The world has become something monstrous.
Do not mistake ‘the world’ for ‘reality’—the world is an image we superimpose over reality. Reality is beautiful, immaculate, precious, eternal, mysterious, fluid, unknowable. The world is hateful, selfish, cruel, violent, despicable, pious, rigid, banal. It is inescapable that death and pain are features of reality, of life. All living things die, and, in the endless play of time, all dead things eventually come to life. In the world that we collectively imagined into being, though, suffering emerged, and patterns of suffering were etched into our lives. We destroy ourselves in the pursuit of that which we are lead to believe will fulfill us. We destroy each other in the pursuit of safety and peace, achieving neither. The Palestinians suffer because the Israelis suffer because the Palestinians suffer, all in vain devotion to a mass hallucination—lines on a map, words on a page—like self-mutilation scars on the arm of a child that has not yet learned to love themself, and the sweet lies that justify ever greater atrocities.
People who do not know say it must be so, because, because, because. They say now isn’t the right time. They say the political situation is thus. They say it’s complicated. They say it’s simple. They say the oppressed and persecuted need only endure until conditions ripen and then, then, things will be better, and all of this horror will have been justified. They say they’re vermin and they deserve to be exterminated. They say it’s so simple, you need only wait and see and cover your eyes and close your ears and forget. They say the future is bright. They say the good thrive and the wicked perish. They say we alone are correct—those that disagree are either naïve or malicious or bigoted.
The world is ending. It always has been.
The truth of reality is that nothing is fixed and unmoving; no particular things exist, all is process. From the moment an infant is born they are dying, from the moment a nation is founded it is collapsing. All ecosystems are eventually replaced by new ones, to be ultimately rendered sterile by external or internal forces of entropy. A desert may lie barren for millennia until atmospheric or geologic shifts bring life-giving rains. Fertile planets are inevitably destroyed by the very stars that formed them. The failure to recognize these truths is the source of all suffering. Attachment to the self creates fear of death. Clinging to empire results inexorably in genocide.
I don’t know how to fix the world. I don’t dare to hope such a thing is possible, and a careful accounting of the odds suggests my pessimism is justified. I spent much of my adult life hating reality because I mistook the world for it. I made what is called a category error, ascribing the characteristics of the world we imagine to the underlying reality it floats on the surface of, like a rainbow oil slick on a vast ocean. It’s an easy mistake to make: when one has a keen eye for nature, one cannot help but notice the preponderance of pain. The parasitic wasps that lay their eggs in the flesh of the caterpillar. The alligators that lurk in muddy water, ambushing their prey, crushing and dragging them to a torturous drowning death. There is no question that pain is inevitable. What about suffering?
When we look for the sources of our pain, we inevitably magnify it, like picking at a scab that should be left alone to heal until a scar forms in its place. We begin assigning blame, as if there were some chain of responsibility that could be traced back to an individual, rather than extending back in time to the formation of our planet and beyond. Free will has been definitively ruled out by modern biology and neurology, but the scientific and public attitudes have been slow to adapt to this new paradigm. Everything in the world, everything in reality, is the consequence of what came before it. Everything we observe as fixed and static is in actuality an unfolding that takes place over timescales we cannot perceive. What is a mountain, but a wave in the landscape? What is a human being but a flicker of sensation and awareness that inevitably returns to the void of nonbeing? Flowers bloom then wilt and drop—food for the worms and the microbes.
In attempting to divide reality into subject and object, observer and observed, we created the world, and the world is an endless nightmare.
We talk about innocence and justice, and then we trample both out of misguided love or implicit in-group favoritism or naked greed or fear. Whether someone is a terrorist or a freedom fighter is a matter of perspective. Whether an invading military is a force of oppression or liberation is a matter of politics. We answer these questions reflexively, mistaking our implicit biases for common sense, enshrining dogma and bigotry as rational ideals. Which is more destructive; antisemitism or islamophobia? Who decides? How many dead children are justified in ‘destroying evil’? In ‘self defense’?
And it will never stop.
There is no enlightened future civilization that doesn’t depend on human misery and exploitation—not one that could conceivably evolve from the current state of the world, anyways. We deal in myths of progress and enlightenment: apologia for a bloody history of colonialism and mass murder. Does the existence of America in the modern world justify what was done to the continent’s indigenous peoples? Does Europe’s relative prosperity justify their ongoing neocolonial exploitation of Africa?
The remedy for a sick world is compassion and understanding—compassion for those caught in the mental trap, as I was for so long, and understanding of life’s fleeting nature. The value of what our species has built is not contingent on how long it lasts, or what our future holds, but in properly appreciating the day-to-day experiences that would never have been possible without the ongoing suffering of billions. The luxuries we take for granted are not our birthright, but a blood tithe we unknowingly and often unwillingly extract from the lives of current and future fellow humans. As indigenous cultures would give thanks to the animals they slaughtered to sustain their own lives, so too must we solemnly acknowledge the monumental human and animal suffering that scaffolds our seemingly mundane existence. We do not choose the violence; we were born into a violent system. We can devote our lives to fighting injustice, but we must do so with the knowledge that injustice will persist as long as the world does. In the meantime we can bow our heads and give thanks.
The world will end—all ‘things’ we conceive of do.
When the time comes, it will be a blessing; sweet release from a torment that has finally become truly unbearable. It could be tomorrow, if the nuclear powers decide it so—the US and (presumably) Israel do not have prohibitions on first use in their nuclear doctrines, and the US and Russia have resumed nuclear testing and development, abandoning their disarmament treaties. It could be decades from now, as climate change shreds vulnerable regions and their neighbors are inundated with climate refugees. It is increasingly unlikely Earth will be hospitable to megafauna such as ourselves by 2100. Live life for the present moment, not the promised future—if there is indeed a future for our species, I fear it might be more horrible than anyone presently alive can even begin to imagine.
Reality is beautiful. After you read this, go outside and look at a tree without judging it or evaluating it. Feel the temperature of the air on your skin. Note the color of the sky, the position of the clouds. When you silence your mind, you realize that all of these things are perfect exactly as they are, that there exists in all things an intrinsic beauty that defies description, quantification, and improvement. Feel the air fill your lungs as you inhale: you are of a kind with that perfection. The apparent boundary between you and your environment is arbitrary, a part of the world. Like the tree, you do not require praise or correction or categorization. Maybe, for a moment, you can leave the world and return to reality. I promise, it’s worth your time.