Will This Fog Last Forever?
An elegy for the future.
Jessica Wildfire
August 30, 2024
...
Imagine living in a world where a major comics convention can't guarantee that you won't leave with an airborne disease that ruins your life if it doesn't kill you, and they make a point of telling you that.
It's the stuff of dystopian literature.
Nobody wants to live in that kind of world.
Hence the denial.
And of course, deep widespread denial is a defining feature of dystopian literature and cinema. It's bad, but nobody wants to admit it. They just go on about their lives. That's what you see in everything from Fahrenheit 451 to Bladerunner. It's bad, but nobody really cares. Nobody wants to talk about it.
You can imagine how many people would find a future without Dragon Con almost unbearable, why they'd be willing to risk death or permanent disability because they're unwilling to give it up.
...
From an ecological standpoint, the planet could never afford the normal we'd gotten used to anyway. Those conventions and theme parks, the coffee shops and fast food restaurants, the palatial grocery stores with sushi bars, the giant shopping centers, the busy airports, the nice hotels, the stadium concerts, the idea of investing for retirement, it was all built on an endless growth destined to come crumbling down at some point. It was just easy to ignore. Now, every year, it gets less easy to ignore. It requires an upgrade to the denial and wishful thinking that keeps it all going. So it's going to get harder and harder for us to witness.
The desperate exuberance wrapped in lies that greets us from our screens is going to get harder to endure over the next few months. As the world gets worse, the smiles are going to get bigger, and the lies are going to get more brazen. The need will grow to shut it off altogether because it's too much.
More than anything, it's this surge of toxic positivity that gets us. We feel like that's never going to end, and it's probably not.
...There's two ways to look at the future now. You can cling to old expectations. That leads you to the empty hope and delirium we're seeing. Peel that off, and you find a yawning desperation and sadness. You find the real nihilism, that life is pointless unless you can distract yourself from things you can't hope to change. That's what the urgent normalizers are fighting for. They need their distractions.
Or...
You can change your expectations.
That's what we've done. I don't know about you, but I no longer look forward to simple pleasures from the last decade. That era has ended, along with all the amusing distractions it brought us in the form of poignant shows and superhero movies. We live in a new age now, with different priorities and values. Our real world Tony Stark turned out to be a giant fascist who can't even build a car.
...
It's good to think about how things used to be. It's important to remember. These days, memories of the old normal feel weird. It's weird that I used to go to a gym to exercise. It's weird that I used to walk into a classroom or a store without even thinking about pathogens floating in the air. It's weird that I could once take my child to a daycare and have a few hours to myself in the middle of the day. It's weird that relatives could babysit her for a few hours. It's weird that I used to just meet someone for a cup of coffee.
Full article:
https://www.okdoomer.io/will-this-fog-last-forever/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from 504DR@climatejustice.social
text/geminiThis content has been proxied by September (3851b).