I'd at least say it has tragic elements, no matter who you are, and you'll find a lot of small pleasures and enjoyments to cluster around certain unsolvable problems that run like skewers through your life and in different ways stake you to the floor while your wings atrophy. Those small pleasures are things to be grateful for, life would be much worse without them, but never the less much of it will always seem palliative.
This is where it seems critical to pay attention to your processing schema. Some myth of progress is usually helpful although you have to be careful not to project it onto politics as well as admitting to yourself - when push comes to shove - that it is a practical operating mythology. One can take up a spiritual worldview that denotes some sort of long-term alchemical process (like the Masonic 'Great Work') and even with that, if times get really hard, cruel, or unfair you will find yourself buffeted by your circumstances or feel like your world view drastically narrows when under duress (though certain kinds of mental exercise do seem to reduce that). I think the key to pinning down worldviews that work is understand that they help provide sanity through boredom and otherwise slow/bland circumstances, or the subtle pains of life, so that you're fully in tact when you're going through hard times rather than getting to the hard times in life already broken (you're best assurance of making it out the other side).
As for whether the world is really burning right now - its tough to say, but I think for most negative things we see these days there are positive countervailing forces we don't see, and when those standardize and take the front there will be negative forces coming up we don't see, and it'll likely keep cycling like that - just hopefully with less mania going forward than what we've experienced in the last decade or so.
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The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.
16 Apr 2019, 8:14 am
