Weltschmerz: On Living at the End of a Bad Idea
Weltschmerz is a borrowed word that I have come to think of a lot lately. The weariness of the world. Well, to put a literal translation it means “world pain” and is a profound sadness over the world’s inherent evils and injustices, and also a melancholy. An apt word for the final curtain call for a new gilded age that must come to an end. Or at least, I hope it ends soon.
When I wake up in the morning a crushing weight descends on me the more awake, I become. This heaviness, while easily attributed to a poor night’s sleep, isn’t so much from the lack of sleep but rather from that which causes the lack of sleep. It is the world itself I am waking into. At times, it feels like waking into a nightmare, and sleep is the relief from that nightmare. To be obliterated by the fantasies of whatever the mind conjures up is more peace than I ever meet in a day anymore.
This world is, in my view, built on a bad idea that has refused to die. An idea that is killing us all slowly, grinding us down, turning our bones to dust and our minds to mush. People like to pretend that this grand society and this mechanistic world is somehow “broken”. That belief belies the lie that it was ever meant to work for us in the first place. It wasn’t, and it works exactly as intended. Everything is a fuel to burn. Your time, your labor, your attention, your hope, your very soul… the system burns it all and calls the smoke and debris it leaves behind progress.
So, escaping the truth that this human world, made by, and suffered by, humans, is anything but good we tell ourselves comforting stories. We tell our stories to each other to survive. We tell ourselves that we will overcome through slow incremental change, and that big changes are risky, so we have to keep at it slowly, bit by bit by bit by bit. I say that is suicide.
We use stories, parables, and words as ways to dull the pain because the truth can be so unbearable. The long tradition of oral histories has mutated into the new tradition of rumors, lies, blatant fabrications, and worse – hope that you too will become one of the elites if you work hard enough. To admit that this modern world we have had built by our ancestors is not just flawed, but fundamentally hostile to human development would require us to stop participating in the ever constant grind of capital, labor, and exploitation.
It would require us to stop pretending that patience for change is a virtue, for it is an ill that lets another child go hungry, another person end up imprisoned for the crime of existing, another gigaton of carbon to be billowed into our already ailing atmosphere.
It would force us to admit that waiting politely for change, for improvement, has only ever benefited the people who profit at our expense as workers. Waiting for change while we wring our hands, pay out the ass for healthcare, watch our children get poisoned by the world built before us, and allow the vile depredations of our politicians to continue is foolish at best and complicity at its worst.
We have convinced ourselves. But we were first convinced. It was not some random act of spontaneous thinking that created these conditions, but rather the motive of how the world is. The world wasn’t always the way it is now, and it certainly won’t stay the same even if our ingrained biases say this is how it always was and always will be. Change is a simple matter; the will to change is where it all becomes difficult. The risk versus reward, the placated dull masses that I am just as guilty being a part of allowing it all to wash over me with fabricated news and rage-bait articles to keep engagement up and thinking low… it’s all there and it is all shoving crap in to our heads so we have nothing but crap to expel.
There is an old myth about elephants, that when they know the end is coming, they walk to a place only they know in order to die. The myth is one that makes death itself romantic, that they will seek out a quiet place, a dignified place, somewhere only they know where they can find peace at last and fade into obscurity only for their sun-bleached bones to be a marker that they once existed and are now turned to dust. The story isn’t true, of course. Fantastical myths about these wise creatures abound, and while their bones may gather in places, it is simply because of the nature of those places. Perhaps though, we needed the myth.
We’re all looking for a place to belong, and to find it at the end is rather romantic, is it not? To believe in a special place where there is no more suffering, where the long grind is finally done, where the ever-crushing weight of it all just fades away and you do too because you reached your end… it can be alluring. But you and I are not mythical elephants. Elephants are known to visit the remains of their departed and grieve them, just like us. Elephants are known to hold grudges against those who wronged them, just like us. Elephants are able to know when the skeleton they see is one of their own, just like us. It is more likely than not that elephants are capable of deep emotion, problem solving, and critical thinking, and we could be too if we stopped allowing ourselves to be distracted by the intentional theft of our time.
Sit down, tune out, and think for yourself. Be bored. Be anxious. Feel the bad thoughts and address them. If you can, get the therapy we all need. I truly and deeply mean it that every citizen of every nation needs therapy and connection with others, even if you’re a loner who does better by yourself – you still need to build a connection and have some kind of network that is mutually beneficial. Humans are not solitary creatures, and neither are elephants.
We don’t march off to some sacred ending anymore; we’re no longer allowed to find peace, and retirement is all but dead. We wear ourselves down where we stand until we fall. We get tired, we get sick, we become numb, and we die. We die closed off from the world that was once ours and now belongs to data-driven tech broligarchs and the same big business interests that have been robbing us blind for three centuries. Three centuries isn’t very long either. That’s not even a twitch in the eye of our history on earth.
We keep showing up because we don’t want to starve, or let our families down, or ruin our meager chances of finding our place to die in peace, and in so doing we become trapped. I am weary because I have taken too much time thinking about all of this muck in my brain and I wish it would stop, that I could not think about what the world is like today, that I could just let it all wash over me, let it just sort of be and hit a soft landing of blissful ignorance again.
Instead, I am stuck having a panic attack at 2am without knowing why until later when I figure out the reason and it is an unchangeable constant that could be changed but isn’t because the conditions aren’t right yet. I’ve tried Stoicism, of saying to myself that if I cannot change it, I cannot worry about it, that all things will pass, that the world will always be there and that there is nothing to truly worry about… except that doesn’t work because I can’t stop caring about this world. Some broken part of me wants to fix it all, or at the very least do something to help fix things, and my weltschmerz is from being unable to do much more than I already am.
The cost of simply existing just keeps climbing as they extract more and more and more from us. Groceries, fuel, subscription after subscription after sub-fucking-scription for this and that and something more. The grift keeps on coming as the revenue streams of exploiting average people dries up, from one extreme to another. Fabrication of entire currencies based on “crypto” which is just insane because of the computational resources it takes being one of the newer ones. NFTs and god knows what is next, along with all the sports gambling you can shake a stick at. All in the promise of finding that place you belong finally – but using those based feelings and the human mind’s own gambling problems against people just to suck out that much more from them.
Life itself is a subscription service and to cancel the subscription is to die now. No one can afford to survive, and no one can afford to die. When death comes it comes not in a peaceful romantic way, it comes for you when you don’t want it and can’t afford it, and it leaves your family more broken and emptier than ever before. Our corporate masters have ruined our social connections to exploit even that with algorithms and fueled hatred to sell more hats and t-shirts and fucking keychains. Every little bit, every single thing in your existence is being monetized, and “normal” people claim that is how it should be, has been and will always be.
That could not be further from the truth. This contrivance of this society is more recent. It isn’t that old. It doesn’t have to be this way. A few times some countries were pushed toward a future with a different economic theory, and the current model crushed them because it threatened profits. Profits, wealth accumulation, and the end of all society are the dooms that await us. We are close to the end, I can feel it like a lump under the skin, like a nagging cough that won’t go away, like a sharp pain in the chest you have to ignore because you can’t afford to get it looked at.
Beyond that, the absolute alien nature of how it all feels to me now. Maybe this is what it is to be alienated? To have grown up in this world and been in it for decades watching everything and still feeling like I did twenty years ago wondering why the fuck everything is just a grinding nightmare when if we worked together, we could be building wonders.
The seasons are unraveling and we still go to work. The jet stream is on the brink of collapse, and we still enjoy our subscription service to whogivesashit plus prime max. The air fills with smoke, and we check our emails from the boss/supervisor well after working hours ended. We sit at our jobs wasting the seconds of our lives while we’re being exploited coming and going. If we choose to raise children, they are raised in a world that has become hostile to children as a whole. Our human-centric form of the planet is dying, and we’re just sitting here hoping someone will come and save us, when we know deep down we can only save ourselves.
The music stopped years ago, and we’re still dancing along in the fog of belief that all things are as they should be, that all things will work out for the better, and that our entire system is just fine as it is. Shuffling along on the floors in silence, the only noises are the scraping of our shoes, and the occasional gasp as someone dies of exhaustion.
This is my weltschmerz. To see it all and just want to leave it all.
I cannot see the end, know how it will end, or comprehend the ending because I lack the ability to see the future beyond what predictive modelling the base part of my brain does… but I do know one thing.
It won’t end on its own.
I’m going to keep looking for a place to lie down though.