Hell Breaks Loose
laphamsquarterly.org
laphamsquarterly.org
What a remarkable, moving piece of writing. Rich and detailed, timely and poignant.
>>I was trying to look up—at the sky, where paradisiacal clouds still for now remained—instead of down. After months of my mind figuring against the firelight of hellish horrors, something strange had happened: I began wanting again to learn about goodness and hope. I looked around my life to the people I love, and to the people I know who love other people the way I try to love people—that is, all we human beings struggling to be present for one another, who seek strength when finding ourselves too frail to act.
That's the most positive paragraph I could find, yet it still reeks of passivity and defeat.
We live in an age of luxury, splendor and wealth unimaginable just a few hundred years ago. I hope the author is able to follow his own advice and find that "goodness and hope" rather than focusing myopically on the negatives. Life is too short to spend your precious time on earth in a hell of self-induced punishment.
Happiness is orthogonal to success, once you're not being brutalized by the world through no fault of your own.
I feel blessed that I have time to write comments to strangers on the internet, that I have access to the internet, that the house I'm in is temperature controlled within 5°C, that I do not fear my neighbours.
> This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
-- Bertrand Russell
Personally, what additional happiness I could get from not suffering, because of the things he mentions and more, I wouldn't want. That pain is a signal, and to bear it, to use it, rather than numb it or dismiss it as mere party pooping is one of the skills of life IMO.
> I pity people who can't find laughter or at least some bit of amusement in the little doings of the day. I believe I could find something ridiculous even in the saddest moment, if necessary. It has nothing to do with being superficial. It's a matter of joy in life.
-- Sophie Scholl
However, I do think that there is more to it than that. There are things that the average person has gained in the past decades but there are also things that people have lost. I think it is possible that some of the things that have been lost such as home ownership, connection to community, a high rate a marriage, autonomous work (e.g. working as an artisan, independent farmer, or small business owner) are more important to happiness than the luxuries that we gained.
I also think that its possible that some of the luxuries that we've gains (e.g. microwavable food, reality TV, cheap clothing) bring less happiness than the luxuries that are now less common (e.g. engagement with the arts). However, this certainly isn't true of all of the luxuries that we've gained (e.g. antibiotics, the ability to video chat with family on the other side of the world).
Finally, I think it is possible that society plays a role in how likely people are to have or develop the thought processes that you correctly point out lead to happiness. For example, it seems to me that American society often does a poor job of encouraging people to express themselves and to be themselves (e.g. by emphasizing art, toxic masculinity, etc.) which could lead to less confidence and satisfaction. Note that when I say "be themselves" I am referring to lifestyle and expression not the idea that people need to "follow their dreams" to be successful.
The article does capture a sentiment I see becoming more common, and which I somewhat share. We are not nearly as hopeful or optimistic about the future here in the West as in times past. It will be interesting to see how we remember this period. Perhaps there is a precedent - something I’ll ponder and read up on in my ample leisure time as a white collar westerner.
Perhaps not the most intelligent, rational, mature people. Else they'd be more productively occupied, I'd imagine.
An unsustainable age of luxury, splendor, and wealth. We're consuming something like 2.5 Earths' worth of resources.
Species are going extinct at record rates. For example, fisheries, which supply a significant portion of humanity's protein, are collapsing due to the efficiency of our magnificent trawler machines.
We can fly around the world in less than a day and eat steak every night, but this is built on unsustainable energy use. Our cross-country flights emit as much carbon as 6 months of driving, and the calories from that nightly steak require another 10x as many calories from the grain required to feed the cattle, all grown using magnificent fossilfuel-created fertilizer, who's runoff into the gulf creates algae blooms that deplete all the oxygen and further collapse the ecosystem.
Calories are a measure of energy, and as thermodynamics tells us, the energy must come from somewhere. A cow is a machine that converts grain to steak at 10% efficiency. Similarly, grain is a machine that converts soil energy to feedstock. And then artificial fertilizer is a technology that converts fossil fuels to soil energy at something like 15% efficiency [1].
The water required to grow all that grain is coming from dwindling aquifers -- farmers in California's central valley are calling in fracking firms from the fracking fields to drill new special fracking-depth wells because all the ones at traditional depths have gone dry.
> Life is too short to spend your precious time on earth in a hell of self-induced punishment.
Yep, eat drink and be merry today, because it won't be around tomorrow. Shit is gloomy because we're squandering our luxury, splendor and wealth, and we're starting see what it's like when it runs out. To the boomers, this was all abstract boogeymen. Today's generation is the one starting to feel the effects.