I've been home from North America for a few days and I'm struggling to sit at my computer. I've opened the internet a few times and found it hollow and wanting. I go back to my notebook, my housework, a walk by the water.
Outside of World Cup fervour there was a bleakness in this visit that felt starker than other trips. We travelled to Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. In each city we saw unhoused people milling around listlessly on the streets, many bent in half by the 'Fentanyl fold'. Scorched glass pipes lay beside shopping trolleys stacked with blankets and bags. The side streets stank of urine and weed, while the roads were littered with plastic bags and blown out tyres.
There's something particularly jarring about this tableau when it's positioned - literally - next to abundance and excess. Shiny glass windows, colourful shop displays, $6 USD coffees. On the streets of Seattle, locals told us Mark Zuckerberg's $300 million mega-yacht had recently pulled into the harbour, just hours after the latest round of layoffs at Meta was announced. That evening, we saw a distressed woman sobbing while defecating into a planter box by the train station. She screamed at us to look away and leave her alone.
Back at my computer, I check my emails to find a sea of marketing bullshit and bureaucratic gobbledygook. I log into LinkedIn and scroll a slop-soup of software ads and pointless posturing. I close the lid again and rinse out my recycling. The tap runs while millions of giant gas-guzzling trucks barrel down US freeways.
The tide is still coming in and out every day here at the Pauatahanui Inlet. The laundry still needs folding. The kids need dinner, and there's a card game waiting for after. Few of the things we do will change the world, but they do shape the corner of it we live in and are responsible for.
As I gently re-engage with my writing, I return to this quote from Joan Didion.
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.”
When confronted with the realisation there's no hidden, universal meaning and the world is disorganised and unfair, we have options.
Fury and sadness are one response, but they have a time and energy ceiling. Numbness and nihilism are another: nothing matters, nobody's watching, and the choices you make won't make a difference. True, perhaps, but hollow.
I prefer the existentialist version: nothing matters, nobody's watching, and the choices you make won't make a difference, so do what is real and right for you.
Whether meaninglessness leads to fury, futility, or freedom is a matter of perspective. I'm hoping that after a few more walks by the inlet, I find my way to a useful one. If there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that I won't find it on the internet.
Happy Wednesday.
-AM
