We had such a bright future ahead of us. What happened?
It seems these days that (almost) just about everything in the world is going wrong. Yet just a decade ago, the world could still have reasonably been characterized as an optimistic place. The internet was evolving out of infanthood, carrying with it a promise of unlimited knowledge and connection. Sweeping reforms were promised following the 2008 financial crisis, and the world had just been introduced to a nifty product called the “iPhone.” Technology, society, and the economy all seemed to be improving. Humanity appeared to be on the cusp of the future, ushering in an era of prosperity unparalleled in all history.
But somewhere along the line, the optimism began to fade. Opponents of the global order gained traction, and a wave of populism shook the world. Social activists focused popular attention on many examples of racism and sexism. Awareness of fake news began to permeate the mainstream in a matter of years.
The mood predictably worsened when the pandemic hit, seemingly out of the blue and giving no advance warning at all. Sure, there were a few articles about the “novel coronavirus” when it first broke out in China, but those treated it as a rather exotic disease that would have no real life consequences for the average citizen. Many of our politicians were apparently of the same opinion at the time, Trump having assured America that the pandemic posed no threat to the nation whatsoever.
The denial continued straight up until this March, when things suddenly changed. Before we even started to process the gravity of the situation, the saner politicians went on TV to announce that the pandemic was indeed dangerous, and by the very next week, issued austere quarantine measures that hadn’t been seen in Western societies for more than 100 years, the last time being the Spanish Flu of 1918. The less sane ones continued to pretend that the virus would just “fade away by summer,” “miraculously disappear,” or was “under control.” Millions around the world believed figures like Trump or Bolsonaro, both of whom spread outright falsehoods at the time of crisis and have appeared to actively hurt the public health responses in their respective countries.
Many wealthy countries, which were seen as the standard for public health, crumbled in their response as the world watched events unfold in gaping horror. Lines formed at grocery stories as essentials ran out, most memorably, toilet paper. Hospitals ran out of protective equipment, ventilators, virus test kits, and other essential equipment as patients died from the pandemic by the tens of thousands. Political leaders feuded with their scientific advisors, often appearing even to be at odds with them. Fake news and misinformation spread like wildfire, and many people panicked. Soon, after a short stint in lockdown, the protests began. A few began here and there over mask wearing or quarantine measures, yet more was to come in the summer. Thousands of activists, mostly in the United States, but nonetheless all over the world, rose up in mass protests over perceived systemic racism and police brutality. Cars burned, shopfronts smashed, teargas raged, and rubber bullets flew as police deployed blunt force on the streets of America.
Then the election came, and still hasn’t gone. Trump had continually cast doubt on legitimate mail in voting and never even agreed to abide by the rules of the election, saying that he would only accept the results if he won. This may be one of the few promises that he has actually kept, considering that true to his word, he still has not conceded defeat to Joe Biden, whom major new outlets agree is indeed the victor of the race.
And that’s not even to mention some of the other downer topics in the world right now. California wildfires. Arctic ice melting. Trade wars with China. Internet company monopolies. Economic recession. Social media addiction. Finance in politics. Depression. Drug addiction. Inequality. Racism. Government surveillance. The list goes on and on.
Some readers may even question or deny that some events I refer to even happened, or at least happened in a very significantly different manner than which I described. Our very idea of a common truth and ability to communicate with each other has frayed, and even more so the capacity to reason with each other. Everyone seems to be caught in their own echo chamber of ideas, playing on full blast, drowning out any alternative viewpoints from those who come from elsewhere in life.
How did it come to this? Why has our once bright vision turned so dark? Something just doesn’t feel right with the world around us, something is out of whack. Something must not be as it seems.
Meanwhile in our personal lives, things aren’t going much better. We barely manage to wake up just in time to drag ourselves before our morning cup of coffee, which places many of us at our simultaneously beloved and dreaded office desk, staring dully at words on a computer screen for the remainder of the daylight hours during which the sun beckons outside temptingly, but which we know we have no right to enjoy. Often having no time to even sit properly for lunch, we reply to email messages and get interrupted by chat messages and texts until darkness finally falls, signaling the release from our office prison.
After a stressful day, some of us binge Netflix until our brains fold from utter exhaustion and we collapse into our beds, dreading the coming of the next morning and a return to the cubicle farm. Some of us scroll through social media envying the photos of recently wedded friends who look oh so happy, or that one suave, photogenic acquaintance who just conveniently happens to be visiting a different country every week. Or we go on the thousandth date suggested to us by the dating algorithms at Tinder, hoping that this time we meet The One, somehow that this time, things will work out differently.
We are bombarded 24/7 with advertisements and messages actively tracking us around the internet, telling us that we’re not good enough as we are; that to be successful, we need the product that they just so happen to happily offer for a small monthly fee. Apps constantly vie and manipulate our attention from our phones, and Amazon now delivers even within hours at the touch of a screen. We now buy pleasures and experiences unimaginable in any other period of human history, and the internet puts the entire world at our fingertips. In fact, we can buy and know almost anything we desire at this point, except that which we all want most: happiness and satisfaction.
Isn’t happiness the reason we sit in misery all day in our office chairs praying to the 401(k) Gods? Isn’t happiness the reason we survive another terrible date from the internet, only to grit our teeth and say, “next?” Isn’t happiness the reason we drink more alcohol or buy more drugs, watch more TV, only to find ourselves ungraciously dumped into an even deeper hole than we had found ourselves the previous morning, plus a hangover to boot? The word we say to ourselves when we take a loan on a car that we cannot afford, when we stress over the likes and comments on our Instagram accounts?
If those things truly brought as much happiness as they are generally claimed to bring, the entire world would have converted to a utopian Disneyland years ago, and we should be living in the happily ever after phase. Instead, when I look around at modern society, I see a massive amount of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Dissatisfaction with career, dissatisfaction with economic opportunities, with politics, relationships, even with lifestyle. The most striking feature of all of this? None of us really knows why.
We don’t know why anger, hate, and misinformation has spread so rapidly across society. We don’t know why depression and suicide is on the rise. Or why politicians seem to lie so much these days, seemingly in the face of common sense itself. The rise of extremism and partisanship in the United States is a highly concerning problem which affects all us citizens, yet we are unable to understand it fully. Often, we don’t even know why the “other side” (Democrats or Republicans, black or white, men or women) does what they do.
Are the answers to these questions truly beyond our grasp, or are we merely deceiving ourselves, being at least somewhat willfully ignorant of basic facts staring us straight in the face? I can’t be sure of the answers, but these questions fascinate me, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about them. No one person can provide complete answers to these very complex questions of life, but I hope that I am able to spark reflection and discussion on a pressing, modern question over my next posts: What is happening with the world today, and why?
If there’s one thing we can all agree on today, it is probably that there is a problem with the world today. Not all questions I raise regarding pressing issues will be considered socially correct to everyone, but that is a risk I am willing to take to get to the heart of the matter.
One case I want to make in more detail is that Trump is at least partially right about the media. The media doesn’t sell truth; they sell narratives, which are essentially the stories that connect the dots between facts and events. This is all good and normal, but at the present moment, many outlets blatantly push one sided narratives that ignore the possibility of there being other sides to the story. The resulting cacophony has grown so loud and disorienting that many give up the hope of making sense of it all and end up sucked into one side or the other.
Other hot topics I want to touch on are, in brief, the idea that advertisements are almost all categorically lying to us, manipulating our vulnerable human psychology into performing the behaviors companies desire. The idea that we’ll be happy in retirement after working our bones frail following a lifetime of sitting in an office chair, is probably another lie. “Woke” culture is, in my humble opinion, not so woke. And buying too many things off the internet doesn’t actually make us happier, on the contrary, it’s probably a major contributing factor to our collective misery.
Above all, I want to illustrate the point that everything in our world is connected. The careers we choose, the photos we post on Facebook, yelling at a stranger, Donald Trump, government corruption, our Netflix watchlist, the economy — each one of these items is significantly related to the whole of the world in which we live. There is an ancient Hindu idea that I’m sure you have heard of, called karma. Literally translated, karma means “action.” Speaking is karma. Eating is karma. Planting a tree is karma, and so on. Yet karma in the philosophical sense also takes into the account the impacts of our actions, the impacts of those actions our actions inspired, and so on down the line.
Imagine that you work in a small company of ten people. You lose your temper in a meeting at two of your coworkers, ruining their day. Since they’re pissed off, they come off rudely to the company secretary. The next time you talk to the secretary, who has already been indirectly pissed off by yourself, the secretary speaks to you disrespectfully, which in turn pisses you off even more. This is the basic idea of karma, that what goes around comes around. It’s not as much of a magical or mysterious concept we sometimes think it is, I think we can find it all around us if we just look in the right places. All your actions come back to you at some point, at some level, because we all live in one giant, connected world. The trouble is, once the metaphorical company or community we interact in grows larger and larger, the effects of our actions don’t always come back to us immediately, and we often lose sight of the fact that what goes around comes around.
The world today is littered full of things it has lost sight of. Yet in the pieces and ashes there is hope of a reconstruction, a better world, and a better you. Events are more related than we realize, and often make more sense than we think. As the pieces come together, life becomes clearer, lighter, and more purposeful. For all you willing to explore the tough questions, come down the rabbit hole with me.
