What to do about the world

stop saying everything is terrible and pay attention

Last week I went back to a place I hadn't visited in seven or eight years. It inspired a story I wrote—the Shirley Jackson Award-winning “The Dying Season”¹—and what's funny is over the years, the place as I wrote about it became more real to me than the actual place. On a return, I am reminded that it's much prettier and more pleasant than what I did with it in the story. Of course, pretty and pleasant isn't very interesting for the purposes of fiction. I have never before been here in the high season, which also helps; the sky is blue, the weather is warm, the sea is full of paddlers, the wildflowers are in full bloom, and there is a general air of good cheer everywhere.

Besides the fact that places are often not their precise analogues in fiction, the main character, and the character whose point of view we remain in for the entirety of the story, is in crisis, like many of the characters I write about. This colors the way she approaches the world, which includes seeing things as more depressing and—perhaps—more sinister than they really are, or perhaps her perceptions are entirely accurate, depending on how you read the story. But people often take fiction as reported fact; many years ago, someone said of my story “The Chance Walker” that while it was a good story, they had found the Czech Republic and the people who lived there to be lovely, and it was a shame that I hadn't portrayed it that way. Well, as a writer of fiction, I am under no obligation to portray anything or anybody in any kind of way, but there's also the fact that assuming that a character's ideas and perspective are those of the author is one of the most elementary mistakes that a reader can make, and it seems to have reached a fever pitch all these years later. As is often the case, I feel I must take off a pair of (imaginary) spectacles, rub my weary eyes, and lament, as did the Professor in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: “What do they teach in schools these days?”

One of many reasons I started writing this newsletter is because so many of my stories are about miserable people. In some of the stories, I try very hard to give you a glimpse of another world, to hint at the sublime, to evoke a sense of awe, but my characters are often lost, trapped, living constrained lives. I would not write these stories if I didn't believe they were true—some people do live such lives, and few of us are fortunate enough to not sometimes or even often become lost, trapped, and constrained ourselves. I know that I am not. But I also believe that the world is a glorious, vibrant, startling, beautiful place, and that people can be infinitely engaging².

There is a part of me that doesn't even care if the previous sentence is true. It is not possible to quantify whether or not the world is vibrant and beautiful or whether a substantial percentage of humanity is worth your time. An alternate view is that the world is misery heaped upon despair and humans are shallow, stupid, destructive creatures. It seems pointless to me to go about with the latter assurance rather than the former, simply because the only effect it has is to make you more miserable. And so while in my fiction I write about the pain that we all carry about with us, about the way it feels when we understand that nothing around us is solid and no one can save us, about fear, about anger, about sorrow, about guilt and regret and fury—I wanted a place to write more expansively about what being alive is like. I especially wanted that because I felt like the torrent of despair I saw every time I looked online was spilling out into the real world—and make no mistake, this physical world will always be the real one, because you will always be flesh, and at the mercy of your flesh. I would find myself having conversations with people offline who would just entirely offhandedly say things straight off of Twitter like, “Well, the whole world is just awful now and things are terrible for everyone and I'm so tired” or “something something late capitalism” and occasionally I would stop them and say, what do you mean by that? And they would back up and stammer because it is an object of faith by now, we all know, everyone agrees that it's all shit, everything is terrible, people are the worst, things have never been so bad, these are all things people recite now as though they are catechisms. How did we get here, and what is is going to do to your brain, your ability to live and thrive, when this is what rattles around in there all day, every day? And sometimes I say—compared to what? Where and when was this Edenic garden where people were not struggling, grieving, starving, fighting, dying in wars, dying in famines, dying in floods, exploited, unhappy? Life is hard because—and here come the litany of reasons and people and things and institutions and ideas to blame when the truth is that life is hard because life is hard. Life has never been easy, will never be easy. You have to beat the odds to get started on this life lottery in the first place, and if it feels like the house always wins, well, that's because every solution carries drawbacks and spawns new challenges: we treat or cure diseases and new ones arise in their place; we make labor-saving devices yet somehow our labors always expand; we find new forms of government that are improvements on the old forms but it turns out they still suck in both old and new ways (plus, sometimes the process of getting that new government is violent and destructive and tragic). It's also because we are these weird advanced primates with complex psychologies that are in many ways at odds with the world that those very psychologies have made and we will probably never entirely be civilized, as much as we like to think we are. And it’s because terrible things can happen to anyone at any time, for no reason or for reasons we can’t understand. These are not reasons to despair. This just is. This is just how it is.

I used to think that most of the major world religions offered messages that were, frankly, downers: Life is suffering, for example: thanks, Buddhists, for giving us something so uplifting to work with. The sternness of denominations that tells its believers that life is a vale of tears. But the older I get, the more I understand that no one is saying these things to make you feel like crap. Well, actually, some people are, but the wise people who originally came up with these things were not. These are statements of acceptance. This is just how it is. Now, what are you going to do with this life of yours, besides spread the message that everything is as miserable as it could be.

In America, I think, especially, we live in a culture where we think of happiness as our birthright. This is not the worst thing, but it does tend to make us think that something has gone terribly wrong if we're not just in some kind of frenzy of happiness all the time, like every day should feel like we're on the best vacation we’ve ever taken. There are entire books about how to be happy; there are people who specialize in studying happiness. I think happiness is a fleeting emotion at best. Its very brevity, the difficulty in capturing exactly what it is, its genuine rarity, is part of what makes it so euphoric. I think a better state of being to strive for is somewhere in the neighborhood of a combination of joy, contentment, and engagement.

Much of the above two paragraphs comes down to semantics, of course. One person's “happiness” or “life is suffering” is not another's, but one thing I am certain of is that while there may be no way to keep misery at bay, a sure way to make sure that it always walks besides you is to constantly invite it in.

I often think of Anthony Bourdain, who also believed that the world was big and beautiful and that every kind of person was worth talking to, and for whom the darkness came anyway. In his later years, he said he was no longer convinced of his earlier idealistic belief that breaking bread with each other, sitting down at a meal together and talking while eating and drinking, can save the world. I don't think it can either; we have civil wars, after all, and one of the oldest surviving stories in the Western tradition is Cain vs. Abel. We've always had a knack for being especially cruel to those we know the very best.

So one reason I started this newsletter is because I believe that the above is true but I also believe so what. So what are you going to do now that you know that fate is capricious and the world doesn't love you and perhaps is actively trying to kill you and everyone dies alone? You rage against it all, not with fury but with vigor, with life, with a barbaric yawp, if you will—rage as Dylan Thomas exhorted us to do against the dying of the light.

Because, you see, all the terrible people and terrible events and terrible things in the world don't care if you are ground down to nothing. The greatest revenge is to carry on, with joy and with purpose. The world is worth it.

If you look very closely at the center of this photo—just on the left edge of the white flower there—you may see a fuzz of yellow and black which is the bee I was trying to photograph when it suddenly got wind of paparazzi and furiously flew over to a more private flower. Sorry, bee!

1. If you like that story so much you want to own a copy, you can find it in my third short story collection, Now It’s Dark.

2. It also helps if you can stop communicating with the world via angry posts and comments and start talking to other actual humans in person.