As I sit here, the taste of coffee still lingering in
my mouth from this morning’s first daily fix, my jumper causing a slight itch on
my arm, here in front of my laptop I can’t concentrate.
The pull of gravity on
the idea of just doing Nothing or checking my Facebook account (for the 16th
time today) or watching something on YouTube until I remember I’m alive and the
day’s nearly over, the urge to do other things than think about this kind of
thing is overwhelming right now. I hardly think I need to justify this feeling;
anyone that’s breathing will know what I’m talking about.
There’s also the
necessity to do some stuff that’s actually important. My room’s a mess, clothes
scattered on my floor and piled up on a chair – I need to put them away. Lunch
needs to be made. I’m meeting people soon. I’ve got work to go to. Reading to
do. I’ve got to be getting on with the lifetime responsibilities of being a
Good son, a Good brother, a Good friend.
On top of this I’ve got a lot of
thinking to do. Politically, a lot has been going on recently, don’t you think?
And I know that these important ideas that I’ve decided that I’ve got to do a
lot of thinking about should not simply spiral through my mind but should also
inform how I live and act on a day to day basis. My actions should holds hands
with my beliefs, right? That’s how it should be, anyway. Ideally.
But on a day
to day basis this can be difficult. Because day to day living is the reaction
to so many things that are sometimes too complex to talk or think about in the infinitesimally
small gaps in the day we have where we’re allowed to stop and breathe for a
minute that as we blaze through the hours we tend to feel like we have in our
head just a dull, numb yet unbearably loud nothingness going on and on in our
heads. It can feel like the only thoughts we have time to pay attention to are
the thoughts that pop into our awareness as one-word commands:
“coffee”,
“lunch”,
“toilet”,
“work”,
“facebook”,
“stop procrastinating”,
“check phone”,
“stop it!”,
“hungry”,
“facebook”,
“coffee”,
“dinner”,
“TV”,
“crisps”,
etc.
You get the
idea.
And one level underneath all of this is the one thought you’ve had since
you opened your eyes: I can’t wait to go back to sleep! This leaves little head
space for much contemplation about whether we are acting in ways that are
totally coherent with our philosophies. Some space is left for such things but sometimes
it can be difficult.
All this being said, one paradox of
being alive is that sometimes it can feel both like that – fast, breathless,
busy, stressful – and at the same time can also feel like our days are so still
and boring and unending that going through the day is like trying to run
underwater. Everyday so similar. An unexplainably complex experience that we
can both love and yet we rush through it at such a fast rate and distract
ourselves with so many different things (phones, facebook, radio, television)
that we risk spending the majority of the day not being Totally Present.
Torn between the (bizarre) pull of
wasting time and of doing what needs to be done, during this time that I have
to sit in front of the laptop I inevitably end up doing nothing. So I strangely
end up having time to think about these things. But as I said: I can’t
concentrate.
This is the context within which I
exist.
And this is why, with so many things
to be doing, with so many distractions, so many thoughts, this is why I
sometimes don’t watch the news. This is why I sometimes don’t have the mind
space to contemplate the things that I know, on a sort of objective level, are
forming the structures that will impact many things in my life (i.e. economically).
This is why I’m so ignorant about how the country works and what opinion’s I
should trust and what not to.
Because of the amount of days that I
miss the news, I miss what’s going on in the political/economic spheres of the
world. This then has resulted in me having an insurmountable pile of newspapers
that are now out of date that I SHOULD have read. I’ve missed so many headlines
that it’s depressing to think about. To call myself “informed” with integrity,
I would need to do so much work and put so much effort into it that a part of
me just wants to shrug and say “stuff this, man. I’m out!”.
But there is an
expectation for us to be informed. This was the expectation during the Referendum and
the General Election. This will be the expectation for the EU referendum.
Being alive in a busy world and being expected to know
things in order to make informed decisions is stressful. Don’t you think? Being
informed becomes very difficult when you factor in all the things that, in day
to day life, impede us from transcending this state of ignorance. We have
little time to become as knowledgeable as it is really necessary to be in order
to make the large decisions we’re expected to make (such as deciding who to run
the country, to name one).
The information we get, we cannot know whether what
we are being told is true; the “media” isn’t trustworthy, right? So, in order
to get some vague idea of what is happening in our country, an idea that is
slightly closer to the fact-of-the-matter (if we can believe in such things
after the sledgehammer of postmodernism smashed all of the remaining sense that
what was shown to us on our screens and our newspapers was a reliable representation
of the world), in order to get closer to the reality of what is happening in
the political sphere then we would need to watch and read many reports from different
newspapers with different biases and different editors and different sponsors
and different perspectives etc etc. But we cannot do this because, as mentioned
before, we don’t have the time to do this.
We are too busy living our noisy,
messy lives to spend every spare hour watching the news and becoming
politically informed about every iota of what’s happening in parliament and the
stock market and the economy and…
But even if we were able to find
enough time to do all of this and become well informed by information that we
could trust, even if this were the case then the political parties that were
presented to us as possible leaders of our government were…not ideal. Let’s be
honest: how many of the policies of the party you voted for did you agree with?
(How many of them did you know about?) Why did you vote for the party you voted
for? My guess is that a) you didn’t agree with all of the policies on the party’s
manifesto and b) you voted tactically (meaning, you voted for a party purely
for the reason of NOT voting for another one).
On top of all of this, even if there
WAS to be a party that presented a manifesto to you that you whole-heartedly
agreed with, there remains the problem that First Past the Post is an electoral
system that is outdated, undemocratic and produces results that make one doubt the perennial claim that “every vote
counts”.
These were the thoughts that were
going on and on and on in my head throughout the entirety of the run up to the
general election. What kind of intelligent decision was I to make
when I didn’t have the time to fully educate myself about the intricacies of
the governmental system, the mysteries of the economic system, to evaluate the
plausibility of every policy on the manifesto of every party that would be an
option on the ballot? What would I base my decision on other than a vague hunch
informed perhaps by various 3 minute BBC news reports, the occasional Question
Time episode and maybe one of the Leaders Debates (which, to be perfectly
honest, I didn’t totally understand because of my aforementioned ignorance)?
Maybe this makes me a bad citizen. Maybe I really am a
stupid as I feel. Maybe what I’m describing is something totally Other to what
the rest of the population experienced.
But maybe I’m unbearably aware of the fact that I’m
human and alive and that I have possibly already lived a quarter of my life and days just keep on happening and ending and happening and ending so “How am I going to spend my Time
tonight?” ends up being a paralysing difficult question to answer and sometimes
I just want to read David Foster Wallace or watch Louis CK, sometimes I just
want to lie down and stare up at the ceiling while I listen to music. Most of
the time I don’t HAVE time to do this because I’m studying or I’m
with friends or I’m working or I’m trying to be there for my family or I’m cleaning
or sleeping or eating, surviving. Sometimes I just don’t want to bombard my
consciousness with soul-shreddingly sad headlines or with things that I don’t
understand.
Of course, beside all of this is a
kind of irony that I am here, sitting in front of my laptop, with the time to
think about these issues that I’ve mentioned, but instead I’m writing about how
I don’t have the time to think about these issues and that I’m not informed
enough, bla bla bla, yada yada yada. But this is important. And the truth from
Lyle (the strange sweat-licking guru in DFW’s “Infinite Jest”) seems here
relevant: that in order to escape a cage, we need first to realise the reality
that we are IN a cage. My cage is my ignorance and my apathy. I feel like I'm not alone in this. This feeling of being overwhelmed and being ignorant and
sometimes feeling apathetic: this is the problem that needs to be overcome.
But beyond the particularity of me, there is the
grander narrative going on right now where the people in Scotland are realising again the urgent
need for political literacy and the importance of participation in the political
sphere in order to help create change. Ever since the Referendum we have, it seems, become a lot more politically active and engaged. Yet, along side this there are some of us who are becoming increasingly disillusioned and pessimistic.
Now it matters what we think and what we do. I need to
concentrate and focus. With the surprising Tory majority that says it’s dealing
with ‘bread and butter issues’ while it repeals a ban on fox hunting, with the
scrapping of Human Rights, with all the cuts that are approaching, with the
need for so many food banks (etc etc), with the state of the country that it is
in now, the problem I have needs to be grappled with.
Because now it really matters.
