QC

This is one of the parts of modern dystopia I hate the most, because IMO it's one of the key components propping up the rest of it. When you've learned to cut yourself off from fear and sadness and anger, you've also cut yourself off from love and caring and wisdom.

How can you step up to serve the world with joy in your heart if you can't feel your heart in the first place? You can't, and it would be cruel to ask you to.

When you can't feel yourself, you can't feel other people either. A life spent numb is a life where it feels like nobody else actually exists and nothing actually matters. Now imagine that many of the most powerful people in the world are in this position.

That scares me, the idea that the people with their hands on the levers actually cannot feel themselves or anyone else. It would explain a lot, though. Nothing left to do but chase power and status, in a world like that. I imagine it's an incredibly lonely place to be.

So, this is my take, the take that's such a background component of how I relate to the world and what a mess it's in that I forget to actually say it: We will never deal with AI or climate change or the culture war or whatever else until we relearn how to simply feel.

Simply feeling is the first step towards sense- and meaning-making. Towards taking in fully what the world is like now, and what actually matters and is worth doing. Towards becoming a good, trustworthy person whose way of being will not break under emotional strain.

I didn't intend to write any of this, it just sort of spilled out. I wasn't steering towards a call to action. I don't know what to do. The problem is much bigger than you or me, and I don't want to sell any kind of false hope.

It's not as simple as just telling people to start feeling things. We don't feel things for very good reasons. We've inherited piles of trauma and conditioning going back generations. We don't want to risk losing the people we have in our lives, who have their own piles.