"Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes."
- P.J. O’Rourke
Catastrophizing is an excuse mechanism. If we fixate on impossibly large issues, then it gets us out of the day to day grind of doing work that makes things slightly better at the scale where we can have a real impact.
I imagine that every era seems unprecedented to those experiencing it. From what I know, it doesn't seem like inflation is as bad as it was in the late 70s, and I think that polarization/animosity is likely in a better state than the late 60s and many points throughout the 19th century. My personal hypothesis that we may be drawn to media about the "end-times" because it confirms our suspicions that everything is falling apart, which gives us permission to give in, to stop putting in the endless effort to keep the world spinning, as it were. Unfortunately, it is very easy to become incapacitated and miserable with this fixation, from my experience! I hope that we will all be able to accept some level of chaos, dysfunction, and fear as a part of life, because then we can work with each other to minimize the suffering and live gratefully. Like you said, there's a lot of alienation and detachment in the world today; I think that people will do a lot better if/when we refocus on community and our loved ones, and accept responsibility for our lives.
Thank you for sharing your writing! I really like reading your perspective on things :-)
Good post. Whatever the flaws of modern society, most people live with safety and luxury that would have been unimaginable in centuries past. Ironically, this may be a source of discontent, inasmuch as it may deprive people of a sense of purpose. In a more hardscrabble world, living another day is the purpose (or, alternately, leaves you with little time to reflect about your lack of purpose).
Yes I think everything has become too easy and many of us have lost an appreciation for life. The #1 thing that's not being talked about enough is quantum computers. This will shake up our society in a way that I don't think anyone can truly foresee. Let's hope it's the good kind of apocalypse and not the bad one :-) Great article Monica! Happy new year!🥳
You’re reading my mind, Sabrina! In the last few months I’ve become fixated on the downstream effects of quantum computers and AI. I believe it is THE single greatest existential threat to humanity. I plan to write a lot more about this issue, and this piece was actually a lead-in.
YES, especially to this: “We are simply coming to grips with the realization that despite the many benefits and conveniences the modern world has gifted us, it has deprived us of what matters most to us as human beings: a visceral appreciation of life.”
Not sure if this is relevant but..... when I think of the unveiling of our real and unelected leaders, I think of all the NGOs and nonprofits that have managed to get laws passed to support the woke agenda.
Yes, exactly. The “unveiling” in that respect is the revelation that the woke agenda isn’t organic but merely a product of social engineering by organizations and other interests, often clandestinely.
And there's lots of bucks involved. Could it be that our existential enemy is money....or does it just mean its another veil to be removed? Wow, this is a very strange rabbit hole with "apocalyptic leanings."
I agree with your mom. You can’t get to the light without going through the darkness. It is our individual and collective shadows we need to face.
And then, we need to do the work to reclaim the earth we come from and belong to, the soil, the water, the entire system that has been hijacked and commodified by corporate interests to control us so a handful of people can have all the spoils while the rest of humanity eats each other alive in some apocalyptic nightmare scenario.
I just wanna say, my 7 year old grand nephew killed his first buck a few weeks ago. My dad raised us to fish, hunt, garden, forage, and to share with people who are in need. We were not religious, and we had very little money. But we were not taught to value money or pedigrees. We were taught to value things that we needed to survive and to enjoy those things.
I believe people are in need of that, but these existential crises screens with their endless videos romanticizing that are a distraction from it.
I garden for a living. I can’t sing the praises of growing food and pollinator plants and repairing soil and natural systems enough.
If you want to feel better about end times blues, just get your hands in the dirt we come from and get to work.
Geez, maybe it’s because it’s the first Monday in January, but this is the theme for today.
I read Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand Files (highly recommend) and today’s question was about how to find hope in what seems like such a hopeless and dire world situation. I am going to share here what the lovely Nick Cave, in his eternally optimistic POV had to say:
“ Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing.
We achieve this vitality of spirit by rejecting the relentless promotion of despair and opening our eyes to the beauty of things, however imperilled, degraded, or difficult to love the world may appear to be. We try to view the world not as it is packaged, presented and sold to us but as we imagine it could be.
We do not look away from the world, we look directly at it and allow the spirit of hope - the necessary driver of change - to inspire us to action.”
Love the article Monica! Great insight that resonates strongly. I am curious about this particular part: “Humanity doesn’t have a death wish. We don’t crave the destruction of all the beautiful and wonderful things we have built together, or the advancements we’ve made in our society.”
I wonder sometimes about this quote from your article, because it seems even though humanity at large may not have a death wish, there are PLENTY of people who seem to have exactly that. Like the billionaires and powerful people behind the WHO and the New World Order, transhumanists, and even mainstream media who seem intent on reporting only that which supports their radically progressive vision, and most of the current movies and TV shows being incredibly dark/evil/satanic/hopeless. Do these people not have a death wish? Or are they seriously too blind to understand the world they are creating is one in which humankind cannot survive?
I notice another miniature apocalypse in the Bible as you describe it: Matthew 27:50-54. In it. I notice a death, an upheaval of nature, an "unveiling" (the Temple entrance to the Holy of Holies); and it ends with a Roman centurion "the enemy" giving to God the glory.
Excellent article! Thank you also for mentioning George Stewart's Earth Abides, which I did not know of. Interesting to contrast Stewart's vision as described in your article with Huxley's Island, which he may well have written to rebut Stewart. But Huxley was an inveterate pessimist.
HA! I read the first paragraph then wrote a post about Al Gore, then I read the whole essay. I knew that I was off target when I read this part and answered it only to have you make the same point later on.
"What’s the first thought that comes to mind when you hear the word “apocalypse”?"
- Revelation
It's called the Book of Revelation, not the Book of Destruction.
People turned it into a scary term because they needed to scare people into following their Rules.
It's all part of the typical con-artist patter, the flim flam man getting you to buy into his scam.
Then you mentioned Earth Abides, and I lost it. That book has haunted me for decades. Stephen King wrote The Stand because of it.
Then I started laughing in reaction and had to go eat lunch to settle down, because I have read every novel, watched all the movies and TV series that built on Earth Abides, and I've come to a different conclusion.
Your OZ metaphor is the answer:
- Once we reveal the Man Behind the Curtain, this world will blossom, because he only gets away with his BS because we don't see him.
Right now, we are at the beginning of the Great Unveiling. HA!
BTW, NASA has been monitoring the Earth's surface with satellites for decades, and they have seen the Earth Greening by 40% since 1980. The semiarid parts of the world have actually greened, not turned into deserts.
CO2 is plant food, and reduces stress on plants, making it easier for them to grow using the limited water that they get. This has also helped grow crops, so all of Gore's predictions of cracked soil replacing farmland has been shown to be false even when he was pushing An Inconvenient Truth.
This is an example of how we can turn this planet into a garden.
In 1807, William Wordsworth went far in addressing the points you have made here.
The World Is Too Much with Us
By William Wordsworth (1807)
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn1;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea2
,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus3 rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton4 blow his wreathed horn.
It is a timeless poem and it pegs the responsibility to a timeless “we”. “We” are out of tune. “We” lay waste our powers. “We” have given our hearts away. It doesn’t matter when I first read it in my high school years, I knew that I shared the responsibility for the Industrial Revolution.
But to address what you’ve written on a Spiritual level, I borrow remarks from Rev. Fred Luter, Franklin Ave. Baptist Church in New Orleans. Rev. Luter was preaching to a group of Samaritan’s Purse volunteers and also to Billy Graham Chaplains, using Psalm 34:19; “Many are the afflictions of the righteous; but, the Lord will deliver him out of them all.” Rev. Luter sums up his point to the assembly by holding his Bible high and telling the volunteers that they do not have to worry about anything, “because it is written in the script.”
Of course he is going to that area you and your mother previously debated. Rev. Luter’s point was that Christ and His followers/believers have already won. Their eternal “home” is not on the earth.
William Wordsworth was correct, so too - I believe - is Rev. Luter.
One addition to your list of things wreaking havoc on planet earth: solid waste. I believe the climate hysteria is meant to distract from the solid waste piling up and/or floating around the earth. The joke at the RNC about Puerto Rico being a floating island of garbage was pointed directly at that problem. There is the tendency to not worry about a problem unless one is directly affected, and our politicians and wealthy class don't likely live next to landfills. Now that plastics and drugs are spread through the environment and in the food we eat, one doesn't have to live next to a garbage dump to experience the negative consequences of proliferating solid waste.
"Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes."
- P.J. O’Rourke
Catastrophizing is an excuse mechanism. If we fixate on impossibly large issues, then it gets us out of the day to day grind of doing work that makes things slightly better at the scale where we can have a real impact.
Oof, that observation hits hard!
Chop wood, carry water...
I imagine that every era seems unprecedented to those experiencing it. From what I know, it doesn't seem like inflation is as bad as it was in the late 70s, and I think that polarization/animosity is likely in a better state than the late 60s and many points throughout the 19th century. My personal hypothesis that we may be drawn to media about the "end-times" because it confirms our suspicions that everything is falling apart, which gives us permission to give in, to stop putting in the endless effort to keep the world spinning, as it were. Unfortunately, it is very easy to become incapacitated and miserable with this fixation, from my experience! I hope that we will all be able to accept some level of chaos, dysfunction, and fear as a part of life, because then we can work with each other to minimize the suffering and live gratefully. Like you said, there's a lot of alienation and detachment in the world today; I think that people will do a lot better if/when we refocus on community and our loved ones, and accept responsibility for our lives.
Thank you for sharing your writing! I really like reading your perspective on things :-)
Good post. Whatever the flaws of modern society, most people live with safety and luxury that would have been unimaginable in centuries past. Ironically, this may be a source of discontent, inasmuch as it may deprive people of a sense of purpose. In a more hardscrabble world, living another day is the purpose (or, alternately, leaves you with little time to reflect about your lack of purpose).
Yes I think everything has become too easy and many of us have lost an appreciation for life. The #1 thing that's not being talked about enough is quantum computers. This will shake up our society in a way that I don't think anyone can truly foresee. Let's hope it's the good kind of apocalypse and not the bad one :-) Great article Monica! Happy new year!🥳
You’re reading my mind, Sabrina! In the last few months I’ve become fixated on the downstream effects of quantum computers and AI. I believe it is THE single greatest existential threat to humanity. I plan to write a lot more about this issue, and this piece was actually a lead-in.
Synchronicity! 🩷
“Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction, ice
Is also great, and would suffice.”
Robert Frost, 1920
YES, especially to this: “We are simply coming to grips with the realization that despite the many benefits and conveniences the modern world has gifted us, it has deprived us of what matters most to us as human beings: a visceral appreciation of life.”
Not sure if this is relevant but..... when I think of the unveiling of our real and unelected leaders, I think of all the NGOs and nonprofits that have managed to get laws passed to support the woke agenda.
Yes, exactly. The “unveiling” in that respect is the revelation that the woke agenda isn’t organic but merely a product of social engineering by organizations and other interests, often clandestinely.
And there's lots of bucks involved. Could it be that our existential enemy is money....or does it just mean its another veil to be removed? Wow, this is a very strange rabbit hole with "apocalyptic leanings."
I agree with your mom. You can’t get to the light without going through the darkness. It is our individual and collective shadows we need to face.
And then, we need to do the work to reclaim the earth we come from and belong to, the soil, the water, the entire system that has been hijacked and commodified by corporate interests to control us so a handful of people can have all the spoils while the rest of humanity eats each other alive in some apocalyptic nightmare scenario.
I just wanna say, my 7 year old grand nephew killed his first buck a few weeks ago. My dad raised us to fish, hunt, garden, forage, and to share with people who are in need. We were not religious, and we had very little money. But we were not taught to value money or pedigrees. We were taught to value things that we needed to survive and to enjoy those things.
I believe people are in need of that, but these existential crises screens with their endless videos romanticizing that are a distraction from it.
I garden for a living. I can’t sing the praises of growing food and pollinator plants and repairing soil and natural systems enough.
If you want to feel better about end times blues, just get your hands in the dirt we come from and get to work.
Geez, maybe it’s because it’s the first Monday in January, but this is the theme for today.
I read Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand Files (highly recommend) and today’s question was about how to find hope in what seems like such a hopeless and dire world situation. I am going to share here what the lovely Nick Cave, in his eternally optimistic POV had to say:
“ Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing.
We achieve this vitality of spirit by rejecting the relentless promotion of despair and opening our eyes to the beauty of things, however imperilled, degraded, or difficult to love the world may appear to be. We try to view the world not as it is packaged, presented and sold to us but as we imagine it could be.
We do not look away from the world, we look directly at it and allow the spirit of hope - the necessary driver of change - to inspire us to action.”
Love the article Monica! Great insight that resonates strongly. I am curious about this particular part: “Humanity doesn’t have a death wish. We don’t crave the destruction of all the beautiful and wonderful things we have built together, or the advancements we’ve made in our society.”
I wonder sometimes about this quote from your article, because it seems even though humanity at large may not have a death wish, there are PLENTY of people who seem to have exactly that. Like the billionaires and powerful people behind the WHO and the New World Order, transhumanists, and even mainstream media who seem intent on reporting only that which supports their radically progressive vision, and most of the current movies and TV shows being incredibly dark/evil/satanic/hopeless. Do these people not have a death wish? Or are they seriously too blind to understand the world they are creating is one in which humankind cannot survive?
I notice another miniature apocalypse in the Bible as you describe it: Matthew 27:50-54. In it. I notice a death, an upheaval of nature, an "unveiling" (the Temple entrance to the Holy of Holies); and it ends with a Roman centurion "the enemy" giving to God the glory.
You gave a good description of an apocalypse.
Thank you for sharing that passage, gadfly. It seems that the theme of “unveiling” carries great significance in the Bible.
Wow. You touched on something mind-shifting here for me. I am going to be thinking about this deeply, for a long time.
BS"D
Excellent article! Thank you also for mentioning George Stewart's Earth Abides, which I did not know of. Interesting to contrast Stewart's vision as described in your article with Huxley's Island, which he may well have written to rebut Stewart. But Huxley was an inveterate pessimist.
Best wishes for the New Year!
HA! I read the first paragraph then wrote a post about Al Gore, then I read the whole essay. I knew that I was off target when I read this part and answered it only to have you make the same point later on.
"What’s the first thought that comes to mind when you hear the word “apocalypse”?"
- Revelation
It's called the Book of Revelation, not the Book of Destruction.
People turned it into a scary term because they needed to scare people into following their Rules.
It's all part of the typical con-artist patter, the flim flam man getting you to buy into his scam.
Then you mentioned Earth Abides, and I lost it. That book has haunted me for decades. Stephen King wrote The Stand because of it.
Then I started laughing in reaction and had to go eat lunch to settle down, because I have read every novel, watched all the movies and TV series that built on Earth Abides, and I've come to a different conclusion.
Your OZ metaphor is the answer:
- Once we reveal the Man Behind the Curtain, this world will blossom, because he only gets away with his BS because we don't see him.
Right now, we are at the beginning of the Great Unveiling. HA!
This is amazing disinformation from the Paid Trolls.
‘He’s making trouble anywhere’: Swisher on Musk feuding with world leaders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwgvmUAKJ2Q
Musk is calling out the hypocrisy of Britain, and the Elite are terrified because the regular people are seeing it revealed.
This is so much fun to watch the curtain be pulled aside, revealing the aging Wizard of OZ.
I suddenly started humming Ode to Joy with everything that is happening since yesterday. Trump election confirmed. Trudeau gone, now this.
BREAKING: Meta issues major changes to restore free speech on Facebook, Instagram
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRcTiOGpmVE
It has begun.
Flashmob Flash Mob - Ode an die Freude ( Ode to Joy ) Beethoven Symphony No.9 classical music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbJcQYVtZMo
This is the first post I wrote before I read the essay:
This is a beautiful documentary that came out in 2007 that gives the history of the Global Warming Swindle:
The Great Global Warming Swindle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY-gRFSaP7o
Al Gore is a classic flim flam artist, scaring people so that he could make hundreds of millions on the scam.
They mention Al Gore and his making money along the way in this documentary from 2020:
Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans | A Film by Jeff Gibbs | Full Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
BTW, NASA has been monitoring the Earth's surface with satellites for decades, and they have seen the Earth Greening by 40% since 1980. The semiarid parts of the world have actually greened, not turned into deserts.
CO2 is plant food, and reduces stress on plants, making it easier for them to grow using the limited water that they get. This has also helped grow crops, so all of Gore's predictions of cracked soil replacing farmland has been shown to be false even when he was pushing An Inconvenient Truth.
This is an example of how we can turn this planet into a garden.
How the UN is Holding Back the Sahara Desert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCli0gyNwL0
It just takes people doing the work.
But I digress.
In 1807, William Wordsworth went far in addressing the points you have made here.
The World Is Too Much with Us
By William Wordsworth (1807)
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn1;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea2
,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus3 rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton4 blow his wreathed horn.
It is a timeless poem and it pegs the responsibility to a timeless “we”. “We” are out of tune. “We” lay waste our powers. “We” have given our hearts away. It doesn’t matter when I first read it in my high school years, I knew that I shared the responsibility for the Industrial Revolution.
But to address what you’ve written on a Spiritual level, I borrow remarks from Rev. Fred Luter, Franklin Ave. Baptist Church in New Orleans. Rev. Luter was preaching to a group of Samaritan’s Purse volunteers and also to Billy Graham Chaplains, using Psalm 34:19; “Many are the afflictions of the righteous; but, the Lord will deliver him out of them all.” Rev. Luter sums up his point to the assembly by holding his Bible high and telling the volunteers that they do not have to worry about anything, “because it is written in the script.”
Of course he is going to that area you and your mother previously debated. Rev. Luter’s point was that Christ and His followers/believers have already won. Their eternal “home” is not on the earth.
William Wordsworth was correct, so too - I believe - is Rev. Luter.
One addition to your list of things wreaking havoc on planet earth: solid waste. I believe the climate hysteria is meant to distract from the solid waste piling up and/or floating around the earth. The joke at the RNC about Puerto Rico being a floating island of garbage was pointed directly at that problem. There is the tendency to not worry about a problem unless one is directly affected, and our politicians and wealthy class don't likely live next to landfills. Now that plastics and drugs are spread through the environment and in the food we eat, one doesn't have to live next to a garbage dump to experience the negative consequences of proliferating solid waste.