I have known for quite some time that humanity is facing many existential crises. The single most important of which is the last resemblance of a collective conscience being sent into oblivion.
In chronology, my subjective experience of life is that I hopped around many schools in my early life, desired to become a pro tennis player, struggled to maintain lasting friendships for numerous reasons (mostly parents moved my young life around a lot), skateboarded for several years, played a lot of pinball as my family had a small arcade in the basement, after high school I received a bachelor’s of science degree in sociology, finally was able to play tennis professionally and focus on my career as a player which is something I would have loved to have done sooner but the theory everyone adopts is that “unless you are really good already, it is better to get an education…the tour is for the best of the best” and so how do you justify going pro when you aren’t even the best junior in the country? You can’t. So after almost two years on the tour, I was going to quit. I had some early success, getting a pro ranking in one of my first tournaments since graduating college. Being in the pro ranking system is a huge deal. However, after nearly two years and only being able to get a few ranking points is no where near good enough to be able to make a career, so I was going to give it up. I met someone who decided to train me hard, and I learned many things and trained extremely hard and got very good. However, at 24 or 25 years old, it was a little bit late, but not too late. Personal issues made it difficult to continue competing despite having significantly better results and genuinely having potential to make a legitimate career as a player.
It didn’t matter anyways. I was elated and proud to have been fortunate enough to feel like I achieved a level of play that I could hang my hat on. The world doesn’t recognize my achievements…my results are not necessarily something someone respects. Which is a bit interesting, because the people in the communities I grew up in respected my abilities as a tennis player more when I was far less accomplished and less experienced than when I actually really learned what I was doing and became a world class player. Human’s have really interesting ways of judging others, interpreting the “levels” as they say, and appreciating what is spectacular.
It’s a lot like the professional violinist who performs solos in symphonies in New York at several hundred dollars a seat, sold out shows…when he plays for pedestrians in the subway station, most the people walk by carelessly, a few dropping him a dollar…and nobody recognizing the music or talent behind it. Birthday Massacre’s most recent album (2019?) Diamonds mentions how its like “diamonds in the dark, people tend to walk right past them.”
The interesting thing about people is, they don’t know what to value. They don’t know other people’s talents or intellect, their knowledge, their desires…they tend to be egoistic and strive to progress their own lives in the context of social reality as they understand it. Our national (the whole western world) institutions have been designed this way…”capitalism” has been distorted into an individualized system of division and impossible-to-overcome bureaucratic, demoralizing games.
True human flourishing requires people recognizing more in others than of themselves. Steven Seagal’s character in Hard to Kill lays his son down to bed and shows him how to pray and tells the boy to pray for all the people in his life…and the boy asks how that will help him get what he wants, and Mason Storm says “
THERE ARE DIFFERENT TYPES OF TRUTHS AND REALITIES. The one that nobody seems to be capable of understanding is the most objective and highest one. People generally are lost in their own internal reality and don’t want to share a higher, universal reality that is based in true reality. Humans have an incredible tendency to allow their imagined life and subjective experience shape the reality around them, when the best thing they could do in order to build a better future world is to give this up, and focus on the world as it is and work toward improving it. It is insanity to have an inner sense of peace when the world around is chaos. This is a supposed ideal of Christianity, but it is flawed because it would be much better to take real action if an immediately problem is apparent.
My soul utterly despises the narratives in modern social life. Perhaps the God in me recognizes the distance from goodliness with which humanity has reorganized itself since the 80’s. …TBC