Happy Endings
This has certainly been a strange time with emphasis on that one word, time. Staying at home, not physically visiting or touching others, not getting out, we now have time to do all those things that we wanted to do, or at least that we thought that we wanted to do. First up, the organization and the meals and the realization that what kids are learning in school is way beyond what we learned at their ages (Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?* now being fully questioned by us, the "adults" who are supposed to know this stuff). Then came the cleaning and polishing and down-sizing of closets and pans and lo and behold, we found that our enthusiasm for that only lasted for a couple of weeks. Before long, after we had scanned the bookshelf and the television for the umpteenth time, we began to get antsy, and worried, and lonely...and now we had to face ourselves. Jill Lapore wrote in The New Yorker: In 2017 and 2018, the former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared an “epidemic of loneliness,” and the U.K. appointed a Minister of Loneliness. To diagnose this condition, doctors at U.C.L.A. devised a Loneliness Scale. Do you often, sometimes, rarely, or never feel these ways? -- I am unhappy doing so many things alone. I have nobody to talk to. I cannot tolerate being so alone. I feel as if nobody really understands me. I am no longer close to anyone. There is no one I can turn to. I feel isolated from others. "Loneliness” is a vogue term, and like all vogue terms it’s a cover for all sorts of things most people would rather not name and have no idea how to fix. Plenty of people like to be alone. I myself love to be alone. But solitude and seclusion, which are the things I love, are different from loneliness, which is a thing I hate. Loneliness is a state of profound distress.
Okay, maybe that isn't or wasn't you. But as the weeks of isolation and stay-at-home orders continued, author Lapore cited British historian Fay Bound Alberti: Modern loneliness, in Alberti’s view, is the child of capitalism and secularism. “Many of the divisions and hierarchies that have developed since the eighteenth century—between self and world, individual and community, public and private—have been naturalized through the politics and philosophy of individualism,” she writes. “Is it any coincidence that a language of loneliness emerged at the same time?” It is not a coincidence. The rise of privacy, itself a product of market capitalism—privacy being something that you buy—is a driver of loneliness. So is individualism, which you also have to pay for. So jump to a piece by Jia Tolentino a few months earlier and you have this new mantra of a younger generation: The self-help minimalists say that keeping expenses low and purchases to a minimum can help create a life that is clear and streamlined. This practice can also lead to the conclusion that there is not only too much stuff in your apartment but too much stuff in the world—that there is, you might say, an epidemic of overproduction. If you did say this, you would be quoting Karl Marx, who declared that this was the case in 1848, when he and Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto.” Comparing a “society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange” to “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells,” they contended that there was “too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.” Hence, they suggested, the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism, which brings the periodic “destruction of a mass of productive forces”—as, perhaps, we experienced in 2008, before the rise of Kondo and company...Several years ago, Duane Elgin, who has become an author and an activist focussed on sustainability, published a paper arguing that either we can “continue along our current path of denial and bargaining” until we drain our natural resources and our capacity to relate to one another as humans or we can “awaken ourselves from the dream of limitless material growth and actively invent new ways to live within the material growth and actively invent new ways to live within the material limits of the Earth.” This is, in the end, the most convincing argument for minimalism: with less noise in our heads, we might hear the emergency sirens more clearly. If we put down some baggage, we might move more swiftly.
So there's the dilemma. Faced with time for ourselves, we watch certain things continue as normal (bills, for one) and certain things come to a full and complete stop (large gatherings, work, vacations, sports, etc.). Bloomberg Businessweek commented: The plan is to put economic activity in a state of suspended animation for weeks or months, get past the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and then resuscitate the patient. Necessary? Probably. Dangerous? Undoubtedly. Because this has never been done before at this scale, there are no white-haired elders to guide us. We are going to have to invent the plan as we go, recalibrating as facts emerge. Just as overwhelmed doctors must choose which patients to save and which to let go, we will need to decide which sectors, which companies, and which workers are most in need of and most deserving of a rescue. And eventually we’ll need to make agonizing trade-offs between saving lives and saving livings. The more people are saved from the coronavirus through draconian shutdowns, the more livelihoods will be broken, in some cases irreparably...However, the more we ease up on quarantines and social distancing to allow the economy to breathe, the more patients will have their breath stolen by this frightening lung disease...Here is one principle for policymakers to consider as they make decisions on our behalf: If you must do harm to the economy, please make it reversible. Hurt, but don’t kill. Bend it, but do not break it.
Certainly, people are trying, adapting to a new reality until things return to normal, whatever that new definition will be. A quick glance at a recent issue of the London Review of Books had these "ads" in their music listings: --London-based amateur soprano looking for alto to sing duets with. --A charismatic, aging French rock star will compose and record an original song for you. --Portait by voice...which consists of portraits based off the sound and energy of the participants. And then there was the backlash when Gal Gadot had wealthy celebrity friends sing John Lennon's Imagine, the lyric "imagine no possessions" coming as the lavish backgrounds captured by their laptop cameras did little to appease those out of work or uninsured. But a quick glance at my AARP community help site showed over 1500 organizations and companies providing ways to help, from free Internet to delaying or forgiving payments, and from sites helping businesses retain employees to food banks needing volunteers or donations...and that was just my local community. People and companies are trying, that was evident. What also became evident was our impact on the planet. Even as we have begun to hoard supplies, we are finding that we didn't really need as much (40% of the food produced never makes it into our stomachs...the average person in the U.S. throws out $371 of purchased food annually, said Popular Science). We're learning that while some are struggling, there are many who are struggling even more (such as the out-of-work migrant worker in India who died walking home...his "walk" was 188 miles, said The Conversation).** We're learning of the many "ordinary" people openly putting their lives at risk to keep things moving --the healthcare workers, the grocery store workers, the bus drivers, the delivery workers, the factory workers-- as well as the many working quietly behind power plants and sewage treatment plants and water plants and at thousands of other "unseen" tasks. We're learning that even as we try to implant the "wash your hands" mentality in our routines, many people simply don't have access to clean water or water at all, said TIME. We're learning how diverse our "similarities" actually are, said Bloomberg Businessweek (a quick peek at what the different states in the U.S. are reading provided a startling view of this). And we're learning that if we do get clobbered unexpectedly, that many other things of ours may get "locked up," including access to our data and emails if we haven't changed account settings at Google. And we're learning that even something as serious as this virus may not be enough to erase our political divides.
Astronaut Alfred Worden knew loneliness well, his patient transition through the dark side of the moon happening 74 times while his fellow astronauts conducted research on the surface. Said Worden (from an obituary in Space): The spacecraft would be in sunshine, in shadow, in and out of radio contact with Earth. I needed to use the sextant, the windows and the SIM [Scientific Instrument Module] Bay, each of which would need to be pointed in different directions for different tasks. But I couldn't just turn the spacecraft any time I felt like it: my fuel was precious, and finite...I was alone but I wasn't lonely. Then there's Brian Greene. Here's what Jeffrey Kluger in TIME wrote: If you’re feeling all dreamy about the universe, here’s a pro tip: don’t tell Brian Greene. That guy can chill your cosmic buzz fast. I recently swung by the office of the Columbia University theoretical physicist full of happy, giddy questions and came away pretty much empty. Is there such a thing as a natural moral order? I wondered. Not in this universe, there isn’t. What about a purpose to the universe, then–the reason the whole 13.8 billion-year-old shebang with its hundreds of billions of galaxies and trillions of planets happened in the first place? Nope, Greene says, no such purpose, adding, “And that’s O.K.” Maybe for him it is. Surely, though, Greene will grant the existence of free will–that first item on the wish list of every freshman-year philosophy student who ever lived. Sorry, not a chance. A bit too grim (indeed, calls to suicide hotlines are increasing during this pandemic); here's how Greene responded: Rather than feeling, ‘Damn, there’s no universal morality,’ ‘Damn, there’s no universal consciousness,' how wondrous is it that I am able to have this conscious experience and it’s nothing more than stuff? That stuff can produce Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, that stuff can produce the Mona Lisa, that stuff can produce Romeo and Juliet? Holy smokes, that's wondrous.
As our urge to get out and re-socialize tugs and pulls at us, we are also having that rare chance to see the generosity and compassion of us ordinary humans, that of giving monies to aquariums and zoos (their operations can't go on hold), and those applauding and feeding emergency workers, and those making free to-go lunches for school children, and those volunteering and checking on neighbors and the elderly, and on and on. There's no reward or praise at the end, at least not externally. But inside, this hidden strength is proving far greater than all the bad political decisions or viral threats. It's captured in a song by Joe Dill (and artfully recorded by Emmylou Harris and Earl Conley): We believe in happy endings, never breaking, only bending; Taking time enough for mending the hurt inside. We believe in new beginnings, giving in and forgiving. We believe happy endings...You and I.
*The television series lasted 12 years but you can still take a few online quizzes...and yes, these are at the 5th Grade level.)
**Struggles can go far beyond economic and emotional; sometimes just finding your identity can be difficult as noted in the New York Review of Books: This week, we published an essay by Asad Hussein, “Chasing the Mirage, from Nairobi to New York City,” a powerful and complex meditation on home, identity, perspective, and storytelling. Hussein, who was born a refugee in Kenya and is now a sophomore at Princeton University, writes about the surreal transition from Ifo refugee camp to US college campus, encounters with police in Nairobi and Harlem, the sometimes misguided expectations that he had of America, and that Princeton has had of him. In one of my favorite passages, he describes his experience of being stateless: "Where every other international student clutched a passport—burgundy, blue, gold, with the name of their country engraved—I carried a flimsy booklet marked Travel Document in small letters, as if shyly doubtful of its own validity. Inside, my details were inscribed by hand, in hurried penmanship. Even my photo, glued by hand, looked hesitant. Where others simply displayed a document, I stepped aside and ended up telling my life story...When you’re a stranger, as I am here in America, you are often confronted with questions about your background and you have to have answers. I found myself in such a situation. I still don’t have answers. But this questioning helped me embrace my Somali identity. I realized being a Somali has been the cause of most of the tension in my life and there is no way I can ever escape it. Of course, there are those who would say I am not Somali enough, either. But if I must belong somewhere, I have a better chance there than anywhere else.”
Okay, maybe that isn't or wasn't you. But as the weeks of isolation and stay-at-home orders continued, author Lapore cited British historian Fay Bound Alberti: Modern loneliness, in Alberti’s view, is the child of capitalism and secularism. “Many of the divisions and hierarchies that have developed since the eighteenth century—between self and world, individual and community, public and private—have been naturalized through the politics and philosophy of individualism,” she writes. “Is it any coincidence that a language of loneliness emerged at the same time?” It is not a coincidence. The rise of privacy, itself a product of market capitalism—privacy being something that you buy—is a driver of loneliness. So is individualism, which you also have to pay for. So jump to a piece by Jia Tolentino a few months earlier and you have this new mantra of a younger generation: The self-help minimalists say that keeping expenses low and purchases to a minimum can help create a life that is clear and streamlined. This practice can also lead to the conclusion that there is not only too much stuff in your apartment but too much stuff in the world—that there is, you might say, an epidemic of overproduction. If you did say this, you would be quoting Karl Marx, who declared that this was the case in 1848, when he and Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto.” Comparing a “society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange” to “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells,” they contended that there was “too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.” Hence, they suggested, the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism, which brings the periodic “destruction of a mass of productive forces”—as, perhaps, we experienced in 2008, before the rise of Kondo and company...Several years ago, Duane Elgin, who has become an author and an activist focussed on sustainability, published a paper arguing that either we can “continue along our current path of denial and bargaining” until we drain our natural resources and our capacity to relate to one another as humans or we can “awaken ourselves from the dream of limitless material growth and actively invent new ways to live within the material growth and actively invent new ways to live within the material limits of the Earth.” This is, in the end, the most convincing argument for minimalism: with less noise in our heads, we might hear the emergency sirens more clearly. If we put down some baggage, we might move more swiftly.
So there's the dilemma. Faced with time for ourselves, we watch certain things continue as normal (bills, for one) and certain things come to a full and complete stop (large gatherings, work, vacations, sports, etc.). Bloomberg Businessweek commented: The plan is to put economic activity in a state of suspended animation for weeks or months, get past the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and then resuscitate the patient. Necessary? Probably. Dangerous? Undoubtedly. Because this has never been done before at this scale, there are no white-haired elders to guide us. We are going to have to invent the plan as we go, recalibrating as facts emerge. Just as overwhelmed doctors must choose which patients to save and which to let go, we will need to decide which sectors, which companies, and which workers are most in need of and most deserving of a rescue. And eventually we’ll need to make agonizing trade-offs between saving lives and saving livings. The more people are saved from the coronavirus through draconian shutdowns, the more livelihoods will be broken, in some cases irreparably...However, the more we ease up on quarantines and social distancing to allow the economy to breathe, the more patients will have their breath stolen by this frightening lung disease...Here is one principle for policymakers to consider as they make decisions on our behalf: If you must do harm to the economy, please make it reversible. Hurt, but don’t kill. Bend it, but do not break it.
Certainly, people are trying, adapting to a new reality until things return to normal, whatever that new definition will be. A quick glance at a recent issue of the London Review of Books had these "ads" in their music listings: --London-based amateur soprano looking for alto to sing duets with. --A charismatic, aging French rock star will compose and record an original song for you. --Portait by voice...which consists of portraits based off the sound and energy of the participants. And then there was the backlash when Gal Gadot had wealthy celebrity friends sing John Lennon's Imagine, the lyric "imagine no possessions" coming as the lavish backgrounds captured by their laptop cameras did little to appease those out of work or uninsured. But a quick glance at my AARP community help site showed over 1500 organizations and companies providing ways to help, from free Internet to delaying or forgiving payments, and from sites helping businesses retain employees to food banks needing volunteers or donations...and that was just my local community. People and companies are trying, that was evident. What also became evident was our impact on the planet. Even as we have begun to hoard supplies, we are finding that we didn't really need as much (40% of the food produced never makes it into our stomachs...the average person in the U.S. throws out $371 of purchased food annually, said Popular Science). We're learning that while some are struggling, there are many who are struggling even more (such as the out-of-work migrant worker in India who died walking home...his "walk" was 188 miles, said The Conversation).** We're learning of the many "ordinary" people openly putting their lives at risk to keep things moving --the healthcare workers, the grocery store workers, the bus drivers, the delivery workers, the factory workers-- as well as the many working quietly behind power plants and sewage treatment plants and water plants and at thousands of other "unseen" tasks. We're learning that even as we try to implant the "wash your hands" mentality in our routines, many people simply don't have access to clean water or water at all, said TIME. We're learning how diverse our "similarities" actually are, said Bloomberg Businessweek (a quick peek at what the different states in the U.S. are reading provided a startling view of this). And we're learning that if we do get clobbered unexpectedly, that many other things of ours may get "locked up," including access to our data and emails if we haven't changed account settings at Google. And we're learning that even something as serious as this virus may not be enough to erase our political divides.
Astronaut Alfred Worden knew loneliness well, his patient transition through the dark side of the moon happening 74 times while his fellow astronauts conducted research on the surface. Said Worden (from an obituary in Space): The spacecraft would be in sunshine, in shadow, in and out of radio contact with Earth. I needed to use the sextant, the windows and the SIM [Scientific Instrument Module] Bay, each of which would need to be pointed in different directions for different tasks. But I couldn't just turn the spacecraft any time I felt like it: my fuel was precious, and finite...I was alone but I wasn't lonely. Then there's Brian Greene. Here's what Jeffrey Kluger in TIME wrote: If you’re feeling all dreamy about the universe, here’s a pro tip: don’t tell Brian Greene. That guy can chill your cosmic buzz fast. I recently swung by the office of the Columbia University theoretical physicist full of happy, giddy questions and came away pretty much empty. Is there such a thing as a natural moral order? I wondered. Not in this universe, there isn’t. What about a purpose to the universe, then–the reason the whole 13.8 billion-year-old shebang with its hundreds of billions of galaxies and trillions of planets happened in the first place? Nope, Greene says, no such purpose, adding, “And that’s O.K.” Maybe for him it is. Surely, though, Greene will grant the existence of free will–that first item on the wish list of every freshman-year philosophy student who ever lived. Sorry, not a chance. A bit too grim (indeed, calls to suicide hotlines are increasing during this pandemic); here's how Greene responded: Rather than feeling, ‘Damn, there’s no universal morality,’ ‘Damn, there’s no universal consciousness,' how wondrous is it that I am able to have this conscious experience and it’s nothing more than stuff? That stuff can produce Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, that stuff can produce the Mona Lisa, that stuff can produce Romeo and Juliet? Holy smokes, that's wondrous.
As our urge to get out and re-socialize tugs and pulls at us, we are also having that rare chance to see the generosity and compassion of us ordinary humans, that of giving monies to aquariums and zoos (their operations can't go on hold), and those applauding and feeding emergency workers, and those making free to-go lunches for school children, and those volunteering and checking on neighbors and the elderly, and on and on. There's no reward or praise at the end, at least not externally. But inside, this hidden strength is proving far greater than all the bad political decisions or viral threats. It's captured in a song by Joe Dill (and artfully recorded by Emmylou Harris and Earl Conley): We believe in happy endings, never breaking, only bending; Taking time enough for mending the hurt inside. We believe in new beginnings, giving in and forgiving. We believe happy endings...You and I.
*The television series lasted 12 years but you can still take a few online quizzes...and yes, these are at the 5th Grade level.)
**Struggles can go far beyond economic and emotional; sometimes just finding your identity can be difficult as noted in the New York Review of Books: This week, we published an essay by Asad Hussein, “Chasing the Mirage, from Nairobi to New York City,” a powerful and complex meditation on home, identity, perspective, and storytelling. Hussein, who was born a refugee in Kenya and is now a sophomore at Princeton University, writes about the surreal transition from Ifo refugee camp to US college campus, encounters with police in Nairobi and Harlem, the sometimes misguided expectations that he had of America, and that Princeton has had of him. In one of my favorite passages, he describes his experience of being stateless: "Where every other international student clutched a passport—burgundy, blue, gold, with the name of their country engraved—I carried a flimsy booklet marked Travel Document in small letters, as if shyly doubtful of its own validity. Inside, my details were inscribed by hand, in hurried penmanship. Even my photo, glued by hand, looked hesitant. Where others simply displayed a document, I stepped aside and ended up telling my life story...When you’re a stranger, as I am here in America, you are often confronted with questions about your background and you have to have answers. I found myself in such a situation. I still don’t have answers. But this questioning helped me embrace my Somali identity. I realized being a Somali has been the cause of most of the tension in my life and there is no way I can ever escape it. Of course, there are those who would say I am not Somali enough, either. But if I must belong somewhere, I have a better chance there than anywhere else.”
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