The lesson of the myth of Sisyphus – at least for
me personally in recent times – has been that there is no great ultimate point
to your individual life, that you won’t ever unlock some boss level and then be
free to do nothing the rest of your life except bask in your conquering of all
possible dreams. Some people can afford dreams, and others are working too much
to ever get a restful enough sleep to even dream. I get this. And as I get
older and realize I’m not gonna achieve a lot of things I used to think I
would, including some very common things (like owning a house, or having a
retirement destination, or maybe even a retirement lol), I’m pretty fine with
that. Instead of getting on that “woe is me” tip, you just refocus your
energies towards doing all the things you wanna do now, as much as possible. I
don’t have a lot of downtime in my personal life. In fact, if I’m just sitting
there doing nothing, ever, I get freaked out and feel like I’m wasting the time
and will grab a notebook or stack of postcards or notecards or something.
With our larger culture meme’ing it up about the
arc of human history more and more, in the context of current geopolitics, the
myth of Sisyphus comes to mind as pretty applicable to our collective humanity
too. We mostly seem to think that our time as a species has been spent
progressing, that we are superior to other species on this planet, and that we’re
working towards an ultimate goal. This is part of why climate change has become
so distressing to people, because it feels like we’ve failed at pushing that
stone called progress up history’s mountain. But there’s no real proof any of
that is true, or even necessary. And in fact, it is over-tinkering with shit
that caused a lot of problems with overall biosphere balance anyways, so maybe
deciding to push harder up the hill is not exactly the way to fix shit, because
the stone’s just gonna roll back down to the bottom anyways.
This is not nihilism. A lot of indigenous cultures
were way less attuned to achieving shit in the ways most of the dominant
cultures on Earth now are into achieving shit. Living in accordance with
everything did not require some ultimate goal so much as acceptance of “fuck
it, we’re all part of this shit, so let’s be chill about it.” Less forcing of
order.
Strangely, I feel like western interference in
Africa is good example for climate change/global warming reaction. Western
colonialism and slave trade completely fucked up Africa. Even after many
nations gained independence, it was colonial borders they existed as, and
Africa continued to be exploited and fucked. So many well-to-do charities were
organized to gather money to help Africa, but most of them did it with the same
superiority complex that colonialism suffered from. But the charities thought
they were better. They weren’t necessarily, just a kinder version of colonialism,
if such a thing can be said, similar to how there were no “good” slave-owners,
because you’re inherently not doing good by most moral codes if you own humans
as slaves.
Same is true of the entirety of Earth. Humans
kinda fucked it up. But now we’re going to scramble to immediately push through
all sorts of tinkering advances to fix shit (if we are progressive about it).
Or we’re gonna just double down on fucking it all up (if we keep trying to make
America great again). Ultimately, as weird as it sounds, maybe doing less is
the answer – stop pushing order and form up the mountain, only to have that
shit tumble back down. Maybe quitting these taxing lifestyles that require so
much travel and expense of natural resource, which don’t really seem to make
our lives any less stressful at all, is the best answer. Or not even best
answer, because that also has that superlative tinge of progress. Maybe we just
need to quit doing so much fucking shit, because not only is it not making
anything better, but it’s fucking pointless. I don’t know. I feel like
mushrooms might help with all of this though.
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