Total Eclipse of the Heart
April 8th, 2024
I was wondering why Target was so busy this afternoon until I remembered that today was the end of the world.
Reading stories this week about stores of all kinds being overwhelmed with certain types of people planning for the apocalypse had me frequently wondering: planning, exactly, for what?
What comes after the end? Can we stand still long enough to think this through?
I don't want to tease the people who believe in impossible conspiracy theories because those people have suffered enough; they believe impossible things that can never be proven true.
That is a special kind of pain, and uniquely human.
I just finished Severance this morning (writing about the series is a future essay, because rarely does a television show affect me in this way, all the way down to my DNA), and among its countless themes and threads is the idea that humans want to skip the hard parts.
The difficult parts of being human. The boring parts of being human. The being human part of being human. We want to skip them and get to the good parts, and the way our culture is evolving reflects that.
It drives me crazy when people speed up their audio, on TikTok or YouTube or audiobooks. It's perfect proof that people don't want to be in the moment; they don't want to experience the pauses and the "um"s and the thought and emotion of genuine human speech.
Just get me to the end. Give me the good stuff.
Don't give me quiet gaps where I might fall, and have to live in my own mind for a minute and think about who I am.
No matter what you do today, during this eclipse, during the end of the world, I hope you do so.
I hope you live in the pause, live in the "um," let yourself have a moment of silence to consider your own thoughts and emotions.
Just remember not to look directly into the sun. The same is not true when it comes to yourself.