Sunday Morning Coming Down in anticlimatic

I never write in the mornings, though it should be when I do. Instead I usually write after I should have been sleeping for an hour or two, when my brain is as mushy and disassociate as it can be. I feel much more present in the morning. More sober, and acute with thought. Motor skills aren’t the best until lunch, I’ll say. I don’t think I’ve made coffee once in the last 10 years without spilling grounds sugar or creamer, or all three, all over the place.

I think I have developed into some kind of misanthrope, or at least I’m on the way there. Maybe my introverted predilections were just sanitized and normalized through the Covid years and peace has found home in my heart that is inversely proportionate to the amount of time I have to spend around people. Including people I love, my family in particular.

I feel like the entire world and zeitgeist of our era is built upon an extremely specific principal or assertion that has more or less been kicked out from underneath it, and we are falling in slow motion as a consequence. This principal is an idea of self actualized conscious evolution of the human race, as though we have transcended something/anything to reach a new form of humanity in which there will be no going back, and from the seed or spring of this new humanity wondrous things might be accomplished including such things as interstellar space travel, world harmony, and the preservation of the earth from climate driven ecological disaster.

I think, watching society collectively get dumber and weaker as each year passes has undermined that idea. All metrics of health- physical, mental, economical- have cratered and are continuing to worsen. People tell themselves they are healing “generational trauma” by myopically focusing on one potential negative outcome and missing the rest that generate as a result. In fact, myopically focusing on one thing while everything you’re too privileged or ignorant of to care about crumbles around you is a large source of the problem.

It turns out humans are not so great after all. It turns out we’re just as pathetic and limited as we were when we were worshipping giant hunks of stone. Yet everything we value and hope for the future is built on the incorrect idea that we are better than that, when we simply and tragically are not. And so it’s like watching a skyscraper that has had it’s foundations detonated begin to lean assuredly over. All those ideas and hopes for the future and big glass windows and steel framing are still there, same as they ever were- they are just wrong now, somehow- slanted, tilted- and that’s because they are falling, whether we can divine that particular fact or not.

So what comes next? What always comes next, of course. War and genocide. Though as usual, I highly doubt our generation will be around long enough to partake in our own consequences. Our kids always have that pleasure.

We had a culture here once, believe it or not.