What is regret? Is it shame? Is it denial of your ways and feelings in favor of what may have been easier? What would’ve felt better? Regret requires so much context and should be reserved for the most grave consequences and feelings. Regret, in my mind has no place in choices that moved us in any direction instead of stagnation.
I don’t necessarily believe in a point by point plot like fate for all of us. Nor do I believe life is chaos. The truth lies somewhere in the middle due to the slippery eel of free will and the nature of being. Like the golden thread spun by the Greek Fates. They didn’t control the life-line that we swing from, only how long the thread would be and when it was necessary to cut the line.
Lately, I see us say we deserved something, we’re being served our karma. I’ve even said as much when in the hospital recently. Thinking it was the result of any baneful energy or acts I’d done physically or spiritually. But life sometimes happens. Ignoring that Karma isn’t quite a universal truth and rarely manifests in this life. That is if you go to the source of the word, eastern India. I see it often, even in spiritual communities. This underlying riptide of fear. Fear the eclipse, fear the moon, fear the unknown. Fear seems to be the base neuropathway or anger. Needless to say, life doesn’t work that way. It just is, it’s not right all the time but it does exist.
Why does the internet feel so antagonistic lately? A malevolent emptiness. Like the cold mouth of a deep cave. Is there someone in there? Yes. But they feel feral. Maybe we all went a touch feral in the last few years. Unmoored by the tearing fabric of the world we grew up in, lived in, and saw almost collapse at the hands of ineptitude and pervasive indifference. It’s hard to feel anything more than frustrated in a world that seems more like it’s grinding us down to diamonds, than watering us to bloom.
The online world isn’t real but the effects undeniably reverberate off the cables and cords into our real lives, like notes from a guitar. Shaping the way our brains work and how we relate to one another and the world we live in. Terms are tossed around like grenades, sans the proper context or definitions. Is the downside of a global society the incessant conflating conflagration of what should be celebrated? How long are we going to use heady intellectual terms to dismiss the concerns of another because that’s easier than confronting uncomfortable truths head on?
I used to read comment sections for entertainment. Until twitter became the worlds comment section and then the world’s sewage plant. But in the days before the compromising of our own intellect at the hands of a South African gemstone heir and his inferiority complex, it was possible to see fruitful, meaningful conversations. That loneliness tempered temporarily by connecting, if just for fleeting moments, on one idea no matter how large or small. Now I can barely stomach them. I know a good chunk of them are from foreign parties in small offices abroad meant to sew discord. But I don’t think that’s all of it, maybe just the encouragement some people need to vent that frustration that has no other outlet. I suggest a heavy-bag and hitting it ‘til your hands hurt? But that’s me.
I feel it the most when I commute. Living in Chicago means I take the train a lot, and I people watch most often. I see a lot of casual disregard for common decency and the average peer. There is a missing link between who we are, and if we’re part of a collective. As if everyone has thrown in the towel. Head down, ignore the person next to you.
I realized recently, I only know two of my neighbors. The rest of us rarely speak, even if we cross path sone another and out of curiosity I wondered when this type of social disillusionment began and why. But again there’s no fruit in mining the details. It doesn’t really matter when it began or why, it’s like a virus. How do we go back? Or forward? How do we re-wire ourselves to be more connected and less inter-connected. A paradox of the human experience is that we’ve all this information about one another swirling about the ether drifting apart like planets in the solar system.