The World is a Stupid Place
The world is stupid place. I’m irritated by the fact that we are facing problems that are entirely solvable and which are defining life in the 21st century. Many of them would have been inconceivable a few centuries ago, if not within the lifetimes of some reading this.
I’m talking about intense poverty, widespread substance use disorder (which has always existed but is now magnified by manufactured drugs and global transportation), pollution, species die-off, poor education, loneliness, and isolation. These are not mysteries; we understand their causes and even their potential solutions. And yet they persist.
When I try to imagine a time when the world made sense, I can’t. Ancient stories tell us it never really did. The Greek myths of Prometheus and Pandora’s Box, or the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel from the Torah and Bible, all point to the same truth: chaos has always been part of us, and storytellers and philosophers have been struggling to explain it for millennia.
Some even say we should have stayed in the trees and never discovered fire. I understand the sentiment. It’s frustrating to see how much better life could be if we stripped away the excess we’ve created - kept the essentials of farming, energy, building materials, and medicine (all vastly improved over the past hundred years) - and left the rest. In theory, that could give many of us a wonderful life.
But theory hardly ever survives human nature. Small groups have tried to live in self-sustaining communities for centuries, usually with disappointing results. A few have lasted, but it’s the failures—like Brook Farm and Fruitlands in Massachusetts in the 1840s—that history remembers. Humanity seems unable to live peacefully together for long; there are always those who want more than their share.
In a previous essay, I wrote about anxiety’s connection to money: “Our mental health is shaped by many factors—how our parents disciplined or supported us, whether they had the financial stability to be emotionally present, and our current ability to care for ourselves, our families, and whatever the future may hold.” Our society’s health is tied directly to the ability of individuals to reliably meet their basic needs - food, water, shelter - for themselves and those they love. Without that, stability and kindness are hard to sustain.
I’ve shaped my own life around finding beauty and fighting, in my own small way, against these solvable problems. The beauty is still here: in family, sunsets, gardens, cats, and apple pie. What is harder is finding beauty in humanity’s imperfection. For years, I tried to believe evil didn’t exist. Lately, I’m less certain. I’ve lost some faith in the idea that the world is inherently good. What we can do is try to see the beauty and goodness in people and understand the fact the most people want to be good and if they aren’t able to be, it is often because of some struggle they are currently facing or have in the past. What we can do is believe in that good and nurture it where we can.
As Langston Hughes said, “I am so tired of waiting, aren’t you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?”
I’m not sure that will ever happen, and waiting isn’t enough. Fighting for solutions is all we can do. See the beauty. Share the beauty. Be the beauty.