And that, to me, is more exciting than any amount of fear that may pool inside my soul, when I think how broken and scary our world is. I was thinking the other day about divorce, about all the love that falters and dies in a broken jar of miscommunication. According to this psychology dude, the vast majority of relationships end up in therapy far too late, by which point either one or both partners have given up on the relationship.
That falls under terrifying.
Why? Because being alone is scary, and the thought of loving someone, of having the potential to create something beautiful with somebody, and letting that go to waste... that's 10x scarier.
We're told half of marriages end in divorce, and I wonder how much of that is a result of miscommunication? Of unhealed trauma? Of one or another's inability to set healthy boundaries, and express what they need for this relationship to work. I'm willing to bet it's a lot, just like I think the rest of divorces can be accounted for by default-living. Getting in relationships out of fear, complacency, loneliness, societal pressure. The list draws on, and it's not uncommon for people who've been together a long enough while to get hitched simply because it's there. It's what's done.
And that can work. If they wake up in time. If they're both willing to work on it, and to relearn the way they communicate, that can actually work. Despite the gloomy-ish title, this is a post about joy and hope.
Half of modern marriages end in divorce. And sure, we can blame a consumerist society, where nothing is built to last any more. It's a valid point. But I was thinking, we go into life, young people like me, just absorbing how the world is.
We don't stop to think maybe the world is sick. Sure, Grandma coughs up blood now, but she didn't always use to. For a child just coming into the world, it seems that's the way things have always been. But if we take our species as one giant living organism, that means maybe it wasn't always like this.
In her 80-90 years of life, Grandma has seen war. Hurt. Violence. She's dealt with loss, and been betrayed by people she considered friends. That alone is enough to account for her being a little set in her ways. Maybe, to you, a little weird in the head, but Grandma's got her reasons. She's developed trauma, first as a child, then as a young, impressionable woman, then as a fragile mother. And all those experiences have come together to create the Grandma you know now.
And yet, if we were to look at an old person and conclude, oh, this must be how they've always been, that would be ludicrous. We're all aware people change, as they move through time, so why can't a species?
My point is, maybe we weren't always broken. But like Grandma, we've seen a lot of death. A lot of war. A lot of big, mean animals willing to tear you piece by piece.
That also falls under terrifying.
Then, there's the stuff we've done to one another. Because, being realistic here, it's not just other people who mess us up. Often, the individual is well-endowed to fuck his own life up, and many of us do. Drugs, toxic behavior, self-destructive activities, we do lots of crazy shit to traumatise our bodies and minds. And we've been doing it for milennia, as a species.
Torturing, maiming, raping, enslaving, and abusing and dehumanizing our fellow men for stupid, irrelevant reasons will leave you pretty traumatised as a whole.
Half of marriages end in divorce. So that young people now go into the game expecting things will go wrong. Hey, if things end up poorly in your relationship, it was bound to happen. It's probably because they were a narcissist and a sociopath, your partner. I see that discourse a lot on social media. Everyone's a narcissist, apparently. It's just never you.
The trouble, of course, is when you go into the ring expecting things will turn out poorly, the battle is already lost. We're taught from the cradle that marriage fails, our body is an alien machine looking to destroy us, that our friends are dangerous, and that our job is something we have to put up with, or starve.
I'm no MMA fighter or nothing, but if I went into the ring thinking that, I'd be up against pretty poor odds.
We've somehow accepted that this is the way the world is. It just is, and adults grow up and roll with the punches. Sure. But what if the world's not actually like this, but is actually sick? More importantly, what if we, as a species, have contracted a virus that's messing us up big-time?
Someone who keeps sneezing and blowing his nose, you don't say "oh that's just how they are". You recognize it as a symptom of an illness. And we treat illnesses, and make the person better.
It's easy to see why we'd be adamant about accepting the "we're all sick" narrative. Because it's fucking terrifying. We get scared when we get a cold, because it kinda feels like our body's trying to destroy and sabotage us. Let alone when the entire human race gets that cold. How do you, the individual, go up against that?
I don't think they've come up with enough aspirin.
But I also think, if we keep accepting this as "the way things are", we're gonna die. I think the species needs us to start believing that we can heal.
Half of marriages end in divorce. But they don't have to. We can heal our past trauma, we can relearn how we communicate, we can become better partners, and unlock the next level. We can band together and build, and there's more value in that than in all the Tinder swipes you're gonna get in this lifetime.
Why do I keep coming back to the marriage thing? Because our interactions with our fellow human beings are pretty much as deep as this gets. All the money, and the cool skydiving, and the fat wallets, and the cool things we create, they mean jack without the love of other people. So I keep coming back to it because if we managed to heal marriages, and how we relate to one another, we'd be a lot richer than we are now.
But I don't think it's just marriage that's sick. Certainly not. I think the way we think of work is sick, too. This pointless, empty careerism that Western society is plagued with is also an example of sickness in our bosom. That needs fixing too. Slaving away at a desk, and spending only a couple hours a day with our kids, that's another symptom. Eating sugar-filled crap because we saw it in a reel and think it looks cute and yummy, that's sickness too.
But it's not the status quo. It can only be that, as long as we allow it.
You see a lot of these very cynical, awakened people who'll tell you the world is sick, that people are sheeple, that everything fucking sucks, and I get where they're coming from. I used to live there, too. Until I realized, with that, you're still not taking your medicine. You're not making humanity actively better.
At the end of the day, those five minutes you spent ranting about the stupidity of others are just five minutes where you managed to bring more darkness, more sick into this world. And time's running out, both on the individual level, and for our species. Again, we are sick. And sick people, when they don't get treatment, and make changes, they die.
Now, how do we heal?
Big one. Heavy hitter. It's a scary question. Filing it under terrifying, too. I don't know, but I wish I did.
But I think a good initial step would be revising how we go into the problem. Obviously, it's much easier to shrug my shoulders and say the dating algorithm/marriage system/work world etc. is broken, and that's just how it is. It requires so little effort on my part.
So from now on, I'm trying to go in saying something different.
I'm saying yeah, this aspect of our shared existence is really messed up right now. It may be a while until it's running better again. But am I gonna yell at it and make a pouty face, expecting it gets better? Or am I gonna swing by with some Vitamin C? Take it out for some sun? Take myself out, while I'm at it.
Hell yeah, our species is sick. It was individuals like us who made it sick. And it's individuals who can make it better. But in order to do that, we can no longer let things lie, and shrug our shoulders at the status quo. Because that's not real. That's just learned helplessness, and it's keeping Grandma and Grandpa, and Mummy and Daddy, and You and Me very, very sick.
