Society’s Scratch Game
Faced with a world in flux, changing times and fabric that we are composed of, many are looking into the causation of what is going on. People are, at this point more than ever in our recent history trying to discern the sense making that their minds are set on autopilot to do. Whether social indicators, marketing results, immense data compilations, or what the ladies in the back row of church on a Sunday morning say… we are flailing at it wildly. We are also stoking its flames with our antics creating more wisps of heat and energy to try to figure out…
The sense making that people do will inevitably leave a pattern of some sort, a Dewy Decimal System to find the thought on why this, or that does, or doesn’t work. The pattern that has been developing inside me for many months now has been spotty, it hasn’t had a continual line of sight appearance that could be picked up from where the last one left off. Patterns don’t always come all at once, their appearance is sometimes pushed and shoved around like a rough game of hide and seek in a forest of mirrors. This pattern though is the one that held on, the one that keeps on winding itself into every other notion, popping up like a badly timed photo-bomb that covers up the crucial evidence needed at the moment. As I have said before, the best tool that I have ever found for understanding others, is a knowledge of oneself. It may be a purely reflective “mirrored forest” response to recent discoveries, or it could be the whole song that has finally revealed the subject of its lyrics.
It finally hit hard this morning, looking at replies from a more younger generation on the subject of the crop circle phenomenon of the 1990’s. They were centered around a part of a Wiki post that claimed it was all debunked by two guys in the UK with sticks and rope. I don’t know why I clicked on it to be honest, I have a fairly open view of it all. Where I thought I may have to argue my beliefs, try to dispel some of the falsities, I found myself in an very different place. I was struck with the aire that what was being talked about was finite, was solved, was debunked. I was more taken with the part where the commenters were not even born then, was just a kid, but their information was spotless and they discussed how it was back then. It was a collective consciousness of finality, of jokes, and of insulting comments. I wanted to reply that they weren’t there, they were taking something out of context, making stuff up. That’s when it hit me hardest, the pattern developed in a growth spurt. The generation speaking about the past ones were taking information, and disqualifying the rest. The rest being the actual experience of being there, but even those experiences that we hold, the importance of them and why it matters… doesn’t connect to anything they live today.
Of course a single set of inputs like this is not what I am basing this observation on, it is an accumulation of thousands. It is reflected on the opposite end of the generational spectrum as the equally numerous accounts by older generations about “back in my day.” The older generation’s inability to grasp the depth of change that has occurred, the stark differences that have arisen, is just as finite and disqualifying as the younger generation’s inability to time travel. These kind of things make more sense today than they did even a few days ago to myself. The recent introspect into self has left me with a wider viewpoint. This dismissal, this disqualifying of generations because of our inability to actually live within that frame of life, of society, is squarely at the center of this era we find ourselves in. As much as I cannot be you, and you cannot be me, the mannerisms of our communal ways these days invalidates the experiences of that generation. The reasoning is that we are faced now with a few generations that have been taught that their “value” comes from the outside world, what they will be, what they are good at, and more and more, what makes them happy. The building of a internal value system in children has been eroding for decades, there is no first place, there are only wrongs when you are being taught much of the time. When you are constantly getting participation trophies then the adults are just putting quarters in the entertainment/babysitting machine. The building of a internal self value, self esteem, and the lessons that come with them have been mostly replaced with a peer system. The like, follow, and subscribe buttons being badges of honor in a world based on just that system. We didn’t destroy the Capitalism train, work, work, work mode. We usurped it with making individuals a commodity. Not only a commodity, but one that can spoil and be ruined at the click of a mouse.
The fear that arises, the anxiety of the of the life that older generations literally cannot see or feel leaves the feeling of being invalid, a valid causation. I know from first hand experience the depths that that feeling can go. I also know that being older comes with the exact same set of players. As much as the younger generations feel disconnected from the older ones, from the Parental units, and guardians. The older generations feel it is something that is out of control, needing more “teaching,” apply more wrongs to it to correct the course. But the course is something that doesn’t really exist anymore, the disconnect is complete, the world changed. For the older generations to try to comprehend this would mean giving up their anchors to their past, the things that made up their lives, the importance their experiences have. They would have to adjust the wrongs that their upbringing brought them, correct for antiquated and hurtful behaviors and mannerisms. To the younger generation a perfect place to “teach” them, but you can’t teach an old dog a new trick. We aren’t worth the trouble, we have been invalidated, just like we invalidate them in our politics, our society, and our class struggles. So in an attempt to move on, each part of the equation is busy working away at invalidating each other, hurting as much as possible, and making things up just to do so. Knowingly or unknowingly.
When I looked at my own picture, I wasn’t going to believe that my Mother could have done something knowingly. Hurting me like that when even I didn’t know I was being hurt more than I knew. But I was able to entertain that it was done unintentionally, the same things that have been trying to show me this pattern for months was coming clear. More than once lately I have stopped a medication and began to feel better almost immediately. I was taking them because I was told it was there to help me, a medication is supposed to heal kind of thing. Yet, I found out that that thing that was supposed to help me, hurt me. That background messaging continued in a number of areas. I then looked into defensive tactics the brain uses to keep the sense making going. In that I found that many of the best thinking, such as acceptance, tolerance, and patience, were also used for some offensive thinking and with remnants from my old thinking left laying around. The articles about too much meditation can lead to depression, that being too positive can send the balance meter in tatters when it’s full. They were all getting me somewhere, but they didn’t finish, they fell away with a continued next week, or next season kind of ending credits. A real careful what you wish for redundancy, with a twist.
I saw the emotions, and lack thereof, in so many areas of our ways that had been present before. I noted how the behavior we are engaged in appears to be that of someone in the throes of addiction. Of course, looking for an outside influence to tell you how to feel is not uncommon, as prescription rates have skyrocketed beyond our ability to cope as well. The communications, the society building we are doing is not a science, but it is intimately human. We are going to have our mistakes and our successes, and we are going to raise a good deal of dis-functional generations as well. Like an actor upon the world stage of life, being always on, and depending on others for you acceptance; the world is a very different place today. I have heard, and said many times before that it doesn’t matter what other people think. That is not the case anymore in the society that has arisen from our slumber. That is not the world that we built and brought younger generations into. Older generations live mostly on a pile of their yesterdays, and the younger ones, their tomorrows. We are straddling an ever widening gap of now, and neither side can remember how to move their foot. We are engaged in an epic scratch battle of tic-tac-toe with the moves just repeated on another square every now and then. The things we must see to go forward are hiding in plain sight and we are engaged in our own deconstruction, our personal addictions of self, as we wander through the Discontinu-um.
