‘The systems in place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed… The level of contradiction is going to rise excruciatingly even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction. I just think it’s going to get weirder and weirder and weirder and finally it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is.’
Terence McKenna Final Earthbound Interview
There are some stories that serve only to illustrate the nature of other stories. You’ve probably heard the one about the other shoe but to set you up, I will tell it shortly:
A man rents a room in a boarding house and above him lives an old man who returns home late every evening, undresses and goes to bed. Through the thin ceiling, the man below listens as the man above, who he has never seen, first drops one heavy shoe and then the other.
One evening, the man comes home as expected and drops first one shoe.
Time passes slowly as the man below waits in silence.
Finally, an anguished existential call cries out in the night: ‘For God’s sake, drop the other shoe!’
How much of our lives is spent waiting for the other shoe to drop, whether it’s as mundane a task as waiting for an egg to boil or and advert break to end? You can read all sorts of inference into this simple story. If you are religious, the man upstairs is easy to understand as God. It’s an act of faith that the other shoe must surely drop.
But for most people, I would wager it’s largely part of the gamified world we live in. The original instinct for writing this article is some observations about social media and how in the war for our attention (literally our eyeballs) the game masters will play our basic psychology for all its worth (which is our data).
It’s the space between a tweet and its reaction, rage followed by outrage, opinion followed by offence. It’s the little red dot that feeds your need for affirmation, it’s the growing number of followers you have on Instagram, an inside joke or a meme that confirms your place in the tribe.
My fb feed is full of content capitalizing on the space between the other shoe dropping. For example, there’s the archetypal two minute story of the abandoned animal that undergoes a transformative intervention (always punctuated by an advert). Somehow or other you are compelled to watch it to the end because it’s human nature to wish for a happy ending and to have that confirmed. Then there is the listicle type where you end up trawling through a corridor of dull html pages that never really deliver on the promise of the clickbait that got you there.
These aren’t new but they seem to be repeated with grave offence, as if content producers have lost all pretense of being anything less than dull and dismissive of your attention while you are advertised to. I can’t bring myself yet to disengage entirely from social media because it goes some way to fulfilling the need for connection and building community. Collectively though, its random frivolous nature, mass appeal to trolls, liars and advertisers makes it a less-than-desirable vehicle in the long run.
But in the bigger world, as Rome burns, these are minor niggles. Just as McKenna predicted in 1998, social media and the news cycle are the echo chambers for all the collective fears, contradictions and sheer weirdness that define our planet today. He called it appropriately, ‘the fire in the mad house at the end of time’ and while we are not there yet, all the signs are apparent.
And to be clear, this piece does nothing to allay fears or offer solutions. How could it? Walking around with a placard stating ‘we are all doomed’ is an old comedy trope, after all. I did, however, very much enjoy an article by Jonathan Franzen in the New Yorker which offered a more sanguine approach to the existential threat we all presently live under — something mapped on the ‘eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’ but with a personalized call to action for hope. Towards the end of the article he writes:
‘It’s fine to struggle against the constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what’s to come, but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specifically — a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble — and take heart in your small successes.’
It’s a practical antidote to the bystander effect the human race collectively is experiencing while psychotic leaders sanction ecological vandalism with little fear of sanction. Weighed down by the sheer immensity of the problems we have created as a species, the death of hope is a final surrender.
We should put our faith in the fact that the other shoe will ultimately drop and live accordingly until it does. That too, is human nature.
