You’ve hit the nail on the head here: we’ve been conditioned to believe there is no alternative. And frankly, reimagining an entire way of life is really intimidating. But the current way of living is not sustainable either.
I think of this as akin to Moses wandering the desert for 40 years (the ins and outs are contested among scholars, of course) — the purpose of wandering was to shed the lived memory of Egypt and allowing a new generation to start over with the knowledge of what happened before, but not the suffering of it.
Ultimately I’m against retreating into nihilism, nor do I think rationalizing cosmetic changes to the status quo as truly progressive is a solution either. We are forced to work and live in the “wrong state of things” so to speak, and we can either try to drag this out for generations or have some kind of “snap” that allows for a significant do-over with the fresh wounds of The Now very much on our minds.
You’ve hit the nail on the head here: we’ve been conditioned to believe there is no alternative. And frankly, reimagining an entire way of life is really intimidating. But the current way of living is not sustainable either.
I think of this as akin to Moses wandering the desert for 40 years (the ins and outs are contested among scholars, of course) — the purpose of wandering was to shed the lived memory of Egypt and allowing a new generation to start over with the knowledge of what happened before, but not the suffering of it.
Ultimately I’m against retreating into nihilism, nor do I think rationalizing cosmetic changes to the status quo as truly progressive is a solution either. We are forced to work and live in the “wrong state of things” so to speak, and we can either try to drag this out for generations or have some kind of “snap” that allows for a significant do-over with the fresh wounds of The Now very much on our minds.