Quandary

Quandary 

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can feel the collective sorrow of humankind. This might seem unlikely coming from me, who hasn’t even seen real life – but  I don’t know how to describe it differently.

There is a deep dissatisfaction that seems to be pouring through the crevasses of society, and if I remain quite still, I can just feel it. Barely. It's not the crying of the dying, or starved children. It's the simple, day to day frustrations that seem to gather around me. Things are just not the way they should be.  

I see at a lot of people around me, mostly my own age, and feel a certain disconnection with them.

All this time, I felt this was because they don’t feel this grief. It was because they are unaffected by that which seems to beckon to me every now and then. But now, I think maybe it is the opposite that might actually be true. Maybe this sorrow has swallowed their subconscious, and they are truly trying to drown it in a charade of parties and enjoyment.

Certain friends of mine like to joke that we were born in the wrong era – we would have loved being born in the 80s, maybe. Maybe I would have made a good hippie...

But maybe not. Hippies try to drown themselves in all things affirmative – believing that if most people surrounded themselves with enough positivity, it could cancel out enough of the negativity to make the world a better place. This theory works out well on paper, but then again, so did Communism.

The curse of Humanity is this – we are all social animals. We thrive on groups. But the more the people in a group, the more we let our animal instincts take over.  “Group Mentality” is what it is called.

There is no limit to what a man can do if he has enough support. Sadly, the larger the group, the lower is their collective intelligence, it would seem.

Why else would we go to beautiful places and completely destroy it with garbage? Why would we deface property that is not ours? Why would we let our personal agendas run amok, disguised by some guise of well intent or righteous anger?

In today’s world, it would serve us well to be selfish. Man, if left to his own devices, is primarily good. I believe that.

So what I am saying, if I am saying anything, is that I would like, one day, to close my eyes and sit still without hearing all the muffled screams. I wish I could be one of the herd – quietly grazing, oblivious to anything else. I wish I could be part of the angry mob for once, rather than the sad bystander, turning my head the other way.

I wish I could unlearn everything that gives life context. I wish I could just be one of those hooligans on the streets.

Because they seem to be enjoying themselves, don’t they?