Tensions, depression, anxiety, over-consuming (think food), addictions, sleep disorders, suppressed anger. These are inner, often unrecognized, simmering beneath the surface, causing us to run faster just to stay where we've been.
We try those places, activities, friends that brought relief before. The activities and friends have changed, and there's a sign in the window, "Closed. Out of business."
What? Pop a pill? Try a glass of wine? A cup of cocoa? A good workout? Sex? What’s your crutch of choice?
How about resigning? Not to, as in gritting what’s left of one’s teeth and just getting through it, but from, as in not playing anymore, aka, “The only winning move is not to play.”
For two decades, or basically since those props (like religion, positive social culture and “spirituality”) which staved off the onset of maturity fell by the wayside one-by-one, I’ve known about Collapse. It's had many names and forms: overpopulation, environmental destruction, peak oil, dwindling resources, war, financial crash. All members of the family, really, all causes of the same Great Correction, i.e., Collapse.
Regardless of terminology, the collapse concept becomes a type of personification, an entity, a thing, an event. Western culture, being big on “instant” but not so big on process, must make its propaganda icon-able, marketable, price-able. App-able. An event! Processes tend to escape the western attention span.
So, in my attempt to prepare for Collapse, I used what I saw as Advent to do a lot of pretty good things. Failing to wrap my head around process, I still expected a thing, an event, a whiz-bang culmination for all my preparation.
What I’m seeing instead is a washing machine that lasts a third as many years as it should have, a pair of shoes I like which no longer exist when I try to replace them, a computer that schedules my workday according to when it begins an update during which I’m not allowed to shut it down, friends whose memories for dates and phone numbers have been permanently transferred to their newest wearable carcinogenic-EMF-emitting, pinhole-worldview-inducing, expensive, self-administered state surveillance and control device.
I’m seeing – or rather not seeing so much – friends for whom I must remember their preferred method-of-contact (text, voice, email, etc., etc.) and its no-longer-published access code so that I can leave a message for them to get back to me if they check their messages.
People who used to be open and tolerant now openly and expressly hate people they do not know and have never met because they're told to. They think it signals virtue and I think it signals psychosis. But obviously, they're not concerned. George in his inimitable prescience: “Nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.”
Duh.
Hello, Collapse. You’re not a big splashy future event, are you? You're already here and you're a million little events adding up. You’re a whole lot of unraveling, patching, bickering, tearing, tearing and disappearing, aren’t you? And, you've hung around long enough now that we can begin to see you.
This isn’t prelude to some dystopian future. Nor, will "things get back to" what they were. There may be a crescendo to some final blowout or satisfying “Bang!” More likely, this is the whimpering end.
Hey, Collapse? Sorry I didn’t recognize you before. I’m glad I finally did.
