These weekly entries have become a prison of my own making. Today’s entry is brought to you by my last vestige of discipline. It’s not that there’s nothing to say, and only boring people get bored; given the size and scope of the world’s most dominant problems, my petty inconveniences and half-baked thoughts on my relatively bourgeois lifestyle feel particularly useless today. The fact that none of you need to click on this is the only reason I’m able to do it, and the idea that maybe none of you will read it in the first place is a source of great relief for me.
I’ll offer the transparent warning now that this one probably isn’t a “feel good” journal. But I’m sure any of you that know me or have read me know that “feel good” isn’t generally my forte.
We’re nearing an election, our government is aiding and abetting an ongoing genocide by funding its perpetrator, our bodies are full of microplastics and so is the planet’s food and water, the climate is warming faster than even our most pessimistic models predicted a few years ago, and all I can seem to write about lately is my own bullshit. This fact speaks equally to my evident egocentricity as it does to my feelings of powerlessness in the face of these problems, which are feelings made worse by my consumption of algorithmic social media timelines that have learned, by studying my behavior, that I am curious about the general state of the world. I swim a river of bad news.
My impulse, when I don’t know what to write about for these things, is to reflect on what has happened since my last entry and try to find fodder there. I played a successful gig, went on a beautiful hike with my love, hung out in the sun with my two-year-old niece, and hit some baseballs with a good friend. It has been a relatively stable week with few complaints. Aristotle said in Nicomachean Ethics that happiness is itself “an end and something in every way final.” Apparently, Ayn Rand paraphrased it really poorly in one of her novels, too. Side note: fuck Ayn Rand. No, I won’t elaborate.
Ok, I’ll briefly elaborate. Ayn got a whole bunch of funding from US public works programs to produce art, then produced art that no one liked at first that mythologizes the individual as this heroic figure that doesn’t need help from anyone. Then, Ayn pushed this philosophy that Big Government is Actually Bad even though Big Government Money is what gave her a career in the first place. Get bent, Ayn. I’m getting deja vu writing this, so I might have said something similar before, but it bears repeating. Ayn: get bent.
Anyway, the original point of this was to say that writing about being happy probably isn’t ever particularly interesting. And right now, when so many people are suffering for very clear political and genocidal reasons, writing about personal happiness feels disgusting.
Writing about trying not to write about your own personal happiness feels pretty disgusting today, too. It doesn’t forgive me for my, as of yet, inability to contribute much of anything substantive to help suffering people.
Michael Brooks, a somewhat niche leftist thinker who died way too young a couple years ago, said to be kind to people and ruthless to systems. How can I simultaneously be kind to myself, and recognize that I am part of a system in which I function essentially as a parasite, or a cancer? I drive a car two hours round-trip for work every day, and yeah it’s a partial-zero-emissions Subaru, but that alone is contributing to the destruction of our planet and the poisoning of our food and water through its consumption of gasoline and its proliferation of microplastics from the degradation of its tires. I eat meat. This is partially due to health issues that preclude me following a vegan diet, but still—I fund factory farming. I buy consumer goods like clothes, and vinyl records (which require fossil fuels to be produced). I have an iPhone, whose battery uses materials that were likely mined in horrific circumstances somewhere in the global south. On said iPhone, I am editing this journal entry in which I try to recognize all the ways I contribute to horrible systems that make the world, and the lives of many, actively worse every day. But what is that worth? It’s not like it makes any of that better, at least in a material sense.
Capitalism makes basic privileged existence villainous, and it persists because those who suffer from our decision making so often are unseen and/or voiceless.
In season one of True Detective, Marty asks Rust how he’s able to get out of bed in the morning, given the depth of the darkness in his philosophy. I’m paraphrasing because I’m too lazy to look it up, but Rust says something like “I tell myself I bear witness, but the truth is that according to my nature I lack the constitution for suicide.” I’m sure Owen will text me the full quote, from memory, and correct me where I strayed from accuracy.
As a disclaimer and a brief pause to catch our breath, I’m not saying that’s where I’m at. I’m already anticipating loved ones, many of whom likely feel compelled to read this week over week (a reality that horrifies me) reaching out to me to ask if I’m “ok,” troubled by my allusion to suicide given various factors re: my personal history. I’ll respond to all of you with a blanket “yes” here and now: I’m not on any ledge, and you don’t need to talk me off of it. But, Rust’s thoughts apply to this situation: I’ve told myself before that my own awareness of my complicity in the world’s problems acts as a form of bearing witness, but this does nothing and helps no one. If anything it’s just a failed attempt to absolve myself of guilt, and makes my continued relative inaction more morally heinous.
I try not to be complacent about the situation, either—I know I could eat less meat, could buy a tin can electric car, never buy an iPhone again, et cetera. But the best-case scenario, unless the systems that govern the way we live in the West radically change, will always be harm reduction, never harm elimination. I want badly to be a good person, for the world to be “better” because I was here. I’m sure a select few might argue with me until they’re blue in the face that they believe that to be true, too. But I’m not convinced.
None of this is a maudlin self-flagellation, either. I’m not even in that bad of a mood. This isn’t meant to be a pathetic grovel in the court of public opinion or some sort of backhanded ploy for reassurance. It’s just a full-throated attempt at honesty, for once. We can’t improve the emperor’s style if we can’t first admit that he’s not wearing any fucking clothes.
I’m sure there are some folks reading this, smarter than me, that are aware of even more problems that present grave danger to us not just as individuals, but as a species. My omission of those problems in this discussion is not due to malice, but incompetence. I simply don’t keep up with world events the way I used to, a past obsession which itself was an attempt at establishing some level of control over a world that, as I entered early adulthood, fucking terrified me. Still does sometimes, in fact, depending on the day.
None of this is meant to bum you out, either, and you have my apology if it does. Smarter people, again, than me have said accurately that our own feelings of powerlessness and complacency serve only the worst people on the planet earth. There is no moral superiority to saying that everything sucks and there’s nothing you can do about it—even if you are correct, saying that out loud does not make you a better person. I don’t want you to feel powerless—I don’t want to feel powerless either—I just want to talk about this shit in the hopes that maybe some people have some ideas pertaining to the whole How to Be a Better Person thing. Let’s collaborate on it.
If you’re wondering how I’m doing, I’m fine, but that wasn’t the point of this one. The world is bigger than you and me.
matt nilsen 