The race to the bottom
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The race to the bottom
Please don’t use the phrase ‘first world problems’ in my presence.
It has become too much of a throwaway line that trivialises and dismisses the immense and growing pressures many people in developed nations are living under on a daily basis. These pressures include but are not limited to crushingly large home mortgages with rising interest rates, rapidly rising home rental costs, diagnoses of chronic illnesses from mild to serious, relationship tensions that range from so-called minor discontentment and bickering through to full scale domestic violence, the challenges of raising children in a technologically advancing society with declining behavioural standards, troubles in the workplace including bullying, poor management and the ever-present threat of job loss, the global ever-rising cost of living, the difficulty of keeping up with the multitude of expensive and complex compliances that small business owners must answer to, the challenges of supporting ill and ageing parents . . .
Feel free to add to the list. It is not exhaustive in terms of the bombardment most of us face on a daily basis. Add in grindingly bad traffic, the rudeness of the people who serve you in the shops, the inconsideration on the roads, the coldness of people to each other in small interactions . . . here we go with another throwaway line – death by a thousand cuts. Let’s say it properly though.
It is the crushing of our aliveness, sense of purpose and natural abundant joyousness by a million normal everyday assaults, be they ‘trivially’ tiny or insurmountably huge.
That’s just how life is. Right?
Comparative assurances, such as ‘at least I/you don’t have cancer . . .’, or ‘well at least [fill in the name of your nation] is still the best country in the world . . .’ or ‘think about the starving children in [fill in the latest country ravaged by drought or war] because they are worse off than you’ are less than unhelpful. They have acted as a cushion against us getting very real and honest about the state of our world at large, our society and local communities and life in general, all of which have become brutally hostile and indifferent to the quality of life of the people who make up its numbers.
Think this is too extreme a statement? Spend some time waiting interminably on a phone line to a government agency, or your power company, or an insurance provider, or a bank you hold accounts with, or your internet provider. The constant invocations from the electronically ‘soothing’ voice, telling you that aggression will not be accepted when you finally get to talk to someone, reveals the level of pressure that people are under – pushed and goaded to the point of losing it at the first person they get to speak to after minutes of being tortured by ‘on-hold’ music, added to weeks, months, years of being reduced to a disrespected nothing by the callous emptiness of life.
That rage (blasted at entirely the wrong person) is not just about the crappy internet that is so bad you can barely send an email at peak time. Nor is it only about the convoluted banking problem, or the stalled insurance claim that bounces you telephonically between three operators, none of whom have a lucid answer to your problem and none of whom care.
It is the bursting pimple filled with the mass of 2?, 10?, 1000? daily incidents and events – all the ‘normalities’ of modern existence – that inflict unnecessary levels of angst over the complication and insolvability of it all. Each one apparently trivial but lending its weight to an array of dehumanising indifference. It is the you-don’t-matterness of it all that hurts the parts of us that are deeply sensitive and strongly register the fact that something is very wrong under all the slick societal marketing that promises everything and delivers only misery. There is a part of us that knows we have lost more than we have ever gained from the ‘advancement’ of society. It is the ‘thousand cuts’ that finally blow up when the urgent email cannot be sent, or the colleague at work says the ‘wrong’ thing. There is no excuse for exploding in rage at the person who finally answers the phone or the work colleague or the bus driver. They are under the same strains, the same inhuman compliances and callous indifference as we are – as all of us are.
Screaming at each other, directing blame at other people, arming ourselves with hostility to survive, or indulging pay-back simply add another portion to the general horror, making normal the wretched state to which human co-existence has degenerated.
Frankly, I cannot stand the general mealy mouthed suggestions of being unfailingly nice and polite to each other as a solution to these manifold problems. Niceness has never fixed anything – all it does is present an acceptably weakened façade over a being filled with hurt, rage and despair. How on earth can we even fantasise that that could help anything in a meaningful way?
The concept of ‘paying it forward’ is a delusional lie. It invokes us to optimistically exhaust ourselves in pointless gestures of kindness that change nothing as the systems grind us to dust. Watch and see how embittered you become after a life of giving away trinkets of goodness . . . waiting and waiting and waiting for the payback that was promised, and you deserve for all of the kindly effort you put in. The lack of reward and the fact that the world is as bad as it ever was, in spite of all these ‘kindness deposits’ , can either embitter us or lend weight to giving up on humanity – effectively adding to the deterioration.
Rebellion is worse than useless. Never once in the history of mankind has it worked, yet the harm it has caused with the ruination of lives and communities – is never talked of nor given the space for consideration in the busy propaganda touting its ‘success’. The only accomplishment from uprisings is a change of the name of the tyrant calling the shots and in the colours of the forms that have to be filled out to validate your existence.
Escaping to the bush or the beach is a lovely fantasy. Until you get sick and cannot find a decent hospital to care for you. And then you notice that the place is filled with similar escapees who brought their disappointment and bad internet with them. What are we seeking to escape anyway if not the general withdrawal of despair that so many of us have entered into, from the endless brow beating of ‘normal modern life’? And that exists everywhere. The beach views are lovely, but the same societal problems blight every single part of human civilisation. Run away by all means – but you are not getting away from it.
So what am I suggesting to us? Surely after all of that complaining and negativity there must be something of value to contribute, some sort of answer I am hinting at to deal with the tsunami of ‘no care’ dehumanisation and misery that has flooded the modern world.
Sorry to disappoint, but I have nothing but the most powerful tools on offer: humbleness, realness, awareness and honesty.
That’s it.
The suggestion is to put down everything else. All of the improvement, the self-help, the fixing, the solutions, the band-aids, the spiritual new age, and the worst of it all – hope and positive thinking with their best friend in delusion, optimism. Pessimism is equally unhelpful. It is nothing more than an elaborately knowing excuse to remain fixed in grimness, meanwhile whining about the parts of life you don’t like because they don’t suit you.
Humbleness and realness are our greatest collective assets to face the world as we have allowed it to become, with the willingness to be genuinely aware of what is going on and honest about its impacts.
Awareness depends on developing at least a relatively settled body. This means reining in hard on the drama, the story-telling, the incitement and the over-reactivity. Those things might make for great dinner party conversation (maybe), but they ravage our ability to simply observe life. Quite simply, they aren’t helping. Worse, they are adding to the general pool of emotion, hurt and devastation that sustains every part of life we hate. They may seem hard to give up, but once you start pulling your head in on reactions, the heavy price paid by our body for having to endure them becomes very apparent. A long-forgotten (long-abandoned) level of clarity starts to emerge from the fog of what is the normally accepted range of emotions and behaviours, and our outrage of hopelessness at it all. It is then that we can become aware of the larger scale of what is making life happen – no longer a pinball being bashed between the bumpers and whipped into a frenzy by the flippers, we realise it was never the bumpers and flippers that were the problem. Without entertaining paranoia, and with genuine will to be aware, it becomes clear that there are immense forces operating on human existence – their origin, inhuman, their quality, brutally indifferent. Not one of us are deliberately making it so awful, but all of us contributing to its swill because we are so deeply enmeshed in it and have not bothered to ask … why? It then becomes abundantly clear why reacting, yelling at each other, blaming each other, or trying to manipulate or cajole each other was never going to work.
Honesty is crucial at this point. With awareness, the real grimness that has overtaken human life becomes painfully apparent. Truly, it is awful to see the scale of suffering of the people around us. It starts to make sense of why our communities have become so degraded and people so insular and self-involved. Most people are suffering or struggling to some degree. The majority are just making it through their day – they have zero in their care-bank to offer to anyone else. Truly open your eyes, walk down the road and you will witness the ravages in people’s bodies and the strain and unhappiness in their faces. There is virtually no vibrancy and joy in the way anyone moves after the age of six – most of us move because we have to (or else) but the reluctance and resistance, and the suffering from physical unwellness and the lack of real purpose in life cannot be unseen.
This is the real epidemic dis-ease of our era – the disorder of the ravaging awfulness of human existence is common – but that does not make it normal.
You might argue that you see plenty of people running, trekking, working out at the gym or leading a great life, looking amazingly fit and ‘doing well’. That’s great, but look into their eyes. If there is an absence of warmth, depth, human intimacy and genuine transparency, then really, what does it matter how fast they can move, how hot they look and how successful they are? This is not judgement. It is humble awareness and honesty stripping off the socially condoned blinkers, to reveal the hollowness of what we have been trained to aspire to at the devastating cost of something that we cannot name, but all deeply miss.
We were made for more than this reductive degrading debacle. No amount of gourmet food, beer, great sex, entertainment, success or sport can compensate for the aching lack we all feel, whether we admit it or not. No amount of complaining will give it back to us. And if we give up, it will never be found. Those busy versions of life might drown out the pain of its absence for a while, but eventually our belly empties, we sober up and have to come home.
In spite of the miserable descriptions of the state of our world above, it is crucial to say that there is a quality that is genuinely gorgeous about the human being. This statement includes all of us. Even the most raddled, given up and despairing of us reveal a deeper glory when something disinhibits us enough that we laugh with real joy, or when we are truly inspired by something that is not the paltriness of good but the power of truth. The eyes come alive, revealing uncharted depths beyond what the surface strategising and normalised despair conventionally allows. Even if this light emerges for but a moment from behind the dark clouds that shroud us when we give up on life, that moment is eternally real and cannot ever be fully forgotten. It hints at what is, deep within us, never lost, simply forgotten.
It is possible to talk forever about the beautiful radiance of us all as children – and the truth and purity of this is fact until the demands of life subsume us, but too many excuses, reasons and unarguable justifications emerge for why miserable adulthood is more natural to us than carrying forth the bubbling vivacity of our younger years to enter into natural union with and ignite the wisdom of our adulthood.
In spite of our conditioning to the contrary, the two are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to be wise and brim with a vivacity that is as limitlessly joyful as it is light. So what/who are we arguing for, with all of those set-in-concrete rationalisations for why life must be a wretched treadmill of ‘born, pay taxes and die’?
At some point we will all have to get honest about the way life is – the pretence that it is getting ‘better’ as technology burgeons yet quality of life sinks, is worse than blissful ignorance. It is crucially harming us as we either play at the fantasy, try as hard as we can to make it work, or withdraw from it altogether in cynical given-upness.
Our body reveals it all, be it through the development of physical disease/s, psychological distress and despair, or the daily horror of normalised ennui that grinds us to boring dust under its vitality crushing feet. This is not being negative, it is simple fact based on the grim statistics that might be used to lie, but ultimately cannot hide the fact that life and society are not working. Our strategies are nothing more than a faster and more frenetic race to the bottom.
The entire contents of this website provide genuine physical, psychological and social support along with deep Soulful nourishment to anyone who has had enough of running in the race to the bottom. This article is nothing more or less than a wake-up call to get real. If more steps are calling to you then ample resources are at hand to support us with genuinely healing and living techniques that allow us to develop strength in awareness and honesty, and to know that we are not alone but have the innate capacity to be part of a grand movement of restoration of true society.
But only if we wake up to the fact that what we have now is not it, and no amount of propaganda, surface redecorating, giving up nor pretence that it is all OK will make it so.
Filed under
Anti-social behaviour, Culture, Overwhelm, Reductionism
