My mental block
Added 2022-06-25 10:11:26 +0000 UTCI apologize to you all.
I write from a place of hope; one factor common to most of my stories is that they start out from trouble, tragedy, and strife. Trials assail my characters but slowly, through the things they experience, their circumstances improve. They fight, they learn, they overcome, and eventually they get to a better place.
After the events of the last couple years, and especially the last few months, my hope has cracked. My belief in the possibility of things getting better, of people overcoming, is crumbling. I'm seeing, forced to face, that we the citizenry, the common folk of humanity, are not the plucky underdogs who have a chance at breaking the hold of those who have us by the throat. We, all of us, are chattel. We have been for generations. The corporate oligarchs and their networks of power and influence own everyone that matters, disrupt attempts to secure basic human needs and rights by creating crises and divisions both great and small through their various influences. They ensure that nothing will improve unless it's tied to their profit margins, and even then it will improve only as long as it takes for them to find a way to create cruelty out of it so they can be entertained while they enrich themselves.
The overturn of Roe v Wade is another such disruption, and one we can't afford to let go or put to the back of the line, but also throws another obstacle to our ability to fight monopoly, the steady purchase and corruption of our government and police forces, the erosion of public services our taxes are supposed to pay for, and the reversion of society back to a primitive, brutal paradigm of strength above all. The only difference is that this time the strength is measured in money rather than muscle, and those without will be shackled in servitude to the wealthy until the wealthy have either destroyed the planet's capacity to support human life or else their offspring have degraded so badly that society collapse entirely.
Even in the "good" result where humans can still survive, it's still a Bad End for humanity. The industrial revolution was only possible because of the massive fossil fuel reserves available when we started exploiting them. We should have gotten off them as soon as we saw what they were doing to the biosphere; we had the technology even in the 70's to switch off fossil fuel and go to wind and nuclear power long enough to get to something better. Instead, greed and great headed off any attempts for something better, because fossil fuels had a whole infrastructure set up and the concerns of a few years of tighten profit margins during the switch over made executives uneasy. Now, the remaining fossil fuel reserves on the planet aren't accessible except through modern means. If society collapse, we won't GET another chance. The conditions that created those oil and coal and natural gas deposits are long gone, and never to return, because of multiple factors including the output of the sun on earth as well as hundreds of millions of years of atmospheric erosion and gradual loss of free oxygen in the bio cycle, the overall reduction of free water (including ocean, ice caps, fresh water, and atmospheric totals) for use, and the existence of new bacterial and fungal strains that hadn't evolved yet when those oil and coal fields first formed.
There will be no humans among the stars. We are doomed to extinction. We will not see the age of Iron stars or black hole harnessing for energy. We will not solve entropy. And we never had a chance for it; the game was over and the vault sealed shut before most of us were born.
My hope is dying a slow and agonized death and I have no idea how to write without it. It feels empty and pointless and even so I still keep trying but every time I open up my word processor app I get a few words out but I can't focus, my mind screams at me and I feel ill because it is the job of a writer to look ahead, to touch on human truths, see possible human futures, show others what we see but I hate what I'm seeing with all my soul and my mind's eye won't let me look away.
This is what I've been fighting. And it's a shit thing to even tell anyone about because you need something better than this from me, you all deserve something more adorning, something less painful than my despair but I can't write what I don't feel and this is what i feel and I can't feel anything else right now.
I'm sorry.
Comments
It is a truism that when you are in the dark, it is nearly impossible to see the light. The despair and hopelessness you feel is not necessarily representative of reality. Climate change, for all its dangers, is not enough to end humanity; the species has survived such straits before, and worse ones even than this. You worry for the collapse of society? It may happen. Yet society is not the species, and though the world is so much more connected and interdependent than it was in the past, it is also true that civilizations have fallen in the past. Yet they were not the end. Nor will it be for us. You despair for the greed that underpins the material wealth of modern society? So be it. It need not triumph. The roadmap of the future has as many paths to success as it does to failure. Things will get worse, but they will get better after; that is the nature of things. Yes, much will be lost, but as much and possibly more will be gained. You despair because you look at the progress and promise of the past and see it in decline; this is the cycle of history. What is now will not always be, but what will be is most likely merely different rather than nothing at all. Why do I qualify my statements? Because I am no more a seer than you. We who write to bring hope for the future must know above all that we are not gods, we do not see the whole span of history laid out before us. We are human, we are fallible, but most of all, we do not know. Your fears are not new, not novel; they are common when old paradigms fall to make room for the new. You despair because you see your country moving backwards, actively trying to regress rather than move toward the future? It happens. The idea that human civilization is a process of constant improvement and progress is a romantic notion that has not been the common one for much of human history. Because of our technological advancements, which are admittedly unprecedented in the history of the species, we tend to see ourselves as special, as somehow better than those who came before us. This is not true. We are no more intelligent, no wiser than our predecessors. We make the same mistakes they did, and because they were no less human than us, we will follow the same paths they did. We rise and fall like the tides, if not so regular. This is not to say we should not try to improve; never that. As individuals, we have the responsibility to work for the betterment of both ourselves and the world we inhabit. Yet that does not mean we will always succeed, nor that we must. What we must do, what we must remember, is that though we ourselves may fail, there will remain others who can continue on. The hope is always here, always alive, and only our fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world. Yet hope is not surety. What then, if our hope should fail? Shall we despair, we who see the end beyond all doubt? No. As the poem says: Rage, rage against the dying of the light. If your pen cannot write of hope, write of wrath; castigate the world, curse the greedy fools who have wrought our end. Let us pass not with a whimper, but with a great cry of wrath. But we need not do this. The end is never certain. What you see as hopeless is as likely to be a sign merely of change, not annihilation. All is not lost. All is never lost. Never believe it. With all I have said, I must now ask the difficult, personal questions. You have written of despair; I have myself have felt as though I stood before the yawning void that seeks to encompass both world and life. It is an insidious thing, depression. Because it originates within us, it speaks with our own voice, our own thoughts, and so the rational mind assumes that the despair it speaks of is itself rational. Listening to that voice will draw us down into nigh-inescapable darkness and despair. Almost always, we can only escape with the help of others. Have you spoken to anyone? A friend? A family member? A therapist? We tend to deride the last, thinking ourselves weak or therapists ineffectual or only for those who have "problems." But everyone has problems, and a therapist, even if you don't have clinical depression, is an impartial ear to speak into. I truly believe that everyone should visit a therapist at least once a year, even if their lives are otherwise happy. The ability to speak to someone who has a different perspective from oneself and no other connection to one's life is a gift not to be taken lightly. Speak to one. Air your fears, your grievances. You will find you are not alone, and that you need not suffer alone, or perhaps even not at all. I won't speak of medication; that is a thing to discuss with a medical professional. It can help, but it can also hurt, and so I won't give any more recommendations. But perhaps you have already taken these steps? I don't know; I don't know any more of you than the stories you've written and this post I'm replying to. If you *have* taken these steps? If you *have* spoken to someone about your fears? Then I can only say to take what I said earlier to heart: hope is not lost; we may yet pull through. I wish you, and truly, all the very best.
Ryan Pennington
2022-06-25 22:01:24 +0000 UTC
