The World At Night
For now, COVID-19 turns the lights out on civilization. What will emerge at dawn?
One by one, the cities and factories, the shops and restaurants, the bars and offices, turned out their lights, closed their doors and told everyone to go home. The markets crashed. The borders closed. The streets emptied. Our neighbours disappeared. This is the world at night. You can even see it from space.
The global economy — particularly the service, travel and entertainment industries — collapsed, and is still collapsing, at light speed. People in the EU and US are now dying at exponentially increasing rates. We’re gripped in a mass panic, leaving the most vulnerable without food or supplies. The global south, largely spared for now, is left vulnerable to unspeakable horror.
Yet, within this tempestuous terror, the light within us will stay the light that shines the brightest. If we can muster our inner angels, and kill our collective id and ego, we can defeat the virus that threatens to vanquish us, and overcome the forces of antipathy that so poorly and heartlessly botched initial response to it. We must, for what brought us here will surely not deliver us out.
In the US, there is no public healthcare. No paid sick leave. No living wage. Education is expensive and our diets are heavy in rich, processed garbage. We are also heavily divisive in our rigid caste system based on an interlocking series of identity strata. Wealth has been extracted from our economy, leaving many of us to literally fight over scraps now that everyone panic-purchased everything as a result of our ruggedly individualist instincts.
Technology is everywhere, intrusive, frightening, and pure surveillance. It’s clear the elite view humans as data collection points and not as … People. News media and our elected officials are hard to trust. Reality itself ceases to exist in any agreed-upon fact-based consensus.
We cage brown babies and black men, leaving them susceptible to death. We consolidate and ostracize our elderly. We commit usury against our unhealthy. We show no compassion for those who become addicted, mentally ill, jobless or hopeless. Unless we’re ever more productive, we’re left to rot under the blood-red sky.
The US executive branch is a burning clown-car. We have foxes watching the hen-house — the self-interested looking out for the public interest. Oil markets are collapsing without renewable energy ready to replace it. Our most vulnerable workers (and the ones who bring the most joy and wisdom to our lives — service, education, arts, etc) are being shoved out onto the street en masse.
Everyone is afraid of everyone else, meanwhile many think some kind of god will spare us, and that science is some kind of deep state hoax. We criminalize movement. We demonize poverty. We lionize the kind of hustle-culture that causes us to go to the office during the worst pandemic in 102 years.
This pandemic is nature telling us, “go to your room and think about what you just did.” That’s what I’m doing. These are my thoughts.
Times are really precarious now, and we will have trouble reacting to them. People don’t handle uncertainty or ambiguity well, by and large. We treat these things as binaries. This side or that, red or blue, this thing happened or it didn’t. And so we are predisposed to polarize on things, even though we all generally want the same stuff: freedom, equality, fairness, health, enough wealth, life and happiness.
People also don’t have a great grasp on systems, by and large. We make decisions in vacuums, don’t ask enough questions, don’t get enough context, and we are imprisoned by the limits of our experiences and circumstances. We don’t zoom the lens out wide enough to see how everything is connected, how whole systems intertwine or work over time, or how things manifest, often unseen over the years and centuries.
Lastly, people really don’t process exponential change well. We tend to assume change is linear or logarithmic. Those are easier ideas to wrap our heads around. These are important for reasons highly relevant to the world right now.
Every day, the news is an exponentially more punishing fire-hose. So our are social feeds. Every day, we’re subjected to more images, more words, more horror than all previous generations combined. It’s clutter. Noise pollution.
We’ve spent years being catered to, marketed to, targeted, and persuaded without our true consent. We’ve become algorithmic data points: ones and zeros housed in clouds — a trail of locations, interests, photos, videos and ideas.
In an economy focused only on revenue growth, shareholder value and deal flow, and in a political climate that profits from division, polarization and radicalization, we’ve become real-life unwitting pawns in a high-stakes game of chess. For now, anyway, it’s checkmate for the commoners. With every move, all the time.
It didn’t always used to be like this: we used to just want to more easily talk to our friends, know what was going on in the world, and develop our careers. Those ideas seem quaint and wholesome now.
Over the course of my history spent writing these dispatches, I began to view the world more clearly, and step out of context and the existing paradigms and stories we tell ourselves. I am now all-too-acutely (and chronically) aware that the life I — and you, and we — long for living is not the life being served up to us by demagogues, organizations, businesses, politicians, media, entertainment, technology and institutions. We are being played, and had.
We’ve — as a whole series of societies, but particularly in the US — radicalized and spent ourselves into debt — financial, emotional and moral. To do what?
To keep up with the wealthy young white women who flaunt and fraud us on Instagram?
To growth-hack our way to our first million while the average American dies $62,000 in debt?
To “Make America Great Again” as kleptocrats, authoritarians, racists, fundamentalists, misogynists, and tech-bros plunged us into a dark age?
To be so short on health, time, energy, attention, love, money, freedom, creativity and empathy that we helplessly recoil into oblivion?
Is this really what we wanted?
This brutality and its equally brutal reckoning lies rooted in a series of stories we tell ourselves that have outlived their useful — to the extent that they ever were — lives.
How did we not see this coming? Because we were not meant to. We’re served up “fake news” so the basic idea of truth becomes obscured. We’ve been reduced to profile pictures and status updates on addictive apps, separated from our basic humanity, so we can be separated systematically from our own autonomy.
We didn’t choose this. We were chosen. I see it. Life’s too full. Now the sky is really falling, and we can’t even catch it, because our hands are loaded with junk and terror, and still we can’t even agree on if there’s even a sky at all.
The great sea of humanity is more like a reef. Coral bends, breathes, blossoms, blooms, flourishes, withers, bleaches and builds. It is a venerable city larger and more diverse than any man-made metropolis. Traffic clogs and collides, and high-rises crest toward the sky.
Each coral sustains the other. Food, light and energy are shared, stored and synthesized. This is life — simple, flawed, yet harmonious.
It should come as no surprise that as we’re slowly decimating humanity with our greed, our fear and our rage, we’ve also caused coral to bleach and recede. We’ve stripped away it’s vibrancy through our incessant and careless quest for more — energy, food, power, access. We’re not efficiently creating or sharing what we have, but plundering and pillaging that which grows around us.
As we’ve forgotten our humanity, and celebrated our supremacy and individuality, we’ve forgotten where we stand and how we got here. Fearful, aching, self-interested humans lash out against those they deem unworthy of the infinite, dooming the reef to receive what falls into their waiting and withering hands. They kill off the brethren that keep them alive. This is the cruelty of our time, and our race.
We have perverted Social Darwinism into Draconian Machiavellianism. The cream was not meant to rise to the top, and the fittest were not meant to persist, at the expense of those who dared to dream and were dashed and derailed by cruelty, apathy or injustice.
No. That selection is not natural. Humanity is natural. The reef is natural. Not fear. Not greed. Not rage. These are tools, ticks and tremors that detract from our humanity — not develop it. Pathological self-interest is not the path to heightened awareness or evolution, but magnetic poles apart from both.
Humans were not meant to be this productive, nor this individualist. This has become clear. We’re burnt out, depressed, exhausted, lonely, radicalized. Now, more than ever. By orders of magnitude. Now the pandemic … there’s no relief, no pause, no surrender in sight.
I wonder if this pandemic is to be a moral, social, environmental and geopolitical awakening. A cleansing of the collective human fabric. I know we don’t cause infectious disease by how we live, but it’s become viscerally apparent that our response to the virus shows our societies value all the wrong things.
Moderation left the station decades ago. Life is, or was, a buffet where the dishes were shoved down our throat whether we went back for seconds or not.
I don’t feel this runaway train of rogue predatory politicking and capitalism, this social side-scrolling platform game where the screen scrolls exponentially faster the farther through the level we clear, is good or healthy. I’m not sure I needed a pandemic to tell me that. It’s clear many of us do.
We need a timeout. We need relief. This is our time and our chance to recalibrate. Before there’s no time left, or no relief so great as to cure what’s ailing — nay, killing — us.
Within our darkest hours, it is the smallest moments that shine brightest. The soul of our humanity will be tested, as never before. Our compassion and calm will be vital. Our selflessness key to survival. We must be remain resolute in our resilience, undaunted by this disease, unwavering in our kindness.
And we must remain, of all things, joyous. We must find it in each other, seek it out in small doses, embody it in the face of horror. These are trying times, but these are not the end times. In fact, these times will end. As the whole of the human fabric threatens to fray at the seams, we must remember we all hold our own needles, and the power to stitch ourselves back together, to one day shine as bright as we ever did, as a collective beacon lighting the way for those who must one day re-emerge to walk in our footprints.
We will prevail. We have it within ourselves. So, as the world goes dark for the foreseeable future — for weeks, probably months — be calm and have faith and compassion in those around you.
This is the world at night. I know it feels hopeless. Be your own hope.