Neighbors

I feel that Covid has irreperably damaged my relationship to other people. Everyone is a threat. Everyone is a carrier of something I can't see, but fear nonetheless. Everyone is a problem. I don't want to look at other people this way. I don't know how to escape this dichotomy either. It feels to me like the best, if not the only approach, is to begin to view one another as neighbors. I don't think this is a small task or even a possible one. We are too torn apart. Too ripped from our seams. Too divided into camps of belief. The social media platforms we use divide us even more. Our slavish obedience to screens divides us even more. Our constant nervous system disruption divides us even more. Everything wants our attention, and all of it makes us worse. It makes us more angry and stupid. More venemous to our friends and family. More selfish. Mor, yes, narcissistic. I can't help but feel that to view people around me as my neighbors is impossible. Not for just me but for everyone. How do you begin to talk to someone? We all walk around pre-packaged and programmed with our talking points ready to go. If someone says the wrong thing, we are prepared. We not what to say. We've been trained. So what to do? To try nonetheless. That seems like the answer. Let's try. Try with me.

Immediacy

 I read this tweet a few days ago: 

Quit news. Quit political media. Create things and try to be around people who create things instead.

Try to improve your world. To lay a single cobblestone path is to have more virtue than a million hot takes. https://t.co/J8FL3eyzGv

— Simon Sarris (@simonsarris) February 12, 2020

 

I've followed Simon Sarris on Twitter since about the summer when I briefly ventured into investor/hustle/libertarian Twitter. 

That's a story for another day. 

He wrote another tweet, which I can't find now, about how people need to be more involved in their own lives. It felt directed at me, at people like me. It wasn't directed at me specifically because he doesn't know who I am. But it was directed at people like me; people who are too lost in the day-to-day movement of the geo-political news cycle. People who consume that stuff for fun. 

It's not fun. It's debilitating. 

I told my wife yesterday, I think news is a scam. 

Not journalism, but news. 

Covid comes to mind as an area where news is important, but even that doesn't seem especially tied to news persay. Someone would have told me about covid even if I never spent hours reading about it and being scared I'll die from it. 

Somebody would have said, hey, wear a mask, asshole. 

Maybe my neighbor. Except she wouldn't have called me an asshole. She's in her 70s and really sweet. 

You get the point. 

So I think I'm going to do a project where every couple of days I'll choose something in my life; in my vicinity or neighborhood; something in my city. And I'll learn about it, and write about it. 

I want to be more involved in my own life. 

I want to be less involved in the world's affairs.

I want to be less manic and depressed. 

I want to be grounded in my immediate surroundings. In my city. I want to be local and present. 

I hope this helps with that. I think it might.