For today’s Venus day letter, I feel called to being the Bad Guy for a little bit, and saying things nobody really wants to hear, instead of providing an escape into the dreamy, ethereal realms that I usually save for Fridays.
The amount of acute, constant awareness that humans today live in of everything bad that’s happening everywhere around the world, at all times, 24x7, is unprecedented, and not something our evolution as a species - our brains, our nervous systems - have catched up to. We were not designed to be so aware, at all times, about everything, everywhere, ever. This unprecedented availability of real-time updates of every horrific human-made atrocity comes hand-in-hand with unprecedented nervous system dysregulation among us. It’s a little ironic how, in this time of an overwhelming abundance of information, we’re still fighting with people about not spreading awareness about our whatever our pet social contagion is, at the moment. Or demanding them to perform their morality and their ‘humanity’ as per our requirements of how we’d like to consume their humanness, virtually.
We are aware of at least five horrible things happening at a large scale, that are continuing to happen inspite of everything everyone shared, and will continue to play out in their own fated way irrespective of whether your favourite celebrity shares a story about them or not. I am also aware of twenty or so awful things, at the least, that are local to my own region and country, that are debilitating and heartbreaking. And yet, amongst all this death, I am in life. And I am not in the mood to slap on an “it’s okay to not be okay” bandaid onto my psyche, this time, because my becoming a crippled mess is not of the highest good or service to anybody in this world, nor to the collective consciousness.
I have been thinking about the term ‘selective outrage.’ The context that I read it in, was perfectly apt and made total sense. We see so many examples of this. And yet, there is another part of me that also wonders, isn’t all human outrage selective? Who has ever lived in a manner where they perfectly curated and expressed their outrage about everything, ever, correctly, and made sure that it is publicly announced in a manner that nobody misses the fact that they were outraged? I also wonder about the fact that we only seem to consider a social media post about something as outrage. You’re not outraged until you shouted in the town square about it, among all the other yelling people. Do we comprehend that people are privately outraged? Or also having private conversations, in the flesh, passionately and deeply, or regulating themselves from their own grief over spending many hours learning about an injustice? Do we comprehend that massive donations as well as humble contributions of whatever they can are made privately, even anonymously, without announcing on social media? Do we comprehend that there are people who are living as though in the circles of hell, trying to process the world burning all around them, while also in massive grief over something that’s also burning down in their personal lives - a loss, a betrayal, a trauma of some kind, that breaks the heart, no matter how privileged it is to be in grief over your heart being broken. Do we comprehend that the requirement is compassion, not a publicly seen and validated performance of compassion?
I know so many people who are deeply moved by their grief and awareness, and taking tangible action to help the world. Through money, through mobilising. I know people who can’t afford to donate to everyone they care about, but they choose to do their bit in their own way anyway, through social sharing that comes from a genuine place of leading others to action - and not a subtle ego trip of moral superiority.
I also know people for whom every social contagion is a vanity metric. I can never stop thinking about these words. Sharing a story is like a quick tax they pay for still continuing to share their life (or business) online, lest they be cancelled by the mob. They can hide behind a quick reshare, so that they’ve done their bit and shown the world that they’re a good person who cares about the thing that everyone else cares about, and now they can go about being visible online for their blogs and businesses as usual without anyone questioning them. I don’t blame them, because this alarming lack of nuance and this utterly disembodied, dysregulated spell of performances is the normal way that people behave on social media now. If you didn’t share the story, you’re on the side of the perpetrator and you’re also out there killing people.
Because, questioning others about why they aren’t sharing what you think they should be sharing, and making a socially mandated performance out of your issue du jour, is apparently a valid use of energy in these times, instead of pouring that energy into what we care about with sincerity and devotion, and leaving people to tend to their own fires, acknowledging that the complexities of their real, human, fleshly life are far beyond our comprehension through a one dimensional 9:16 lens.
It’s okay to not see the news for a weekend, and schedule time out from constantly consuming reality (which, in itself, is never not distorted in it’s expressions based on who’s writing it) - because you need to be in health, groundedness, regulation and functioning as a human being to be of good to the world.
It’s okay to spend time off social media if you need to, and ground yourself into Nature and the real world around you. Your family, pets, neighbourhood, friends. It’s human to be grateful for living in peace, and none of us know when we could be next in seeing some sort of horrifying disaster unfold in front of our own eyes.
It’s human to live in both awe and resentment for the duality inherent in all of life. For the contrast that’s inescapable, everywhere. Children are dying, and there are those being conceived and birthed as we speak. There’s atrocities and weddings, everywhere, all at once. There is grief, and there is still good news, and you’re still feeling a pang of excitement about something you’re about to eat, and then you watch yet another horror unfold. Everything sucks and everything is going to shit, and most of us millennial women are questioning if the world will even exist instead of daydreaming about marriage and babies. And then we have a meet-cute with a stranger at a cafe somewhere, cry at our best friend’s weddings, or experience the perfection of a cat purring in our laps. We have breakdowns in the bath, and then we experience the golden incandescence of walking home after meeting a friend in the same day. As much as we want to (and think it’s right to) pause our entire lives and collapse into a heap of sadness over every bad thing that ever happens to someone somewhere, we cannot seem to make it happen that way. Death and life and death and life are always happening all at once, and we do not know what to do, we don’t know how to linearize the spirals and the paradox encoded in every aspect of the human experience. And we resort to fighting, finger pointing and descending into guilt about why we get to have even one thing to be grateful for when so many people don’t. And ultimately, we realise that all we can do is live this out one day at a time, witness and feel and do things about the tragedy and still make our favourite flavour of tea because it’s Venus day and clinging on to even one moment of hope, beauty and joy feels like the whole point.
More than everything id have to share on this topic!! Next time someone asks my stand or opinion, sending this article 💝
“It’s human to live in both awe and resentment for the duality inherent in all of life.” Yes! This!
This really sums it up. A lot can be traced back to our struggle to live with the paradoxes and polarities of life.
Everyone’s activism looks different. We can only focus on what we are doing and hope that most people are doing the best they can personally do given their circumstances.
I love that I can feel your energy so strongly in this piece ❤️🔥