Time to wake up
There is little we can do about the next developments that are soon coming in the Modern West. From “new pandemics” to “fifteen minute cities” to social credit tied to your bank account, bad things are going to happen, whether we like it or not. Complaining won’t solve anything, and it seems to me that most people are happy with the status quo anyway.
Of all the black pills, hat’s the hardest black pill to swallow. That most people today are content with the way things go. Or that they even fret about mostly imaginary problems (“climate change”, “transgender children”) while completely ignoring real ones, such as collapsing birth rates or the rise in the cost of living or the increasing violence.
Well, as Chesterton said, we all agree that there are problems, but we really disagree about what those problems are:
“But exactly the whole difficulty in our public problems is that some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states of disease. Mr. Belloc once said that he would no more part with the idea of property than with his teeth; yet to Mr. Bernard Shaw property is not a tooth, but a toothache. Lord Milner has sincerely attempted to introduce German efficiency; and many of us would as soon welcome German measles. Dr. Saleeby would honestly like to have Eugenics; but I would rather have rheumatics. (…) In social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease.”
I don’t really care.
I’d rather just check out, you know what I mean? Living in a small community in the woods or in a farm, away from it all, with the very few people I like.
Yet I fear that that, too, is a dream. I mean, people have to make a living somehow, and that’s hard enough inside the system, imagine outside.
But at least it seem to be something worth trying — to find an alternative on how to live the best you can, while things around you slowly disintegrate.
Truth is, I’m tired of complaining. I’ve been complaining all my life, and it never took me anywhere. I think the main problem of the opposition to globalism is that this seems to be a bunch of guys who are always complaining, complaining, complaining, but that doesn’t really inspire anyone. People don’t like complainers. What’s inspiring is someone who does something.
But… Oh, well, that’s hard.
So, what to do?
I lived in Finland for two months, and in many ways, it felt like a dream. Perhaps because it was a period limited in time, perhaps because I had a lot of different experiences that didn’t quite fit together, perhaps because the foreign language and landscape and people made me feel displaced, perhaps because the film project I was working on was about dreams, or perhaps because I was influenced by some dreams I had even before coming here, fact is, I had a general sensation of unreality that hasn’t been dispelled yet.
It was mostly a wonderful experience, even if with a few setbacks — setbacks that appeared to be more frequent in my final days, as if signalling that the dream was coming to an end.
Now, very soon, I will be going back to Germany, and there I must go back to “normal life” — working or trying to find work, worrying about my residency permit, paying bills, moving to another apartment, and in general trying to solve several practical things that I have been postponing for a long time.
Besides, while Finland (or at least the small town where I resided) felt like a place out of time, seemingly isolated from all the problems of our contemporary world, it is not the same in Germany. Oh no Siree. Germany does indeed feel like the modern world, from climate change to inflation to refugee drama to all that’s wrong with the world today.
(“What’s wrong with the world?”, asked Chesterton. “What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.”)
Anyway, I don’t know if I will continue writing when I am back there, or at least, I will probably be taking a break for a while. Perhaps I need some time to rethink this blog. People don’t read much blogs anyway these days — they watch videos and social media. But videos take time, and I hate social media.
So, we’ll see. In the meantime, thanks for reading.
Time to wake up.