On dissonance, and how we are made to believe that if everything is a crisis, nothing is
(And how profoundly untrue that is)
“The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us. I had started to feel that the internet would only ever induce this cycle of heartbreak and hardening—a hyper-engagement that would make less sense every day.”
- Jia Tolentino, ‘The I in the Internet’, Trick Mirror
- Lady Bird (2017)
“While the primary concern is for human life, conflict would also affect the world’s supply of oil.”
- The Independent, “Oil price ‘could double to $150 a barrel’ if US and Iran go to war”, 7 January 2020.
What I am feeling, and what we are consistently told to feel, is numb. To posit that the world is falling apart this week and not the previous, this week and not the next, last decade and not today, makes no sense to me. I feel churned out by every news cycle that denotes the years in which I, and we, have lived on this earth. There is little agency in the revolutionary, disruptive inventions that proffer us the idea that we have the ability to change anything. Why would we be given, for the low, low price of nearly a thousand dollars, the handheld, three-camera-having opportunity to realize that none of this is helping us?
I’m talking in circles about phones, but I’m also talking about dissonance. The space between us and the people we have the genuine capacity to care for, help, and stand in solidarity with has been getting bigger and bigger and it doesn’t stop – we cry at memorials and watch the stock soar at the prospect of mass violence. We shrug, because we have nothing left. “While the primary concern is for human life” is a prefix someone thought to write, because the primary concern is not for human life, and we are telling on ourselves by creating the need, the moral panic for it to be said at all.
And I’m wrong, again, because no one is panicking, and that was always the point. If the ticker tape is so red, so fast, so blinding that it shoots straight past our eyes, we stop seeing it altogether. We are overwhelmed with all that we have been given by generous entrepreneurs and start-ups, we say thank you, and wait until the overwhelm becomes the status quo, so that nothing is new, and nothing can hurt. It is truly the most fundamental paradox of being “empowered” with more and more information, with isolating education and “awareness” as good virtues in and of themselves, with gilding everything with further and further technological advancement until it is all seamless, unrecognizable, all flat, cold metal.
I try to go to meetings about the things I care about because I want to feel something. I find it hard to go to meetings about the things I care about because it feels inherently flawed to posit that it makes me significantly less disillusioned or numb than simply not doing so at all. “While the primary concern is for human life”, the primary concern is for a singular life, and it is not the one that most are living.
I worry that I will lose my ability to care, when I am so tired of wondering why no one else is screaming their screens at work. I understand that this is what social engineering is, that I’ve always craved doing what I was told to do and supposed to do because I trusted that someone would eventually tell me that it was all for the intangible, greater good. Realizing that I have always been living through not only “something” but nearly everything possible, and that there is still an infinite amount of nearly everything possible left, and that we are all engulfed in it to the point where it feels like we are different species to each other – it’s not great. And I don’t know what to do about it.