How does one do this?
A collection of personal scrambled garbage thoughts on what it means to be living in times like these
So, I guess I’m jumping on the Substack bandwagon? Maybe? In a sporadic sort of way? So hi there, and welcome to this space. I don’t really know why I’m doing this. Maybe it’s because a friend of mine started writing? Or the fact that I’m just so tired of social media but the kind of person that I am really would like a space to curate thoughts and experiences to share. Or the fact that I’ve been steadily subscribing to an increased number of newsletters and am enjoying reading them, and I feel like I wanna have one of my own. Or (and I promise this is my last hypothesis), the fact that I started journaling at the end of most days, and it felt so good and fun so I was like, let’s subject the world to more of me. Anyhoo folks, I’m doing this I guess. So, join if you wanna :3
So, I wanted to write about this thing I’ve really been thinking about but felt like a billion disjointed pieces, but I’m going to attempt to string together poorly. The world has been equal parts sad and scary it feels like. And like, y’know, I used to just think that we’re just exposed to a lot more conflict, violence, hatred and ‘horrifying clickbait’ news nowadays than we have ever been in the past. It’s just social media, I thought, and the fact that we just don’t have the capacity in our brains to handle being exposed to so much suffering. And yes, that is true to an extent, but like, global conflict (which when we were growing up I very much remember learning was on the decline, and that it was ‘the most peaceful time in human history’ yada yada)… it’s been on the rise y’all. Apparently there is a 22% increase in political violence recorded in the last 5 years, and a report in June 2023 said that there was a year on year 96% increase in deaths due to conflict… and this was before October 7th! There is growing nativistic nationalism everywhere, and it’s especially scary to witness around me in the places and people I grew up around. It feels like the spaces to just ‘be’ in ways that feel safe and familiar to me is just rapidly shrinking, and I come with a lot of privilege, so I can’t begin to imagine the way those more vulnerable than me might be feeling in this era. The dumpster fire memes that were popular in 2016 times feel like the good times now.
If this is your morning light read, I am sorry for how suddenly intense this got, but we all live in delulu-land so I trust you’ll be unfazed. I’m sorry if not.
I used to have a theory that ever since 2009 the world has been slowly slowly going to shit. I very subjectively based this on the fact that last set of best Bollywood songs I knew were from 2009 (Billu, Delhi-6, New York, Luck, Kurbaan, etc) but I had a ‘smart’ correlating point that ‘the number of people who identified as non-religious’ started declining since then, and I used to think this was some magical watershed year and stuff (I would like to let you know that I was 13 when I came up with this theory). Honestly, looking back, it all makes sense- it was just the year after the global financial crisis lol - the first large worldwide failing of the post-Cold war neoliberal order.
Now, if you know me, you might be surprised how I haven’t yet brought up frickin climate change yet. And well, I am going to now, so don’t worry. This next sentence is a big confession, but to tell you the truth, I don’t… actually really care all too much about climate change as such. Golly! But what I care about, and I’ve only recently been able to articulate this, is justice in the face of the climate crisis. As we face planetary crises, how much more easier will it get to not give a shit about marginalised communities, adopt private militias, and disregard aspects of human existence like compassion, empathy, kindness etc. How much more will we become ‘to each their own’, and only care about what happens to people who look most like us (and dress, eat, talk etc just like us). And in those aspects, I think it’s already here- I don’t think climate change is going to make any grand announcements and say ‘I’m here and I’m wreaking impact’, but amidst all the global conflict ongoing, control over natural resources forms the crux of these battles, and climate crisis is making these resources even more scarce and precarious.
I also have this other set of thoughts that I have brewing in me lil ol’ noggin somewhere. In Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein very superbly lays out how the Washington neoliberal agenda really became the norm, the baseline and standard in world economics. She lays bare how since post world war and especially the end of the Cold War era, state functions have been systematically dismantled so that it remains a shell of its former capabilities. The state is more or less a giant contractor today, she helps articulate - no matter the government, they all have to suck up to make the country more ‘investor friendly’ and woo the multinationals through building garish business districts and SEZs etc- and look, who am I really to really act like I know what’s to be done here, and what the way to do things are- so I will not pretend to be on any high horse here. But my point is, when I see clips like this on Instagram where all I can hear are identity-politics based (or counter identity politics?) social media sound bytes instead of any real kind of political program or vision or anything of that sort, I wonder if its not just social media which is channelling politics more and more into the identity/culture space all over the world but also if it is so that a weakened state can only wage battles on an ideological space anymore, since most states doesn’t really have the muscle to really be able to influence things like employment, food security etc in any real way anymore? I don’t know, and I really haven’t done any research or have any data to back this up, but its just a funny (not actually) feeling that I have.
Now I don’t really have a neat bow to tie all my thoughts into at all, no real feel good message to bring us all home. And also I feel like I should say this because I’m writing about things that very serious journalists, researchers etc spend a lot of time rigorously studying, that this article here is just my random thoughts and must not be taken to be anything more than that. I don’t know if everyone has thoughts like these just ruminating in their head, but I assume that to some degree, yes surely. We are exposed anything and everything, all of the time, so I assume some part of all of our mind is always trying to make sense of what the fuck is going on here, and it’s just a sign of the times. And the other part is watching some lady clean her apartment, have a thinner waistline than us, watching some cat cuddling a bear, etc.
So, how do we do this? Living in these times? Got no clue folks. But I feel like me actually sitting and writing all this gibberish out instead of just moving to stimulating forms of internet actually helps; or reading other people’s longform thoughts helps. Reading books, learning how people felt in other crazy times in history helps. Learning how your mom prevents rice from going bad the next day helps. Telling your friend hundreds of kilometres away how to do eyeliner over call helps. Learning how to not kill the plant you’re growing helps. I’m not sure how good we are at being in community because we’ve mostly learnt about working for our own growth, and maybe our family’s, but for me, it feels like pretty much the only thing that remains as meaningful amidst it all. I don’t know about the world and its problems, but I can maybe make the people and living things around me feel a lil bit better as they deal with living in these complex times, and I can learn to lean on them more as I deal with living in them. For now, that’s my best attempt at a bow.