In this climate, of absolute uncertainty, chaos, rhetoric and entropy, we are accustomed to beliefs that frame politicians and leaders as either villains or heroes. We are sentenced to a fate where you really feel like you are not quite sure what world you are in, if it’s real or if it’s fake.
Hell is digital, heaven is digital. News broke recently of British MPs warning us all that social media has shape-shifted politics too much, threatening our own digital democracy, the same one in which permits political ideologies to be conducted of hatred and misinformation. For we are the generation of the misinformed, the misled millennials, and we don’t try and really make things better – we just experience it.
What we see and what we read is fed to us by our own curated system, established by subscriptions and follows that make us all troops of some kind of political side. For we are so deeply blind and accept to rhetoric that we allow such lies to slide, and truths to be pleasant surprises.
And at this point, I do not know what I am even talking about. Political action, like history, is just rite words and rote timing.
I chose to live in two different worlds. One in which was hyper-real, dopamine, temporarily satisfying and completely fake. It was a world and it was fascinating and interesting. It made me confident and amiable, but it was fake. The other one was insatiable and ruined. It was real and there was no hope. Politics, future, dreams… that version of life I had been told about didn’t seem to be in my hand of cards. It was hard to live in that world because everything seemed so wrong and there was no solution on how to make it all better. Everything was just ruined.
Going back and forth between these worlds was exhausting and mentally tormenting, leaving me completely lost when faced with myself. I was disconnected from these worlds because in my mind I knew that they both couldn’t coexist. I could keep planting seeds, and digging for gold but somehow each hole I dug was just filled with worms. Even worms die eventually.
Then there was faith. The only thing that seemed to shine light at the end of the tunnel. The only sense I could make of each world and the only peace I could bring to each anxiety-filled risk society. Sometimes it was hard to cling to when faith and reality seemed so far apart, and that faith could only exist in my mind on rare occasions. Faith didn’t lie in the day-to-day, and not much in humanity except for a rare occasion. I didn’t want to be surprised by faith but I wanted to be guided by it but again that just wasn’t in the cards.
In the first world, I had a good poker face and could tolerate my opposition. In the second I kept folding because I knew that no matter how many chips I could score that it would never be enough, and I’d always be crawling back for more.
Everything I saw that was hyper-real was catered to me and fed me what I wanted. Everything that was actually real was completely disappointing, and left me depressed. That temporary happiness may just be the closest I’ll ever get to real happiness, but it was fake and that prohibited me from allowing that world to take over. I dreamt of leaving both and completely disconnecting, but knew that if I ever did I wouldn’t be able to cope. I was in too deep, and needed that next hit of dopamine. I needed that reminder that the world wasn’t so bad, and that if it all blew up that wouldn’t be the best thing for it. I searched desperately for reason but couldn’t find it anywhere but in places that created the right algorithms for my own psych, but in reality, I was potentially psychotic.
I would bounce between insane hits of happiness and utter loneliness and sadness. I had no sturdy frequency or control over my own emotions. I was scared to face who I was outside of each world, and I knew deep down that I could make no sense of who I was to be in each world. Each day I thought, just get through this day and worry about the next later. I was shockingly dependent on things that I didn’t even think mattered and was constantly unsatisfied with the things that did. Was this just depression? Or a disease? Was I insane? Or just normal? Was this society, that risk society that that German philosopher wrote about? Was this the eternal return that Nietzsche was talking about?
How to live is how to avoid any risks. How to just make do and get by, and not question because the answers were too unfathomable. We know we can’t trust the news, the banks or the politicians but we don’t think of why. This is a norm and it’s what we’ve been handed so we must just make it work somehow. Therefore, we don’t need truth, or trust or leadership, because to us it’s not reality.
Photo: Kingdom Preppers
