A few days ago a Singapore Airlines flight encountered severe turbulence, causing one death and tens of people to be injured. The night the news broke out I commented to my partner that this may get worse, because in recent years weather patterns have become more extreme and unpredictable. It turns out my fears were not unfounded. What seems like a tragic isolated event to most people feels like the start of a worrying trend to me (sometimes I resent this hyper-awareness).
Concurrently in the US a second person working on a dairy farm has tested positive for the bird flu. The virus is also spreading across farms in the US right now. As of now, 9 states and 63 herds are affected. I can’t help but wonder if we would collectively be losing our shit by now had this happened before covid. But we are now all trying to pretend this is still okay because of the trauma generated by covid. A second pandemic would be very hard to stomach, when the first one is not over.
It feels like we’re living in the beginning of the end. Everything seems to point to things getting worse especially because our main coping mechanism is denial, so we wouldn’t do anything about everything until shit hits the fan repeatedly. The system is complex, so I don’t know if the cascading effects will cause us to decline suddenly and rapidly, or it would just be a slow, drawn-out decline. We are also weirdly resilient in some ways, like cockroaches. It is just that we seem to prefer leaving things to the last minute. And sometimes these last-ditch efforts wouldn’t be enough. I mean, the covid pandemic might have been prevented if some people actually did something about it in its early days (instead of punishing the doctor who sounded an alarm over it).
I must have been spoilt by the relative stability we enjoyed in the first few decades of my life, so having all of these swim in my consciousness is provoking a lot of anxiety, on top of having to process my friend’s passing recently. I suffered from existential anxiety even before the pandemic, so it is being exacerbated now. I too wish I can do the whole denial thing like everyone else is doing, but I can’t seem to.
I feel an urgency to live life, to do the things I wish to do and not defer anything unnecessarily. Will flying be unsafe one day? Will we start to experience food security issues due to the worsening climate? How about wars? Will I receive a life-changing medical diagnosis suddenly? How long will people I care about remain alive and well for?
I suffer from executive dysfunction, so there are plenty of things I wish to do and yet I cannot seem to do. But it is difficult to tell what I truly want to do versus what I think I should do. I cannot help but blame myself for “wasting time” every day, because life is so impermanent yet I am doing none of the things I hope to do. How do I balance the compassion for my condition with the urgency I feel?
I wonder how are similarly aware people choosing to navigate their lives at this point in time. It is difficult not to feel weighed down and paralysed, and it also feels wrong to live somewhat hedonistically. I am a somewhat prudent person because of my chronic health issues. Typically I wouldn’t do anything to risk my health or stability. However being prudent in the present is only useful if there is a future.
We can never know our future timeline anyway. Will there be a day, five years, or a few decades? It is easier to plan, to know how one should live if there is a timeline. But in my opinion if life was already impermanent, the unpredictability factor has gotten much worse. In the past there was a probability of experiencing a negative personal event, but now we are all facing a collective future that is trending negatively.
Personally I’m going to try harder to live as though I’m facing a shortened timeline. I was like this in my youth, hence I made plenty of risky decisions which brought me great – both positive and negative – life experiences I wouldn’t have had if I had chosen to stay on a safe and stable trajectory. But I was forced to become a lot more conservative with ageing and chronic illness.
What would “living as though I am facing a shortened timeline” look for myself? I don’t really know. I am still getting to know myself. I had hoped to have more time to do so before I figure out how I should live. But everything seems precarious now, and the only thing I can do is to be willing to try more experiments in order to figure myself out.
I think in these times people like to consume feel-good stuff, and my writing is the opposite. But I am simply writing as I am.