My tiredness is not unique. I am not unique in my frustration and disappointment with myself and, frankly, just about everyone else who has walked and continues to walk on this planet of ours. Our priorities are evidently skewed, and our hypocrisy is our most prominent attribute. Our words rarely match our actions, and our thoughts rarely match our words. I know it gets exhausting to read and absorb sad and cynical content. It is so much easier to immerse ourselves in a world of lighthearted, wholesome, and superficial videos, pictures, and inspirational quotes. In my experience, however, doing so only numbs my tiredness, leaving it to come back even stronger when the trance of a filtered world has been lifted.
Well, I am too tired to even put myself in a trance anymore. I only have the energy to be tired, now. I have no more stamina to withhold my urge to lash out, demonstrate my frustration and disappointment, or cry in front of strangers and colleagues and friends and family. The world is sad, it has been for a while now. The world is so sad that we have children crying out of fear and anger for the future that they very well may never have. Children feel the weight of the world because we, the “adults”, have failed so miserably that they realize their future involves picking up broken pieces and cleaning up OUR mess.
We have lost a future that didn’t belong to us in the first place. Perhaps now it is time to start acknowledging that we are in the process of grieving an extremely significant loss. Maybe now is the time to move on from shock and denial, so that we can feel anger, bargain with the universe, and understand our sadness. If we cannot get through these other steps of grief, we will never reach acceptance. If we never reach acceptance, hope will never exist because until we accept our collective failure, we will be stuck in the trance that is killing the world and everyone in it.
With absolute sincerity,
Dr. Tired
The Science of Working Together 
Dear Dr. Tired,
I read your post. I suppose that’s all I’m here to say. I did read it, even though it took me seven months to get around to crafting a reply. I hope things have brightened for you since then – a Nordic summer does wonders for the mood – but I suspect the underlying frustration remains. The world is indeed a sad place, and I’m not sure we’ll ever solve that. It can all feel quite pointless, yet we persist. That seems to be what Camus meant with the idea that life is absurd. It’s an endless process of rolling boulders up hills, yet we can find joy in the absurdity of it. That’s the idea anyway. It never really helped me feel any better about my pointless and infinitesimal contribution to a sick society. Maybe fire and brimstone is exactly what we deserve. Maybe the answer is simply to party until the end of the world. Hide away in puppy videos and celebrity gossip between all-night parties and trips to Thailand. It’s eminently possible even on a limited budget. Ah, the wonders of modernity! But of course that doesn’t actually make the pain go away; it merely numbs and distracts. Grief is an interesting concept in this context. Grief implies loss, but can you lose something you never had? It’s true that we’ll never get to experience a world untouched by human influence, but let’s be honest with ourselves: had we been born 500 years ago, how far would we have truly wandered away from the village? And when we did, would we really be able to appreciate the wilderness? Or would we simply be terrified of it? I have no idea, and I don’t want to project my modern hopes/fears/etc. onto our ancestors, but it’s a useful thought experiment. Had I been in my parents’ or their parents’ or their parents’ shoes, how would I have done things differently knowing what I know now? And knowing that they couldn’t have known what I know now, what could they have been thinking? I don’t want to make excuses for anyone, but I also don’t want to point any fingers. I’m no saint either, and I’m not saving the world anytime soon. I was on a mission to do that once, and then I realized the world is a lot more complicated than I thought, which was somehow quite a shock. I feel like everyone older than me told me that at some point, but I guess I needed to figure it out for myself. Now I have no idea how to save the world, and somehow that makes it more manageable. But it took some time to get comfortable with that not-knowing. I really don’t have any answers. I have some reasonable guesses, and I can string together pages of sophistry with the best of them, but I can only hope that the reader knows as well as I do not to believe my bullshit. I think they mostly do, and there’s a sense of camaraderie in that. We’re all just making this up as we go along. Maybe that’s what it means to be an adult, to realize that none of us have any idea what we’re doing and the one’s who think they do are the most lost of all. That doesn’t sound helpful for the world’s problems, but such humility might be more effective than it initially seems. It may be simply lowering expectations, but we do need to be realistic with our expectations. I’m not going to save the world, and neither are you, but I can make my little slice of it perhaps just a touch better for those I love. If everyone does that, maybe we’ll move in the right direction, but that’s really just a fool risking belief in powers far beyond me. And yes, the road the hell is paved with good intentions, but if we’re honest with ourselves and each other, maybe we can correct our course before its too late. I’m not sure we have anything else.
Hopefully,
Mr. Foolish
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