Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 135 million years, and disappeared in a mass extinction event 65 million years ago. Early hominids, the ancestors of early man only showed up 10 million years ago. If you were to draw a timeline from the first dinosaur to today, then the last surviving dinosaurs are closer in time to humans than they are to the first dinosaurs.
I don’t know why I grew up assuming that humans and dinosaurs co-existed long ago, but give me a break… I was only 55-60 million years off! Maybe it was drawings of humans and wooly mammoths? Maybe it was cartoons? But it’s a real time warp when you think about how long dinosaurs ruled the earth, and how short of a time humans have existed.
It’s even weirder to think of the time it took from the first steam engine to the time when our industrial lives started to threaten the well-being of our planet. Is this what intelligence life forms do? We’ve just been looking at time in millions of years, but the first steam engine was built just over 400 years ago.
Humans have been on this planet for such a short time, yet we place so much attention on ourselves and our significance, as conscious beings. This one species, on an insignificant planet, in an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, at an insignificant time in the existence of the universe.
Last night I went for a walk with my wife. Minutes from home we were walking on a quiet, empty street that doesn’t have sidewalks. Then a car approached from in front of us. We started to move to the side of the road, and noticed car lights coming from behind us as well. The cars crossed paths right where we were on the edge of the road, having had to slow down to cautiously make space for us and the other car. Then we continued our walk with no cars approaching us from either way until we arrived home.
I find it fascinating how we seem to be drawn, pulled to intersecting points with other people. For the amount of times someone walks by our house, or the front of my school when I arrive before any students, I’m amazed how often I have to wait for a pedestrian to walk cross the driveway before I can make the turn… amazed that as I wait, I can see no other pedestrians for an entire block.
In a car you are turning left and must wait for the one car coming the other way to pass.
At a shopping plaza you go to open a door to a store and the one other person in sight is coming through the door the other way.
On a path in a park, you are walking faster than the people in front of you, and as you go to pass them, other people are approaching from the other way crowding the path at your takeover point.
I think we find ourselves at these intersections at a rate that is greater than probability would suggest… The likelihood of such intersections happen far more than just by chance. Like magnets passing one another, there is a pull towards others, an unseen force that draws us into each other’s path. It isn’t a case of bad timing, it’s not that we are unlucky and forced to slow down, wait, or squeeze by someone else. It’s actually just the opposite. We naturally seek each other out on some unconscious level. We are drawn to human intersections.
We have an inherent bias that we believe things will happen in our lifetime, and conspiracy theorists are far more biased in this area than others. The next big event will bring the end of the world as we know it.
From the Bay of Pigs all the way to the Reagan era, World War III was inevitable. Y2K was going to send us back to the Middle Ages. Meteors, super volcanos, earthquakes, super floods, and yes, viruses, are all threats to humanity that will be the end of civilization as we know it…. apocalyptic threats to the human race that will happen any day now.
But the weird part is that somehow these are inevitable to happen in ‘our’ lifetime. We will bare witness. We will be the last generation to know what normal was.
Normal.
What is that? Normal as in a life of traveling by horse and buggy? Normal as in women can’t vote? Normal as in smoking in restaurants? Normal as in life before indoor plumbing, or before social media?
Our world advances in extremely fast and innovative ways, but somehow the human race will find its demise in our lifetime… or so conspiracy theorists believe. People will prepare for the end days, but they won’t live in the now.
“If I hold up this sign that says, ‘The world will end tomorrow’ long enough, one day I will be right.”
…that’s assuming the end will happen in your lifetime… but it probably won’t. We will see so many changes in our lifetime, but so will our grandkids… and maybe they will see the end times, but the simple reality is that it’s unlikely to happen in ours.
Humans, the earth, or the universe probably need a few more generations to really screw things up for us, for our planet, and odds are that this will happen after everyone living today is long dead. The end might be near, but it’s farther away than our short lives.
It’s 10:30 pm and I’m sitting in my hot tub. My phone is in a clear waterproof bag and I’m sitting on the edge with my feet in, to end my session. Usually I listen to podcasts or my book while enjoying my hot tub, but today I put Greta Van Fleet’s second album on and looked up at the sky. The moon is out and bright enough to give me a shadow.
It’s nice to see the night sky, stars, and moon since my last several hot tubs were all under rain or heavy clouds. As I stared up at it, it dawned on me that it is very unlikely that I was the only person on earth looking at the moon at that moment. How many of ‘us’ were taking a moment to look at the same moon? It’s a simple question with an impossible to know answer.
We all race through this stark, empty, and insignificant part of a truly vast universe on a tiny planet… together. The next time you look up at the moon ask yourself, “Who else might be looking at the moon right now?” Do this and the world seems smaller, more connected.
Yesterday I spent a good part of the day inside my own head. I don’t know if I’m the only one that experiences this sensation (or rather lack of sensation) or if it’s a quirk of the human condition we all experience? I was able to do my job, and I could interact with others, but I felt more like an observer than a participant. I wasn’t fully present.
This isn’t a headspace that I particularly enjoy. It is one where I don’t feel fully engaged in the world. I feel like a visitor in a foreign land, a stranger that vaguely understands my surroundings. I have to work to stay focused on a conversation because my thinking is too loud but not terribly interesting. I feel somewhat disengaged, not just from others but from myself.
Thankfully, the feeling is gone this morning. I don’t like to spend too much time ‘there’. It’s like the world outside my head is a movie that I must watch, but don’t really want to. Reading this now I feel like this should be titled head-case rather than headspace and wonder if someone reading this will recommend psychotherapy… but I also suspect that others will fully understand this experience. Is it really just me, or do others have these moments too?
I imagine for some people this can feel scary. For others, comfortable. For some they can put themselves here, for others they can’t leave. For me it is infrequent, it is not something I can talk my way out of, and it seldom lasts more than a day. It’s just a headspace that I sometimes get into… a mode of observing my own participation in the world around me, yet not feeling present.
It is wishful thinking to hope that people will not be fooled again by QAnon. This is a sad but true statement. The reality is that people are natural puzzle solvers who seek to make connections. We want to make sense of the world, and this leaves some people vulnerable to suggestions that there are connections that are not really there.
Our brains extrapolate, they naturally extend ideas. This has made us incredibly inventive and creative people. This has not helped us distinguish fact from fiction. This is where extrapolation goes very wrong. I think the problem is that while our brains are seeking to extrapolate and extend ideas, they are stimulated towards possible connections and simultaneously let down our bullshit detectors. Our brains really struggle to seek new connections while at the same time make good judgements about those connections we are seeking.
Have you ever played 2 Truths and a Lie?
Try to pick out my lie:
1. I’ve illegally bungee jumped off of a local bridge.
2. I cheated on, and successfully passed, the LSAT.
3. I stole a neighbour’s car when I was 17, dented the fender, and put it back without him knowing I took it.
Which one did you pick?
I know this doesn’t paint a very nice picture of me. I wanted you to see my dark side. Now before you even pick the lie, you are probably extrapolating things about me and the kind of person I really am. You also probably extrapolated that statement #3 was a truth because it is more believable and more detailed than the other two.
However, here is a strategy I used: I told 3 lies. In one easy step, I could’ve convinced you that 2 lies are true. It’s that easy to convince someone of a lie… or in this case 2 lies.
I’ve never bungee jumped, never wrote the LSAT, and never stolen a car. But had I not told you that, had I picked one as the lie, you probably would have believed the other two. What’s scary is, the more you know me, and the more credibility I have, the easier it is for me to fool you.
Here is an example in the media: This is how people like Tucker Carlson can dupe viewers over and over again. In this article, Fox News lawyers argued in court that Carlson is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’
They argued this in a libel lawsuit where Carlson was being sued and, “The Court concludes that the statements are rhetorical hyperbole and opinion commentary intended to frame a political debate.” Fox News told the court that this is what Tucker Carlson does, he doesn’t report news… and the judge agreed and they won the case. Think about this! Fox News said Tucker Carlson’s show is not news, but just exaggerated opinion.
However, he is broadcasted on a ‘News’ show, that gives him credibility. To a fan of his: He is in ‘your’ living room with you 5 nights a week. And he feeds you tiny little, often convincing lies… or should I say ‘exaggerated opinions’. Next you go to even less reliable websites and you hear the Tucker Carlson lies being repeated. Other lies are added to the things you know are true because you heard it on Fox ‘News’ from your buddy Tucker Carlson, and you extrapolate that these must be true too.
That’s right Dave is a car thief, oh and he cheated on the LSAT’s, and I seem to recall that he illegally jumped off a bridge too… The other interesting thing about our memory is that we don’t often remember what the lie was and we can easily put the lie in with the other ‘truths’.
Some people eventually catch on.
Many others will get fooled again. It’s sad but true.
Every extended break I end up doing this: I pick a series and binge watch a few seasons over a few days. I watch so little television of any kind regularly, that there is always something to catch up on. My wife totally sunk into The Handmaids Tale a while back and told me I’d love it. So here I am approaching the end of Season 2, her watching it again with me, and saying ‘One more’ after already watching two episodes in a sitting.
Margaret Atwood is a brilliant writer, and the series is very well done. I remember seeing her say in a video that she didn’t put anything into Handmaid’s Tale that wasn’t something that had already happened somewhere in the world. If I was watching this series in 2019, I would have thought less about this fact, but somehow 2020 has made me see the world quite differently.
Today I’m more keenly aware that fascism can rear its ugly head. I’m more keenly aware of how religious beliefs can be argued and leveraged to reduce non-believer’s choices. I am more keenly aware of how information can be misconstrued and manipulated to fool a large percentage of the population.
We live in a world where rulers can still rule for their lifetime; Where religious and cultural genocide happen; Where rights to basic food and healthcare are dependent on geography and luck of being born to parents who can support a child’s needs. This is a not a just and free world for many, and that can lead to unrest. It can lead to upheaval, and it can spark less democratic and more totalitarian regimes. Regimes that, while not necessarily similar to Handmaids Tale, can be quite scary.
On that solemn and dark thought… my wife wants to watch another episode, and I’m quite willing to partake.
We live in an era of incredible potential. And yet when I opened my news feed this morning this is what I saw:
A misogynist Op-Ed that was clearly written with malice.
A racist group causing harm and violence.
An extremist left group doing the same.
An anti-mask gym owner saying he’ll continue to pay fines to keep his gym open.
A politician calling covid a ‘hoax pandemic’.
The largest iceberg ever, that broke off in 2017 thanks to global warming, is heading to islands likely to cause an ecological disaster.
Crazy.
When I think of the potential of humanity, I think of benevolence, creativity, generosity, love, and kindness.
When I open the news I see hate and ignorance. Today these stupid headlines came (except for the iceberg) from the country south of our borders. A country that’s supposed to be about equal opportunity, liberty, and justice. A country divided into two camps so opposed to the other side that they see the other as enemies more than neighbours (or I should say neighbors).
What does it mean to be human? What potential do we have as a species? What could we accomplish if we work together? What kind of world would we live in if we focused on what’s possible?
We can be better as a species. We can be peaceful. We can be kind. We can be loving. We can be more human.
One love, one heart
Let’s get together and feel all right. ~ Bob Marley
I used to think that we would reach a time in my lifetime where we could all be seen first and foremost as citizens of the world. That people would eventually be able to get a global passport and travel with a universal identity as global citizens. It was naive, but I thought it would happen.
With the rise of social media, I thought we were getting closer. I saw how social media extended the reach of individuals to find others of similar minds and interests. The internet extended our reach and our ability to understand others, whether they thought like us or not.
But while understanding our differences can help us see that we really are more alike than we think, differences in core values separate us further. Religions divide us more than anything else. That’s ironic and sad. Faith in a higher being sectionalizes humanity into narrow groupings that undermine our ability to focus on the well-being of our global community.
What would it take to go beyond the divisiveness of religious dogmatism?
What would help us see that as a species we have more to gain from being cooperative rather than confrontational?
What could bring us all together as a global community of citizens that care for our species and our world?
I fear that people will try with tyranny before they try with love.
Humans are divided into different clans and tribes, and belong to countries and towns. But I find myself a stranger to all communities and belong to no settlement. The universe is my country and the human family is my tribe. ~Kahlil Gibran
I shared this quote on Facebook 4 years ago today. It seemed timely with world events. I also shared a graphic I created to try to help two deeply divided groups see less of a divide between them. The image was grossly misunderstood and I ended up taking it off Facebook. The irony isn’t lost on me. I tried to show less divisiveness and I accidentally created something that exposed the differences and widened the gap that I was trying to reduce.
Think for a moment about how borders divide us; how cultures divide us; how religions divide us; how politics divides us. Yet diversity makes us stronger; it teaches us to be tolerant; it enriches our experience.
What if we invested time and energy into the idea that, ‘the human family is my tribe’?
