19 January

A personal post, a bit long, but a rare one about me, the person. I know many people who avoid the news, feeling that the world is too depressing and they don’t see a way out of the numerous problems societies are facing. Many retreat to a forced positivity, refusing to engage with anything that isn’t fun and ‘positive’ (whatever that means). Thus the obsession with recreation, whether travel, or going to concerts, or socialising more generally. I see all of this a bit differently. We live in rich societies where for the past 70 years we’ve been able to live lives that historically are very rare. Very few wars, prosperity, huge increases in life expectancy, etc. In historical terms, we’ve lived like gods. It’s SO important to recognise a few things here. Firstly, that *most of the the world* hasn’t lived like this for the past 70 years, or ever. What we’re experiencing right now is in some ways a correction, us coming back to the rest of the human pack. The gods are becoming mortal again, our 70 years of ignoring some basic realities of existence are over. We don’t get to live lives that are just about being constantly entertained, we have to face tough questions head-on. Secondly our 70 years of living like gods were created by catastrophe. The world wars mostly, and the Spanish Flu pandemic between them. That forced us to create a huge range of public institutions to regulate and improve life, during and after the wars. That’s why things got so much better for us. We had better water and food, better healthcare, we introduced massive public health measures to drive down deaths from infectious disease (see the graph), something the rest of the world still dies from more than anything else. At the same time since the late-1970s, our politics has attacked these public institutions, we got so used to life being good that we forgot what created that god-like life. The institutions became ‘red tape’, or ‘bureaucracy’. Fantasy ideas of all of this good life happening by itself through ‘markets’ were introduced instead. In reality it drove us backwards, to the time pre-wars, and all the problems we then shared with the rest of the world. Humans are like that. Without catastrophe, they don’t act well collectively, they form status hierarchies, like we do at school, and these status hierarchies compete. Let that run long enough, and life gets so bad that catastrophes happen, forcing collective action. Which then improves life, for long enough that people then forget and assume that good life happens by itself. Then the whole cycle starts again. That’s us, right now. This is why what makes me happiest, what’s most ‘fun’ for me, is addressing the problems we all face. Running away from them through gigs or travel or eating out, or booze - all of that just feels fake and childish, to me. Like we’re partying as the Titanic goes down. Being an adult means loving a challenge, solving problems, thinking through solutions. It’s fun. We don’t ’live with’ lethal viruses, for example, that’s a ridiculous conceit only rich societies totally divorced from the realities of life could entertain. Like Rome in its final days.