Living in a hurry
The zeitgeist, as global industrio-cosmopolitan culture, is a place where life is cheap. Cheap labour, non-existent quality of life, and where everyone from the pedestrian to the politician is replaceable.
It is a place where population density is not just a geographic metric, it is a temporal one as well. Every second of every minute is overcrowded. Resources are minimal, and goals overlap, so a tendency to disregard the other is, by this point, a survival reflex — this is peak competition.
Leisure in such a state is a criminal enterprise, and is often treated exactly as such. There is a distrust in anyone able to foster sufficient time and space to look beyond their own needs and desires. People able to rise above the grind are seen as being out of touch; and in the rare cases that they’re framed as something aspirational, any privilege they wield is obscured to allow for this.
And now, with the advent of AI, we’re racing against technology itself for the same spaces of time and place. The economy floods every waking instance like a tsunami so rough and bullish that it faces no resistance, bearing down on one red flag after the other. And life itself is reduced to nothing more than a ghost; a phantom used to discuss the intangible, the unobtainable.
There is only the grind, the whole grind, and nothing but the grind. Each day is a bullet-train hurtling into the abyss; and those unable to hold on are left to the mercy of natural selection.
As a result, tempers are perpetually flared, diffidence is instinct, and self-preservation trumps all. Morals are not expansive since there is nowhere for them to expand into. The outlook is bleak and the future is rigid. Where is the allowance for innovation and adventure when imagination is indistinguishable from psychosis?
And, paradoxically psychosis is seen as essential, as the fundamental drive to survive; the feeling of claustrophobia, the sense that the walls are closing in, and the sense that one must thrash against every hindrance and hurdle like ones life depended on it (whether one understands what these encumbrances are or not) — these are the hallmarks of the efficient worker.
Even ants are more considerate of their friends and neighbours than the modern human worker. A colony of ants is friendly, at least, to themselves. Their destinies predefined and their roles rigid, the reason they carry on even as they must crawl over one another in the space that they exist only to sustain is solely that they feel at least welcome there.
Yet, human colonies seem almost hardwired to treat the individual as an infection; people seek to eke out space for themselves by driving out their neighbours — the mindset of occupation is the mindset of colonialism, albeit one informed by the success of capitalism’s atomisation. We cannot even call this delusion; solipsism, with some exceptional affordances, is the fundamental reality we experience.
To be able to see beyond the haze of self-preservation is to be terrified by the vast and seemingly hostile expanse of possibility. If there is no prescription for the path ahead, the path ahead is not so much a path as it is a trap. There is a sense of foreboding that has clouded the skies of adventure. There is no spirit but the spirit of collapse; there is no purpose, no raison d’être but exhaustion.
Blood, sweat, and tears; blood, sweat, and tears — there is no currency but this. We feed ourselves by the very sweat of our soul and become reduced to animals in such an environment; any fancies we may harbour of being something distinct, something intelligent beyond other creatures, should be left at the door. But why bother, right? If delusion is already baseline, what is more delusion but fuel to the fire; what is more delusion but the very essence of nourishment.
Evolution is an emergent property; it is the culmination of an intrinsic potential in creatures, encoded in their basic genetic makeup, to select for the fittest traits through the act of survival. In other words, it is the fundamental property of life to account for its environment in (its other fundamental capacity) to propogate itself. We are as creatures, today, living embodiments of life’s relentless capacity to be in dialogue with its environment and to draw sophistication from this ongoing conversation.
As languages evolve and change based on physical and social environmental constraints, taking on observable patterns in the expression of this process, so too do our genes; and, as a product of this, so too do our traits.
This is the very essence of life; perhaps even the reason that the word ‘creature’ seems assembled from two parts: creation and fracture. We are as rivulets from that grand stream of life. That it courses upon earth under the milkyway, we are spin-offs, run-offs, and spirals channeling further into this cosmic wonderland.
And in this material unraveling of the cosmic design humans do have a distinct capacity, perhaps even an advantage. Granted, it is hard to see it as one when the only effects and symptoms of this advantage seem to have manifested themselves in the worst possible ways — almost as active disadvantages engendered by this capacity. Perhaps the adage is true: with great power comes great responsibility. Yet, while we have so far been more than content to claim great power, rarely are we ever as ready to take accountability for the responsibility that comes with it. Such consequence is the consequence of neglect, not of the power itself.
This distinction of the human creature is seen in the overcrowding of time and space; it is seen in the rigid structures that channel our attentions into narrow spaces so as to flush their rushing with greater force; it is seen in the smog, the noise, and the hellish climate, physical and psychological, we have come to impose on ourselves.
That is to say, this distinction of the human creature is its capacity to shape its own environment. And, thereby, to shape the trajectory of its own evolution.
Our ability to affect our environment is our ability to create such conditions as amplify the fitness of specific traits; and, thus, to lay a path for evolution’s progress. We hold in our hands the ability to determine our future state; and to be blind to this is as to walk across a busy street with ones eyes intentionally closed, simply for that one does not believe they have eyes at all.
Such is the state of delusion that guides us all unto our self-inflicted demise. The waste of the capacity to shape our environments is not just a waste of potential; it is the active investment in unnecessary destruction. It is to make inevitable that which is absolutely not and then to act as if there is no escape from this phenomenon. That the inevitability of living in a hurry is one wrought upon us by the cosmic design — ignorant, in each second we choose to invest in this collective hallucination, that we are paving the very road we walk on.
As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intention. The pavement is there to make the journey less arduous even if the journey itself is, from the beginning, known to lead to exactly the opposite of salvation. However, if we take the Hindu perspective, perhaps this adage takes on a more optimistic flavour. If hell is no more than a shower, no more than place of cleansing, then perhaps the road to hell is only the road to heaven with some diversion.
Maybe this paving of the way of life with concrete and asphalt seemingly designed to narrow its scope is merely a stage in the progress towards a place where it is no longer necessary. Maybe we drive ourselves into pigeonholes so we may see that this is not where we want to be. One can only hope that this, too, is somehow a part of the cosmic design.
For, if life exists in the vast vacuum of space then, literally, there is a space, a seat of purpose for life. Even if the exact nature of that purpose is, at least currently, something incomprehensible to human faculties. Maybe we are not walking blind, nor rushing into the dark; maybe we are exactly where we need to be.
That seems, really, the best possible framing of the worst possible conditions; but, at the risk of further delusion, maybe its true.