind of way about it or not, and then I work on or speak to it.
Where? I like having a mental map of where my stuff is that matches the physical locations. I like knowing where the centers of my happiness or contentedness exist, so when I try to pursue them it feels real and accessible and something I can remain personally responsible for pursuing or maintaining.
When? It’s always now. Tomorrow, most of the same shit is going to call to me at differing levels of intensity, but no less will they exist. I either engage or I pretend, which has consequences on my ability to access agency.
Why? Well, “things” begin to “make sense” and “feel better.” I truly think the evidence for living objectively healthy and well exists, even if it can’t be pinned to a specific diet and certainly not a particular belief system. I’m a significantly different person today having embody my living environment versus when I was dreaming about creating it. At the same time, the parts of me that created it are the same that are about to install a window. I can pretend I need something deeper as to “why” that means anything to me, or I can just install the fucker and vibe with pictures I’m going to take of it.
My universal observation of people is they’re inability or unwillingness to put together the practical and accountable steps behind their “whys.” They get bogged down in the self-serving deceptively detailed weeds of insecure egos asking the wrong questions. “Why” feels irresponsible, if not impossible, because there’s no concurrent inclination to do the work. I think people’s fascination with true crime highlights this. I’m under no illusions about how every level of depravity exists, is celebrated, and seeks justification.
Consider, you might be very busy, but it may not have anything to do with the kind of work you need to be doing. For as much access to things that I enjoy doing that I’ve given myself, I recognize I’m not finding consistently enough the level of meaningful engaging work that sustains me in the “deepest” ways. I’m, begrudgingly, a people person, so isolating is never going to sit perfectly. I’m not a people-pleaser, which means the conditions of how I engage with them need a certain set of rules or order. I think this underpins my disposition to seek positions of leadership before anyone might bother with evaluating my effectiveness.
I need to lead my own life first. I notice my sense of “desperation” rises in direct proportion to how much I “hope” and “wait” and “wish” that “someone will save me” from suffering the infinite void calling to me from a hundred different directions a few minutes after I wake up. You know when I’m never anxious? Any given moment I’ve embodied a decision to do something. This might be a missing piece from my “white coat syndrome” affliction. I allowed my decision to be there to become catastrophically ambiguous and speculative. It was no longer just the necessary next step on the road to anywhere more significant. I didn’t immediately create a new meaningful goal.
Here I need to resist a new temptation to overburden the word “meaningful.” It’s been perfectly meaningful to get the amount of work done I have over the last few weeks. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t feel like life or death. But each thing I throw away, organize, or set up in preparation for the next day allows me to feel like I’m not betraying the infinite now. It’s like writing. In the synthesis of abstract feelings and notions with these “actual” words, acted upon my keyboard and begetting action in the world, I exist. I’m okay. It’s never and not wasted time and effort. I can find, and relocate, and reiterate the nature and process of existential conditioning. It’s the closest we can ever come to providing an answer to anything.
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