Fear

I, like a lot of us these days, have a fear of what the future may bring. The fear ultimately stems from a lack of knowledge. The ambiguity is what keeps me up at night. It's easy to reside in a sort of soft nihilism where you have just accepted doom so it justifies forgoing moral and ethical decision-making. That's a lifestyle I just cannot accept. I worry that this need for purpose that I have will destroy me someday. If I keep on this path of naive gravitas about my own life, I will have nothing left. I have taken great strides in mourning the change, I used to have really debilitating spirals when seeing how the world feels so different now than it did when I was a kid. I now know that that feeling of change is somewhat inevitable, but being able to come to terms with a changing world is the most powerful tool we have against this soft nihilism, it maintains our ability to not fall into hopelessness.

The way people cope with this unknown that we are all feeling is very interesting to me. I was at dinner with my grandma and after we got into an all too familiar argument over Israel and her sudden fascist turn toward misplaced tribalism, we departed from that conversation and I brought up how there is a feeling amongst my generation that we will be the first generation in about 100 years to have it worse than our parents. My grandma said "well you won't" and she was right. Then some late 30's early 40's libby mom interjected in our conversation and said "Well I heard on the news that people have been saying that forever and its actually a misnomer" and that's her form of coping. She had her 7 or 8 year old daughter with her and if her trusted news source tells her not to worry then she's not going to worry. That being said, my grandma is right that I will have a lot more economic and familial comfort and stability than my parents did, but I think that anyone who wants to properly participate in society will not use that as an excuse to disengage and pretend everything's alright. Also, while those factors of my life and being are true, I don't think my parents had this pervasive existential dread seeping its way into every facet of their lives like I do. Especially my dad, my dad grew up in an idyllic Sydney suburb and I seriously think he was like the Buddha, completely unaware that suffering existed. 

There's this article that Hunter S. Thompson wrote for ESPN of all places, a week after 9/11 about how the back half of the 20th century seemed like a wild party for rich kids and that the party is over now. That feeling has really controlled most decisions that I have made. I don't think I am ambitious because I don't know what there is to be ambitious for. I am going to work on this farm because I don't know what the future is going to look like but I don't want to be unprepared. Every day I wake up wishing I could just take life lightly. I'd like to blame my psyche for not allowing me to not care, but I think I know deep down that it is because I have this fear of the future, not because I am some morally prosperous individual. I literally have one friend who is holding on to this sense of ambition, Lucce. I am very jealous of Lucce. He has aspirations of starting a clothing line and other businesses and his sense of purpose is not fueled out of a need for survival or self-preservation. It makes me so depressed to see that Lucce is the only person in my life here in Philadelphia who has this mentality. I hope one day in my search for purpose that I will find a sense of clarity and understanding of the world around me, rather than inhabiting this schizophrenic state of being of both extreme acceptance of the realities of our world and extreme denial. Sorry for the bleak one folks.