"This Difficult Thing of Being Human"

"This Difficult Thing of Being Human"

by Bodhipaksa

"It's always good to remember that life isn't easy. I don't mean to say that life is always hard in the sense of it always being painful. Clearly there are times when we're happy, when things are going well, when we feel that our life is headed in the right direction and that even greater fulfillment is just ahead of us, etc.

What I mean is that even when we have times in our life that are good, that doesn't last. In fact, often the things we're so excited and happy about later turn out to be things that also cause us suffering.

For example, you start a brand new relationship and you're in love and it's exciting and fulfilling. And then you find yourself butting heads with your partner, and you hurt each others feelings. Maybe you even split up. Does that sound familiar?

For example, the new job that you're thrilled about turns out to contain stresses you hadn't imagined. Has that ever happened?

For example, the house you're so pleased to have bought inevitably ends up requiring maintenance. Or perhaps the house value plummets. Or perhaps your circumstances change and you find it a struggle to meet the mortgage. Maybe you've been lucky, or maybe you've been there.

Happiness has a way of evaporating. Unhappiness has a way of sneaking up on us and sucker-punching us in the gut.

On a deep level, none of really understand happiness and unhappiness. If we truly understood the dynamics of these things, we'd be happy all the time and would never be miserable. We'd be enlightened. But pre-enlightenment, we're all stumbling in the dark, and sometimes colliding painfully with life as we do so.

This being human is not easy. We're doing a difficult thing in living a human life. It's good to accept all this, because life is so much harder when we think it should be easy. When we think life should be straightforward, and that we think we have it all sorted out, then unhappiness becomes a sign that we've failed. And that makes being in pain even more painful.

We haven't failed when we're unhappy; we're just being human. We're simply experiencing the tender truth of what it is to live a human life.

So when you're unhappy, don't beat yourself up about it. Don't fight it. Accept that this is how things are right now. Often when you do that, you'll very quickly - sometimes instantly - start to feel better. By accepting our suffering, we start to move through it. And as you look around you, realize that everyone else is doing this difficult thing of being human too. They're all struggling. We're all struggling. We all want happiness and find happiness elusive. We all want to avoid suffering and yet keep stumbling into it, over and over.

Many of the things that bother you about other people are their attempts to deal with this difficult existential situation, in which we desire happiness, and don't experience as much of it as we want, and desire to be free from suffering, and yet keep becoming trapped in it. Their moods, their clinging, their anger - all of these are the results of human beings struggling to find happiness, and having trouble doing so.

If we can recognize that this human life is not easy - if we can empathize with that very basic existential fact - then perhaps we can be just a little kinder to ourselves and others. And that would help make this human life just a little easier to navigate."

- https://www.wildmind.org/

"What Happens When We Die"

"What Happens When We Die"

by Maria Popova

"When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the body in the hospice bed that had contained half a century of shared life and love, cradled the cranium in which his stubborn and sensitive mind had dwelt, and whispered into the halogen-lit ether: “Where did you go, my darling?”

Whatever our beliefs, these sensemaking playthings of the mind, when the moment of material undoing comes, we - creatures of moment and matter - simply cannot fathom how something as exquisite as the universe of thought and feeling inside us can vanish into nothingness.

Even if we understand that dying is the token of our existential luckiness, even if we understand that we are borrowed stardust, bound to be returned to the universe that made it - a universe itself slouching toward nothingness as its stars are slowly burning out their energy to leave a cold austere darkness of pure spacetime - this understanding blurs into an anxious disembodied abstraction as the body slouches toward dissolution. Animated by electrical impulses and temporal interactions of matter, our finite minds simply cannot grasp a timeless and infinite inanimacy - a void beyond being.

Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16

Even Walt Whitman, who could hold such multitudes of contradiction, could not grasp the void. “I will make poems of my body and of mortality,” he vowed as a young man as he reverenced our shared materiality in his timeless declamation that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” It was easy, from the shimmering platform of his prime, to look forward to becoming “the uncut hair of graves” upon returning his own atoms to the grassy ground one day.

But then, when that day loomed near as he grew old and infirm, “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” suddenly could not fathom the total disbanding of his atomic selfhood, suddenly came to “laugh at what you call dissolution.” And then he did dissolve, leaving us his immortal verses, verses penned when his particles sang with the electric cohesion of youth and of health, verses that traced with their fleshy finger the faint contour of an elemental truth: “What invigorates life invigorates death.”

I wish I could have given my grandmother, and given the dying Whitman, the infinitely invigorating "Mr g: A Novel About the Creation" (public library) by the poetic physicist Alan Lightman - a magical-realist serenade to science, coursing with symphonic truth about our search for meaning, our hunger for beauty, and what makes our tender, transient lives worth living.

Toward the end of the novel, Mr g watches, with heartache unknown in the Void predating the existence of universes and of life, an old woman on her deathbed, the film of her long and painful and beautiful life unspooling from the reel of memory, leaving her grief-stricken by its terminus, shuddering with defiant disbelief that this is all. “How can a creature of substance and mass fathom a thing without substance or mass?” wonders Mr g as he sorrows watching her succumb to the very laws he created. “How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?”

And then, as a faint smile washes across her face, she does die. Lightman writes: "At that moment, there were 3,​147,​740,​103,​497,​276,​498,​750,​208,​327 atoms in her body. Of her total mass, 63.7 percent was oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars.

In the cremation, her water evaporated. Her carbon and nitrogen combined with oxygen to make gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which floated skyward and mingled with the air. Most of her calcium and phosphorous baked into a reddish brown residue and scattered in soil and in wind.

But then we see that every atom belonging to her - or, rather, temporarily borrowed by her - truly does belong to everything and everyone, just as you and I are now inhaling the same oxygen atoms that once inflated Walt Whitman’s lungs with the lust for life: "Released from their temporary confinement, her atoms slowly spread out and diffused through the atmosphere. In sixty days’ time, they could be found in every handful of air on the planet. In one hundred days, some of her atoms, the vaporous water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and ingested by animals and plants. Some of her atoms were absorbed by light-utilizing organisms and transformed into tissues and tubules and leaves. Some were breathed in by oxygen creatures, incorporated into organs and bone.

In a passage evocative of the central sentiment in Ursula K. Le Guin’s spare, stunning poem “Kinship,” he adds: "Pregnant women ate animals and plants made of her atoms. A year later, babies contained some of her atoms… Several years after her death, millions of children contained some of her atoms. And their children would contain some of her atoms as well. Their minds contained part of her mind.

Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this woman? It is not likely. Will they feel what she felt in her life, will their memories have flickering strokes of her memories, will they recall that moment long ago when she stood by the window, guilt ridden and confused, and watched as the tadr bird circled the cistern? No, it is not possible. Will they have some faint sense of her glimpse of the Void? No, it is not possible. It is not possible. But I will let them have their own brief glimpse of the Void, just at the moment they pass from living to dead, from animate to inanimate, from consciousness to that which has no consciousness. For a moment, they will understand infinity.

And the individual atoms, cycled through her body and then cycled through wind and water and soil, cycled through generations and generations of living creatures and minds, will repeat and connect and make a whole out of parts. Although without memory, they make a memory. Although impermanent, they make a permanence. Although scattered, they make a totality."

Here we are, you and me, Walt and Alan, my grandmother who is and my grandfather who is no more - each of us a trembling totality, made of particles both absolutely vulnerable and absolutely indestructible, hungering for absolutes in a universe of relatives, hungering for permanence in a universe of ceaseless change, famished for meaning, for beauty, for emblems of existence. Out of these hungers, out of these contradictions, we make everything that invigorates life with aliveness: our art and our music, our poems and our mathematics, our novels and our loves."

- https://www.themarginalian.org/

o

Rudi and Corlea, "Hoor Jy My Stem"

Haunting song by South Africans Rudi Claase and Corlea Botha,

 sung in Afrikaans with subtitles in English.

Losing someone we love, as we all have and will, made me think of this...

Todd Hayen, "Hanging by a Thread"

"Hanging by a Thread"

by Todd Hayen

"It is quite amazing how close people are to serious mental illness. What is serious mental illness? Suicidal depression, psychosis, anxiety that requires hospitalization, and frankly anything that keeps a person from living a functional life, a life with its share of sadness, trauma and suffering, but also with moments of happiness, fulfillment, love and laughter.

That’s serious mental illness. What about “not so serious” mental illness? Well, we’ve got a lot more of that than one could even imagine. And then twice that many hanging by the thread, just about ready to drop into depression, anxiety, personality disorders of a dizzying variety, sadness, emotional dysfunction, relational wackiness, on and on. It is a pandemic, and yes, a real one that isn’t a hoax.

In my opinion, nearly every human alive suffers from some sort of emotional/mental anomaly. Maybe not everyone but a lot (and if you find one who doesn’t - maybe some young couple dressed in loincloths riding horses on the beach of some idyllic island somewhere in the South Pacific - let me know about them, I would love to meet them).

I see a lot of people in my practice, and I can unequivocally say that they all have issues. Well, that stands to reason, of course. That’s like a dentist saying everyone who comes into his or her office has some issue with his or her teeth. But I also hear about my client’s friends and family, I also interface with people in the grocery store, on the streets, and in my own friend circle, and all of these people have emotional issues, or are hanging by a thread - me included, of course (although my thread broke long ago and I have been swimming in psychological muck for most, if not all, of my life).

Isn’t this the normal “human condition?” Well, I used to think so, but not anymore. There is, of course, a “normal” human condition concerning mental and emotional regulation. Everyone gets depressed and sad once in a while, everyone gets anxious and has emotional flare-ups. We can describe a “normal” mental state which includes a lot of ups and downs. What I am describing is more than that, it is what comes across as abnormal, intense, devoid of much reason, out of regulation, and bordering on crazy. We are all, for the most part, whacked.

Ok, ok, not all of us are whacked. I know I am; you might not be. You may fall into this narrow band of a “normally wiggy” person psychologically, and if you do, congratulations. I am not convinced, however, that there are very many of you who can completely escape the screwed-up environment we all live in (yes, some may be more adept at processing this shite show than others). I would venture to say that you more than likely have been bitten, in some way, by the agenda if you live on this particular planet. Even if only through being around people who are truly crazy - that’s enough to make you fit into this category.

But I am not really commenting on fringe stuff here. I am commenting on those of us who are very close to being certifiably “off” - close to an actual diagnosis. Whether it be run-of-the-mill depression or anxiety, or more exotic personality disorders such as Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, or even any one of the array of psychotic maladies such as Schizophrenia, Bipolar with Psychosis, or Paranoia.

Let’s look at some numbers. Almost 3 million people have been diagnosed with depression in 2020 in the USA, 66 million with anxiety over the past year. In the same year almost 5 million were diagnosed Borderline Personality Disorder, about 5 million with Narcissist Personality Disorder, and almost 2 million with Schizophrenia.

About 10 million will suffer from some form of psychosis in their lifetime, almost 10 million have been diagnosed with BiPolar disorder over the past year, 15 million adults suffer from ADHD, and nearly 35 million children were diagnosed with this particular malady over the same year.

And these statistics only apply to people who have complained enough about their mental condition to their doctor, psychiatrist, or certified psychologist, to be actually diagnosed and put on the docket as having these mental disorders. No telling how many are suffering from mental illness and have not shared their condition with someone who is qualified to render an official diagnosis (psychotherapists, in Canada, are not allowed to diagnose).

Yep, it’s a big problem. And then there is the medication. It is estimated that approximately 76 million people in the US, of all ages, have been prescribed, and are consuming, some form of psychiatric drug (I would venture to say it is more than this). That’s a lot of folks, folks.

Do I put a lot of weight on official diagnoses and labelling? Not really. But regardless of what you think of diagnosis standards and criteria, people are suffering from something - even if you refrain from putting a name to it. This is easy to see without doing much digging. People seem to have lost a lot of their mental capacity to think, to think critically, and to function within the expected “norms” of society (whatever that is). People, in general, seem to have a very difficult time making any sort of rational decisions about everyday challenges in everyday life.

That’s a big statement, I know. And maybe this has always been true, but my gut tells me this is all due to the social pathology the agenda has brought upon us. And no, it isn’t all due to an intentional agenda to pulverize us into flesh-eating zombies, but by golly most of it is.

If you think about how far away humans are from living a natural life, it isn’t much of a stretch to believe we are all suffering from some sort of mental and emotional dysfunction. Although this has been slowly going on since humans stopped living in caves, we have been relatively skilled at staving off the pandemic of mental illness we now seem to be suffering.

Sure, humans have always been a bit kooky. But wouldn’t you say today it appears to be much worse than it was 100 years ago? 200 hundred years ago? The disintegration of moral values, character development, a misunderstanding of “right and wrong,” the dissolution of family, community, spirituality, gender, and even the sanctity of the human body has all had its toll on healthy emotional and mental processing. When we no longer can process properly, we lose psychic homeostasis, and disease sets in."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

o

"Don't wonder why people go crazy. Wonder why they don't.

In the face of what we can lose in a day, in an instant,

wonder what the hell it is that makes us hold it together."

- "Grey's Anatomy"

o

"The worst part is wondering how you'll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it's treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself."

- Louis-Ferdinand Celineo

o

"Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether

 it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it." 

- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"Alert! Russian Plague?! NATO Troops Deploy to Russia's Border! Saudi Aramco In Flames!"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 10/5/26

"Alert! Russian Plague?! NATO Troops Deploy 

to Russia's Border! Saudi Aramco In Flames!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Beyond the Emerald Falls, A Golden Stairway Leads to the Palace Where Forgotten Dreams Still Wait"

Full screen recommended.

Everdream Realm,

"Beyond the Emerald Falls, A Golden Stairway

 Leads to the Palace Where Forgotten Dreams Still Wait"

Incredibly, astonishingly beautiful...

"Why You Were the Different One in Your Family and What It Means"

Full screen recommended.

Native American Elder,10/5/26

"Why You Were the Different One

 in Your Family and What It Means"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Delta Blues Brother, "What Doesn’t Bend, Breaks"

Full screen recommended.

Delta Blues Brother, "What Doesn’t Bend, Breaks"

"Strength isn’t always about holding your ground. Sometimes… it’s about knowing when to soften. “What Doesn’t Bend, Breaks” is a Delta blues reflection on pride, loss, and the quiet realization that not everything needs to be resisted. Some things could’ve been saved… with just a little more understanding."

Musical Interlude: The Who, "Overture" from "Tommy"

The Who, "Overture" from "Tommy"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Can the night sky appear both serene and surreal? Perhaps classifiable as serene in the below panoramic image taken last Friday are the faint lights of small towns glowing across a dark foreground landscape of Doi Inthanon National Park in Thailand, as well as the numerous stars glowing across a dark background starscape. Also visible are the planet Venus and a band of zodiacal light on the image left.

Click image for larger size.

Unusual events are also captured, however. First, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy, while usually a common site, appears here to hover surreally above the ground. Next, a fortuitous streak of a meteor was captured on the image right. Perhaps the most unusual component is the bright spot just to the left of the meteor. That spot is the plume of a rising Ariane 5 rocket, launched a few minutes before from Kourou, French Guiana. How lucky was the astrophotographer to capture the rocket launch in his image? Not lucky at all- the image was timed to capture the rocket. What was lucky was how photogenic - and perhaps surreal - the rest of the sky turned out to be.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Chet Raymo, “When The Morning Stars Sing Together”

“When The Morning Stars Sing Together”

by Chet Raymo

“A Chinese proverb: A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song. Which might be an acceptable epigraph for this blog. I can’t imagine anyone coming here looking for answers. Certainly, providing answers is the last thing on my mind. I would like to think you come for song.

We are, I think, by and large, a community who distrusts answers, at least answers that are vehemently held. We are made uncomfortable by stridency. By dogma. By the desire to proselytize. We wear our truths lightly, gaily, as a song bird wears its feathers. We are grateful to those who push back the clouds of ignorance and hold the reins of passion. With Blake, we sing their praises, a song we have spent a lifetime learning. We sing to celebrate. We sing because we have a song.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"If Saudi Arabia Collapses, the Entire Region Will Transform"

Full screen recommended.

Seyed M. Marandi, 10/5/26

"If Saudi Arabia Collapses,

 the Entire Region Will Transform"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Attacks Sweep Across Iran - and Trump’s Invasion May Have Finally Started"

Full screen recommended.

Col. Douglas Macgregor, 10/5/26

"Attacks Sweep Across Iran - 

and Trump’s Invasion May Have Finally Started"

"Col. Douglas Macgregor examines reports of a new wave of attacks across Iran and whether the latest escalation signals a dangerous new phase in the U.S.–Iran conflict. The discussion covers Iran’s wartime mobilization, rising tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. military strategy, missile shortages, oil prices, and growing economic risks. Macgregor also analyzes the strategic importance of Iran’s rail links with China, regional military pressure, and why continued escalation could create serious consequences for American power, energy markets, and Middle East stability."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"1929 On Steroids; Death By A Thousand Cuts Of Borrow And Spend; The Big Short Is About To Repeat"

Jeremiah Babe, 10/5/26

"1929 On Steroids; Death By A Thousand Cuts Of 

Borrow And Spend; The Big Short Is About To Repeat"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"12 Big Retailers Collapsing Right In Front Of Our Eyes"

Full screen recommended.

Epic Economist, 10/5/26

"12 Big Retailers Collapsing 

Right In Front Of Our Eyes"

"Has a store you've shopped at for years put up a closing sign? This video reveals 12 big retail chains that are closing stores now - from Party City and Joann to Rite Aid and Cato. Party City was crushed by $2.2 billion of buyout debt. Joann closed all of its roughly 800 stores, and about 19,000 people lost their jobs. Rite Aid's prescription files went to CVS, Walgreens, Kroger and other chains, so it pays to confirm your refills now. Francesca's closed about 400 boutiques, and only the name sold, for $7 million. The key point: bankruptcy doesn't always mean the end. At Home and West Marine used Chapter 11 to close weak stores and keep the rest. But Cato shows a different warning - no bankruptcy, just budget shoppers with less to spend. Knowing which chains are shrinking helps you spend gift cards and move prescriptions in time."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Maintal, Hessen, Germany. Thanks for stopping by!

Charles Hugh Smith, "Burnout"

"Burnout"

by Charles Hugh Smith

"At least once a year, I completely burn out: exhausted, I no longer have the energy or will to care about anything but the bare minimum for survival. Everything not essential for survival gets jettisoned or set aside. This goes with the territory if you're trying to accomplish a lot of things that are intrinsically complex and open-ended - for example, running a business, being a parent, juggling college, work, family, community commitments, etc. 

I am confident many if not most of you have experienced burnout due to being overwhelmed by open-ended, inherently complex commitments.

I don't think burnout is limited to individuals. I think entire organizations and institutions can experience burnout, especially organizations devoted to caring for others or those facing long odds of fulfilling their core purpose. I even think entire nations can become exhausted by the effort of keeping up appearances or navigating endless crises. At that point, the individuals and institutions of the nation just go through the motions of coping rather than continue the struggle. Perhaps Venezuela is a current example.

I have long suspected that in many ways America is just going through the motions.  John Michael Greer (the Archdruid) has brilliantly described a process he calls catabolic collapse, which I would characterize as the stairstep-down of overly complex, costly systems as participants react to crises by resetting to a lower level of complexity and consumption.

Just as ecosystems have intrinsic carrying capacities, so too do individual humans and human systems. When our reach exceeds our grasp, and the costs of complexity exceed the carrying capacity of the underlying systems, then we have to move down to a lower level of complexity and lower cost-structure/energy consumption.

This sounds straightforward enough, but it isn't that easy in real life. We can't offload our kids and downsize to part-time parenting or magically reduce the complexities of operating a small business (or two). These tasks are intrinsically open-ended. Reductions in stress and complexity such as quitting a demanding job (and earning one-third of our former salary) require long years of trimming and planning.

So what can we do to work through burnout? Since I'm designed to over-commit myself, burnout is something I've dealt with since my late teens. I like to think I'm getting better at managing it, but this is probably illusory. (It may be one of those cases where the illusion is useful because it's positive and hopeful.) I find these responses helpful:

1. Reduce whatever complexity can be reduced. Even something as simple as making a pot of chili or soup to eat for a few days (minimizing daily meal prep) helps. Reduce interactions and transactions.

2. Daily walks - two a day if possible. If there is any taken-for-granted magic in daily life (other than sleep, dreaming and playing music), it's probably walking - especially if you let your mind wander rather than keep working.

3. More naps, more sleep.

4. Avoid the temptations of overly fatty/sweet/carbo comfort food, digital distractions, etc.

5. Keep to positive routines (stretching, walking, etc.), no matter how tired and down you feel.

6. Set aside time to play your musical instrument of choice, preferably improvisation rather than practice.

7. Do whatever calms your mind, even if it requires effort.

8. Do stuff you enjoy and set aside as much of the stuff you actively dislike doing as possible.

9. Set aside solitary time to "do nothing." Lowering the barriers raised by conscious effort, focus and thought may well be critical to our well-being.

This is one conclusion from research cited by Sherry Turkel in "Scientific American": "For the first time in the history of our species, we are never alone and never bored. Have we lost something fundamental about being human?"

I think the answer is an unequivocal yes. Our minds need periods of solitude, aimless wandering (i.e. boredom), time to integrate thoughts and feelings, time to question things and time for introspection. Without these restorative periods, we end up just going through the motions, on an autopilot setting of keeping overly complex lives and systems duct-taped together. This leads to burnout, and eventually to some measure of catabolic collapse/system reset.”

- http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/

Related:

"Depression vs Burnout: 

Main Differences & Treatment Approaches"

"Brian Eno’s Remedy for Burnout and Despair"

"Brian Eno’s Remedy for Burnout and Despair"

by Maria Popova

"There comes a moment in every life when you find yourself suddenly wondering about the point of it all - the point of all that productivity, the point of so-called success, the point of the poem that is the universe. It is a hollowing, a withering, a deadening of the spirit that can manifest as burnout or creative block, as a breakdown or a midlife crisis, or as the persistent low-frequency din of despair. Often, it comes in the wake of some great achievement. Often, it strikes at 4AM. Always, you simply have to live through it until you glance over your shoulder staggered by the recognition that it had been a vital period of recalibration and regeneration - fallow ground for the rewilding of your spirit.

In 1995, shortly after a major retrospective of his work had been released, Brian Eno hit that point of pointlessness. In a stirring entry from "A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary "(public library), he writes: "After several months of work, I slowly grind down and it all starts to seem like “my job.” I do it, and I probably don’t do it too badly, but I find myself working entirely from the momentum of deadlines and commitments, as though the ideas are not springing forth but being painfully squeezed out. At the back of my mind, unadmitted to, are some nasty thoughts swimming about in the darkness. They whisper things like: “You’ve had it” and “You’re out of steam.”

Experience has shown me that, when I reach this point, all the distractions I can muster are only postponements. It’s time to face up to total, unmitigated despair. I sometimes do this by going alone on a “holiday” - though that word scarcely conveys the crashing tedium involved, for I usually choose somewhere uneventful, take nothing with me, and then rely on the horror of my own company to drive me rapidly to the edge of the abyss."

One thing experience shows us over and over, if we pay enough attention, is that the way out of such suffering, out of the abyss of self-concern with our mattering project, is always unselfing. Eno describes the cycle: "It goes like this: me thinking, “What’s it all for? What’s the bloody point? I haven’t done anything I like and I don’t have a clue what to do next. I’m a completely empty shell.” This lasts two days or so… Then I suddenly notice - apropos of something very minor, like the way a plane crosses the sky, or the smell of trees, or the light in the early evening, or remembering one of my brother’s jokes - that I am thoroughly enjoying myself and completely, utterly glad to be alive. Not one of the questions I asked myself has been answered. Instead, like all good philosophical questions, they’ve just ceased to matter."

By the end of the year, Eno had pioneered generative music and had traveled to war-torn Bosnia, across the border from where I was growing up, to lead music therapy workshops for orphaned children in the grounds of a shelled primary school. Half a century earlier, traveling through these same troubled lands in the interlude between two world wars, Rebecca West had written: "Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted."

It is, in the end, the taste of aliveness that saves us. But we must choose to raise the cup, may even have to make it. A generation after Albert Camus observed that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Eno captures the resuscitation of the creative spirit - that terrifying, transcendent transmutation of despair into a defense of joy: "The process involves reaching the point of not trying any more to dig inside, but just letting go, ceding control… And at the point of giving up I’m suddenly alive again. It’s like jumping resignedly into the abyss and discovering that you can just drift dreamily on air currents. This feeling, of sheer mad joy at the world, is ageless. It’s the fresh, clear stream at the bottom of the abyss."

                                                   - https://www.themarginalian.org/

The Poet: Czeslaw Milosz, "A Song On The End Of The World"

"A Song On The End Of The World"

“On the day the world ends

A bee circles a clover,

A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

Happy porpoises jump in the sea,

By the rainspout young sparrows are playing

And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends

Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,

A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,

Vegetable peddlers shout in the street

And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,

The voice of a violin lasts in the air

And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder

Are disappointed.

And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps

Do not believe it is happening now.

As long as the sun and the moon are above,

As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,

As long as rosy infants are born

No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet

Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:

There will be no other end of the world,

There will be no other end of the world.”

~ Czeslaw Milosz

o

Full screen recommended.

Czeslaw Milosz, 

"A Song on the End of the World"

"This poem was written in Warsaw in 1944. Czesław Miłosz ( 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".

Miłosz survived the German occupation of Warsaw during World War II and became a cultural attaché for the Polish government during the postwar period. When communist authorities threatened his safety, he defected to France and ultimately chose exile in the United States, where he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry - particularly about his wartime experience - and his appraisal of Stalinism in a prose book, "The Captive Mind," brought him renown as a leading émigré artist and intellectual.

Throughout his life and work, Miłosz tackled questions of morality, politics, history, and faith. As a translator, he introduced Western works to a Polish audience, and as a scholar and editor, he championed a greater awareness of Slavic literature in the West. Faith played a role in his work as he explored his Catholicism and personal experience. Miłosz died in Kraków, Poland, in 2004. He is interred in Skałka, a church known in Poland as a place of honor for distinguished Poles."

"The World..."

"The world is a comedy to those that think,

a tragedy to those who feel. "

- Horace Walpole, In a Letter, 1770

"How Society Shapes Humanity"

"How Society Shapes Humanity"

by John Wilder

“Don’t worry, scrote. There are plenty of ‘tards out there living 

really kick-ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded. She’s a pilot now.” 

– "Idiocracy"

"One constant theme of this blog is change. We live in a world that is defined by change, and the benchmarks we measure society are things like change in GDP, change in population, change in the availability of different PEZ™ flavors. Blue is a flavor, right?

The focus of humanity on change is not the norm, but rather an exception. The amount of novel situations and technology entering our lives is at an all-time high and is increasing year-over-year. Let’s backtrack a bit and put this in perspective.

Going back to food, 15,000 years ago we ate a lot of meat and fish, some rando fruits and vegetables that some cave-bro had been brave enough to taste and not die, and nuts.Nothing about society would change for 15,000-year-ago bro’s tribe for thousands of years.There are people who maintain that the human organism hasn’t changed enough so that our very different diet of sugar, grains, sugar, industrial chemicals, sugar, minerals from a mine in Bulgaria, sugar, beef jerky, and microplastics isn’t somehow normal and that our bodies haven’t adapted to it.Maybe they have a point?

Anyway, this isn’t so much about feeding your head as it is about feeding your mind with the change in the way we deal with information.How has that changed humanity? In the beginning was the Word. And, the word. If you couldn’t speak it, chances of getting your genes propagated were slim because if you can’t talk your grubby cave-gal out of her wolfskin jeans, your genes aren’t gonna be around for the next round. Thus, we became a society where language was important so her Tinderclub© didn’t swipe left.

Then we started writing stuff down. Most kings and leaders didn’t need this, but a growing segment of the population did – people like scribes and lawyers. Eventually, they made more money than people who couldn’t read. The ladies of the past weren’t so different than the ladies of today (except they couldn’t vote and were property pretty much) but the written language genes also showed up for the future. In lots of places, but not all. Some never jumped from talking to reading, so the segment of their population that couldn’t read never got flushed. This is evident in many sub-populations even today.

Generations of humans would live and die during this period with little change in technology or the basic factors that determine the shape of their lives. They would be born and die in a house that looked just like the house (and maybe was the same house) that their ancestors 100 years previous had lived in.

Writing and reading made society more complex, and allowed ideas to span continents, and I’ve written about this before. So far, so good. But more complex societies have more complex outcomes. Rather than sort for good eyesight or the ability to take down a mammoth, the selection process moved to selecting for people who got along well with strangers, and who could plan.

The harsher the climate, the more the pressure for these selections. Did we still need people who could kill, kill, kill? Sure we did. They came along, too because their mating opportunities are high. There’s a reason that 1/8 of Asia is related to Genghis Khan. I think his go-to pickup line was “I’ll conquer your steppe, baby.”

At some point around the Renaissance, Western civilization decided to get rid of the members who had impulse control issues. England, for example, started executing criminals who couldn’t control themselves, and kept it up for hundreds of years. This was pretty good at weeding out the undesirables. China had gone through this process hundreds of years in the past, which may explain why so many Chinese have a bit of Khan in their respective woodpiles.

Societies back then also let stupid people die. There wasn’t a welfare system to keep stupid people alive, so there were selection pressures for smart. Some folks call it “social Darwinism”, but I call it the universal penalty for being stupid.

Essentially, this is a society-enforced soft eugenics program, culling out a portion of the population just because they never make enough money to breed. And, let’s be honest: everyone feels bad for the kids on the short bus, but nobody really thinks they should be having kids of their own in an attempt to see how many more chromosome pairs than 23 that you can fit.

Society has changed now. Besides subsidizing poverty, which ensures we’ll have more of it, we’ve also changed in a fundamental way how we take in information. The media we consume has been decreasing in complexity for over 100 years. My guess at the high-water mark for complexity in media and the most intelligent era in human history (in Western Civilization) would be around the time of Dickens. Go back and read the language of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, a series of debates meant to appeal to the common voter of the time, and tell me what would be made of the breadth of language and the depth of argument today? Could an average eight grader keep up with it? Could an average Harvard™ freshman without having ChatGPT® or Grok© summarize it?

Since current political debates look much more (in many cases) like the wrestlers of the WWE™ before a steel-cage match, I think most people would get bored and wander off. That’s the media that we’re trained with today. We went from books, to magazines, to television, to 10-minute YouTube™ clips, to 20-second TikTok™ videos. Trump? His 2016 election was based on 140-character Tweets™.

The building of complex arguments has largely been abandoned in the public sphere and decisions of vast chunks of the population are made on what emotions are stirred by looking at a photograph. Certainly, many of those are now staged, and in a decade half of them will be the propaganda products of A.I.

The selection and sorting still exist, but now it has (like in the film "Idiocracy") selected for people who are the opposite of the groups society selected for in 1820: someone seems to want low-impulse control, and non-productive populations that are incapable of planning. Sure, it could be a coincidence that major policy initiatives all remove incentives for stupid people not to have dozens of babies.

This process, thankfully, is self-limiting. A technological society depends on a stream of competent people to plan and run society. And, no, not like Soviet Central Planning, but rather, “Hey, we need more lettuce in the Modern Mayberry Walmart©, so since we’re Walmart™ and want to make money, we should ship them some” planning.

It’s always quicker to burn down a house than to build one, so it’s really no surprise that making things worse is a lot easier than making them better. Paraphrasing what Thomas Sowell (I think) said, “We shouldn’t look at poor places and ask why they’re poor, we should look at rich places and ask why they’re rich.” Nah, there aren’t any votes in that. And it sounds like hard work, right? Besides, stupid is growing faster than TikTok™ dance challenge videos.

Have we reached the point where we’ve made a society so complex it allows devolution to the point it can no longer be maintained? If so, congratulations! You’ve been alive during the period of peak novelty in human history. The good news is that you can get blue-flavored PEZ™ here at the peak."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

"Americans Are Spending More Because Everything Costs More"

"Americans Are Spending More 

Because Everything Costs More"

by Martin Armstrong

"Economists keep pointing to consumer spending as proof that the American economy remains strong. Americans spent 0.9% more in August, and naturally this is being celebrated as the resilient American consumer. But real disposable income did not increase AT ALL, while the personal savings rate fell to just 4.1%. Americans are spending more while their inflation-adjusted income is going nowhere and savings are being depleted to maintain their standard of living.

The cost-of-living crisis is showing up in the numbers. Consumer spending can rise during inflation simply because everything costs more. If your grocery bill rises from $150 to $200, you increased consumer spending by 33%, but you did not become wealthier or eat 33% more food. You simply handed over more dollars for the same necessities.

Personal consumption expenditures increased by $190.8 billion in August while personal income increased only $66.6 billion. Real consumer spending rose 0.6%, but real disposable income was flat. You can maintain that imbalance temporarily by reducing savings or borrowing, but you cannot maintain it forever.

This is what Washington never understands about inflation. They tell people inflation has fallen because the RATE of increase is lower than it was at the peak. That does not mean prices went back down. Consumer prices are roughly 30% higher than at the end of 2019. Something that cost $100 then costs roughly $130 today. Lower inflation merely means prices are rising more slowly from an already elevated level.

This is why consumer confidence can collapse while spending remains strong. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index plunged to 81.9 in September, its lowest reading since 2014. The University of Michigan’s sentiment index fell to 48.1 and is now 15% below January. People are continuing to spend because they must continue living, but they are increasingly worried about what comes next.

The University of Michigan reports that consumers’ expectations for inflation over the next year climbed to 4.6% in September, up from 3.4% in February. Consumers’ assessments of both their current and expected personal finances also deteriorated. The paycheck may still be coming in, but it simply does not stretch as far as it once did. Americans feel the conditions of the economy daily.

Even if inflation fell to 2% tomorrow, today’s elevated price level would remain. Prices would simply continue increasing from that higher base. This is how inflation quietly destroys the middle class. Savings decline, debt rises, homeownership becomes harder, young people delay families, and retirees discover that their savings purchase far less than expected.

The American consumer has kept this economy moving, but there is a limit to how long households can spend faster than their real incomes grow. You cannot raid savings forever, increase credit-card balances forever, or finance your standard of living indefinitely.

Strong consumer spending therefore does not necessarily mean the consumer is strong. Sometimes it means the consumer is paying substantially more simply to remain in the same place. Americans are still spending, but real disposable income has stalled, savings are falling, confidence has collapsed, and prices remain roughly 30% above where they stood before the pandemic-era inflation surge. Washington can call that resilience if it wants, but ordinary people know the difference between spending more because they are becoming wealthier and spending more because life itself has become more expensive."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/