At 40, I am beginning to find myself more intellectually and emotionally adrift, more so than what we’ve come to expect in the post-modern, end-stage capitalist warzone into which we have been herded by the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” (thank you Paul Simon) that seem to direct every aspect of life. I find myself more and more often at a loss for words, unable to capture the term or phrase or even the essence of what I am struggling to convey. I waver and lurch between hopelessness and nihilism at one moment and spluttering outrage at another. Every waking moment is an ordeal, a fierce battle to prevent the merchants of misery and the distributors of despair from forcing their way into my consciousness. I have disabled notifications and feeds across devices personal and professional and have encouraged others to do the same. I have distanced myself from the minefields of TikTok and ‘Xwitter’; I have limited my interaction with American ‘news’ and have been reading the English edition of Spain’s El Pais which, free from the heavy hands of the American infotainment industry and its milquetoast quislings masquerading as journalists, offers a spectacular and illuminating perspective on the world, especially the Spanish-speaking world.

There is an old adage that claims “ignorance is bliss” — that may well be, but it only applies if one has always been ignorant and knows no other existence. I feel this is an appeal of religious zealotry and devout conservatism — they offer easy answers to unimaginably complicated issues and allow their adherents to insulate themselves from losing sleep or shedding tears over real-world evils. Crushing poverty? Pray about it and the Almighty will jot it down on his cosmic to-do list. Intractable war? Try being more patriotic or tightening your bootstraps or expel some more undesirables. People are either heroes or villains, self-starters or leeches — there’s no space for nuance ambiguity is just what pussies call cowardice.

It is a very different exercise to become overwhelmed with awareness and then try to adopt ignorance. What happens is the knowledge doesn’t go away and the bliss never comes. Instead, self-imposed ignorance begets deep and corrosive guilt that is an even more onerous cross to bear. It’s bad enough to know the world is collapsing and not be able to do anything yet still trying — it’s exponentially worse knowing the world is collapsing and pretending to not know or even care.

Caring is tiring. Caring about strangers is stressful. Caring about abstract ideas like democracy, education and the future is debilitating. Caring about all those things is damn near suicidal. The trouble is I feel that I should care about all those things and not just care about them but advocate, in even small ways, for those things. It’s why I read books about current lines of liberal thought. It’s why I write letters to (and sometimes get them printed by) the conservative weekly newspaper in my county. It’s why I struggle to wrap the disparate threads of my politics into something resembling a coherent philosophy. It’s also why I’m constantly stoking the furnaces of pessimism and cynicism within myself even though my family, friends and therapist have all pointed out it’s best to focus attention on positive things and things we can actually control and that doing so is not surrendering to The System or abandoning the ideals that I hold so dear. It’s difficult, though, admitting that my personal position in the Universe might not afford me the option to hurl Molotov cocktails in the midst of a peasant revolt — it’s even less likely I will ever have an opportunity to make a career out of being a public intellectual in the mold of Noam Chomsky. Maybe the best I can do in this age is write my occasional letters to the editor in hope my words one day resonate in someone’s mind. Perhaps my gift is to provide others with the inspiration and encouragement they need to secure life, liberty and happiness for themselves and others. It’s hard to know.

I wonder sometimes if part of the reason governments and their lapdogs in the media (particularly in the West) have become so troubled by declining birthrates is that people without children and families are more likely to involve themselves in anti-establishment activities. I don’t know if that is accurate, but I feel it’s probably more accurate now than, say, the late 18th Century. A citizen trying to raise a family in today’s world seems less inclined to hurl the aforementioned Molotov cocktail than a citizen without such responsibilities. Perhaps, though, we are in a sort of post-revolutionary age where our lives are so dependent upon the luxuries and necessities of The System that no one, married or single, childless or otherwise, is likely to wage a full-fledged uprising. The System dictates virtually everything we can and cannot do and it does so, oftentimes, without real coercion. Shelter, nourishment, knowledge, communication… all these things are tied up together in kind of Gordian knot that, if severed, would unravel the entirety of society in very short order. Sadly, I enjoy my fairly reliable electricity and am pretty motivated to keep gasoline in my automobile. Even my ability to seek medical care is largely dictated by forces far outside my control although I feel that millions of Americans, every year, will not step foot in a casino or buy a lottery ticket yet will gamble thousands of dollars on health insurance that they may or may not ever see pay out. For me, the at this table is over $600 a month and the odds of a meaningful jackpot are pretty low.

The reason I decided on ‘no links’ is because I have found that I often spend too much time hunting down references that would be better spent putting my thoughts down. Don’t get me wrong: I am a huge supporter of citing your sources, but in an informal situation such as this, it seems unnecessary. If my reader is unacquainted with the lyrics to Paul Simon’s “Boy in the Bubble”, there are many AI-enabled methods to finding out about the song. This isn’t a scholarly article getting ready for publication, so there’s no need to make it seem like one.