Life is Weirder Than Ever So Let Me Count the Ways
There are so many things that feel weird about life these days.
If it was just the cost of housing, we’d hate it but we might be able to focus on it a little better. If there was only a baby food shortage, we might be able to deal with the religious fanaticism on the rise. If it was just that Russia is attacking the Ukraine, we might not feel so blinded by metaphorical headlights shining in our eyes. If we only had to deal with the high prices of food, we could at least relax between shopping sprees. It’s not just one thing, however. It’s not even just two, three or four things —
It’s everything.
We live in an upside down world where backwards is forwards and right is wrong. This is a world where emotions are negative and hope is scarce. People have dropped their masks, and I don’t mean their KN95s, I mean their social masks that use to hide the truth of who they really are from the public. Now, the masks are off and people are yelling obscenities at one another, unapologetically in your face at every turn.
Sure, people were always selfish assholes, crude, and largely without empathy.
What went on behind closed doors tended to stay behind closed doors, however, back in the good old days. Keeping up appearances was a collective goal required by very strong cultural expectations. There were deviants but they were shunned by the rest of us.
They were the weirdos.
Not any more. The internet, even my ability to express myself publicly on a forum like Medium, has opened the door to mass expression. Suddenly everyone has been freed from living in the dark with their eccentricities to living in the open in a degenerative state which they’re now starting to believe is one of their most enviable assets.
I mean after all, they’ve found a whole community of people just like themselves on the internet.
There’s a good side and bad side to this recent transformation due to the internet’s ability to level the playing field. It may have given me a platform to express my opinions, but it’s also given everyone else the same privilege. It may have provided a pathway to finding one’s tribe no matter how much society told people they were weirdos, but some of those people are angry and violent.
We get to read what we agree with and scroll by the rest. Algorithms make sure of that.
So, although the internet is a fountain of information, it hasn’t actually opened our collective minds, but rather intensified our personal beliefs and opened the door to our perversions. It may have made it easy to cross borders, but it also made it easier to cross borders looking for people who were looking for assholes.
Assholery has been normalized by the fact that we soon discovered that we aren’t the only assholes. There’s lots of us.
But the internet is not entirely to blame for what’s going on. We’re dealing with a growing loss of systemic stability. It feels more like the system is falling apart rather than progressive change, however. Well, I suppose when something falls apart that constitutes change but not necessarily change for the better.
There are so many things that need attending to that we can’t focus on anything in particular, so nothing gets resolved which ends up creating new problems to add to the list.
My sis lives in Florida. She just informed me that in order to qualify for a two bedroom apartment in her area, one must show proof of earning three times the price of the apartment rent. Most two bedrooms are now going for $2900 a month. So perspective renters must show proof of an income of $9000 a month. Essentially, the highest income earner wins.
She’s feeling stressed as a single woman approaching retirement age.
And, then, of course, we’re dealing with a looming shortage of nurses, doctors and teachers in the near future. My other sis is a registered nurse in a rural area of Maine. She had surgery this week and stayed the night on a floor that had 15 staff members out sick with COVID. Yeah, it’s surging again. However, the topic of conversation on the floor wasn’t COVID but the fact that over a third of nurses will soon be retiring. My sis will be one of them.
But here’s the disturbing circumstances to this particular dilemma.
Republicans are anti education. So, instead of encouraging an American model that supports an educated citizenry, they discourage higher education and denigrate universities. Even while we face an impending shortage of doctors, nurses, teachers, scientists, you name it.
The very systems that qualify us as an advanced country, we no longer support, not monetarily nor ideologically.
I’m sorry to say but the new way of dealing with impending doom, regardless of the issue at stake, is to either deny it exists, like climate change, or do the complete opposite of what needs to be done. Logic and rational approaches to problem solving have been replaced with denial, wishful thinking, or actual plots to allow things to crash and burn rather than cooperate with one another. Trust me both the far right and the far left are hoping it will crash and burn. They’d rather end up with nothing than concede in the slightest to one another.
Thus, nothing gets fixed.
I wish I had the time to explore the many contradictory and damaging messages that come from politicians and American citizens over the internet and in the public domain. Whether in school board meetings, town meetings, churches, radio stations and podcasts, newspapers or political rallies, the ranting and screaming that has become customary feels like we’re on a self directed mission to destroy our very existence.
I know I’ve rambled in this essay. I apologize.
I really am capable of writing a cohesive essay that sticks to a main idea, but there is no main idea to our current state of affairs. It’s too multifaceted, too varied, and too scattered to pull together into a single solution. Solutions remain illusive. We can’t pinpoint the problem.
Why?
Because it’s not just one or two or even three or four problems. It’s everything. Everything is morphing before our eyes and we seem to have no power to stop it. When chaos rules, humans resort to their baser instincts. That’s what we always do.
It may be driven by our personal needs to survive at all cost.
Of course, our current drama may play out on its own without resorting to humanity’s favorite go-to solution — war. I hope so. But even if the storm passes, when we get to the other side, I feel certain that we will discover that the old normal has been replaced with a new normal.
Will we like the new normal is the question that keeps plaguing me.
Teresa Roberts is a retired educator, author, world traveler, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
